Japan’s Status-Driven Restraint Despite Racial Humiliation, 1921–1936

Abstract According to recent theories on the intersection of status and race, a combination of a rising power’s pursuit of status and its encounter with the racial hierarchy at the international level does not bode well. This is the case because one can assume that such moments drive a rising power to be more aggressive. Given Japan’s racial humiliation associated with the rejection of its racial equality proposal at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 and the Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924 in the United States, why did Japan concede to an inferior ratio in naval size and remain committed to the Washington naval system from 1921 to 1930? Why by the early 1930s did Japan profoundly overturn its status policy and not earlier? Drawing on critical appraisals of the theories that address a rising power’s status and its racial anxiety, this article argues that Japan’s orthodox foreign policy idea prioritized its higher civilizational status relative to the Western great powers and the rest of East Asia, which generated an elite consensus among civilian and military leaders on accepting the trade-off between reduced military capabilities and increased status from 1921 to 1930 despite racial humiliation. Japan’s status-driven restraint persisted until this elite consensus collapsed and the political-economic consequences of the Showa Depression defeated social expectations.