In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Anglo-American dominion over global affairs seemed to be coming to an end. Proliferating anti-colonialism, interstate wars, economic catastrophes, and volatile cycles of regional integrations and disintegrations nurtured the imagination of viable alternatives for redistributing power in a world in which North Atlantic states and empires might no longer predominate.Footnote 1 This article centres Chile and Chilean–Japanese relations to ask how this global moment of international order-making, nation-building, and decolonization played out on Latin America’s Pacific coast.
Indeed, Japan’s seemingly successful formula for steadfast development and international influence, underway since the Meiji Restoration resumed Japan’s foreign engagements in 1868, became a prototypical inspiration across the globe.Footnote 2 For post-colonial nation-builders, Japan’s spring into modern nationhood and sturdy sovereignty could be explained through its repudiation of the very same Anglo-American imperialism under which they continued to toil.Footnote 3 Meanwhile in London, some elites echoed many of their colonial subjects by the 1890s and thereafter in pointing to Japan’s unwavering dedication to the national collective as a potential solution to Britain’s fractures and defects.Footnote 4 Bolsheviks in Russia after 1917, taking aim at Britain and committed to spreading Marxist-Leninism, came to recognize Japan as a worthy adversary and competitor in its own right.Footnote 5 Despite their own violent, imperial appetites, ascendant fascist leaders in Germany and Italy simultaneously shared with Japan a sensation of ostracization from the liberal order solidifying after 1919.Footnote 6 And Japanese leaders self-consciously framed their own imperialist world- and nation-making project as an alternative to Anglo-American international leadership.Footnote 7 Put differently, Japan offered evidence of—and an alternative path toward—what could be accomplished by many nations and political movements, whether imperial or post-colonial, young or old.
Beginning in the 1890s, diverse cohorts of Chilean actors attempted to convert Japan into a principal consumer of Chile’s national export, sodium nitrate fertilizer (saltpetre).Footnote 8 Primarily profiting and dominated by British nitrate producing firms, this industry had supplied the majority of Chilean government revenues since the 1880s. But the proliferation of European synthetic nitrogen production (particularly in the form of ammonia through the Haber-Bosch process of fixing atmospheric nitrogen) in the 1910s quickly dismembered Chile’s former monopoly on global nitrogen and fertilizer networks. Chile’s economy and politics were thrust into an existential crisis. Consequently, various Chilean diplomats, intellectuals, and businessmen (who often also represented the parastatal nitrate industry) came to identify massive and seemingly untouched Japanese markets for chemical fertilizer as a solution to their industry’s and nation’s economic woes. But pragmatic calls to save this export industry through Japanese consumption quickly morphed into something more: a deliberate and nationalist effort to replicate Japan’s blueprint for swift nation-building and uncompromising sovereignty in an otherwise North Atlantic-dominated world.
This article contributes to global history scholarship that traces how post-colonial leaders linked domestic development to the overturning of empire in the international sphere.Footnote 9 I take a cue from political theorist Adom Getachew’s notion of ‘anti-colonial worldmaking’ among Black anglophone and Pan-African nation-builders to argue that some Chilean elites developed a similar imaginary for a new international order in the Pacific.Footnote 10 Through integration with Japan, Chile could reaffirm its economic self-determination and recast itself as the author of the nation’s future, along with deploying Japan’s nation-building toolset for domestic progress. But advocacy for a Pacific reorientation for Chilean nitrate and political economy was far from unanimous at home.Footnote 11 Indeed, rampant anti-Asian racial animosities, vocal opposition to Japanese imperialism and fascism by a highly institutionalized Marxist Left, and, later, Chilean neutrality in the Second World War, all deeply polarized Chileans over Japanese relations. So the influential Chilean advocates of this Pacific pivot came from across Chile’s elite, but their international imaginary formed just one of many competing proposals to remedy the intertwined crises around economic sovereignty and Chile’s place in the world. That Latin American nation- and order-building was shaped not only by the binary embrace or rejection of models from the United States and Europe, but also by ideas from Japan, the Pacific, and Latin America itself, illustrates the possibilities for and sophistication of Global South designs for international engagements and development, even if their counterfactual imaginaries did not always materialize as intended.
This story also complicates the familiar narrative of the transition from British to US hegemony in Latin America and beyond.Footnote 12 From the vantage point of Chile, I argue that three empires—not only Britain and the United States but also Japan—competed as viable contestants for international leadership in the Americas and Pacific. I begin in the 1890s when the Chilean nationalism animating Chilean–Japanese relations was predominantly aimed at Britain as the dominant external force in Chile and the nitrate industry. But by the 1920s and 1930s, Chilean nation-building in the Pacific shifted from excoriating Britain to preserving neutrality in the deteriorating Japanese–US conflict to stake out agency in Chile’s foreign affairs, especially as the United States usurped Britain’s influence in the nitrate industry and as Japan assembled a formidable empire of its own. Chile remained neutral in the US–Japan conflict until 1943 when pragmatic realizations of the United States’ much larger role in Chilean foreign trade and likelier military triumph motivated Chile to terminate ties with the Axis belligerents. Up until then, however, some Chileans (alongside many others in the post-colonial world) looked to Japan for a more compatible formula for nation-building and maybe even a likely candidate to inherit British international supremacy.
Chile, nitrate, and dependency
To convey why Japan’s fertilizer markets and nation-building so appealed to some Chilean nationalists, I begin with a discussion of the corner into which the Chilean state and nitrate industry had backed themselves in the late nineteenth century that would inspire the calls for Chile’s integration in the Pacific by the early twentieth.
Composing just under 80% of our breathable air, nitrogen is one of the most ubiquitous compounds in the atmosphere. But until it is ‘fixed’ (making it biologically accessible) from its triple-bonded atmospheric gas form (N2) into ammonia (NH3) either organically (by bacteria in plants) or industrially, it remains unreactive and unavailable to plants, which require this nutrient to perform photosynthesis and to build proteins and DNA. Plants and ecosystems possess naturally regulated nitrogen reserves within broader atmospheric nitrogen nutrient cycles.Footnote 13
But the nineteenth century’s population explosion and input-intensive agriculture stripped soils across the globe of their nutrients and irreparably disrupted ecosystems. The world’s ensuing urgent demand for fresh nitrogen inputs was met by the 1840s through the industrial extraction and distribution of Peruvian guano—fossilized maritime bird droppings that for millennia had accumulated on islands off the coast of Peru. Driven by British and US firms, the guano boom inserted South America’s Pacific coast into the centre of global agricultural and economic networks before, by the 1870s, it busted due to evaporating reserves and egregious mismanagement.Footnote 14
Chilean sodium nitrate (NaNO3 and known as salitre in Spanish) thereafter filled global nitrogen deficits. Nitrate is fixed through the industrial leeching of nitrogen-rich caliche ores whose only natural deposits were discovered in the nineteenth century under South America’s Atacama Desert. Rivalry over this mineral-rich desert triggered the War of the Pacific in 1879 in which Chile achieved uncontested victory over the Peruvian–Bolivian alliance by 1883 and seized vast nitrate territories formerly claimed by Peru. Chilean nitrate embarked upon its own boom thereafter and helped fuel the final stages of global industrialization by enabling modernizing states to feed and clothe their rapidly expanding populations. Primarily utilized as fertilizer, nitrate also proved efficacious as the nitrogenous input for the industrial manufacture of other chemicals and goods such as gunpower (and therefore arms and explosives) steel, glass, paint, and dyes.
