Rethinking The Russo-Japanese War 1904-05: Centennial Perspectives [1] 190524603X, 9781905246038

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
List of Maps, Tables and Figures
List of Illustrations
Conventions
Introduction
Maps
1 The Memory and Significance of the Russo-Japanese War from a Centennial Perspective
PART I ORIGINS
2 Guarding the Gates of Our East Asia: Japanese Reactions to the Far Eastern Crisis (1897–98) as a Prelude to the War
3 An Invitation to the Aquarium: Sergei Witte and the Origins of Russia’s War with Japan
4 “The Unknown Enemy:” The Siberian Frontier and the Russo-Japanese Rivalry, 1890s–1920s
PART II THE WAR
5 The Clash of Two Continental Empires: The Land War Reconsidered
6 The Secret Factor: Japanese Network of Intelligence-gathering on Russia during the War
7 Chaos versus Cruelty: Sakhalin as a Secondary Theater of Operations
8 The War and the Perception of Japan by British Investors
9 Realpolitik or Jewish Solidarity? Jacob Schiff’s Financial Support for Japan Revisited
10 The War, Military Expenditures, and Postbellum Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Japan
11 The Widow’s Tears and the Soldier’s Dream: Gender and Japanese Wartime Visual Culture
12 School Songs, the War, and Nationalist Indoctrination in Japan
13 Forgotten Heroes: Russian Women in the War
14 The Dress Rehearsal? Russian Realism and Modernism through War and Revolution
15 The Scepter of the Far East and the Crown of the Third Rome: The War in the Mirror of Russian Poetry
PART III REACTIONS AND POSTWAR REPERCUSSIONS
16 The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan
17 The Legacy of the War and the World of Islam in Japanese Pan-Asian Discourse: Wakabayashi Han’s Kaikyo Sekai to Nihon
18 Soldiers’ Unrest Behind the Front after the End of the War
19 Imperial Russian War Planning for the Eurasian Space and the Impact of the War
20 The War and British Strategic Foreign Policy
21 British War Correspondents and the War
22 Participant Observation: Germany, the War, and the Road to a European Clash
23 Perceptions of Russia in German Military Leadership during the War
24 A Different View: The War in Austro-Hungarian Political Cartoons
25 A Reinterpretation of the Ottoman Neutrality During the War
26 The Jewish Response to the War
27 Russo-Japanese Negotiations and the Japanese Annexation of Korea
28 Japan’s Victory in Philippine, Vietnamese, and Burmese Perspectives
29 The War and the British Invasion of Tibet, 1904
30 Distant Echoes: The Reflection of the War in the Middle East
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

RETHINKING THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR, 1904–05 Volume I

CENTENNIAL PERSPECTIVES

RETHINKING THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR, 1904–05 Volume I

CENTENNIAL PERSPECTIVES

Edited by

ROTEM KOWNER University of Haifa

RETHINKING THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR, 1904–05 VOLUME I: CENTENNIAL PERSPECTIVES Edited by Rotem Kowner First published 2007 by GLOBAL ORIENTAL LTD PO Box 219 Folkestone Kent CT20 2WP UK www.globaloriental.co.uk © Global Oriental Ltd 2007 ISBN 978-1-905246-03-8 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library

Set in 9/10.5pt Stone Serif by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester Printed and bound in England by Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wilts

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Contributors List of Maps, Tables, Figures List of Illustrations Conventions Introduction 1. The Memory and Significance of the Russo-Japanese War from a Centennial Perspective

viii ix xiv xv xvii xix

1

BEN-AMI SHILLONY AND ROTEM KOWNER

PART I: ORIGINS

11

I. Geopolitical, Economic, and Intellectual Background 2. Guarding the Gates of Our East Asia: Japanese Reactions to the Far Eastern Crisis (1897–98) as a Prelude to the War

13

URS MATTHIAS ZACHMANN

3. An Invitation to the Aquarium: Sergei Witte and the Origins of Russia’s War with Japan

31

DAVID SCHIMMELPENNINCK VAN DER OYE

4. “The Unknown Enemy”: The Siberian Frontier and the Russo-Japanese Rivalry, 1890s–1920s

