Political Thought and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Ethiopian-Japanese Relations (1927–1936)

Abstract Ethiopia and Japan tightened their diplomatic and economic relationships between 1927 and 1931. Haile Selassie and the “progressive” intellectuals around him were striving to strengthen Ethiopia’s claim to sovereignty. Japan as an example of non-white success added ammunition to their claim that Ethiopia had a right to sit at the table of the "great nations". The Japanese government sought to expand its trade, and probably understood its economic penetration in Ethiopia as a tentative imperial foothold in the African continent. The two governments never envisioned the alliance as a substitute for their respective pro-Western foreign policy, but sectors of their societies thought otherwise. Both the Young Ethiopians and the Japanese Pan-Asianists were critical of their respective governments’ capitalist internationalism and thought that the racism that shaped Western attitudes towards non-Europeans should be antagonised, not appeased. The analysis of the international context with which Ethiopian elites had to contend allows us to recontextualise and reframe the “alienation debate” in Ethiopian intellectual history. The “turn to Japan” should not be understood as an xenophilic infatuation with a fashionable foreign model, but on the contrary as a sophisticated and calculated response to the international relations of the time.

development. For Clapham, Japan was the "preferred paradigm" of the two or three decades before 1936. This was a period, as we shall see, in which Amharic print culture frequently featured calls for Ethiopia to follow the Japanese model, to the point that the intellectuals active in the interwar period have become known in the scholarship as "the Japanisers". Clapham argues that, like the other imitative trends that preceded it and followed it, the Japanese paradigm was "fatally flawed". 3 Its failure came from an inadequate knowledge of Japan and an overestimation of the similarities between Japan and Ethiopia. The model was aspirational but completely unviable in practice. Bahru Zewde agrees that "the impassioned pleas of the 'Japanizers' remained a subjective urge unsupported by objective reality". 4 Ethiopia simply did not have the "capacity to emulate either the technological or the organisational achievements of late nineteenth century Japan". 5 In this article, I situate the thought of the Ethiopian "Japanisers" within the global politicoeconomic power relations of the interwar years. An analysis of the international context with which Ethiopian elites had to contend will allow me to recontextualise and reframe the "alienation debate" in Ethiopian intellectual history. The "turn to Japan" should not be understood as an idiosyncratic choice for an attractive foreign model, but on the contrary as a calculated response to the international relations of the time.
Ethiopia entered the twentieth century as an independent polity, having defeated an Italian invasion attempt in 1896 at the Battle of Adwa. In the interwar years, it was, together with Liberia, the only formally independent polity in the African continent. Ethiopian elites were aware that this independence was fragile. Ethiopia was surrounded by Italian, French and British colonies, and each of the three colonisers had expansionist interests in Ethiopia, whether in terms of economic penetration or straight-up territorial annexation. The 1906 Tripartite Treaty signed by Italy, France and Britain divided Ethiopia into European spheres of influence, making it painfully clear to Ethiopian elites that the Europeans remained a threat. 6 The Ethio-European border negotiations of the first years of the twentieth century were signed in conjunction with treaties on extraterritoriality, which further inscribed Ethiopia's subordinate position internationally. The 1908 Franco-Ethiopian Treaty of Amity and Commerce (also known as the "Klobukowski Treaty") represented the "first meaningful attempt by Europeans to extend their extraterritorial jurisdiction into Ethiopia". 7 Although Ethiopia's extraterritoriality regime was weaker than other extraterritoriality regimes, for example in East Asia, this should not be interpreted as a sign of Ethiopia's international strength. On the contrary, according to Hailegabriel Feyissa, extraterritoriality was weaker in Ethiopia precisely because European powers considered it a matter of time before Ethiopia fell into European hands. Capitalist integration also proceeded along deeply unequal lines. The Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway, initially a private concession to a French company and later taken over by the French state without Emperor Menelik's consent, is regarded as "one of the very few successful illustrations of European economic imperialism in early 20th-century Ethiopia". 8 Menelik tried to offset the greater influence France had gained through the railway by granting the British a concession to set up Ethiopia's first bank. Charles Schaefer, who studied the history of the bank, concluded that in its first years the bank acted "as a tool of British imperialism". 9 Everybody who had personal, political or ideological stakes in Ethiopia's government was apprehensive about Ethiopia's political fragility on the international scene. Ethiopia should develop, intellectuals and public figures kept repeating, or otherwise risked losing its independence. The development Ethiopia should pursue was framed in terms of "catching up with Europe". In fact, although the intellectuals of this period are known as "the Japanisers", calls for Ethiopia to follow in Europe's footsteps were infinitely more frequent in Amharic print culture than articles or books mentioning Japan. This already puts into discussion Clapham's assessment that Japan was the "preferred paradigm" for Ethiopian intellectuals at the time. And "becoming more like Europe" was not just the xenophilic call of culturally alienated intellectuals. On the contrary, it was about boosting those political and economic credentials that could allow the Ethiopian elites to demonstrate they were perfectly able to make the country progress without European intervention. Most of the diplomatic squabbles between the Ethiopian government and European governments in these years revolved around the control of borders. European colonial administrators repeatedly complained to Emperor Menelik that pastoralist groups were crossing the borders from Ethiopia into European colonies for cattle raids or armed skirmishes, creating economic and political disturbances. 10 The Ethiopian government was aware of what was at stake in those complaints: the inability to enforce border legislation could be constructed as evidence of the Ethiopian government's failure to meet the standards of sovereign statehood. This, in turn, could be used by European powers as an excuse for an invasion. For Ethiopia to maintain its independence, a process of reforms had to start, and framed in the right language.
In a Eurocentric international system that served white supremacist values, the criteria that determined sovereign statehood all derived from few Western European "prototypes". Ethiopian political culture had traditionally operated according to different criteria. The old Ethiopian empire did not have a neatly demarcated territorial identity. Much like other pre-colonial African polities, the control over people and resources was much more important than the control over a set territory. While sovereignty was increasingly being defined in international law as the stable ability of an "effective" and "responsible" government to administer a "permanent population" and "a defined territory", 11 older power configurations in the Horn of Africa relied on a much more varied and layered typology of relations. The Ethiopian Empire, for example, exacted tribute from other polities, but being "tributary to" did not necessarily mean "under the control of". 12 Terms like "subject to" and "tributary to", argues Reid, are "frustrating and unsatisfying umbrella terms used to describe -and disguise-a wide range of political, diplomatic and military relationships, varying degrees of influence and/or control, and levels of short-and long-range regional suzerainty or hegemony". 13 From the modern period onwards, though, the global space was gradually reconfigured. International law worked to create a specific kind of individual and collective subjectivity that emerged out of, and in turn served to reproduce, the capitalist order. The non-European world was gradually "forced to reconstitute its myriad alternative normative orders and practices of self-organisation in this way or face the consequencesconsequences which have ranged from outright colonisation to more recent forms of armed intervention". 14 This reconstitution worked via both coercion and desire: the new legal subjectivity was imposed at gunpoint or under the threat of military violence, but also framed as a "modernity" and "progress" that non-Europeans should aspire to. 15 It is often difficult to separate the two: when Ethiopian intellectuals talked about the need to become "more like Europe" they aspired to a better society as much as they feared foreign conquest. Modernisation did not have to entail Westernisation, but in a country like Ethiopia, whose sovereignty was recognised only intermittently, modernisation could not mean something radically different from Westernisation either. Ethiopia could try to beat Europe at its own rules, but it was not in a political, economic or military position to set the rules.