Nitrate quickly solidified into the cornerstone of Chile’s political economy. The nation thereafter followed a development model (emblematic of Latin America’s late nineteenth century) driven by dependency on exports and foreign capital. The industry provided several revenue streams for the Chilean state, the most important of which was nitrate export duties. Indeed, public nitrate revenues financed the bureaucracy and public works, education, and transportation infrastructures. Supplying the nitrate north with labour and provisions simultaneously profited private Chilean interests. Nitrate amounted to nearly 80% of Chilean exports by 1910 and supplied approximately 75–80% of Chilean state revenues by the early 1900s.Footnote 15 Yet, predominantly British, German, and US firms dominated the industry through their ownership of the majority of nitrate production plants (known as salitreras or oficinas). Since the nineteenth century, the Chilean state essentially forfeited most nitrate territories and production to foreign capital (British interests alone possessed over two-thirds of the industry) in exchange for a tax levied on every ton exported.Footnote 16 Estimates indicate that Chile retained only an estimated one-third of the industry’s total profits.Footnote 17
By the 1910s, cultivating fresh nitrate markets in Japan appealed because this unwieldy and institutionally messy industry confronted an existential crisis.Footnote 18 Overproduction, stockpiling, dwindling deposits, declining prices abroad, and, especially, competition from European synthetic nitrogen all converged to strip Chilean nitrate of its former command over nitrogen and fertilizer markets. Synthetic sulphate of ammonia comprised nitrate’s foremost competitor. Ammonia is a versatile nitrogenous chemical salt that, like Chilean nitrate, proved effective as an agricultural fertilizer or as industrial feedstock.Footnote 19 Prior to the spread of the Haber-Bosh process pioneered by German chemists in the 1910s, ammonia was produced from the chemical reaction of sulphuric acid with ammonia-rich gases given off from coke ovens in steel plants. The resulting ammonia could then be refined into a beige crystallized substance that resembled Chilean nitrate.Footnote 20 The proliferation of synthetic ammonia (but also cyanamide and calcium nitrate) across the 1910s and 1920s deeply threatened Chile’s nitrate industry.Footnote 21
Figure 1 tells a dramatic story. Chile’s possession of the global share of nitrogen production plummeted from about 66% in 1901 to just 7.6% by 1936.Footnote 22 Spurred by wartime demands for nitrogen and excluded from global trading networks, German production of synthetic ammonia surged across the 1910s and thereafter, particularly in the Oppau and Leuna plants of the Baden Aniline and Soda Factory.Footnote 23 Home production rapidly hijacked Chile’s largest market in Germany which formerly consumed about a third of Chile’s annual production. US consumption of Chilean nitrate for munitions production during the First World War helped conserve nitrate’s profitability in the 1910s, but US producers of synthetic nitrogen soon also displaced Chilean nitrate there.Footnote 24 This is all to say that synthetic nitrogen production and structural global economic shifts unfolding across the 1910s threatened Chilean federal revenues and plunged the industry into crisis.
Percentage share of global nitrate production.
Chilean politics
These international dimensions of the nitrate industry unfolded between Chile’s Parliamentary Republic (1890s–1925) and the Popular Front coalition governments of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1891, elite conservative parliamentarians, aligned with the rebellious Chilean navy, triumphed in a brief but bloody civil war against President José Manuel Balmaceda and the Chilean Army. The parliamentarians’ victory ended what is known as Chile’s Portalian Republic (1831–91), during which alternating cohorts of conservative and liberal elites mostly preserved order by essentially selecting presidential successors in fraudulent elections. The subsequent parliamentary system concentrated power under the legislative branch populated by the oligarchy and foreign investors (both of whom resented Balmaceda’s nationalist efforts to bring the nitrate industry, and its profits, under Chilean control). Though overseeing the nitrate boom and a relatively stable and ideologically accommodating democracy, the Parliamentary Republic was troubled by social and political unrest.Footnote 25
By the 1910s, the nitrate industry’s stumbles motivated a challenge to the oligarchy and foreign capital. Demanding structural reform and the restoration of republicanism, an emerging multi-class generation of urban, nationalist liberals elected liberal Arturo Alessandri Palma as president in 1920. Alessandri’s 1925 constitution shifted power from the traditional elite and towards the executive and an expanded urban electorate. But intractable political polarization enabled periodic military intervention and dictatorship just as the Great Depression paralysed Chile’s economy, given its reliance on commodity exports. Thereafter, facing a military liable to revolt and an aging oligarchy clinging to power, a multi-class coalition of Left and Centre-Left labourers and reformers coalesced around the Comintern-authorized Popular Front governments from 1938–52.Footnote 26 Steered by presidents from the centrist Radical Party, these governments consolidated a diverse Centre-Left coalition in which otherwise competing factions negotiated delicate political and social compromises. But right when the better angels this ‘compromise state’ seemingly prevailed in expanding Chile’s democracy and social rights while reducing socio-economic inequality, President Gabriel González Videla (1946–52) bowed to the Right’s alarm over the institutionalized and militant Left and its increasingly successful labour movement, particularly in the countryside. Videla terminated the Popular Front when he violently repressed Chilean leftists and workers and drew the Chilean battle lines of the global Cold War.Footnote 27
In short, from the 1890s to the 1940s, Chilean politics underwent dramatic upheavals triggered often by the bumpy road of export-driven development. At several moments, the nation seemed poised to implode. A heterogenous Chilean state struggled to preserve civil order, and disparate voices promoted divergent interpretations of where Chile had gone wrong. Blaming each other, Chileans and the foreign nitrate interests clashed over who shouldered the burden to fix the industry’s problems and who was entitled to Chilean natural resources. It was this context—in which asking what was next for the nitrate industry was tantamount to asking what was next for the nation—that prompted some Chileans to look to Japan for nitrate markets and an actionable blueprint for modern nationhood.
