Is Japan really stalling for time?

The British assured that they did not. Pen fun and pavilion www.biquge.info

Has the civilian government of the Ming Dynasty really been deceived, no one is so stupid, let alone a group of old fritters who are mixed up in the officialdom, but everyone doesn't care. Even if Japan lays mines in Edo Bay, it will not be able to seal off the entire bay, and the Ming navy can land at any place at any time.

According to international law, belligerents have the right to blockade each other's coasts, and during the Civil War, the United States used this clause to blockade the southern coasts, but they never recognized the south as a country, only calling them rebels.

The Ming blockade of Japan did not violate international law, but in fact affected the trade of Western countries with Japan, and most importantly affected the interests of Britain and the United States.

The United States is not yet a country accustomed to being tough, and Britain is constantly mediating.

Ming diplomats believed that a blockade would bring Japan to its knees.

The negotiation team was led by the young diplomat Jaishankar, who was only 30 years old, but he was the first diplomat of the Ming Dynasty to Japan, and his understanding of Japan was unparalleled in the entire Ming Dynasty.

The main reason why Jaishankar was able to become the first minister of the Ming Dynasty to Japan was because he was proficient in Japanese language and culture, and he also married a woman in Japan.

Jaishankar did not come to Japan in an official capacity, but because he came to Japan, and finally obtained an official status, he first came to Japan to rely on the channels of foreigners to work for foreign companies as a comprador.

In Chinese history, when describing merchant groups in the late Qing Dynasty, we often only pay attention to the long-standing Jin merchants, the rising Ningbo Gang, and the Jiangsu and Zhejiang consortiums that started from industry and commerce.

In fact, the strength of the comprador group is even better than that of the once-glorious merchant group of the Ningbo Merchant Gang.

From Xiangshan, three of the four major compradors of the late Qing Dynasty, Zheng Guanying, Tang Tingshu and Xu Run, but more were unknown small compradors, who not only went north to Shanghai, but also crossed the ocean, and spread throughout East Asia through the commercial channels of foreigners.

Jaishankar is such a comprador, his father is engaged in import and export trade, obviously with foreigners, Xiangshan County has an open atmosphere, and the Portuguese in Macau have dealt with for more than 500 years, and has long formed a custom of not excluding foreigners, so Jaishankar was sent by his father to have business dealings with foreign companies as an apprentice, and when he grew up, he followed the foreign companies to expand Japanese trade and became the comprador of the British foreign companies in Japan.

Some nationalist scholars gritted their teeth and hated it, saying that the reason why China is not as developed as Japan is because Japan has not given birth to compradors such traitors, but in fact, the Japanese are not unable to produce compradors, but Japanese compradors have been made by the Chinese.

Jaishankar came to Japan when he was young, and at first he talked about business with the Japanese through writing, helped foreigners to start trade, mainly buying Japanese tea, and then slowly learned Japanese, not only married a Japanese woman named Kawai Sen, but also quietly hooked up with Kawai Sen's sister Kawai Ruo, and secretly gave birth to a child, named Su Manshu, who was very famous in later generations, but the Su family could not accept this kind of child born with the Japanese, and drove Su Manshu out from an early age.

This is all for later, Jaishankar is now at the peak of his proud life, and he has taken advantage of the negotiations with the Japanese.

However, he does not represent a country in the Ming Dynasty, but represents the Ryukyu king, so there is also a Ryukyuan person and a Vietnamese in the negotiation team, but these two people are really just a full number.

Jaishankar severely reprimanded Japan for ignoring international morality, flagrantly violating a country that had existed for more than 500 years, and also exiled the king of that country to his own country, which is intolerable under any public international law, and demanded that Japan immediately correct it, release the king of the Ryukyus, apologize to the Ryukyus country, and sign an agreement to ensure that the Ryukyus will never be violated again.

Jaishankar's Vice-Chancellor fully supports Jaishankar's hard-line attitude.

After a year of internship under Jaishankar, Jaishankar replaced Jaishankar as Japan's new minister, and Jaishankar moved to Beijing as the Qing envoy.

The difference between Huang Zunxian and Jaishankar is that Jaishankar belongs to the place where the foreign affairs department was created, and Wu Chongyao directly recruited a comprador who knows foreign languages, while Huang Zunxian passed the imperial examination and entered the foreign affairs department, and then studied international etiquette in the foreign affairs department for a year, and then went to Tianjing to officially take up a post and began his career as a diplomat.

Therefore, unlike Jaishankar, Huang Zunxian is a technocrat who is more proficient in international law and knows how to be a diplomat.

He was shocked by the changes in Japan, and found that the Japanese were rapidly industrializing, and Huang Zunxian highly recognized the Japanese industrial method, that is, through government investment, continuous construction of large factories, and the information he collected showed that Japan has intensively built hundreds of government-run factories in recent years, from steelmaking to shipbuilding, as well as railways, telegraphs and mines, textile industry and silk reeling factories, and the government has issued more than 200 million yen of bonds to provide funds for the establishment of factories, which Japan calls the development of agriculture.

With such a large amount of capital invested, it means that the Japanese government has almost all the fields it can think of, such as railways, mines, shipbuilding, cement, textiles, etc., as long as it can think of and can do it, there are almost all government-run factories.

Japan's government's direct construction of factories, not only did not make Huang Zunxian feel that they were competing with the people, but felt that this was the best way, he mainly felt that the Ming Dynasty's way of everything was autonomous by the people, too slow, such as this direct government deep involvement, direct participation in the method to be direct, effective and fast, and he felt that the people must only focus on the present, regardless of the long-term, where can they think thoughtfully.

