by the National Assembly on 9 July by a vote of 209 to 116. Japan The disenfranchised and often colonized "non-white" world held high expectations that a new order would open up an unheralded opportunity to have a principle of racial equality recognized by the leading global powers. Japanese diplomacy had bitter memories of the rhetoric of the Yellow Peril, and the arrogance, underwritten by the assumptions about a White Man's Burden, memories aggravated by the rise of racial discrimination against their business men, severe immigration restrictions on Asiatics, and court judgments hostile to Japanese interests, which characterized Western states' treatment of their nationals. Japan's delegation, among whose plenipotentiaries figured Baron Makino and Ambassador Chinda Sutemi, was led by its elder statesman Saionji Kinmochi. Versailles represented a chance to overturn this imposed inferiority, whose tensions were strengthened particularly in Japan's relationship with the United States during WW1. Confidence in their growing industrial strength, and conquest of Germany's Far East possessions, together with their proven fidelity to the Entente would, it was thought, allow them finally to take their rightful place among the victorious Great Powers. They solicited support especially from the American delegation to obtain recognition for the principle of racial equality at the League of Nations Commission. Their proposals to this end were consistently rebuffed by British, French, American and Australian diplomats, who were all sensitive to their respective countries' internal pressures. Wilson himself was an enactor of segregationist policies in the United States, Clemenceau openly ridiculed them, Arthur Balfour considered Africans inferior to Europeans – equality was only true of people within particular nations – while William Hughes, adopting a "slap the Jap" attitude, was a vocal defender of a White Australia policy. Japan's attempt, buttressed by the Chinese emissary Wellington Koo among others, to incorporate a Racial Equality Proposal in the treaty, had broad support, but was effectively declined when it was rejected by the United States, Great Britain and Australia, despite a powerfully persuasive speech delivered by Makino. Japan itself both prior to and during WW1 had embarked on a vigorous expansion of continental colonialism, whose aims were justified in terms of an ideological vision of Asians, such as Koreans and Chinese, being of the same culture and race (: ), though its vision of those countries was paternalistic and geared to subordinating them to Japan's interests. Aspiring to be accepted as a world actor with