The encounter between Ethiopian emperors and international law introduced new conceptual frameworks for the exercise and legitimation of power, and Ethiopian emperors learnt to appropriate the language of international law to boost their own political position. Menelik was aware that his international standing depended on making selected concessions to the new normative framework of sovereign statehood. Scholars that have traced the history of his diplomatic dealing with Europeans have traced precisely how, over decades, he gradually came to master the new international legal language to his advantage. After some initial diplomatic blunders, the Emperor realised that it was advantageous, if not straight-up fundamental for Ethiopia's independence, to continue gesturing towards the international criteria for statehood. Around the time of the Battle of Adwa, for example, Emperor Menelik engaged in sustained military campaigns to the south, south-west and south-east of the traditional highland core of the Ethiopian empire, using the presence of his men on the ground as evidence of "effective occupation" during his border negotiations with the three European powers that had annexed neighbouring territories. 16 As Rose Parfitt has noted, these treaties did not imply the recognition, on the part of Europeans, of a pre-existing Ethiopian sovereignty, but rather it was the treaties themselves that constituted Ethiopia as a sovereign state and called into being a relationship of formal equality. 17 Menelik was probably aware that his policy of concessions, especially when it came to key infrastructure (the railway) and economic institutions (the bank) essentially entailed outsourcing his sovereign prerogatives, but as long as he could play the three European powers off each other or off a fourth party, he could hope to minimise the dangers of dependency. Plus, there was more to be gained by the presence of a central bank than there was to be lost by the fact that this central bank was foreign-run. Railways, telegraph lines, banks were tools to integrate Ethiopia into the global capitalist economy, an integration that states recognised as sovereign were expected to embrace. In this sense, Menelik sought to defend Ethiopia's independence by conceding to an international order which, despite the promise of "sovereign equality", actually locked Ethiopia in a dependent position.
At the same time, though, the Emperor was clear that subordination did not mean capitulation. Some of the concessions he made to European powers were formal and not substantive. In 1907, he formed Ethiopia's first Council of Ministers, announcing to foreign powers that "it is some time since we thought of introducing a European system into our country. You have always [ … ] said it would be good if we [ … ] would adopt some of the European system. I have now started to appoint a ministry". 18 De facto, though, the Council of Ministers operated like a traditional advisory body. The appointees "had only the vaguest ideas about their responsibilities" and Menelik himself "made only perfunctory use of the new ministry". 19 Already at the time of Menelik, then, the political debate in Addis Ababa was not "whether or not to 'become more European', but rather how to obtain those aspects of European existence which might allow the Empire to remain what it already was". 20 The challenge faced by Ethiopian Emperors was that international equality was predicated on samenesson firmly renouncing Ethiopia's political culture and transforming Ethiopia and its people according to the international definition of statehood and citizenry. Defending a degree of "otherness" was extremely dangerous, as non-compliance with the international legal order would be seen as a failure to meet the standards of sovereignty and civilisation. But as risky as it was, the Emperors had to defend a degree of "otherness", because their domestic legitimacy in the eyes of the Ethiopian establishment depended on another epistemological frameworkthe political theology of the divinely-ordained monarchy. There was indeed a strong political faction in Ethiopia of church leaders and aristocrats (usually defined as "conservatives" in the scholarship) which strongly resisted the Emperor's concessions to the international order and did not want to compromise on Ethiopia's political identity. That Ethiopian Emperors could not rule without the support of this faction would become evident in 1916, when Menelik's appointed heir Iyasu was deposed in a palace coup organised by the aristocracy, and in the end also validated by the head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The coup makers disapproved of Iyasu's redistribution of power away from Addis Ababa towards the eastern regions of the Empire and were also apprehensive about his pro-Ottoman leanings during the First World War. 21 Ras Tafari, who was appointed heir to the throne under Empress Zawditu after the coup, had to contend with this political faction and their intransigent defence of Ethiopia's traditional political culture, while also appeasing the international community's demands for change and reform.
The establishment of the League of Nations at the end of the First World War was celebrated by many within the Ethiopian government as a possible way out of the conundrum of politicoeconomic subordination. Tafari saw the League as an institution that could create an international level playing field, protecting small nations and restructuring international relations on more equal premises. He applied for membership on behalf of Ethiopia in September 1923. The League's response showed that Tafari's hopes were partly misplaced, as Ethiopia's application was accepted only conditionally. Ethiopia had a right to remain a member of the League for as long as it worked towards meeting three "special obligations" related to the eradication of slavery and the slave trade. Ethiopia's sovereignty was at the same time recognised and considered insufficient. The Ethiopian Empire "clearly bore some resemblances to the international legal conception of statehood. Yet it also continued to manifest certain other traits which European officials and lawyers found impossible to 'recognise' as belonging to a state.
[ … ] Ethiopia [ … ] was narrated, and constituted, quite literally, as a simultaneously sovereign and less-than-sovereign entity". 22 Ethiopian intellectuals attempted to compensate for Ethiopia's military, diplomatic, and economic weakness with a discursive offensive that cast their country as kith and kin of Europe on the grounds of its Christian past. Christianity had always been a central source of identity for the Ethiopian monarchy in previous centuries, and it could now be used as a useful weapon in the Ethiopian diplomatic arsenal. The League of Nation's founding charter had been called a "covenant" precisely to evoke the Biblical notion of God's covenant. Religion was a key source of identity for Western powers and a key mechanism through which Eastern "otherness" (Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist) was constructed. Ethiopia, though, could use religion as a powerful source of "sameness". By stressing the Christian character of Ethiopian civilisation, the Ethiopian intelligentsia claimed that Ethiopia naturally belonged to the club of the world's "great nations", despite not conforming to all international criteria for sovereign statehood.
The bid for international acceptance was already perfectly summarised by Af€ aw€ arḳ G€ abr€ a-Iyy€ asus  in his 1908 Guide du Voyageur en Abyssinie: if Ethiopia was lagging behind Europe, one should "blame the governments in power up until this day in Ethiopia, a country so renowned and distinguished for its old traditions as a big Christian empire". 23 Ethiopia's present underdevelopment was due to a series of accidental historical conjunctures, Af€ aw€ arḳ argues, and did not reflect in any ways Ethiopia's intrinsic civilisational standing. It was the unfortunate succession of bad leaders that held Ethiopia back, but in terms of its civilisational essence, Ethiopia was a renowned and distinguished Christian country, much like its European counterparts. Now that finally Ethiopia had a good ruler in Emperor Menelik, it was rapidly catching up with her bigger Christian sisters in Europe.
The Guide du Voyageur is similarly adamant that Ethiopian Christians were more civilised than the Muslim or "pagan" inhabitants of the Ethiopian lowlands, many of whose lands had been incorporated in the Ethiopian state only few decades before in the wake of Menelik's expansionist campaigns of the end of the nineteenth century. 24 The establishment of this civilisational hierarchy between Christian and non-Christian Ethiopians capitalised on older prejudice, but should not be seen as merely the product of the cultural chauvinism of Ethiopian Christian elites. Once again, we should interpret the construction of this domestic hierarchy in the context of Ethiopia's bid for sovereign statehood. Recent research on the Ottoman empire has shown that the ability to colonise and civilise other lands and people was regarded at the time as an important legal evidence of "civilisation" and thus "sovereignty". 25 The Ethiopians did not have their colonial empire, but had their own internal others, racially and religiously different from their rulers, towards which the state could claim to be performing the same civilisational, developmental duties that the international community was performing towards the Ethiopian rulers. The Ethiopian government could be trusted not only with abiding by international law, but also enforcing its same principles on people constructed as "even-more-backwards". 26

The Japanese model in Ethiopian political thought
Many other non-European polities were faced with the same dilemmas as Ethiopia, and were struggling to assert their sovereign statehood in a Eurocentric international system. Japan was one of them. Ethiopia turned to Japan and Japan turned to Ethiopia for the same reasons: to enhance their respective claims to sovereignty. Even at the peak of Ethio-Japanese relations in the early 1930s, though, theirs was always a hierarchical relationship, and the rest of the article will explore the nature and meaning of this hierarchy.
