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The government had sent Takahashi, who had begun his study of English at age ten in 1864, to London to sell Japanese war bonds, at which he was eminently successful. Foreigners provided over 800 million yen, 47% of the cost of the war, through buying Japanese treasury bonds. (The list of purchasers is a who's who of London, New York, and later Hamburg and Paris finance: Jacob Schiff, John Baring, Ernest Cassel, Otto Kahn, the Warburgs, the Rothschilds, and even Britain's crown prince, later George V). Takahashi learned two lessons in London and New York. Japan's victory depended on the goodwill of the Anglo-American capital (thus, Takahashi's adherence to the cooperative approach); the costs of paying the interest and repaying the principal of these loans required fiscal prudence in Tokyo. (Thus, his opposition to new military spending and the nationalization of Japan's railroad system). Takahashi's view won out for the most part from 1905 until World War I.
The conflict arose again in the wartime years over Japanese policy toward China. One group advocated a more autonomous Japanese policy on the mainland of Asia. Japan should issue loans to competing Chinese warlords and military intervention to gain what it saw as its deserved imperialist position in China. The Twenty-One Demands of 1915, the Japanese government's attempt, in the absence of an Anglo-American presence during World War I, to become the primary imperialist power in China, represented this view. Takahashi and others opposed this approach on two grounds: it alienated China, with whom Japan should cooperate economically, and it endangered Japan's relations with Britain and America. In 1920, Takahashi, while serving as finance minister, not only criticized his own government's China policy, but even advocated the abolition of the army's and navy's general staffs because they undermined the democratizing government's control over foreign policy. As one Japanese Marxist historian wrote, "Takahashi was the leading representative of the bourgeois politicians who advocated civilian control of the military." His China policy views won out temporarily. His prime minister, Hara Takashi, squelched his inflammatory memo on the general staff issue before it was made public.
Hara was assassinated in 1921, and Takahashi replaced him as Prime Minister to oversee Japan's enrollment in the Washington Treaty System, the symbol of international cooperation in the post-World War I decade. This system, which went into effect with the signing of the Washignton Treaty in 1922, limited Japan's navy (capital ships) to three-fifths of the United States and United Kingdom navies, required Japan to give up its leasehold of the naval base at Tsingtao in China that it had won from the Germans during the World War I. It also limited American, British and Japanese bases in the Pacific and required all signatories to "respect the territorial integrity of China," a euphemistic expression which meant no further aggressive military intervention in China. Takahashi, with the support of most of his party and all of the opposition party, thus bought into a policy of cooperation with the United States and Great Britain over China. Not all of Japan's leaders, and particularly not most of the army's and navy's leadership, agreed with this policy. That is, they still advocated a strong military and autonomy, but given the antiwar public mood of the 1920s, they acquiesced for the time being.
Under the façade of cooperation, several ominous portents appeared for Japanese who advocated internationalism. First was the success of the spread of nationalism through the school system. One can safely say that by the 1920s, Japan existed as a nation of Japanese.
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