While travelling aboard a “little coasting steamer” from Colombo to Tuticorin in 1908, Count Hans von Königsmarck met a Japanese army officer who was undertaking his own voyage of discovery across India. The officer, whom von Königsmarck referred to only as Mr Kaito, apparently intended to study the subcontinent systematically and thoroughly. In his book A German Staff Officer in India, von Königsmarck wrote that “the Japanese warrior” resented the extent of European power in Asia, particularly in India.

“Asia for the Asiatics,” von Königsmarck quoted Kaito as saying. “Why indeed should Europe grab everything?”

As the pair travelled through Sind, the German military officer noted that his companion spent much of his time writing and sketching. “What on earth can he find to engage in this dirty scrub?” von Königsmarck wondered.

The intrigue deepened as their train crossed the railway bridge in Rohri on the east bank of the Indus. Von Königsmarck observed: “The eyes of the little Japanese gentleman are growing larger every minute – he takes up his stand at the window, runs from one side of the carriage to the other and back again, raises himself on tiptoe, talks to himself and then makes notes busily.”

In colonial India, such obsessive documentation by a foreign military officer would ordinarily have attracted considerable suspicion. By then, however, British officials had become accustomed to these visitors from the East – a fact confirmed to von Königsmarck by a British general in Quetta. “They visit us on the Frontier frequently nowadays, the Japanese do,” General Pearson told the German. “They are always wanting to find out something about everywhere.”

Strategic alliance

This steady flow of Japanese military visitors was made possible by the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, a strategic pact designed to check Russian expansionism in East Asia. Widely regarded as the first treaty signed on equal terms between a Western and a non-Western power, it reflected international recognition of Japan’s rapid modernisation during the Meiji era, which had begun in 1868.

By 1905, the agreement evolved into the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and was expanded to cover British India. Under the new terms, Britain recognised Japan’s right to control the Korean Peninsula, while Tokyo pledged to defend British India in the event of an external attack.

In 1906, several Western newspapers carried a wire report about Japanese military officers arriving in India to be attached to the Indian Army to study the country’s military organisation and the defence of the northwest frontier.

“They will be distributed among the various commands and will remain in the country for 12 months, or a longer time if agreed on by the two governments,” the report said. “A party of officers of all arms, belonging to the Anglo-Indian army will proceed at the same time to Japan to study the Japanese military system.” The report added that the arrangement was “not liked” by the army in India.

The American press viewed this growing bonhomie with outright scepticism. In July 1910, The New York Times argued that “Japan’s ambitions in promoting friendship between herself and the peoples of the Far East has been greatly assisted by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and indirectly her commerce and trade has benefitted”.

The newspaper contended that Britain had sacrificed its interests in the Far East, effectively leaving the region’s affairs to Japan. It noted that influential Japanese figures such as Count Ōkuma Shigenobu, who would later become prime minister, were attempting to “foster intimacy and regard” between India and Japan, often at Britain’s expense. “One of Japan’s leading statesmen Count Ōkuma, now President of the Indo-Japan Association, said some time ago that millions under oppression in India were looking to Japan for sympathy and help,” it added.

Although the colonial establishment harboured some suspicion that Japanese politicians were seeking to undermine British influence in India, the strategic value of the alliance remained unquestioned.

Educational exchange

Alongside promoting trade, Japan also encouraged Indian students to enrol in Japanese universities, which offered technical education largely unavailable in India at the time and were considerably cheaper than attending British universities.

This initiative took place within the context of the wider Meiji era reforms, during which Japan also closely examined foreign systems of education. In 1908, Rokusaburo Mochiji, councillor and superintendent of education in Formosa (present-day Taiwan), travelled to India to study its education system firsthand. Over a two-month tour, he visited schools in Calcutta, Madras, Allahabad, Lahore, Simla and Bombay. The Home Department instructed officials in each of these cities to “afford him every facility in visiting typical educational institutions” and in “obtaining information regarding the government’s education system”.