The Japanese ruling elites, for once, had looked at Africa as a possible avenue of economic or territorial expansion. Just like other polities that had a hybrid status under international lawalternatively recognised as sovereign and non-sovereign, or defined as "semi-civilised" -Japan kept a close eye on European colonialism and variously pondered whether to join in the colonial expansionist momentum. Strong of its victory in the 1894-95 war against China, Japanese intellectuals and policymakers studied very carefully European colonial administration in Africa and Asia. The Japanese government's believed that "a European-style empire [ … ] would earn Japan the respect of the Great Powers and eventually lead to the recognition of Japanese equality". 27 The colonisation of Korea was seen as an important step towards Japan's assertion of full sovereignty rights on the international stage. British colonial administration in Egypt was closely monitored and ended up being chosen as the model for Japan's rule in Korea. 28 The Japanese were ready to take advantage of any opportunities to increase their empire, including beyond East Asia. 29 When it came to Ethiopia, for example, Japanese authorities considered sending an officer, a doctor, and an accountant to join the Italian expeditionary force that invaded Ethiopia in 1895, as a possible gateway to a greater military and politico-economic presence in the African continent. Some members of the Japanese elite explicitly called for Japan to participate in the partition of the African continent. In an 1899 pamphlet titled Afurika no Zento ("The Future of Africa"), for example, a professor of law at the Tokyo Imperial University, Tomizu Hirondo, predicted that the "whites" would reap great economic benefits from the colonisation of Africa, and Japan would lose out if it did not join in. Tomizu Hirondo's reasoning makes again a clear connection between colonialism and sovereignty: if the "yellow" race did not work hard to catch up with the "whites", he states as a corollary to his call for a Japanese colonisation of Africa, they would end up being themselves "enslaved". Tomizu was advocating some kind of sub-imperialism, or defensive colonisation, much like the attempt on the part of the Ottoman Empire to take part to the Scramble for Africa a couple of decades before. 30 But if the Ottoman Empire had ultimately succumbed during the First World War, Japan was on the rise, and its imperial conquests in East Asia and the Pacific were expanding. This must have been a source of admiration for Ethiopian thinkers, who held the hope of one day bringing the whole of the Horn of Africa under Ethiopian control. To Ethiopian intellectuals, Japan represented maybe the only example of a "small" nation that became a global power contender on par with Europe, while at the same time successfully defending a degree of "otherness". This was not only the perception of Ethiopian thinkers, of course. Japan's victory against Russia in 1905 had a profound impact on Asian and African intellectuals, and the decades that followed saw an outpouring of political pamphlets, newspaper articles, and treatises advocating the Japanese model in places like India, China, Vietnam, Egypt, Iran, and Turkey. 31 We see here the core tension that would shape Ethio-Japanese relations into the 1930s: while at least some members of the Japanese ruling elites looked at Africa as a possible target of imperial expansion, the Ethiopians saw Japan as a case study to buttress their own bid for independence.
The first mention of Japan in Amharic print culture is perhaps a 1900 poem by G€ abr€ a-Ə gziabher Gila-Maryam (1860s-1914 which clearly frames modernity as a defensive endeavour: "He who accepts it, fears no one/He will become like Japan, strong in everything". 32 G€ abr€ a-Heyw€ at Bayk€ ada n (1886-1919) concluded his 1912 At : e M@nil@k-nna Ityop*ya ("Emperor M@nil@k and Ethiopia") with the advice to L@jj Iyasu, who had succeeded an ailing Mǝnilǝk on the throne, to follow the example of the Japanese government, especially when it came to educational policy: "when the Japanese Government finds someone willing to go to Europe to learn, it supports them by giving them money.
[ … ] As a result, the people (of Japan) opened their eyes. They became rich, strong and respectable.
[ … ] China and Asia have been following the path of Japan with great enthusiasm". 33 In a 1925 speech, W€ arḳ en€ ah Ə s€ ate (1865-1952) also argued that education was the key to Japan's success: "Realizing that to be successful in life they ought to imbibe European knowledge and imbibe it fast, [the Japanese] began to work diligently and were able to reach in sixty years the level of development that it has taken others centuries.
[ … ] The reason behind the success of the Japanese to successfully defend their independence is their mastery of knowledge and education in due time.
[ … ] Let us follow this amazing and praiseworthy example of far-sightedness and resoluteness of an entire people". 34 By that time, a consensus had arisen that Ethiopia was exactly sixty years behind Japan, calculated from the Meiji restoration of 1868. "Sixty years ago", remarked Deressa Am€ ante on a 1927 issue of the Amharic newspaper B@rhan@nna S€ alam, "Japan was in the same state as Ethiopia". 35 G€ abr€ a-Ə gziabher Gila-Maryam, G€ abr€ a-Heyw€ at Bayk€ ada n, W€ arḳ en€ ah Ə s€ ate, and Deressa Am€ ante represented a new type of intellectual in Ethiopia: foreign-educated, well-travelled, globally-oriented, and fluent in foreign languages. They were all in various ways involved with the imperial court and sought to influence policy-making. Bahru Zewde describes them as Ethiopia's "pioneers of change" or "progressives", in opposition to the "conservative" bloc. From their experiences abroad, these "progressive" intellectuals were all aware that foreign recognition had become as important for Ethiopian emperors as domestic recognition, and sought ways to reinforce the powers of the state in order to strengthen Ethiopia's claim to sovereignty. They all saw the expansion of education as essential to create the new type of individual and collective subjectivity required by international law. Educational policy would be fundamental to create a secular political domain under the control of the Emperor and limit the powers of the Orthodox Church, which up until that moment had detained the monopoly over education and provided a powerful counterbalance to the power of the imperial crown. Not all of the "pioneers" embraced a rigidly unilinear conception of development, but the quantification of Ethiopia's lag at sixty years must have been empowering in a moment when the future of Ethiopia's independence seemed uncertain. The number could also be used to reassure Europeans by offering them a timeline for Ethiopia's development "deliverables", so to say. These intellectuals were aware that Ethiopia did not meet, at the time, the "standard of civilisation" and that the preservation of their country's independence was premised on convincing European powers that Ethiopia had a stable government committed to fulfilling the international obligations of sovereign statehood. The adoption of the teleological historical framework of the "sixty years", therefore, was not a sign of cultural alienation, but the oppositeevidence of these intellectuals' lucid understanding of their present moment, in which this teleology of progress, enshrined in international law, determined the recognition of both Ethiopia's sovereignty and their own personal sovereignty as subjects. The Japanese case proved that it was possible to complete the developmental arc from "backward" to "advanced", and to do in in a relatively short amount of time.
The "sixty years" narrative, of course, implied that Japan had made it: in 1868, it started an irresistible process of modernisation that kept stably unfolding over the decades, turning Japan into a world power in just roughly half a century. At a first glance, such extensive discursive engagement with Japan on the part of Ethiopian intellectuals could be puzzling. Ethiopia's claim to sovereignty and membership to the League of Nations revolved almost entirely around Christianity. Ethiopia was an ancient Christian monarchy and thus a natural member of the family of Christian nations. Japan was not Christian, so it might be unclear how references to Japan's developmental trajectory might support the Ethiopian case.