A Japanese model for Chilean nation-building
The Meiji Restoration in 1868 reintroduced Japan to foreign engagements. Over the following decades, foreign loans, investment in industrialization, and modernization of the military enabled Japan to gradually shake off the very same unequal relationships with Britain and the United States that continued to haunt development in Chile and the post-colonial world. Following triumphs in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Japan constructed an empire in Asia. Successes in industrialization and war reinforced Meiji leaders’ confidence that Western civilization, enhanced by Japanese characteristics, would secure modernity for Japan. To compete with US and European traders, Meiji leaders founded banks which subsidized Japanese manufacturing, trade, mining, education, shipbuilding, and steamship companies. Private and public interests formed large vertically integrated conglomerates, known as zaibatsu and named after a family holding company, which founded subsidiaries across a broad range of industries abroad. Many of the institutions that came to deal in Chilean nitrate were associated with one or another zaibatsu.Footnote 28 Indeed, these firms developed robust mining and shipping industries capable of processing and transporting raw materials, such as nitrate.Footnote 29
While Japanese imperialism in East Asia and the immediate Pacific was defined by formal, and often militarized occupation, Japan also pursued empire informally in the Americas through settler colonialism and commerce.Footnote 30 Envisioning emigration as an escape valve for politically resistant and often racially undesirable groups and as a reprieve for overpopulation, the Japanese state midwifed large-scale emigration to North America, before immigration exclusions and souring relations with the United States forced policymakers to look to Latin America in the 1890s.Footnote 31 Finding Latin American leaders eager for cheap labour, Japanese officials sponsored the growth of robust migrant settlements in Peru, Brazil, and Mexico.Footnote 32 Immigration invited the extension of Japanese shipping networks across the Pacific and the installation of some Japanese industries, thus encouraging Japanese officials to view Latin America through the traditionally dependent, subordinate dynamics of Latin America’s entanglements with Anglo-America.
It was within this context that Chile and Japan initialized diplomatic relations in 1897. Already possessing formal treaties with Peru (1873), Mexico (1888), and Brazil (1895), the Japanese state sought out Chilean fertilizer to address exhausted soils and national sustenance. Chilean nitrate sales in Japan averaged a modest few thousand metric tons annually in the early 1900s, before reaching annual consumption in the tens of thousands of metric tons by the 1920s. Nitrate sales peaked in the late 1930s and early 1940s with consumption that reached 70,000–100,000 metric tons annually. Nitrate was consumed mostly in the heavily agricultural prefectures of Yamagata, Nagano, Gunma, and Tokushima in the cultivation of staple crops such as sugar beets, winter cereals, vegetables, and fruits. Though it was primarily as a fertilizer that it would be marketed, it appears that as much as half of the nitrate imported into Japan supplied the industrial production of manufactured goods, other chemicals, and arms.Footnote 33 For example, demand for munitions during the Russo-Japanese War lifted Japanese nitrate consumption by almost 80% between 1903 and 1904.Footnote 34 By the late 1920s, an average of just over 50% of nitrate imported into Japan went to industry, while on average 40% was used as fertilizer, and just about 8% in mixed fertilizer production.Footnote 35
Given that silk comprised Japan’s principal export and the source of vital revenue streams for Japanese industrialization and foreign commerce, Chileans were encouraged at indications that nitrate evidently nourished mulberry trees whose leaves provided the primary food source for silkworms. Chileans often interpreted the contours of nitrate commerce in Japan based on mulberry yields. For instance, one Chilean official calculated a 63.2% rise in Japan’s silk yields between 1910 and 1919 stemming directly from the methodical and ‘scientific’ application of fertilizers in mulberry tree cultivation.Footnote 36 (Though he claimed that Chilean nitrate deserved credit for this spike, it was more likely that other commercial fertilizers, especially soybean cake imported from north-east China, was responsible for rising silk yields.)Footnote 37 To take a much later example, an agricultural experimental station in Niigata observed in 1935 that nitrate outperformed by about 30% the average yields of the next twelve varieties of fertilizer utilized in mulberry tree orchards.Footnote 38 That these and other figures come from senior diplomatic and corporate correspondence and are rarely corroborated by methodological explanations provides good reason to question some of these claims. Indeed, mulberry trees typically did not require or rely on substantial nitrogen inputs, and farmers utilized soybean cake with greater prevalence.Footnote 39 These sources—potentially guilty of deliberate misrepresentation in order to inculcate Chileans in Chile with the importance of the Japanese market, or simply of wishful thinking—reveal much about Chileans’ aspirations for their relationship with Japan and the type of mutual interdependence that Chilean elites hoped to establish with a trans-Pacific nitrate chain.
Actors on both sides also imagined that this emerging infrastructure could catalyse nitrate consumption throughout all of Asia, and particularly in China. To Chilean eyes, China was denser, more agrarian, and even less penetrated by foreign fertilizer networks than Japan.Footnote 40 Diplomatic and bureaucratic impediments ultimately complicated the extension of a Japanese nitrate infrastructure across Asia, but China always comprised the elusive, ultimate prize and an important motivation for Chile’s potential Pacific reorientation.
Chilean diplomats in Japan (the primary agents for Chilean–Japanese diplomacy and commerce) came to deliberate on the instructive value of Japanese nation-building. In 1897, the Chilean minister to the United States, Domingo Gana Cruz, described how ‘Japan has realized in recent years admirable internal progress’ premised on liberal reforms and democracy that vaulted Japan onto the global stage.Footnote 41 Angel Custodio Espejo, the Chilean consul in Yokohama, commented in 1903 that ‘Everything associated with [Japan’s] commercial and socio-cultural advancement is a subject of study among Chileans.’Footnote 42 The evening edition of Chile’s El Mercurio on 23 November 1905 advised the Chileans who looked ‘over our own industrial development … to attentively study the issues in Japanese development that could impact us’.Footnote 43 Another prominent Valparaíso periodical, La Unión, likewise counselled the Chilean government in 1913 to ‘send our students, our engineers, and our workmen so that they might observe, study, and profit from the many valuable things which Japan has’.Footnote 44 In 1921, Chilean minister in Tokyo, Víctor Vicente Robles, insisted that Japan’s methods of national administration ‘be studied for our own experience and use; whether it be commerce, politics, the army and navy, in ongoing social questions, or how economic problems unfold’.Footnote 45 The initially commercial mission of establishing nitrate commerce in Japan evolved into an admiration of Japanese development.