Japanese interest in India’s educational institutions extended beyond government officials. In February 1909, R Takebe, a student at Tohaku Imperial University College in Sapporo, submitted an unusual request to the government of India: he sought admission to the newly-established Pusa Agricultural College in Samastipur, Bihar, to study Indian agriculture.

The request briefly threw British bureaucracy into a fluster. Internal communications reveal that while the government had invited students from the Federated Malay States, Siam, Sudan and Nepal to the Imperial Forest College in Dehradun, Pusa had never admitted a foreign student. In the end, it was decided that requests from applicants such as Takebe should be routed through the Japanese Consul General in Calcutta.

Racial friction

Although the Anglo-Japanese Alliance reshaped relations between the two empires, it did not exempt ordinary Japanese citizens living within the British Empire from racial discrimination. As the cotton trade boomed in the first decade of the 20th century, bringing a wave of Japanese banks, shipping agents and businessmen to Bombay and Calcutta, the expatriate community began demanding the same legal status and privileges enjoyed by Britons, Europeans and Americans.

One source of the Japanese community’s resentment was the Indian Arms Act of 1878, which required Indians to obtain government licences to manufacture, possess, sell or carry arms and ammunition. Europeans, American citizens and Anglo-Indians were exempt from the law, as were some loyal Indian princes. Japanese residents in India enjoyed no such exemption, prompting their government to raise the matter with the colonial administration.

“Complaints have been brought to the notice of the Japanese authorities, some time ago, by their countrymen residing in India, that some of them have been treated at the hands of the Indian local authorities, discriminatively from European and American residents, in connection with the license for possessing firearms and with certain other civil proceedings,” T Hirata, Japan’s acting consul-general, wrote in a 1909 letter to SH Butler, secretary of the foreign department of the government of India.

Hirata argued that this discrimination stemmed from special provisions in Indian law that applied only to Europeans and Americans. He asked whether this was indeed the case and, if so, requested a “list of those sets, regulations, or rules which contain such special provisions”.

Butler replied that the “correct procedure” was for the issue to be “discussed between the Government of His Britannic Majesty and His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan”. Similar responses were given when the Japanese consulate in Bombay raised the matter with the provincial government.

The grievances extended into criminal justice. The Japanese government pointed out that their citizens were technically subject to “transportation” – the colonial punishment of being exiled to the penal colony in the Andaman Islands – and, unlike Europeans, could not claim trial by a European jury.

A year later, the India Office in Whitehall issued a memorandum on the treatment of Japanese subjects in India. “It will be seen that the total number of Japanese residents in India is estimated at 594 only, and that in the past 10 years no Japanese has been sent up for trial by jury or has been sentenced to transportation,” it noted. The memo added that the British authorities were prepared to issue an executive order allowing any Japanese person sentenced to penal transportation to serve the sentence in an Indian prison. However, the government refused to alter its position on jury trials or exempt Japanese residents, whom it classified as non-British “Asiatic” subjects, from the Arms Act.

As diplomatic ties between Britain and Japan deepened, some concessions were finally made. Japanese travellers entering or leaving India through the Karakoram Pass into China were granted certain administrative privileges, while the Indian mission in Kashgar agreed to accept postal packets from Kashmir addressed to Japanese travellers arriving from eastern China.

When the First World War broke out, Japan honoured its obligations under the alliance and declared war on the German Empire, eventually emerging as one of the victorious Allied powers.

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance effectively came to an end with the signing of the Four-Power Treaty by Japan, Britain, France and the United States at the Washington Naval Conference in December 1921. The new agreement replaced the military alliance with a looser framework. Under pressure from Washington, Britain chose not to renew its alliance with Japan and it formally lapsed in 1923.

Many historians argue that the alliance’s termination was viewed in Tokyo as a profound betrayal, contributing to Japan’s gradual estrangement from Britain and its eventual alignment with Germany and Italy during the Second World War.

Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His latest book, Colombo: Port of Call, has been published by Penguin Random House.