Japan Forays

An architect of the Black civil rights movement and its foremost theorist, W. E. B. Du Bois looked expectantly to Japan. Apart from having escaped China’s fate -humiliated, nibbled, reduced – it was the sole colored country able to check white global dominance. He wrote elatedly after the Russo-Japanese war: “For the first time in a thousand years a great white nation has measured arms with a colored nation and has been found wanting … The awakening of the yellow races is certain … the awakening of the brown and black races will follow in time.” In 1936, Du Bois visited Japan and its continental provinces, which experience sealed his trust in Asian-African cooperation. Soon after Du Bois’s foray, Helen Keller went to Japan. Keller hoped, in what she thought would be a multi-month tour, to further the cause of people afflicted by disabilities, particularly blindness. Her 1937 excursion was additionally an exercise (albeit futile) in informal diplomacy, to avert the Japanese-US slide into a war trap. Neither did attempts in 1940-1941 by Bishop Walsh and Father Drought preserve the Pacific peace. These self-appointed emissaries had sought to lessen Japanese-US estrangement.