Poet, journalist, liberal politician, and Chilean minister to Japan in the early 1910s, Alfredo Irarrázaval Zañartu, authored some of the most forceful arguments linking nitrate commerce with Japan to Chilean nation-building.Footnote 46 The ardent nationalist reported from Tokyo in 1912:
The example of what Japan can accomplish is an immediate and practical model for the application of certain governing procedures and economic principles which should undoubtedly exert a healthy influence upon new countries, like ours, which search for solutions to guide their still uncertain destinies. It is only logical that we should take inspiration from this new country and adopt the methods which have served it in the modern era to triumph in place of continuing to follow economic theories that come to us from European countries. Europe already surpassed long ago its initial period of progress and consequently today stands matured and strengthened. Considering Japan’s model of improvement and prosperity, it would convenience us to study its financial mechanisms.Footnote 47
Though a much older civilization, Japan’s recent arrival on the international stage likened it to other ‘new countries’, such as Chile, and distinguished its model for development as much more clearly compatible with Chile’s case than what could be offered by ‘matured and strengthened’ North Atlantic states.
Irarrázaval hatched a project in 1912 to initiate Japanese production of nitrate in Chile. Backed by diplomat-businessmen in both nations, Irarrázaval proposed that Chile auction off nitrate-rich lands and/or production plants at reasonable rates to Japanese firms who themselves would administer the entire supply chain for Japan from which the Chilean state would then enjoy a durable spike in export tax revenues. Irarrázaval estimated that five years of this hypothetical arrangement would produce a ratio of six to one in profits over expenses.Footnote 48
The predominantly European-owned nitrate producers in Chile, affiliated under the London-dominated Nitrate Propaganda Association, energetically opposed Japanese firms acquiring salitreras. Its governing committee framed its opposition through a supposed ideological allegiance to state non-interference with free markets, which Chilean subsidies and incentives for Japanese firms would surely compromise. More likely, however, the European producers feared sharing limited remaining tracts of nitrate land and deposits with Japanese producers whose nitrate could compete with their own. Conveniently disregarding that a privileged command over Chilean property and resources was precisely what the foreign nitrate producers currently enjoyed, the body warned that privileges for Japanese nitrate producers could invite a ‘monopoly’ that would weaken other national shippers and stifle ‘Chilean, English, German, and other national industrialists’.Footnote 49
Irarrázaval stuck to his guns. He contemptuously questioned the logic of following policy devised by ‘the dominant spirit of the United Kingdom’, explaining how ‘the big, the strong, the triumphant, are committed supporters of free competition, while the weak who need help, support the theory of protectionism’.Footnote 50 The European producers would thus always prioritize supposedly free competition in ‘the more established though less promising region [in Europe] which, moreover, coincides with their own national interests’. Because the European producers clearly possessed no incentive to ‘concern themselves with interests that are not their own … the Chilean state should do the same when it comes to its own national interests’.Footnote 51 It thus struck Irarrázaval that this very contest over a potential Japanese nitrate chain presented an opportunity to make a pre-emptive strike for Chile’s economic self-determination.
But in this and other showdowns, not all Chileans endorsed the potential pivot to the Pacific. As early as 1897, sceptical congressmen suggested that funds for diplomatic offices in Japan would be better utilized as direct payments to the Nitrate Propaganda Association who could administer commerce in new Asian markets themselves.Footnote 52 El Diario Ilustrado in 1909 similarly accused the stationing of diplomats in Japan as ‘extravagant’ and questioned what ‘relations there could be with Japan whose benefits would match the cost’. The article declared that the Chileans advocating for diplomacy with Japan had got ahead of themselves: ‘At a time when we are debating a fiscal crisis with an imbalanced national budget, it is a grave error to create a Legation in Japan. The legation will be very expensive.’Footnote 53 Such voices opposed saddling a strapped Chilean treasury with unworthy financial obligations.
The Chilean state ultimately rejected Irarrázaval’s proposal for Japanese nitrate production in Chile. A blend of ambivalence and dependence on European capital informed this decision. The Chilean foreign minister, Antonio Huneeus, conceded an interest in ‘some sort of convenient adjustment to assure ourselves of increased carriage of nitrate to Asia’, but refused to endorse Japanese acquisition of salitreras ‘because the other foreign elements would be offended’.Footnote 54 Seen in this light, Irarrázaval’s outlook towards Japan and the Pacific for Chilean nitrate, and the Chilean state’s concern over aggravating European investors, became a proxy contest over Chile’s economic sovereignty.
Scattered throughout these conversations was the thorny issue of race. On the one hand, some Chileans—from a nation subjected to North Atlantic and, by implication, ‘white’ imperialism—appreciated Japan’s racial insurgency. Chilean diplomat, Luis Illanes, commented in 1922 that ‘Japan has become the protagonist in the fight for liberation for races denominated as inferior and a champion of their rights not previously recognized.’Footnote 55 Reflecting on Japan’s foiled pursuit of racial equality within the League of Nations, the Chilean minister to Japan, Victor Robles, indicted ‘the movement to link the principal white nations to limit and intervene in questions of the Extreme Orient’.Footnote 56 Another Chilean in Tokyo crowned Japan ‘the champion of the races of the Orient … showing itself to be the defender of the oriental races and their rights’.Footnote 57 On the other hand, however, many Chilean elites identified as a regionally exceptional, whiter populace within a heavily miscegenated Latin America.Footnote 58 Convinced that mixing with Japanese would dilute Chile’s white homogeneity, they opposed inviting large-scale Asian labour migrants and sustained a healthy scepticism towards integration with Japan and the Pacific. Chilean elites told a national creation story in which they attributed their relatively whiter population to a heritage that was more European than indigenous or African. These Chileans thus incongruously seesawed between identifying with Japan’s confrontation with white imperialism and the racial implications of Japan’s emerging international presence, while also differentiating themselves from Japanese and others in the Global South.
