South Seas Mandate

The South Seas Mandate was a League of Nations mandate given to the Empire of Japan by the League of Nations following World War I. The mandate consisted of islands in the north Pacific Ocean that had been part of German New Guinea within the German colonial empire, in a part of the world broadly known as the South Seas. The islands were occupied by Japan during World War I, and Japan subsequently governed them under the mandate as part of the Japanese colonial empire. During World War II the United States captured the islands, and after the war the United Nations revoked the mandate and established in its place the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands which was governed by the United States. The islands are now part of Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

The mandate's official name was the Mandate for the German Possessions in the Pacific Ocean Lying North of the Equator. In Japan, the territory is known as "Japanese Mandate for the Governance of the South Seas Islands" (委任統治地域南洋群島, Inin tōchi chiiki nan'yō guntō) and was governed by the Nan'yō Government (南洋廳, Nan'yō-chō).

Origin

Japanese interest in what it called the "South Seas" (南洋, Nan'yō) began in the 19th century, prior to its imperial expansion into Korea and China. By 1875, ships from the newly established Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) began to hold training missions in the area. Shiga Shigetaka, a writer who accompanied a Navy cruise to the region in 1886, published his Current State of Affairs in the South Seas (南洋時事, Nan'yō jiji) in 1887, marking the first time a Japanese civilian published a firsthand account of Micronesia. Three years later, Shiga advocated for annexation of the area by claiming that doing so would "excite an expeditionary spirit in the demoralized Japanese race." Despite the appeal imperialism had for the Japanese public at the time, neither the Meiji government nor the Navy seized any pretexts to fulfill this popular aspiration.