The answer is that the example of Japan complemented, rather than supporting, Ethiopia's case. By stressing the Christian character of the Ethiopian monarchy and its commitment to civilise the non-Christians within its territory, Ethiopian ruling elites could claim sameness with Europethe sameness on which political recognition and sovereign equality were predicated. Yet, civilisation was defined by European powers (and as a result also by international law) not only based on religion, but also based on race. Civilisation was Christian and white. On this latter criterion, the Ethiopians were destined to remain "other", and thus to be permanently constructed as uncivilised and unable to form an "effective" and "responsible" government. This is where Japan was useful: not only was Japan a "small" state that had become "big", but specifically a non-white state that had become "big" and gained full sovereign rights. The Yellow Peril discourse in the West implicitly highlighted the racial significance of Japan's rise and the way it challenged the racist underpinnings of international legal categories. Japan, then, allowed the Ethiopians to claim that their racial "otherness" would not prevent them from rising to the level of European nations politically, economically, and militarily. Or, put differently, Japan was the proof that Ethiopia's racial "otherness" did not condemn the country to be conquered and colonised. Stretched even more, Japan was seen as a guide on how to gain international acceptance while defending a degree of "otherness", or better, while reserving the right not to entirely comply with the Western definition of civilisation. The 1931 Ethiopian constitution is a case in point.

The 1931 Ethiopian constitution
By the time he finally sat on the imperial throne in 1930, Haile Selassie could count on a goodsized group of "progressive" intellectuals. After the coronation, he moved to further centralise power into his own hands, and it is at this point that the Japanese model became operative. The 1931 Ethiopian constitution was closely modelled on the 1868 Meiji constitution, in terms of both content and division into articles. 36 What is the significance of this choice? Ethiopia's precarious international standing had not changed, and Haile Selassie's priority was to reinforce Ethiopia's claim to sovereignty. The presence of modern legislation was again regarded as of the main attributes of a sovereign state. The more persuasively a state proved capable to enforce the rule of law on its territory, the more easily Europeans could be convinced to scrap unequal treaties and extraterritoriality clauses. Unequal treaties were "gradually abandoned as the Japanese, Chinese, Siamese and other 'semi-sovereign' states provided institutional proof of their capacity to 'furnish' Europeans (and, if necessary, their trading partners) with these rights independentlyfor instance, with the promulgation of the 'Meiji Constitution' in Japan. Only after these entities had 'voluntarily' interpellated as self-governing states of their own accord were they re-recognised, as it were, as 'full' (or fuller) subjects of international law". 37 The legal framework laid out by the 1868 Meiji constitution had allowed Japan to overwrite some of the unequal treaties that had previously regulated Japanese-Western relations.
That the Ethiopian constitution served precisely this same purpose was transparently admitted by the intellectual who wrote the first draft of the document, T€ akl€ a-Hawaryat T€ akl€ a-Maryam . In the speech he gave before all Ethiopian notables at the official promulgation of the constitution, he explained that "Ethiopia shall be protected and pacified by Law, which means, on the one hand, that she will improve her standard of living and grow wealthy, and on the other hand, that she will gain the respect of her neighbouring and other countries of the world, and benefit by concluding treaties in consonance with her ultimate interests". 38 The fact that the Emperor had "voluntarily" gifted a constitution to his people from above, and that the constitution came into effect "in a peaceful and orderly manner" was in itself "sufficient to gain for Ethiopia equal respect with other civilised people". 39 The Ethiopian people should thank the Emperor for this gift ("unparalleled in the history of the world") because "we know that [the constitution] is not only for us", but will also provide "for the safety of the independence of the future generations". 40 If the constitution strategically "interpellated" Ethiopia "as a self-governing state", it did not do it along Western lines. In other words, the form of the constitution catered to the Eurocentric definition of statehood, but its content did not. The document approved in July 1931, as noted by virtually every historian, simply reconfirmed all the power hierarchies that already structured the Ethiopian state. In particular, the constitution insisted that the power of the Emperor was absolute, inviolable, and incontestable. T€ akl€ a-Hawaryat explains this choice in his speech before the Ethiopian nobility, where he lists four possible forms of government. The first three are declinations of a monarchical government with the king at the top: "tyrannical government", "government by patience and customs", and "united government acting according to the Law". The fourth type is the "government of the people", i.e. a democratic government, and T€ akl€ a-Hawaryat rules it out for Ethiopia in unambiguous terms: "such a government is not for uneducated and backward people; even amongst civilized people it continues to cause bloodshed". 41 This is an intriguing statement, as it seems to make two partly contradictory points. The first part of the sentence alludes at the usual unilinear teleology of development, and acknowledges that Ethiopia is still lagging behind. The second part of the sentence seems to dismiss the democratic form altogether, or at least expresses doubts over whether it is really the most advanced. The third form of government, what T€ akl€ a-Hawaryat calls "united government acting according to the Law", meaning essentially a constitutional monarchy, is not only appropriate for Ethiopia in its current stage of development, but might be the best in absolute terms. T€ akl€ a-Hawaryat's argument is cunningly crafted to rebut any possible Western objections to the authoritarian character of the constitution: firstly, he concedes to Western powers that Ethiopia is behind, and its uneducated citizens are not yet ready to participate in political decision-making. Then, he reminds Europeans that their democratic governments did not fare any better in terms of preventing violence and war. The last, unspoken weapon in his argumentative arsenal is precisely that the constitution is copied from the Japanese one: if the Meiji constitution worked for Japan to the point that Japan gained full international sovereignty, why couldn't Ethiopia follow the same trajectory?
In other words, the Meiji constitution allowed T€ akl€ a-Hawaryat to comply to the rules of the international society and partly resist them at the same time. It offered a blueprint for a form of sovereign statehood that was not completely predicated on the values of democracy that Western states ostensibly considered the hallmark of modernity from the Enlightenment onwards. It rather offered a modern way to legally codify the emperor's sacredness and inviolability (chapter 1, article 3 of the Meiji constitution and chapter 1, article 5 of the Ethiopian constitution). In other words, it allowed the Ethiopian elites to fit into the existing international society and into its hegemonic ideology on unilinear progress, while at the same time defending a degree of "otherness" and preserve the political theology that for centuries had regulated power in the Empire. In this sense, the form of the constitution was designed to appease the international society, while its content was designed to appease the conservative power bloc at home.
While this mediation was not always easy, the Ethiopian government did not want (nor it could afford) to stray from it. The years immediately after Haile Selassie's coronation saw a diplomatic and economic convergence between the Ethiopian and the Japanese state. Although it is tempting to see this convergence as a South-South alliance against the West, the relationship between the Ethiopian government and the Japanese government always kept to the spirit of international law. Neither the Ethiopian government nor the Japanese one intended to antagonise Western powers, and they both retraced their steps once Western states opposed Ethio-Japanese alliance. In fact, the alliance kept to the spirit of international law so much that it replicated the usual hierarchies of international relations. Japan was interested in Ethiopia as a source of raw materials and as a market for its manufactured goods. At least some representatives of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs held disparaging views of the Ethiopians as barbaric, lazy, and uncultured. 42 The members of the Japanese government did not "overly romanticize any presumed racial solidarity binding the Japanese with the Ethiopians". 43 This stood in contrast with some important sectors of Japanese civil society, as we shall see, to the point that Ethio-Japanese relations came to be precisely defined by two different worldmaking projects: the two governments' and non-government actors'.