Enthusiasts of Chilean–Japanese relations further neglected three critical ironies. First, they seemingly did not detect the contradiction of seeing an escape from dependency on European economic penetration by aspiring to be the structurally subordinate commodity frontier for another empire—Japan. Second, these Chileans either deliberately or conveniently overlooked that the rising state they emphatically praised as the avenger of former subjugated peoples everywhere was simultaneously violently marshalling East Asia under its own imperial control. Third, social relations in Japan had also deviated far from Chileans’ idealization of Japanese domestic stability. Indeed, by the 1890s and 1900s, enthusiasm for Meiji modernity slumped under the pressures of overpopulation, unemployment and worker mobilization, food shortages, and anxieties that surrendering all national culture to western customs corroded Japan’s unique cultural heritage. Criticisms of the Meiji state and aspirations to establish representative government prevailed by 1912 when the Meiji emperor died, and a new generation of liberal politicians took command of a highly restrictive constitutional democracy governed by an emperor and the Diet. The subsequent Taishō period (1912–26) witnessed the acceleration of quasi-liberal party politics at home and the solidification of Japanese prominence on the world stage, while simultaneously intensifying the same social conflicts that destabilized the late Meiji era.Footnote 59 In other words, Japan’s international and domestic trajectories did not always align with Chileans’ interpretations. But because the North Atlantic possessed a more obviously detrimental record of interventionism, the novelty of Japanese activity in Chile perhaps seemed by contrast palatable and strategic. Chileans’ depictions of Japan also reveal much about how Chileans perceived of their own nation and its place in the world, but not necessarily of Japan itself.
Chile, Japan, and the ‘literature of the crisis’
Historians refer to a ‘literature of the crisis’ to categorize the generation of early twentieth-century Chilean social scientists whose charged publications asked how Chile had degenerated from a highly prosperous, mostly politically stable, and mostly socially harmonious belle epoque, to an economically dubious, socially fractious, and politically polarized early twentieth century.Footnote 60 This section of the article examines how Japan emerged as one telling referent among nationalist intellectuals debating where Chile had lost its way.
In 1909, influential journalist and co-founder of Chile’s Nationalist Party, Tancredo Pinochet Le-Brun, published a monograph entitled, The Conquest of Chile in the Twentieth Century. The work amplified calls for Chileans to wrest control of their political economy from the foreign (particularly European) capital to whom Chile’s oligarchic rulers had ransomed ‘the national sovereignty’.Footnote 61 Such foreign ‘conquest’ explained Chilean underdevelopment. Though far from sympathetic towards Japan—he opposed Japanese immigration and generally resented most other nationalities—Pinochet Le-Brun extensively analysed Japan’s speedy rise into ‘a nation capable of facing the great European powers’. He correlated Japanese triumphs with the study, extraction, and adaptation specifically for Japanese conditions of ‘the secrets to the successes’ of European civilization. While similarly steeped in and ensnared by foreign industry and culture, Chile had failed to repurpose for itself European strategies of national development ‘as Japan has done’.Footnote 62
Upon completing his tenure as Chile’s minister to Japan in 1921, conservative Francisco Rivas Vicuña published a lengthy monograph entitled, The Real Japan: Notes on a Grand People and the Internal Forces of the Empire. In it, Rivas outlined an interpretation of global history in which the world gradually modernized and progressed but could not escape the pathology of Old World civilizations to relapse into conflict and war. He argued that Western-driven violence and conquests had bifurcated the world into ‘the providers of raw materials and the producers of manufactures’ which primed global society for repeated inter-imperial contests over colonial suppliers, as had erupted in Europe in 1914.Footnote 63
Japan, by contrast, illuminated ‘an opposing path’. Rivas explained Japan’s successful nation-building through its unique harmonization of the many tiers of domestic society that were perennially in conflict in western nations. This harmonization eradicated the dissatisfactions that resulted in the inter-state conflicts which blighted the West’s record of global leadership: ‘a general program of methodical development is a far more effective guarantor of peace than submarines and canons’. Moreover, in praising the Japanese state’s generous public expenditures across many venues, he argued that Japan’s ‘Buddhist collectivism’ outperformed ‘the empire of economic liberalism … and the Christian individualism of the Occident’ through which selfish Western states eroded protections in agriculture and labour which nourished social divisions and, ultimately, violent conflict. To break the global cycle of rivalry and war engendered by Western leadership, and for other nations who hoped to trade in their colonial provider and debtor status for industrialization and progress, Japan’s model could ‘be imitated with great success’.Footnote 64 In no clearer terms could The Real Japan have praised the achievements of Japan’s nation-building and the rewards of its international leadership.
Prolific right-wing economist and journalist Carlos Keller Rueff also deliberated on development and political economy in Chile and the world. Guided by a Chilean nationalism deeply informed by his German heritage and sympathies for European fascism, Keller co-founded Chile’s National Socialist Movement in 1932.Footnote 65 Following the global economic collapse in 1929, Keller composed a series of publications that endeavoured to explain Chile’s particularly dire reaction to the Great Depression. (Indeed in 1933, the League of Nations would identify Chile as the country most afflicted by the global recession.) Keller envisioned decisive, authoritarian leadership moulded after, for example, Italy’s Benito Mussolini as the remedy for Chile’s complacent political elite gridlocked by an accommodating and indulgent democracy, foreign interest, a workforce incapable of carrying out industrialization, and the failures of liberalism. He ultimately echoed many other Latin American thinkers in advocating for protected domestic industrialization that scholars have termed Import Substitution Industrialization.Footnote 66
The third instalment in Keller’s trilogy analysing Chile’s Great Depression hardships—A Country Adrift: A Commentary on the Social Seismology of Chile (1932)—outlined how Japanese achievements represented an instructive foil for Chile’s underdevelopment:
Japan is a country whose economic organization is incomparably more advanced than ours. Its system of education, according to German authorities, is the best in the world. It has a population fifteen times greater than ours, which alone implies far more possibilities than we have for scientific development.Footnote 67
While likely knowing little about Japan, Keller took inspiration from Meiji Japan’s rural land reform which expropriated and repurposed for the national good land formerly wasted by a complacent, feudal elite. A Country Adrift insisted that Chile implement this same strategy to eradicate its own inequitable and inefficient rentier land tenure system (latifundismo) exploited by the mainstream, parasitic elite and to transfer land and property rights to campesinos who would manage the land with some technical and financial support from an energetic and corporatist state. He further contrasted the methodical Japanese agricultural work ethic with the complacency rampant among Chilean workers who had never been provided the impetus or the resources to innovate. To enact an agrarian reform that could generate sustainable production and wealth for the nation rather than complacent landholders or foreign firms, ‘If we need an example to follow, I will point to Japan.’ So, for a Chile adrift, waylaid by the absence of nationalist conviction, effective governance, order, prosperity, and morality, Keller concluded that Japan ‘is the model we should imitate. The misery we live in obliges us to follow this path because there is no other option.’Footnote 68
This intellectual history indicates how Japanese development resonated with Chileans over time and for different reasons. In the early 1900s, Pinochet Le-Brun (whose Nationalist Party drew from across the political spectrum in their indictments of the oligarchy’s alliance with foreign capital) idealized Japan’s successful infusion of foreign knowledge into an organic and nationally controlled political economy. As the world reeled from the catastrophic shock of the First World War, Rivas, a member of the Conservative Party, contemplated Japan as a stabilizing agent within the international order, and a model for promoting harmony, rather than competition, at home and abroad. And, in the 1930s, Japan resonated with Keller’s ideological sympathies for fascist authoritarianism and his search for decisive resolutions to the Great Depression. That the Japanese blueprint for nation-building and international autonomy resonated over time and across the Chilean political spectrum, illustrates how Chilean–Japanese relations became one important theatre for the nationalist contest over Chile’s future.