46

EVA-MARIA STOLBERG

PART II: THE WAR

63

II. The Military Dimension 5. The Clash of Two Continental Empires: The Land War Reconsidered IAN NISH

65

vi

Contents

6. The Secret Factor: Japanese Network of Intelligencegathering on Russia during the War

78

INABA CHIHARU AND ROTEM KOWNER

7. Chaos versus Cruelty: Sakhalin as a Secondary Theater of Operations

93

MARIE SEVELA

III. The Economic Dimension 8. The War and the Perception of Japan by British Investors

109

NATHAN SUSSMAN AND YISHAY YAFEH

9. Realpolitik or Jewish Solidarity? Jacob Schiff’s Financial Support for Japan Revisited

123

DANIEL GUTWEIN

10. The War, Military Expenditures and Postbellum Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Japan

139

ONO KEISHI

IV. The Cultural Dimension 11. The Widow’s Tears and the Soldier’s Dream: Gender and Japanese Wartime Visual Culture

159

SHALMIT BEJARANO

12. School Songs, the War and Nationalist Indoctrination in Japan

185

URY EPPSTEIN

13. Forgotten Heroes: Russian Women in the War

202

YULIA MIKHAILOVA AND IKUTA MICHIKO

14. The Dress Rehearsal? Russian Realism and Modernism through War and Revolution

218

AARON COHEN

15. The Scepter of the Far East and the Crown of the Third Rome: The War in the Mirror of Russian Poetry

232

ANNA FRAJLICH

PART III: REACTIONS AND POSTWAR REPERCUSSIONS

245

V. The Belligerents: Consequences in Japan and Russia 16. The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan NIKOLAY OVSYANNIKOV

247

17. The Legacy of the War and the World of Islam in Japanese Pan-Asian Discourse: Wakabayashi Han’s Kaikyo Sekai to Nihon SELÇUK ESENBEL

263

Contents 18. Soldiers’ Unrest Behind the Front after the End of the War

vii 281

JAN KUSBER

19. Imperial Russian War Planning for the Eurasian Space and the Impact of the War

291

ALEX MARSHALL

VI. Divided Onlookers: Europe and the War 20. The War and British Strategic Foreign Policy

307

KEITH NEILSON

21. British War Correspondents and the War

319

PHILIP TOWLE

22. Participant Observation: Germany, the War, and the Road to a European Clash

332

BERND MARTIN

23. Perceptions of Russia in German Military Leadership during the War

352

OLIVER GRIFFIN

24. A Different View: The War in Austro-Hungarian Political Cartoons

367

MONIKA LEHNER

25. A Reinterpretation of the Ottoman Neutrality during the War

383

HALIT AKARCA

26. The Jewish Response to the War

393

BEN-AMI SHILLONY

VII. Rude Awakening? Asia and the Colonial World 27. Russo-Japanese Negotiations and the Japanese Annexation of Korea

401

HUAJEONG SEOK

28. Japan’s Victory in Philippine, Vietnamese, and Burmese Perspectives

413

GESA WESTERMANN

29. The War and the British Invasion of Tibet, 1904

430

GORDON T. STEWART

30. Distant Echoes: The Reflection of the War in the Middle East

444

RINA BIEGANIEC

Bibliography Index

456 497

Acknowledgements

W

ith growing awareness that the Russo-Japanese War marked a historical juncture far more important than it is usually taken to be, this project was conceived in the mid-1990s. An initial exchange of ideas and a few presentations on the war at scholarly conferences in 1996 and 1997 led me to the conclusion that a reexamination of the war’s origins, course, and repercussions was in order. As the centennial of the war approached, this project yielded a number of symposiums, notably a two-day conference held in Haifa in 2001 and a five-day conference held jointly in Jerusalem and Haifa in 2004. These academic meetings, as well as the three-day conference in Nichinan, Japan, in 2005, provided me with the opportunity to meet many of the leading scholars in the field and to promote this project. More than anything, these scholars furnished much stimulation and focus regarding the issues requiring reexamination, as well as the ultimate spur for this volume. The outcome, nonetheless, is by no means the proceedings of those conferences. First, half of the contributors to this book took part in none of them; furthermore, each of the chapters presented here was selected carefully to suit the initial aim of thinking the war through anew, from a critical perspective, and often by perusing fresh sources never used before. During this project I came to owe a debt of gratitude to many people. Foremost among them is my teacher and friend, Professor Ben-Ami Shillony, who supported this venture for many years, who co-organized with me the 2004 conference, and who was instrumental in setting the preparation of this book in motion. I thank him for his continuous intellectual inspiration and broad vision regarding this historical event. I am also indebted to Professor Ian Nish, Professor Chiharu Inaba, and Mr Paul Norbury for their cordial support and enthusiasm, and for setting high standards of knowledge regarding this topic, each in a different and unique way. The financial support provided by the Japan Foundation, the Research Authorities at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Haifa, and the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University was essential and is highly appreciated. I thank also Shira Taube, Ran Snir and Ido Blumenfeld for their assistance in various stages of this project.

