British support for Japan during the war was never really a given, despite the Anglo-Japanese Treaty. Much of the British support for Japan came in the form of fiscal support, which British financiers were not willing to extend to Japan in the war's initial stages. The pro-Japanese tilt of British policy only happened when a constellation of contingent factors aligned in Japan's favor.

One of the diplomatic coups of the Meiji state was the securing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The initial orientation of the alliance when it was signed in 1902 was as mutual security pact against Russian intervention within the East Asia. The British conceptualized the pact as a means to guarantee imperial defense within India. For their part, the Japanese saw this alliance as a means to gain access to British naval technology and as a means to ensure a friendly Britain in the event of war with Russia. By virtue of these limited terms, the pact was successful; the Japanese battleline at Tsushima was mostly British-built for example. But in terms of actual strategic realignment of the Pacific, the Alliance had only a limited impact. There was little in the treaty that compelled one party to act, nor did either party share any significant "tripwires" or common strategic interests to form the basis for collective action Despite some initial enthusiasm, the ardor for alliance had cooled somewhat in London even before the Russo-Japanese War. Prior to 1902, London's understanding of the balance of power was that by helping prop up Japan, they would have prevented Russia from capitalizing upon Japan's perceived weakness and expanding into Korea and Manchuria. This strengthened Russia could then pose an even bigger threat to India. In the run-up to the war, British PM Balfour declared of the alliance that:

If we interpret the Japanese Alliance as one requiring us to help Japan whenever she gets to loggerheads with Russia, it is absurdly one-sided. Japan certainly would not help us to prevent Amsterdam from falling into the hands of the French, or Holland falling into the hands of the Germans. Nor would she involve herself in any quarrel we might have over the northwest frontier of India.

Japanese envoys in Britain found themselves something of a cold shoulder when asking for credits and bonds in 1904 to pay for an ever more expensive war effort. The Japanese government dispatched Viscount Takahashi Korekiyo, the vicegovernor of the Bank of Japan, as an envoy to Britain to gain credits from Parr's Bank, a firm which Japan had extensive dealings with prior to the war. Parr's rejected the initial Japanese request as too large and risky. Balfour had expected that the war would soon devolve into a stalemate and felt that Japan should "work out her own salvation in her own way." Although the British foreign policy staff was far from pro-Russian, they did worry that supporting Japan would alienate Russia's chief ally on the continent, France. If Britain were to give too much support to Japan, she could find herself further isolated in European affairs with little gained aside from strengthening Japan.

The Takahashi mission managed to reverse its misfortunes through the intervention of the American banker Jacob Schiff, head of the private bank Kuhn, Loeb and Co. In May 1904, Schiff offered to underwrite a major loan to Japan, which would be the first of several loans the US extended to Japan during the conflict. News of the these American financing helped to break British finance out of its neutrality as there was a fear that America would take the place of Britain as Japan's chief financier. Arguably even more important for Japan's future finances than the Schiff meeting was that news filtered back to London and New York about the Japanese successes against Port Arthur, the Dogger Bank incident where the Russian fleet mistakenly fired on British trawlers, and the broader turn-around in Japan's military fortunes. Once it became clear that it was likely that Japan could win the war, Anglo-American financiers were more willing to help Japan pay for its war.

Like their British counterparts, the Americans' enthusiasm for the Japanese was highly conditional. Schiff, as one of the New York community's prominent Jews, was very ill-disposed towards Tsarist Russia, especially after the 1903 Kishiniev pogrom. Both US President Teddy Roosevelt and J. P. Morgan were also quite leery of Russia's violation of the Open-Door Policy in northern China and saw backing Japan as means to preserve American economic interests in the Far East. In a curious mirror of the British, the American's initial warmth for the Japanese cooled as Japan became more successful in the field. A number of American commentators began to fear that Japan would be even more dangerous rival than Russia. Although Alfred Thayer Mahan praised Japan for hewing to his principles of concentration of force, his articles on the war also had a tone that Japan was emerging as a danger to the US. It was no small coincidence that War Plan Orange, the USN's plan to defeat Japan, began to gel up at this time. Sensing the mood among his counterparts,the Japanese naval attache Commander Taniguchi Naomi sent back a report to Tokyo in 1907:

Among those military men who openly discuss a Japanese-American war in journals is Admiral Mahan; I have reason to believe that he and other naval officers secretly regard our Empire as an enemy.

Beyond the issue of imperial competition, there was a domestic component to the strains in the Japanese-American relations. The school issue in California, where Japanese parents protested the placement of Japanese children into segregated schools exacerbated tensions between the two nations, especially since Tokyo took an active interest in the status of its nationals living abroad. Although Roosevelt did pride himself as a negotiator for peace, but balked at Japan's demands of an indemnity from Russia claiming that the US did not do so after its wars with Mexico and Spain in which the US received territory, but not money.

But these increasing tensions were not enough to derail Anglo-American financing of the war, which proved both lucrative to the investors, but also allowed the Japanese significant leeway to conduct operations in the latter half of the conflict. The Japanese were further able to use German bankers as financial leverage against the Anglo-Americans once it became clear that Japan was going to win the war after Tsushima.

Schiff's antipathy towards the Tsarist state was emblematic of one of the other main advantages Japan possessed during the war: its enemy. While Anglo-American backers could find some quality in Japan they liked, the inverse was true of the Romanov state. Russian foreign policy in this period was erratic and often inconsistent and the blundering of the tsarist state bore a great deal of responsibility for the outbreak of the war. The Romanovs had positioned themselves in Europe as the champions of reactionary politics (or as Dominic Lieven put it in an LSE lecture, "the T-rex of reaction") and a wide strata of Anglo-American opinion tended to see Russia's loss as progress's gain.

Although Anglo-American support for Japan appears relatively straightforward, the reality was quite different. This support was often highly conditional and often less about Japan winning than seeing various other sides lose. This type of environment hindered long-range thinking about the future of European colonies in the region, although as the American case indicates some Westerners were thinking along those lines as Japan started to win the war. Yet, even this Yellow Peril-ism had its limits. Japan still regarded itself as a member of the imperial club that was quite different from other Asian nations and the war only cemented this idea among a good deal of Japanese elite opinion.

Sources

Asada, Sadao. Culture Shock and Japanese-American Relations: Historical Essays. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007.

Dickinson, Frederick R. War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914-1919. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999.

O'Brien, Phillips Payson. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902-1922. London: Routledge, 2004.

Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David. Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan. DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001.

Steinberg, John W. The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective World War Zero. Leiden: Brill, 2005.