Economic and political relationships between the two governments
From the point of view of the Ethiopian government, a rapprochement with Japan had a number of advantages. Japan did not pose any direct territorial threat to Ethiopia, and an ally outside of Europe could come in handy if Britain, France or Italy started acting against Ethiopia's interests. Japan could also be a useful ally at the League of Nations, where the Ethiopian government feared isolation. But at a more basic level, every foreign alliance would boost Ethiopia's state credentials on the international scene and heighten Haile Selassie's standing in the eyes of his subjects. The "capacity to enter into relations with the other states", as the 1933 Montevideo convention would put it, was seen as a defining trait of sovereign statehood. 44 Relationships with foreign powers could also serve the domestic power framework of the absolute monarchy. The American consul Addison Southard observed that the Ethiopians wanted a Japanese legation set up in Addis Ababa "to enhance the pride and prestige of their Emperor". Haile Selassie knew that scenes of foreigners from powerful countries bowing to him would have a huge impact on Ethiopian public opinion. According to Southard, it was not difficult to imagine Haile Selassie's officials "pridefully remarking, 'See how even the great Emperor of Japan sends an important representative to bend the knee to our even greater Haile Selassie!'". 45 Besides the potential to boost Haile Selassie's domestic and international reputation, a rapprochement with Japan was also thought to offer economic benefits. Japanese products were much cheaper than Western ones: Japanese cotton cloth, for example, was eighty percent cheaper than American cloth. 46 Already by 1918, Japanese cloth had superseded American muslin as the biggest textile import. 47 This was a conspicuous slice of Ethiopia's trade balance: in 1935 cotton cloth made up half of Ethiopia's imports. 48 Closer commercial relationships with Japan could also lessen Ethiopia's economic dependency on Europe, although the Ethio-Japanese commercial relationship reproduced previous patterns of dependency: Ethiopia would export raw cotton and import cotton cloth. Despite the internal opposition of some prominent Ethiopian economists, G€ abr€ a-Heyw€ at Bayk€ ada n above all, 49 the Ethiopian government seemed prone to continue with the economic strategy to diffuse dependency in order to minimise its risks. Building an international reputation of good capitalist players, the Ethiopian government hoped, would bring benefits able to offset the possible dangers of asymmetrical commercial relationships.
The Japanese government maintained however a restrained approach to trade relationships with Ethiopia. In 1927, the two governments signed a (fairly standard for the time) treaty of friendship and commerce, but the Japanese government hesitated on whether to immediately set up a legation in Addis Ababa or delay the move until later. For Japan, Ethiopia offered the possibility to boost Japan's manufacturing exports in a country that was not yet saturated with European goods, but the Japanese government was hesitant about the business opportunities offered by Ethiopia. A report on the state of the Ethiopian economy commissioned by the Japanese Ministry of Commerce did not yield encouraging results. The purchasing power in Ethiopia was extremely low, 50 the cash economy very small, and transportation infrastructure for the most inadequate except for the French-owned Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway. The report recommended to reinforce Japan's position as main source of Ethiopia's cloth imports by opening a direct maritime trade route between Japan and Ethiopia, thus bypassing the Indian merchants that the Japanese state had been relying on to deliver the products in the last leg of their Indian Ocean journey. The Japanese government, however, did not act on this recommendation.
The diplomatic relationships between the two countries became closer in 1930-1. With the economic downturn of the Great Depression, Japan was now more interested in exploring commercial opportunities in Africa. 51 Haile Selassie invited the Japanese government to his 1930 coronation ceremony, and the Japanese sent their ambassador in Turkey to attend the ceremony as Japan's official delegate. To reciprocate the diplomatic visit, an Ethiopian delegation travelled to Japan in 1931, headed by the powerful Ethiopian Minister of Foreign Affairs H@ruy W€ ald€ a-Selasse . The main objective of the visit was to develop closer commercial ties and stimulate Japanese investments in Ethiopia, but the Ethiopians covertly hoped to discuss an arms deal as well. 52 The Ethiopian delegation received a very warm welcome, but the arms deal did not materialise. The Japanese government was, at the time, dealing with the international fallout of the Manchurian invasion, and was reluctant to get involved in any other potentially controversial military arrangement. In the forty days they spent in Japan, H@ruy and his party attended a number of high-profile receptions and visited factories, offices, industrial farms, zoos, theatres, railways, shrines, museums, and military training schools. As part of his visit, he met Emperor Hirohito, to whom H@ruy reportedly announced: Our Ethiopian Emperor is deeply impressed with Japanese Empire's remarkable and great progress of the last sixty years, and is moved with surprise that the Japanese Empire accomplished such a great deed in such a short time.
[ … ] He is determined to advocate to his whole nation to take the Great Japanese Empire as the best model. 53 This visit marked the highest point of the diplomatic relationships between the two countries, although the Ethiopian government seemed keener than the Japanese one to tighten the alliance. H@ruy W€ ald€ a-Selasse was so impressed with his trip that, once back in Ethiopia, he promptly put together a booklet titled Mahd€ ar€ a B@rhan H€ ag€ ar Japan ("The Place of Light: the Country of Japan", 1932). The book listed a number of historical similarities between Ethiopia and Japan, especially when it came to their monarchical history. The argument that the two countries had nearly identical historical trajectories allowed H@ruy to make a case for a closer political alliance. It also allowed him to make the usual argument that, given that the two countries had always proceeded in history along parallel lines, Ethiopia would surely become like Japan in sixty years. Mahd€ ar€ a B@rhan H€ ag€ ar Japan was translated into English by Oreste Vaccari , an Italian linguist and Orientalist scholar, and then from English into Japanese by Oreste's Japanese wife Enko (1896Enko ( -1983. Much like Haile Selassie thought that a Japanese legation in Addis Ababa would increase the prestige of the Ethiopian crown, the Japanese government proved keen to capitalise on H@ruy's praise. The Japanese translation of Mahd€ ar€ a B@rhan H€ ag€ ar Japan was published in Tokyo in 1934 with a preface penned by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Kij ur o Shidehara. 54 Haile Selassie had been keen to show to his subjects how even Japanese appointees from the Far East bowed to his power, and the Japanese government was keen to show that even a remote country like Ethiopia was impressed with Japan's greatness.

The role of non-government actors in Ethio-Japanese relations
The Japanese government favoured diplomatic and commercial ties with Ethiopia, but was also reluctant to intensify them beyond a basic level of mutual cordiality. Some sectors of Japanese civil society thought otherwise. The economic relationships between the two countries were mostly driven by private businessmen, who, following H@ruy's 1931 visit to Japan, started seeing Ethiopia as a potential new market as well as a land of untapped resources. Ethiopia's development policy, as we have mentioned, mostly relied on concessions to foreigners for the building of infrastructure or the economic valoristion of the land. In the 1920s and early 1930s, a number of Japanese businessmen travelled to Ethiopia seeking concessions. These businessmen were very few in number, but their economic activities had a big impact on the international relations of the time. A case in point is Kitagawa Takashi, a Japanese merchant who travelled to Ethiopia in 1932 on behalf of the Nagasaki Association for Economic Investigation of Ethiopia (known as Nikkei-sha). Calvitt Clarke describes him as a "glib-talking and unscrupulous fixer". 55 His track record is indeed quite dubious. In Ethiopia, he was received by H@ruy W€ ald€ a-Selasse, to whom Kitagawa asked to lease more than 12,300,000 acres of land. Nikkei-sha would use the land to grow cotton, tobacco, tea, rice, wheat, fruit trees, vegetables, and medicinal plants, both for the Ethiopian market and for export. Kitagawa also asked for exclusive rights to grow opiuma risky proposal, since the League of Nations was working to curb and control the opium trade. To manage the concession, Kitagawa envisioned an (overambitious) settlement scheme which would bring 650,000 Japanese to Ethiopia. The Ethiopian and the Japanese government seemed to initially support Nikkei-sha's plans, and they both provisionally authorised Nikkei-sha to grow medicinal plants. Kitagawa flaunted the concession as a done deal, although he had yet to sign any contract, and the news soon leaked to international newspapers, triggering a domino effect of exaggerated and sensationalist reports.