Development and order in the Pacific during wartime
Charged and nuanced discourses over reorienting Chile’s nitrate industry towards Japan, which I argue represented proxy conversations over Chilean development, began to change in the third decade of the twentieth century. Up to that point, nationalist advocates of a Pacific economic pivot principally aimed their animus at British influence in Chile. Yet, the United States seized upon Britain’s declining commercial power in Latin America during the First World War to hasten its own imperial march southward. During the 1910s, US firms, goods, and finance capital swept across South America. The year 1915 marked the first in which the United States leapfrogged Britain as Chile’s principal trading partner.Footnote 69 And by the 1920s, US capital overtook British predominance in Chile’s nitrate industry: Guggenheim Brothers capital purchased the two largest formerly British-owned nitrate producers (the Anglo-Chilean Consolidated Nitrate Corporation and the Lautaro Nitrate Corporation) and overhauled production methods.Footnote 70 The US role in the industry deepened in 1931 when the Guggenheims and the Chilean state reformed the industry through a new parastatal body called the Chilean Nitrate Corporation (COSACH). Under the COSACH, the Guggenheims compensated the removal of Chile’s export tax in exchange for a 50% stake in the industry, a 6% income tax and, direct payments to the Chilean state in advance for future dividends.Footnote 71 In other words, the United States replaced Britain as the predominant external force in Chile, the nitrate industry, and beyond.
Simultaneously, Latin America became an important theatre of US–Japanese imperial rivalry. Japan’s violent assembly of an East Asian empire, underway for several decades, aroused significant international animus by 1937 when Japan accelerated its war-making in China. Thereafter, Western policymakers shoved Japan out of global trading networks, culminating in 1939 when the United States terminated its 1911 commercial treaty with Japan.Footnote 72 Japan consequently entrusted the yen bloc (mainland Japan and territories under Japanese occupation) and Latin America, which one senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official described as ‘client states’, with filling the void in Japan’s foreign commerce vacated by Europe and North America.Footnote 73 Targeted by Japanese manufacturers, Latin America ran a trade deficit with Japan for the very first time in 1934.Footnote 74 By 1939, Chileans reported that Japanese exports to Latin America exceeded imports by almost two to one.Footnote 75 Across the Pacific, the United States planned to expand recent acquisitions of Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines into its own imperial offensive in the region. The US and Japanese empires careened towards confrontation until the Japanese air force attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in 1941 and ignited total war in the Pacific.
While still premised on an admiration of Japanese economic modernization and the promise of Japanese nitrate consumption, Chilean nation-building in the Pacific shifted by the 1920s and 1930s from repudiating British interventionism to preserving neutrality in deteriorating US–Japanese relations. Chileans in Tokyo attentively described the Pacific order transforming around them. Regarding Japan’s February 1933 retreat from the League of Nations, Chilean diplomat Sergio Montt narrated how ‘The Old World political system which through its colonies reaches into the North Pacific is based on an equilibrium that has now been broken by the emergence of a grand new empire: Japan … Will Great Britain and America tolerate this policy?’Footnote 76 Chilean minister to Japan, Armando Labra Carvajal, commented in 1939 how ‘the Pacific is being divided into two tutelary doctrines: the Monroe Doctrine and [Japan’s] “New Order.” … The Pacific is now not only the “economic bridge” between the occident and the Asian orient, but will be as the Mediterranean used to be but in a much larger scale: the centre of occidental civilization and of the new order of things in the world.’Footnote 77
Chilean representatives thus saw themselves as vested participants in this struggle. Labra further defended neutrality by suggesting that as war in Europe and East Asia ‘converted the Pacific into the axis of global history … Chile, which lives in the reflection of the great powers of the Pacific in these times of world history should be vigilant and alert in guarding its interests and liberties.’Footnote 78 As one of the ‘young’ nations of the Americas, Chile ought to closely follow the ‘problems of the Pacific, because I believe them to be ours’.Footnote 79 Chilean president, Pedro Aguirre Cerda, committed in 1940 to ‘vigilant neutrality’ in the global war as ‘the means of enabling national progress’ and ‘strengthening our economic independence’.Footnote 80 Chileans calculated that abstaining from US–Japanese conflict could catapult Chilean commerce and buttress its national self-determination.
In early 1937, a Chilean economic delegation entrusted with expanding nitrate commerce visited Japan, China, and the occupied zone in Manchuria, financed in part by the Japanese government. Conveniently neglecting the violent realities of war and Japan’s intensifying invasion of China, Japanese officials wined and dined the visiting Chileans across the empire, and both sides doubled down on their belief in the promise of nitrate commerce and diplomatic integration in the Pacific. Asia America (a monthly journal on Japanese–Latin American relations edited by Venezuelan diplomats in Japan) published a special issue commemorating the Chilean mission. In one contribution entitled, ‘Chile Looks to the Orient’, the Chilean consul general, Carlos de la Barra, contended that, though the ‘furthermost neighbour of Japan on the Pacific’, Chile hoped ‘to see and understand something of the stupendous progress and endeavour of the Japanese people’.Footnote 81 Manuel Cuadros, Chile’s senior nitrate representative in Japan, likewise emphasized his ‘admiration of the people of this Island Empire … I feel that members of the coming Mission are fortunate in being able to see first-hand and experience for themselves something of the life and work of the Japanese.’Footnote 82 The Chilean minister, Martín Figueroa, added that ‘Whether observing up close the progress it has achieved, assimilating in few years the material advantages of occidental society … or observing the personal knowledge of its ruling elites or of its disciplined and laborious masses, the fact is that even us Chileans have come to its land in order to understand what Japan is.’Footnote 83 Japanese commerce and development, even into the late 1930s, thus retained its shine.
