Portsmouth Treaty
The Treaty of Portsmouth of September 5, 1905 ended the Russo-Japanese War in Portsmouth, America, and secured Japan the supremacy it had gained in the war in Korea and southern Manchuria .
After the naval battle at Tsushima on May 27, in which the Russian fleet suffered a devastating defeat, and after there had also been considerable internal unrest ( Russian Revolution 1905 ), Tsar Nicholas II was forced to conclude a waiver peace. The United States, under President Theodore Roosevelt , made itself available to mediate peace , so that the emissaries of both warring states - Sergei Juljewitsch Witte and Roman Rosen for Russia , Komura Jutarō and Takahira Kogorō for Japan - at the Portsmouth naval shipyard in Kittery, Maine ( USA) came together.
Sovereignty over Manchuria was granted to the Chinese Empire , but the formerly Russian leasehold Kwantung on the Liaodong Peninsula with the port of Port Arthur fell to Japan. Japan also received the formerly Russian concession for part of the Chinese Eastern Railway , which resulted in the South Manchurian Railway . The concession for the railways in northern Manchuria remained with Russia. In addition, Russia had to cede the south of the island of Sakhalin to Japan. Although Japan could not enforce its maximum demands (all of Sakhalin and compensation payments), it finally rose to regional supremacy. Nevertheless, the Hibiya riots broke out in Japan , and ultimately the government of Katsura Taro had to resign in 1906.
The USA presented itself as a neutral negotiator; in fact, in an informal agreement, in return for recognizing Japanese supremacy in Korea, they secured recognition of their possession of the Philippines . Roosevelt himself received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his mediating role . Parallel to the Portsmouth negotiations, Japan also agreed with Great Britain on August 12, 1905 to renew and expand their 1902 alliance . For the major powers' China trade , these agreements confirmed the open door policy . The conversion of Korea into a Japanese protectorate in November 1905, however, was implicitly recognized by the Anglo-Saxon powers.
Japan's victory in the war against Russia represented the first significant victory of an Asian nation over one of the established European great powers and was thus viewed by the Western great powers as a threat to their supremacy and by the Japanese at least as proof of their equivalence.
