It’s the late 1800s (March 1895) and Russia is one of the most prominent Super Powers of the Western Hemisphere. They have significant plans of expanding into China and Korea. At this time, Japan took the win against China in the Sino-Japanese War. This created a major obstacle that Russia was not willing to accept. With the support of the other western super powers (Germany and France), Russia was aggressive and succeeded in sustaining pressure on Japan that moved them to return control of the Liaotung Peninsula to China. Russia then proceeded to push through with their expansion plans and started building the East Qing Railway. It boldly cuts across Manchuria and directly through the Liaotung Peninsula to Port Arthur. …show more content…
The Japanese offered to let the Russians have superiority over Manchuria if they, the Russians, would just stay out of Korea. Russia was doing whatever she wanted to, and even seemed to pay a total disregard to Japan as if Japan were not a factor of any importance. Despite this, Japan continued to be diplomatic with several attempts to reach a consensus with Russia. It was like offering a dominating child all of the toys in the toy chest, including your favorite one, as long as they let you keep the one that you are currently playing with. The dominating child continues to say no, but you keep on making offers until you either give in to give them what they want or stand your ground to suffer from excruciating whining and fighting. Japan was intimidated by Russia; in that, they didn’t want to go to war, but wanted to reach an agreement that would benefit both parties. Japan was not succeeding. If one cannot win negotiations, one would only believe that they could not win a physical war.
Bottom line up front, Japan didn’t want to go to war because they were not confident that they could win. They were a rising, but still a relatively poor country. They haven’t won a large war before; they defeated the Qing Dynasty and then had to give back their winnings. They were humiliated and could not afford to go through