14 - What Japan Has Done (1937)

Summary

This 1937 essay was written after Du Bois’s 1936 voyage around the world, when he visited both Japan and Japanese-occupied Manchuria, hosted in both places by Japanese officials. The essay considers Japan’s success in having “copied” European capitalist society and developed its education, industry, and technology. Just as Japan “saved the world from slavery to Europe” in the nineteenth century, it is called in the twentieth to save the world from “slavery to capital” by joining forces with the other non-European nations to resist European domination. Japan seized Manchuria knowing that if it did not European states soon would, but the British have fomented resistance to Japan in China. Shut out of other European alliances, Japan allied with fascist Germany and Japan; this alliance cements her enmity with Russia. Japan’s danger is that of simply becoming another capitalist stronghold; its hope lies in its history of leading resistance to European imperialism.