The American–Japanese Controversy Over the Island of Yap
Lee, Rosalie Leong (1939). The American–Japanese Controversy Over the Island of Yap (Thesis). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii.
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Abstract: The paper surveys the origins, course, and resolution of the American–Japanese dispute over the Island of Yap by first situating Yap geographically and historically and highlighting its strategic significance as a Western Pacific cable hub. It frames the issue within the broader map of post–World War I mandates and submarine cable networks and sketches the state of American–Japanese relations prior to the controversy, establishing why the control of communications infrastructure at Yap became a sensitive test of influence and access in the Pacific.
It then places the argument within the League of Nations mandate system that emerged from the war, emphasizing the covenant’s principle that peoples in former enemy colonies not ready for self-rule should be administered as a “sacred trust of civilization,” with safeguards embedded in the covenant. This postwar legal and moral framework shaped debates over who would administer Yap and on what terms, especially as the island’s value derived less from local resources and more from its role in global telegraphy linking Asia and America.
The narrative traces how diplomatic frictions sharpened around control and usage rights of the undersea cables connected to Yap. American policymakers pressed for guaranteed, non-discriminatory access rather than exclusive control by any single power, while Chinese officials urged Washington to secure influence over the Tap–Shanghai cable to protect China’s communications interests, a position conveyed to the U.S. in an August 9, 1920 conversation summarized by the State Department’s Far Eastern Division. These overlapping concerns about sovereignty, mandates, and communications access complicated the bilateral negotiation space and widened the circle of stakeholders.
By the summer of 1921, public opinion on both sides of the Pacific had grown dangerously inflamed. Newspapers and even more serious publications in the United States and Japan engaged in harsh, unrestrained criticism of the other’s conduct and policies, eroding the traditional goodwill between the two nations and raising anxieties that a dispute over a small island could escalate into a broader confrontation.
