Why Far East incidents vanish from familiar history

Why is the Tsingtao incident so poorly represented in standard histories?

European-centred narratives of the road to war have often obscured frequent and serious British-Japanese incidents in the Far East.

The standard story of the 1930s privileges Europe and the approach to war with Germany. That focus can obscure the frequency of British-Japanese friction and the Royal Navy's confidence that it could manage threats in East Asia. Tsingtao is contrasted with the contemporary Netherlands war scare, in which Wilhelm Canaris helped expose a false warning about a German move through the Netherlands. The British government treated the European alarm seriously while the Navy assured it that Japan remained manageable. The comparison shows how later knowledge of where the world war began can make an equally dangerous Far Eastern crisis disappear from the familiar narrative.