Port towns and diplomacy: Japanese naval visits to Britain and Australia in the early twentieth century

Abstract

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1905 was a watershed moment for the presence of the Royal Navy in the Pacific. Although it allowed the Royal Navy to concentrate its fleets in European waters, this strategy caused resentment due to the underlying fear of the 'Yellow Peril', especially in the British dominions of Australia and New Zealand. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance presented some challenges to the received Edwardian racial hierarchy and the idea of British military supremacy. This article demonstrates how the 'port town' not only became a place of mediation where highlevel international diplomacy mingled with the face-to-face experience of an alliance 'in practice', but also a space through which issues such as Otherness and imperial security were contested and explored.The 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance marked the end of Britain's 'splendid isolation'. 1 Such an alliance presented some interesting complications when courting diplomatic, military, and public opinion in Britain because the Japanese did not neatly fit into the concept of 'Western' Edwardian racial hierarchy as they were not White, nor were they European by geography or descent. 2