Other Japanese businessmen took the initiative to explore Ethiopia's economic potential, for example representatives of the Kanegafuchi Spinning Company and of the Chukyo Trading Company of Nagoya. Most of these initiatives came to nothing. Japanese businessmen soon found confirmation that purchasing power in Ethiopia was too low to sustain a Japanese import/ export business. Some businessmen very lucidly noted that any Japanese commercial inroads would be perceived by the Italians, British and French as a threat to their interests, and recommended (against the report previously commissioned by the Japanese government) that the Japanese conduct all of their business via foreign intermediaries.
The Japanese newspaper Osaka Mainichi sent to Ethiopia correspondents that were militant about tightening Ethio-Japanese relations. One of them, Yamauchi Masao, volunteered to personally negotiate with the Japanese government a loan for Ethiopia. He said he was disappointed that his government had turned down H@ruy's request for a loan in 1931, and offered to lobby the Japanese government on behalf of Ethiopia to rectify the situation. Another correspondent of the Osaka Mainichi who felt that his government was not doing enough for Ethiopia was Shoji Yunosuke. Shoji and Yamauchi had too initially travelled to Ethiopia in search of business fortunes, but they also had a much larger political vision for Ethio-Japanese relations. They were both Pan-Asianists, and conceived of the Ethio-Japanese alliance as a racial coalition of nonwhite people against white supremacy. Shoji articulated this vision explicitly in his writings: The Yellow Peril narrative showed the extent of the discriminatory and pejorative views Westerners held towards Easterners. For th Pan-Asianists, these views should not be appeased or placated, but opposed in their entirety. For the Japanese government, the Pan-Asianists were a source of apprehension, as their vocal anti-Western ideas could undermine Japan's relationships with Western powers. The Pan-Asianists' "turn to Ethiopia" of the early 1930s generated a similar apprehension among the Japanese government. The growing number of pro-Ethiopian publications of the 1930s and the way they captured the imagination of the Japanese reading public soon started interfering with Japan's foreign policy.
This situation had a striking parallel in Ethiopia, where a new generation of foreign-educated Ethiopians, nicknamed the "Young Ethiopians" by foreign commentators, was becoming increasingly critical of Western racism, causing more than a diplomatic headache for the Ethiopian government. The Young Ethiopians were distinct from the "progressives", who were generally older and occupied higher positions of power and prestige. Many Young Ethiopians worked in the public administration, but their relationship with the imperial bureaucracy was strained. "Most foreign commentators", observes Pankhurst, "differentiated between the Young Ethiopians and the Ethiopian Governmentand in some cases even regarded the former as the critics of latter". 59 The Young Ethiopians' hostility towards outsiders was notorious, and foreign observers, no doubt offended in their feelings of racial superiority, often accused them of "xenophobia". Two successive British Ministers to Ethiopia, first Charles Bentinck in 1927 and then Sir Sydney Barton in 1928-29, repeat the accusation. Both were condescendingly unsympathetic towards the Ethiopian people, and they felt outraged that the Ethiopians were not inclined to conform to their idea of racial hierarchies. Bentinck complained of the situation in the following terms: As in China and India, so in Abyssinia, there is a small section of the younger generation which has received a smattering of Western education. These young men are satisfied with having scratched the surface and think they know enough. In the town of Addis Ababa they consort in terms of equality with the riff-raff of Armenia and Greece, and in some cases France and Russia. They get the idea that they are not only the equal, but the superior of the white man, and they strive to show this in various forms: refusing to pay salaries due to Europeans for services rendered, and by throwing them penniless into the streets or using personal violence against their persons and properties, etc. 60 No doubt these were precisely the racist attitudes that the Young Ethiopians resented. The colonial machinations of European powers towards Ethiopia further incensed them. The December 1925 agreement between the Italians and the British, whereby the British recognised Italy's exclusive economic influence in Western Ethiopia and Italy supported the British project to build a dam on Lake Tana in Northern Ethiopia, spurred waves of turmoil in Addis Ababa. The Young Ethiopians were reportedly at the forefront the protests. According to British traveller Charles Rey, "foreigners were stopped in their cars and allowed to drive on only if they were certified to be neither British nor Italian". 61 A similar instance of unrest happened in 1933, when several Young Ethiopians were thrown out of a Greek coffee shop, the Tabaris Caf e. The motivations of the caf e owner are unclear, but the expelled evidently felt they were being discriminated against. They returned six days later to smash up the place in reprisal, causing the intervention of the police and the closure of the caf e. In the incident were reportedly involved all the major figures associated to the Young Ethiopians: Kidan€ a-Maryam Ab€ arra, F€ ak*€ ad€ a-Sellas e H@ruy, W€ ald€ a-Giyorgis W€ ald€ a-Yohann@s, M€ akonnen Habt€ a-W€ ald, B€ a sahwer€ ad H€ abt€ a-W€ ald, and Ayy€ al€ a G€ abr€ a. The terrain was fertile for the Japanese Pan-Asian arguments to take hold among this youth, and the Ethiopian government must have been worried about an anti-Western, anti-white ideological escalation.
More individual initiatives jeopardised the Ethiopian government's and the Japanese government's relations with Europe. When Shoji Yunosuke left Ethiopia in 1933, Haile Selassie entrusted him with delivering a gift to Sumioka Tomoyoshi, who had hosted the 1931 Ethiopian delegation headed by H@ruy W€ ald€ a-Selasse. Sumioka was, like Shoji, a pro-Ethiopian Japanese nationalist and Pan-Asianist. He appears in a now-famous photo that portrays the four members of the Ethiopian delegation sitting on their knees (except for H@ruy, who is seemingly sitting on a low stool) in the front row, all wearing Japanese kimonos. Sumioka and his wife are standing behind them in the back, Sumioka also wearing the same type of kimono as the Ethiopians, while his wife is wearing a traditional Ethiopian white cotton robe called net : ela. The solidarity between the two people is symbolically represented by the swapping of traditional clothes: Sumioka's Japanese wife is wearing Ethiopia's national dress, while the four Ethiopian men are wearing Japan's national dress. The Ethiopian on the right end of the front row was Lǝjj (a title for young noblemen) Araya Abebe. Araya seems to have desired to marry a Japanese woman even before his 1931 grand tour of Japan, but the 1931 trip must have strengthened his resolve. At first, Haile Selassie and H@ruy W€ ald€ a-Selasse did not oppose the plan, and H@ruy cautiously asked Sumioka if he could help broker the marriage. Sumioka was enthusiastic at the idea.
