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In the period before World War II, the Nation of Islam was one of many nationalist formations around the world that looked to Tokyo as a kind of racial Mecca. Japan's victory over Russia in a brutal war in 1905 was seen as the harbinger of the erosion of the material basis for "white supremacy." Thus, in the early 20th century, African-Americans of various ideological stripes -- W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, et.al. -- may have disagreed on many points but all were united in their admiration for Japan; it symbolized to them that modernity was not solely a European invention and, consequently, was not beyond the reach of Africans either.(1)
African-American sympathy for Asians generally was not unnoticed in the corridors of power. When the U.S. was fighting revolutionaries in the Philippines in the early 20th century, a conscious effort was made to limit the number of black troops fighting there.The perception was that "`there was a natural bond between the rural Filipinos and the American Negro,'" which would redound to the detriment of U.S. military objectives. This sympathetic bond was seen as a potential obstacle to U.S. encroachment in the region and, as such, was viewed with the utmost sensitivity. One "general order" of the U.S. army in the Pacific declared that "`such delicate subjects as...the race question, etc. will not be discussed at all except among ourselves and officially.'"(2)
In fact, one of the central difficulties for the 21st century researcher in excavating the "race question" in the Asian-Pacific is that Euro-American elites have tended to shroud, obscure, and hide its meaning. Whereas virtually every issue concerning African-Americans is viewed as a "race problem," matters relating to the Asian-Pacific -- especially Japan -- are often dressed up in the finery of politics and economics. Make no mistake, however, in the first few decades of the previous century, Tokyo was viewed by friend and foe alike as the major challenger to the hegemony of "white supremacy."
Indeed, this challenge from Japan was so severe and potentially threatening that it eventuated in the only use of atomic weapons the planet has witnessed to this point. James Belich, the leading scholar of the titanic wars that led to a stalemate between the...