The Japanese contributors to Asia America portrayed Chile and Japan as virtuous partners in the construction of an alternative international community right as the North Atlantic-led order crumbled into war. Kadono Jūkurō, president of Japan’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, stated that ‘Currently, uncertainty reigns in Europe. The waves of the Pacific, by contrast, remain calm. I believe that durable peace and growing prosperity can be achieved in the Pacific Ocean only through economic connections and by the trading companies who reach across, figuratively and physically, the countries that border the Pacific Ocean.’Footnote 84 Ryuzo Asama, a director of Japanese exporter guilds for Latin America reinforced Kadono’s confidence that Japanese–Chilean commerce contributed to ‘international amnesty and global peace’.Footnote 85
Because it promised a reliable revenue stream, Chilean diplomats and nitrate businessmen evidently did not question their complicity in Japan’s war in China, which they predicted did ‘not have an end in sight’.Footnote 86 Indeed, Chilean nitrate sales to Japan achieved quantitative peaks in the 1930s and early 1940s and Chilean advocates of Japanese relations articulated scant objections to nitrate supplying the organs of Japanese imperialism and war-making. For example, to counteract anticipated deficiencies in agricultural and armaments production, the Japanese state authorized an emergency increase of Chilean nitrate by 300% in 1940. Japanese nitrate imports increased from about 31,000 tons in 1938–9 to about 100,000 tons in 1939–40.Footnote 87 The record also indicates that much of the nitrate shipped to Japan by this moment supplied the production of Japanese munitions, as well as agriculture and heavy industry in Manchuria.Footnote 88
So by the early 1940s, Chilean neutrality in the global conflagration and rising nitrate sales aligned with thickening institutional ties to indicate that Chilean–Japanese relations could take the form promised by its architects since the 1890s. But just when it appeared that Chile was successfully benefiting from toeing the line between the United States and Japan, an animated political and social battle over Chile’s wartime allegiances raged at home.
Chile’s Left and Centre-Left, consolidated under Popular Front coalitions, campaigned vehemently for the rupture of relations with the Axis. From inside and outside of the government, Chilean socialist and communist spokesmen launched an ideological assault on fascism’s threat to labour and social rights. Though also reproachful of its role in Latin America, these actors concluded that US New Deal commitments to liberalism, cross-class collaboration, and democracy distinguished the United States a preferable alternative to a fascist, authoritarian vision for reorganizing the world.Footnote 89 Chile’s Marxist Left joined liberals and labourers from across Latin America by the late 1930s in sounding alarms over Japan’s escalating violence in China.Footnote 90
But a vocal Chilean Right (a loose coalition of several political parties, anti-Marxists, most of the landed and industrial elite, and senior military commanders) eagerly guarded Chile’s neutrality. Some Conservative Party officials, such as Chamber of Deputies congressman Rafael Moreno and senator Maximiano Errázuriz (the latter of whom directed the Chilean economic delegation to Japan in 1937), even accepted covert payments from Japanese diplomats in exchange for information and advocacy within Chilean politics.Footnote 91 Rumours of plots to unseat the Popular Front governments swirled among both the armed forces (which possessed a strong Prussian influence) and Chile’s German population concentrated in the southern city of Valdivia. By 1942, when Chile and Argentina remained the only neutral Latin American states, Japanese intelligence agents gathered clandestine assurances of Chile’s commitments to withstand US geopolitical pressure from very senior Chilean officials including current and former foreign ministers and even then-president Juan Antonio Ríos Morales (1942–6).Footnote 92
In addition to the ideological allure for the Chilean Right and the profitability of commerce, relations with Japan remained tenable because the war’s victor remained far from clear. Francisco Javier Díaz, former inspector general and division general of the Chilean Army and co-founder (alongside the aforementioned Carlos Keller) of Chile’s National Socialist Party, published a short monograph in February of 1941 entitled, The War Between the United States and Japan: Its Relation to Chile. The work sized up the military escalations on both sides and the colliding visions for international dominion and concluded that ‘the United States has little chance of imposing its will against [Japan]’. He stressed that because Chile possessed strategic materials, military installations, and supply chains linking the Pacific and Atlantic, Chile’s allegiances potentially ‘could be a decisive factor’. But considering Chile’s military unpreparedness, he predicted that Chileans would be relegated to ‘mere spectators’ and thus preferred Chile to rebuff US overtures to install military bases in the nation. Moreover, in declaring that this impending war ‘is not disassociated from South American interests, and consequently those of Chile’, Díaz emphasized that Japan remained a highly attractive commercial partner, citing the recent tripling of Japanese–Chilean commerce owing to Britain’s naval blockade that stripped Japan of many former trading partners.Footnote 93 Here, Díaz echoed Maximiano Errázuriz who, while leading Chile’s commercial mission to Japan in 1937, enthusiastically endorsed Japanese occupation in Manchuria and the South Manchuria Railway Company as the tools that could finally prise open China’s nitrate markets.Footnote 94
The Chilean public also weighed in on Japan’s invasion of China. In August of 1937, the liberal periodical, Ercilla, offered a sweepstakes soliciting Chilean testimonials. Historian Pedro Iacobelli calculates that only one-quarter of the nearly 8,500 responses defended Japan, collectively endorsing its defiance of ‘deceitful white imperialisms’ whose defeat would surely open the floodgates of US imperialism across Latin America. The overwhelming three-quarters of Chilean readers, by contrast, sympathized with China in whom they detected a reflection of Chile’s post-colonial struggle, drawing on anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-imperial rhetoric.Footnote 95 And finally, the Chinese immigrant community, concentrated in the nitrate north, similarly mobilized the press and the Chinese Red Cross to promote solidarity with China and to vilify Japan.Footnote 96 So while Chilean diplomats in Japan for years viewed Japan as a cause célèbre for the world’s have-nots, Japanese aggression in China guided the Chilean public to the opposite conclusion.