In June 1933, Japanese newspapers published the announcement that the "immensely popular" Ethiopian "prince" (vastly inflated credentials in both cases) that had visited Japan a year and a half before was looking for a Japanese wife. Sumioka sent H@ruy a shortlist of the best applicants and when the final decision was made in Addis Ababa in January 1934, H@ruy summoned Yamanouchi to the imperial palace to cable the news back to Sumioka in Japan. The chosen candidate, Kuroda Masako, came from a well-off aristocratic family, but had also received a modern education, was fluent in English, and fond of sports. The Japanese press was soon inundated by romanticised reports celebrating the fairy tale of the impending "royal wedding". The press affiliated to Pan-Asian associations, on its part, aggressively promoted the wedding as a step towards the urgent alliance of non-white people against white colonialism. Kuroda herself seems to have operated precisely within the hierarchical logic of Japan's Pan-Asianists. She "saw herself as the first of many who would emigrate to Ethiopia", explaining that "with its everincreasing population, Japan would have to found colonies abroad". 62 The peak of the marriage preparations coincided with the peak of the media frenzy about Nikkei-sha's alleged deal with the Ethiopian government. Japan's political and economic presence in Ethiopia seemed to have widened. This was mostly due to the private initiative of concession hunters and ideologically militant Pan-Asianist activists, with a certain degree of synergy between the two, for example about the possibility of a large Japanese population transfer. On the Ethiopian side the situation was similar: the marriage idea was a private initiative of Araya himself, and while H@ruy and Haile Selassie initially gave the young bachelor their blessing, the marriage was not something that H@ruy and Haile Selassie had themselves sought to arrange in the first place.
The Japanese Pan-Asianists and the Young Ethiopians had similar ideas about how their respective governments should position themselves globally. They both perceptively understood that the universalism professed by international law and international organisation was a fac¸ade to defend Western colonial interests. The international society promised acceptance and recognition to all those people that met the legal requirements of statehood and civilisation, without actually intending to grant any to non-white, non-European "others". The compliance with those requirements, if anything, would make non-European states more dependent on Western diplomatic endorsement and more vulnerable to Western economic penetration. The international space was constituted according to racist principles that made any Western talk of sovereign equality empty. In the global system of the time, Japan and Ethiopia would always be in a subordinate positioninternational law was designed for this very purpose. Why trying to constantly appease the Westerners, considering the dehumanising, discriminatory views they held of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-European people? As we have seen, however, the political vision of Japanese Pan-Asianists was not a remaking of the world under more egalitarian principles of horizontal solidarity. It was rather the creation of an alternative world-system in Asia, in which Japan could rise to prominence without any Western interference. The relationship with Ethiopia was probably understood in a similarly hierarchical way. It is not that genuine solidarity was absent, but Japan was always nationalistically presented as the alternative solution to a Westerndominated world.
On their part, the Young Ethiopians repeated some of the arguments of the "conservative" power blocmaybe paradoxically, considering that in terms of their foreign education and global outlook they could not be more different from the far less travelled and less cosmopolitan aristocrats and church authorities that made up the bulk of the conservative faction. The two groups converged on their disapproval of Haile Selassie's policy of integrating Ethiopia in the world-system as fast as possible in order to protect its sovereignty. The expansionist ambitions of European powers were in front of everyone's eyes to see, making it clear that foreigners could not be trusted. The Europeans had abundantly demonstrated their disregard for Ethiopian traditions, so how could the government be sure that they would suddenly change their mind if Ethiopia managed to develop its economy and infrastructures? Playing by the rules of those who wanted to conquer Ethiopia and undermine its cultural traditions would put the country even more in danger. Hence, the conservatives pushed for isolationism as a solution: Ethiopia had to go its own way, close its borders, refuse to integrate in the world-system. While the conservatives were reluctant to compromise on Ethiopia's political identity, the Young Ethiopians were instead keen to see a transformed and modernised Ethiopia. Just, Ethiopia did not need foreigners to develop: it had all of the resources (including the human resources, and here the Young Ethiopians referred to themselves) for a self-driven development, without concessions to foreigners, foreign advisors, and foreign businessmen, who only worked to advance the interests and colonial schemes of their own countries. While the connection drawn between political and economic sovereignty was cogent, the Young Ethiopians' argument that Ethiopia could modernise in isolation stood in contrast with their view of modernity as a project of global politico-economic integration. . The Young Ethiopians were right, though, that this project was a project of domination of a restricted group of countries over the rest of the world, and that Ethiopia would ultimately lose out in the process.
6. Government vs. non-government actors: The denouement of Ethio-Japanese relations These ideas were dangerous for the Ethiopian and the Japanese government, whose objective remained to fit into the international system and maintain good relationships with Western powers, while also trying to resist as much as possible a full assimilation into the civilisational ideals promoted by Western nations. The tension between these two different visions of worldmaking came to the fore almost immediately.
As some Japanese had feared, Britain, France, and above all Italy immediately felt threatened by Japan's diplomatic and commercial inroads in Ethiopia. Starting from September 1933, European newspapers reported on Nikkei-sha's alleged deal with the Ethiopian government in exaggerated terms, inflating the scale of the concession and framing it as a premeditated challenge to British, French and Italian interests in the area. News of an impending Ethio-Japanese arms deal further amplified this narrative. The European reports about the engagement between Araya and Kuroda in early 1934 were similarly sensationalist. Like in the romanticised articles published by the Japanese press, European newspapers talked about a "royal wedding" between the Japanese and the Ethiopian imperial dynasties. London was alarmed at the rumours that the Japanese intended to run the cotton trade on their own, without anymore relying on Indian commercial mediation. Rome, whose colonial ambitions towards Ethiopia were increasingly transparent, had an even stronger reaction. Italy knew that the rumours were largely false, but willingly amplified them, in an attempt to justify its looming invasion of Ethiopia as a defence of European interests against the Yellow Peril. 63 The press coverage of Ethio-Japanese ties was for the most part overblown. Araya and Kuroda came from the upper echelons of their respective societies, but were far from a "prince" and "princess" in their own imperial houses. Araya, for once, was only remotely related to the Emperor and was an overall unimportant figure in political and dynastic terms. Rumours about an alleged Japanese commercial takeover of Ethiopia were also hyperbolic. The concession to Nikkei-sha had never been finalised, and (to Ethiopia's disappointment) no Ethio-Japanese arms deal had ever been signed. Commenting on the international controversy, Addison Southard reported that there was only a dozen of Japanese in the whole of Ethiopia, and most Japanese business ventures in Ethiopia had failed. Although the Ethiopian government had cunningly advertised the country's business potential, in reality there was little capacity, in terms of resources and infrastructure, to seriously incentivise any foreign investment. 64 Accused of turning against European powers and fearing serious repercussions, the Ethiopian government and the Japanese government rushed to shut down the rumours. Neither had the least intention to compromise their relationship with the Great Powers. H@ruy explained to international correspondents that he had indeed held preliminary talks with private Japanese individuals about a possible land concession, but that the deal was never finalised. He maintained that Ethiopia was interested in doing business with Japan while also maintaining cordial relationships with Europe. The Ethiopian government also backtracked on the marriage plans, withdrawing their support. The Japanese government intervened heavy-handedly to investigate matters. They were in a much more difficult position than the Ethiopian government, since Japanese public opinion was resolutely pro-Ethiopia and Japan's Pan-Asian organisations were escalating their pro-Ethiopia campaign. Italy's military support for China against the Japanese in 1932 had further turned Japanese public opinion against Rome. The Japanese government "did not agree with either Yamanouchi or Shoji and certainly took little but embarrassed notice of Kuroda's hopes. Tokyo could not allow a free hand in Ethiopia to ambitious, pan-Asiatic adventurers such as Kitagawa-or for that matter Yamanouchi himself". 65 The government proactively tried to reassure Italy of its peaceful intentions, denying all the rumours of Japanese military aid to Ethiopia.