After all, Huang Zunxian has only been in Japan for a short time, and he has only seen the surface of Japan's westernized urban transportation, the longer and longer railway lines, and the continuous exaggeration of the successful experience of the Meiji Restoration by the government-controlled newspapers, but he does not know that the factories established in Japan have become more and more unsustainable, and they are about to be sold cheaply under the impetus of Okuma Shigenobu.

In short, Huang Zunxian just came to Japan, he still has a good impression of Japan, the Japanese have a lot of respect for the diplomats of the Ming Dynasty, not only the Ming Dynasty, when the Manchu diplomats came a few years ago, they were also warmly welcomed by Japan, they were happy to be valued by the countries of the Asian continent, and the government exaggerated this to signify that after the Sui and Tang dynasties, after more than a thousand years, the mainland countries once again established official ties with Japan.

There are also a large number of Confucian scholars in Japan, who often come to discuss and consult with Huang Zunxian, and in less than two years, Huang Zunxian has a considerable status in the Japanese Han poetry circle.

His good impression of Japan made it difficult for Huang Zunxian to understand why the seemingly ancient-style Japanese who got along with him would directly destroy a traditionally friendly and obedient friend, or even a vassal state of Japan, for no reason.

Of course, he understood Japan's thoughts, and they thought that if they did not annex the Ryukyus directly, they would lose the Ryukyus permanently, but the Ryukyus were not Japanese. Therefore, Huang Zunxian knows what the Japanese think, but he doesn't know why the Japanese have such thoughts, and the innate sense of crisis of the island nation has not yet been put forward by scholars of this era.

But since the Japanese have done such a thing, and the Ming Dynasty is determined to intervene, then Huang Zunxian must serve the country, this is the principle taught by the teachers of the School of Foreign Affairs, even if it is not moral, diplomats must obey the interests of the country, and diplomats represent the country.

What's more, in dealing with the Ryukyu incident, the Ming Dynasty has earned enough of a good moral image, in the East it is to hoe the strong and help the weak, to uphold justice for small countries, and in the West it is to maintain regional peace and restore good order in the region, so even Britain, which had a conflict with the Ming Dynasty before, cannot intervene in this great light, and can only play a role in it under the guise of mediation.

The negotiations were not smooth, the Japanese refused to give in at the negotiating table, they were willing to send back the king of the Ryukyus, let the Ryukyus return to the country, this is the basis for the Ming Dynasty to accept mediation, but also after the powerful Ming fleet came to Japan, a group of Japanese diehards reluctantly bowed their heads, they knew that the Ming had a powerful ironclad fleet, but they had not seen it, in their eyes, the British warships occasionally anchored in Japanese ports were the most majestic ships in the world, but those were just British cruisers, The ironclad giant ships of the Ming Dynasty were actually more majestic than the British warships, and the muzzles were thicker than the British warships, and the shock of seeing was believing, so that they compromised, and the government and the opposition reached an agreement to negotiate with the Ming Dynasty.

On the basis of allowing the restoration of the Ryukyus, with the mediation of the British, the Ming agreed to negotiate with Japan.

However, there were variables in the negotiations, and Japan produced a handwritten document of allegiance to the emperor from the king of the Ryukyus, proving that the king of the Ryukyus had voluntarily attached himself to Japan, and had voluntarily requested the abolition of the feudal domain and the return of the copyright.

The Ming Dynasty believed that the King of the Ryukyus had arrived in Japan and had lost his personal freedom, and that all the decisions made by the Ming Dynasty were imposed on the King of the Ryukyus under the pressure of the Japanese government, and demanded that Japan must release the King of the Ryukyus as soon as possible.

The second and perhaps most important reason for the stalemate between the two sides is that the Ming Dynasty asked Japan for military expenses, believing that the reason why the Ming Dynasty lent troops to the Ryukyus was entirely because of Japan's extermination of the Ryukyu countries for no reason, and Japan must bear full responsibility for this, including paying the cost of the Ming Dynasty, Vietnam, and the Qing army, and not allowing the Ryukyu countries to bear this cost.

The cost calculated by the Ming Dynasty was a lot, as much as more than 30 million taels of silver, and this cost was not wanted, because the merchant ships hired by the Ming government were three times higher than the market price, and a large amount of money was smashed into it.

At the same time, he also asked Japan for the loss of the Ming merchants, because the evacuation of overseas Chinese in the Ming Dynasty led to the loss of more than 3,000 Ming merchants, and the Japanese government also needed to compensate for this loss, the number was 20 million taels, obviously the scale of the Ming merchants in Japan was far larger than the scale of the British merchants in Guangdong during the Opium War.

The Japanese Government will not be able to pay more than 50 million taels of reparations in any case, and when they feel that the cost of war is smaller than peace, war will not be an unbearable price.

Maybe a war with the Ming Dynasty will make them feel that Japan is not easy to mess with, and maybe they will compromise.

This is the idea of some people in Japan, but Huang Zunxian received the situation in the country and made him feel that if there was a real war, it would not be a small war, but a large-scale war that burned all over Japan, larger than any war in Japanese history, and he told his Japanese friends who secretly visited him that unless the Japanese planned to return to the Warring States Period, they should quickly admit defeat, as fast as they could, and there was not much time left for Japan.