Despite its appeal for commerce and autonomy, neutrality was a risky business. Ensconced in an economic order in the Western hemisphere dependent upon the United States and which quickly filed in behind the Allies, the Chilean state found itself increasingly isolated.Footnote 97 Across the 1930s, the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s promise of good neighbourly relations further concretized US dominion in Latin America and the Pacific. A month after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States convened senior US and Latin American representatives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to consolidate commitments to an inter-American security alliance. That the remainder of Latin America had by then severed relations with the Axis enabled the United States to ratchet up its geopolitical pressure on Chile and Argentina as the only neutral states. For example, both sides knew that Chile was deeply reliant on enormous loans from the Import–Export Bank to finance the Chilean Development Corporation or CORFO (a state apparatus founded in 1939 to generate domestic industry) and also for war materiel to fortify Chile against a hypothetical Japanese or Nazi ‘fifth column’ assault. US-owned copper companies additionally courted Chile by fixing prices on and committing to production increases of Chilean copper for the US wartime market.Footnote 98 And while Germany (26%) and Japan (4.5%) comprised Chile’s second and third largest trading partners by the early 1940s, their percentage share of Chile’s foreign commerce was dwarfed by the approximately 60% possessed by the United States.Footnote 99
As the nation’s wartime allegiances politically and socially polarized Chileans, economic pragmatism, hemispheric pressure, and the growing likelihood of US victory gradually eroded the case for Chilean neutrality. By mid-1942, Chile recalled its diplomats and businessmen from Japan and closed its nitrate sales offices in Tokyo. The nitrate sales conglomerate thereafter mutually abrogated its contract with the primary importer of Chilean nitrate—the Mitsubishi Corporation—all of whose activities were directed by the Japanese state to meet exclusively wartime agendas.Footnote 100 In January of 1943, the Chilean senate terminated diplomatic relations with the Axis states. The rupture of relations seems somewhat abrupt, given the fortitude of the neutrality caucus within Chile and the sustained vision, cultivated since the 1890s, for what Japan could commercially and diplomatically offer, especially in respect of nitrates. However, the rupture of relations also marked the culmination of the gradual leftward tilt of Chilean politics, Japan trending towards military defeat, and a quantitatively much more important US trading partner marshalling the hemisphere under its influence. That the Chilean senate had resoundingly favoured neutrality up until that point, and that the vote to terminate relations triumphed with only a two-thirds majority by early 1943, illustrates that relinquishing ties with Japan and the Axis was far from unanimous.Footnote 101 Thereafter, the Chilean state relegated and expelled many residents of Axis nationalities and most punitively targeted Japanese.Footnote 102
Japanese officials had evaluated wartime allegiances as a contest between Chile’s self-determination and US imperialism. In June 1942, the Japanese foreign minister, Shigenori Togo, applauded the resilience of Chilean ‘sovereignty and independence’ against US geopolitical harassment.Footnote 103 Two months later, a Japanese cabinet official similarly declared his ‘profound respect’ for Chilean and Argentine autonomy ‘despite all the schemes of the United States and Great Britain’. He concluded that ‘the only means for South America to secure its progress is eliminating the obstacles of the current conflagration and maintaining neutrality’.Footnote 104 These sentiments flipped once Chile severed relations with Japan. Tomokazu Hori, the official spokesperson for Japan’s foreign ministry, indicted Chile’s ‘great folly’ of bending to ‘the strong pressure of the United States’. Hori lamented Chile’s ‘abandonment on her own accord of her controlling position in the waters of the Pacific Coast of South America’.Footnote 105 The Tokyo Nichi-Nichi in Osaka described how ‘American agents have spent millions of dollars to bribe Chilean senators and the US will very likely, after pushing Chile to cut its relations with the Axis, obtain bases in that country for its military operations and will eventually bring them into the war. Chile is undergoing the most serious crisis it has ever experienced since the founding of its statehood.’Footnote 106 In other words, Japanese officials accused Chile of forfeiting to the United States precisely the economic autonomy which Chile’s Pacific enthusiasts had advocated that Chile could acquire through Pacific integration.
The Second World War thus contracted the opportunity and potential autonomy of the Pacific of the early century to a violent imperial standoff in the 1930s and 1940s. By 1945, the United States inherited uncontested Pacific hegemony following Allied military victory. Thereafter, administrators of the US-dominated Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–52) deliberately impeded the resumption of Chilean nitrate commerce in Japan in order to sell US-produced synthetic fertilizer. US hegemony in the Pacific and emerging Cold War obligations entailed that the United States would obstruct any effort to organize international political economy in the region that did not align precisely with US interests.
Conclusion
Beginning when it appeared as though Anglo-American imperialism was fading in the early twentieth century and ending when the United States outlasted Britain and Japan to capture Pacific hegemony by 1945, this article has tracked the history of a Chilean project for development and international order in the Pacific. Chileans looked to Japan for nitrate commerce and for a reproducible model for economic and political administration to overcome subservience to Anglo-American interventionism. Partaking in a surge of post-colonial revisions of the international system in the 1910s, Chileans and Japanese cast themselves as regional leaders uniquely qualified to construct a new Pacific order that could also unlock prosperity at home and to reinforce self-determination. Japan thus offered some Chilean actors an actionable and compelling means of understanding their own nation-building process.
By the 1930s, the North Atlantic empires joined Japan in relinquishing the early century’s fading tendencies towards liberal internationalism and pursued instead political economic integration within their regions and empires. Even as Japan prosecuted a merciless war in China by the late 1930s, some Chilean elites persisted in their quest to harness Chilean development to commercial and diplomatic relations with Japan and imagined Chile as a protagonist in this retooling of the Pacific order. This agenda, however, collided with rising domestic anti-Japanese sentiment led by the Marxist Left and concessions of US economic importance in Chile. Torn between these competing impulses, the Chilean state debated which horse to back until January of 1943 when pragmatism convinced Chile to officially terminate relations with Japan.
Historian Joaquín Fermandois posits that the dilemma over Chile’s wartime allegiances constituted a political ‘search for national identity’.Footnote 107 I expand the sentiment by arguing that the dilemma was not only political, but, seen through the larger story I have told, represented a deeper question over how Chileans conceived of and debated economic sovereignty, development, and their place in the world. The Chilean–Japanese ambition to forge in the Pacific an economic order autonomous from North Atlantic influence ultimately anticipated the fates of many other post-colonial visions for remaking the world that were to be bludgeoned or sidelined by imperial reaction and the exigencies of the global Cold War.
This article ultimately contributes to conversations that invert the traditional North-to-South directionality of development and international relations.Footnote 108 I apply this approach by seeing the Pacific as another counterfactual theatre of Latin American order- and nation-building. Meiji Japan appealed to many have-not nations and outcasts on the geopolitical margins as an alternative possibility for successful nationhood and international leadership. So even though, in the end, Latin America never escaped its dependency upon Anglo-America and the predicament of relying on foreign capital to support efforts to eradicate subordinate entanglements in the first place, this story illustrates how nation-building was both a domestic and international process that originated not only with US or European models for development, but also in Japan, the Pacific, or within Latin America itself.
Acknowledgements
For their intellectual support and feedback, the author thanks Margaret Chowning, Michel Gobat, Rebecca Herman, Elisabeth Leake, Michael Montesano, Daniel Sargent, Heidi Tinsman, the anonymous referees, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
Financial support
None to declare.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Evan Fernández is a historian of Latin America with a focus on Chile, international relations, and political economy. He has also published on US–Latin American relations in the twentieth century. In 2024–5, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. In 2025, he is Visiting Assistant Professor and Core Fellow at Boston College.
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