The hierarchical nature of the relationship between Japan and Ethiopia quickly became apparent: Japan did not need Ethiopia as much as Ethiopia needed Japan. The Japanese ambassador in Rome, Yotaro Sugimura, went as far as precociously announcing in July 1935 that Japan would remain neutral in Italy's upcoming war on Ethiopia. More tensions followed, but by the summer of 1935, Rome and Tokyo started reconciling and the press frenzy started subsiding. Italy's strategy to paint Japan as a two-faced enemy who was secretly scheming against the West, though, had worked. Britain and France acquiesced to Mussolini's attack on Ethiopia, among other reasons, also because their fears of Japanese meddling with European colonial affairs had been rekindled. The Italian narrative also contributed to persuading the Soviet Union, who had a history of military tensions with Japan, to abandon its anti-imperialist policy and take a pro-Italian position at the League of Nations.
The Ethiopian government, though, had not completely given up on Japan as a possible ally or at the very least a possible source of military aid in the brewing conflict with Italy. Af€ aw€ arḳ G€ abr€ a-Iyy€ asus, who in the meantime had been appointed Ethiopian ambassador to Italy, asked Sugimura for military help, which Sugimura refused. The last Ethiopian bid to revive the relationship with Japan was entrusted to Daba Birru, who had accompanied H@ruy to Japan in 1931 and can be seen on the left in the famous photo with Sumioka Tomoyoshi. In September 1935, when the Italian invasion was inevitable, and faced with the disappointing inaction of the League of Nations, Daba travelled to Japan in search of help.
Daba's mission was at the same time a public relations success and a diplomatic failure. Shoji accompanied Daba on the trip and his newspaper Osaka Mainichi gave ample coverage to Daba's visit. Daba was hosted as a guest of honour by all those ultra-nationalist and Pan-Asianist organisations that had embraced the Ethiopian cause. The Black Dragon Society had organised an Ethiopia Crisis Committee, many existing associations (including women's and youth associations) took a firm pro-Ethiopia stance, and many new organisations were set up to campaign for Ethiopia. All these organisations scrambled to host Daba as their guest of honour, gathering large crowds to welcome Daba in each leg of his tour and to attend each of Daba's public speeches. All the major exponents of Japan's ultra-nationalist and Pan-Asianist political wings were involved, including Toyama Mitsuru, the founder of the Black Dragon Society and of the Dark Ocean Society. Influential Japanese, though, were largely absent, and Daba's talks with officials from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs came to nothing. The Japanese government was firmly committed to its policy of non-interference in Ethio-Italian tensions. The complete denouement of the Ethio-Japanese alliance was sealed by the mutual recognition of December 1936, when Italy recognised Japanese rule in Manchukuo and Japan recognised Italian rule in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government's policy to play Britain, France and Italy off against a fourth power could only work so far.
The Italian justification for the invasion before the League of Nations was what the Ethiopians had always feared. Italy claimed that Ethiopia did not meet the criteria for sovereign statehood and that it was a tyrannical regime whose lowlands, far from being "civilised" its lowlands, had actually seen a recrudescence of the slave trade. This, Italy argued, was evidence that Ethiopia had not met the "special obligations" on which its membership (and its sovereignty) were conditional. Parfitt has shown that, from the point of view of how international law was constituted at the time, these Italian claims were not legally false, precisely because the "special obligations" had constructed Ethiopia as simultaneously sovereign and non-sovereign and premised its membership on meeting of specific civilisational requirements, such as the eradication of the slave trade. As a consequence, we should not interpret the Abyssinian crisis as the failure of the League to apply international law, but rather as evidence that the problem was in the way international law was itself constituted. From this point of view, the Young Ethiopians and the Japanese Pan-Asianists had lucidly captured that, structurally, the international system was never, and could never be equal. The issue was not the application of the lawthe issue was that the law was designed from the start to reproduce that politico-economic inequality between the centres and peripheries of capitalism. 66 7. Conclusions: "a politics of emulation"? There were many layers to the intensification of Ethio-Japanese relations in the interwar period. Ethiopian elites could use the Japanese case to challenge the racist ideology that underpinned the international system. Against that white supremacist ideology, Japan proved that non-white people were perfectly able to develop and modernise without the colonial intervention of the West. The Ethiopian government might have been a racial "other", but was perfectly able to lead the country on the path to progress. This argument complemented the Ethiopians' main bid for sovereignty, which claimed sameness with Europe on religious grounds and cast the Ethiopian government as the civiliser of its non-Christian lowlands. Overall, the Ethiopian government strove to abide by the rules of the international system, while having to defend some of its previous political identity in order to placate some powerful conservative domestic factions. Japan was seen as a model for this type of mediation between domestic and international political culture. The Ethiopian convergence towards Japan should be seen as a way to assert a more authoritative juridical personhood within the existing international system.
The Japanese government, like the Ethiopians, also chose a policy of alliances with Western powers and, initially, of participation in international organisations such as the League of Nations. The intensification of Ethio-Japanese diplomatic relationships in 1930-31 was not, in any way, intended to challenge the international law of the time, but on the contrary to boost the two country's sovereignty rightsin the case of Japan, also through a (very hypothetical and never materialised) colonial takeover of Ethiopia. In this sense, the relationship between the two countries was always hierarchical, and reproduced the same pattern of economic dependency that Ethiopia had with Western states. The power relation between the two countries became apparent when Japan chose to side with Mussolini over Haile Selassie when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. The Italian justification for the invasion hinged precisely on Ethiopia not meeting the parameters of sovereign statehood, including failing to civilise its ethnically more "backwards" lowlands.
Both Ethiopia and Japan had militant social groups that opposed their government's pro-Western policies, and called for a more confrontational foreign policy against the racism that underscored Western diplomacy and economic policies. Both the Japanese Pan-Asianists and the Young Ethiopians opposed their government's capitalist internationalism and conciliatory response to Western discriminatory attitudes. These were the two factions that pushed more aggressively for a tightening of Ethio-Japanese relationsand between the two, the Japanese Pan-Asianists were particularly militant in their campaign. The way in which Japanese Pan-Asianists proactively tried to forge closer politico-economic relationships between Japan and Ethiopia in the interwar years is evidence of their expansive understanding of Pan-Asianism. Ethiopia was seen as potentially part of the Pan-Asian project, as some kind of "Orient writ large".
Despite their vastly different social positions, the Young Ethiopians shared many of the fears of the conservative power bloc. They thought that opening Ethiopia to Westerners would increase, not decrease, the risk of being conquered, and that Westerners could not be trusted to respect Ethiopia's independence. This was a long-sighted assessment. Japan's Pan-Asianists and the Young Ethiopians had intended to come together precisely to oppose European colonialism and white supremacy, and the Europeans reacted precisely by reasserting European colonial prerogatives and white supremacy.
Reducing these complex power relations to a "politics of emulation" is a simplification to put it mildly. Calls for Ethiopia to become "more like Japan" were fewer in number than calls for Ethiopia to become "more like Europe", and in both cases, these were sophisticated ideological pitches in support of a fragile claim to sovereignty. The conservatives' position should not be seen as a patriotic defence of "tradition" and, equally, the progressives' concessions to the international system should not be seen as an intellectually-flawed betrayal of that "tradition". The two blocs had different assessments of the workings of the international system and of the best strategy to protect Ethiopia's independence, and argued for different solutions on how to mediate domestic and international political cultures. In other words, calls to "emulate" others were not for the sake of emulation per se, and should not be taken as evidence of a derivative, uncreative political thought. On the opposite, they were sophisticated responses to an international system designed to reproduce Eurocentric politico-economic hierarchies, and thus stacked against Ethiopia. We are bound to misrepresent political thought if we analyse it as detached from its material conditions.

Notes
(There are no surnames in Ethiopia, so Ethiopian authors have been referred to and listed by their first name followed by their father's name, as common practice in Ethiopian studies).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.