List of Contributors

HALIT AKARCA is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University and

working on Ottoman-Russian Diplomatic relations. Currently he is conducting research on the Russian consulates within the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries. SHALMIT BEJARANO is a doctoral candidate in the history of Art and

Architecture Department of the University of Pittsburgh, and conducting research on the relations between art and polity in the Edo period. RINA BIEGANIEC is specializing in the history of modern Egypt and works

at Oranim College, Israel. AARON COHEN is Associate Professor of History at California State

University, Sacramento. He is a specialist on Russian culture history in the early twentieth century and the author of a number of articles on art culture, comparative political culture, and the memory of war. His book Imagining the Unimaginable: Mass Mobilization, Public Culture, and Modern Art in Russia during the First World War is forthcoming. URY EPPSTEIN is lecturer at the Department of East Asian Studies at the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and specializes in Japanese music and theatre. He has written extensively on culture and the introduction of Western arts during Japanese modernization, notably, among these works, the book The Beginnings of Western Music in Meiji Era Japan. SELÇUK ESENBEL is Professor of History in the Department of History,

Bogazici University, Istanbul, and a specialist of modern Japan. Her research interests are peasant conflicts and the use of Western culture in Meiji Japan, Asianism in pre-war Japanese nationalism, JapaneseMuslim relations, and Japanese-Turkish relations. Her publications include Even The Gods Rebel: Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising and the co-edited volume The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent. ANNA FRAJLICH is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Slavic Languages

of Columbia University. An author of eleven books of poetry, she has published a number of essays and articles on Russian and Polish liter-

x

Contributors ature of the twentieth century, among them recently: “Henryk Grynberg: The Quest for Artistic and Non-Artistic Truth,” and “The Contradictions Of The Northern Pilgrim: Dmitrii Merezhkovsky.” Her book The Legacy of Ancient Rome in the Russian Silver Age is forthcoming.

OLIVER GRIFFIN is Assistant Professor of history at St. John Fisher College,

and specializes in modern Germany and modern Europe. He is the author of “Military Attachés and the Russo-Japanese War: Questions of Access and Elan,” co-authored with Jennifer Siegel, forthcoming in The Journal of Military History, and is currently writing a history of perceptions of Russia in German military leadership between 1871 and 1918. DANIEL GUTWEIN is Professor of Jewish modern history at the University

of Haifa and is specializing in the socio-economic aspects of the modernization process of the Jewish people and in the economic and social policies implemented in the State of Israel. His publications include The Divided Elite: Economics, Politics, and Anglo-Jewry, 1882–1917. IKUTA MICHIKO is Professor of Russian history and culture at Osaka

University of Foreign Studies. Her research interests focus on RussoJapanese cultural relations and Russian diaspora in Manchuria. Her publications include The Kiss of Daikokuya Kodayu: Intercultural Communication and the Body and N.A. Nevsky seen through Archive Materials. Her recent research is devoted to the study of mutual RussoJapanese images in the Edo period. INABA CHIHARU is Professor of International Relations in Meijo

University, Nagoya, Japan, and specializes in Finnish and East European modern history and the relations of this region with Japan. He has a special and long interest in the Russo-Japanese War and among his numerus publications on this topic are the books Akashi Kosaku: Boryaku no nichiro senso and Abakareta kaisen no shinjitsu: Nichiro senso, and the co-edited volume The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent. ROTEM KOWNER is Professor of Japanese history and culture at the

University of Haifa, Israel. His recent works include The Forgotten Campaign: The Russo-Japanese War and Its Legacy (in Hebrew), Historical Dictionary of the Russo-Japanese War, and the edited volume The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War. He is currently working on a book on the role of racial and bodily images in shaping Meiji Japan. JAN KUSBER is Professor of East European History at Johannes-

Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany. He is the author of Krieg und Revolution in Rußland, 1904–1906: Das Militär im Verhältnis zu Wirtschaft, Autokratie und Gesellschaft and Eliten- und Volksbildung im Zarenreich während des 18. und in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Studien zu Diskurs, Gesetzgebung und Umsetzung.

Contributors

xi

MONIKA LEHNER is lecturer at the department of East Asian Studies/

Chinese Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, and specializing in Sino-European relations. She is co-author of Österreich-Ungarn und der Boxeraufstand (China 1900–1901) and is currently writing on iconographic manifestations of the “Other” in satirical periodicals, analyzing Austro-Hungarian perception of political change and revolutionary movements in China during 1894–1917. ALEX MARSHALL is Lecturer at the Defence Studies Department of

King’s College, London. His areas of interest and expertise include Russian relations with Asia from 1800 to the present, Russian military history, and the modern history of Afghanistan. He is the author of The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800–1917 and is currently writing a volume on the history of the Soviet Caucasus between 1905 and 1960. BERND MARTIN is Professor of Modern History in the Department of

History at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Among his numerous publications on National socialist Germany, World War II, and German-Japanese/Chinese relations are Die deutsche Beraterschaft in China 1928–1937 and Japan and Germany in the Modern World. YULIA MIKHAILOVA is Professor in the Faculty of International Relations,

Hiroshima City University and a specialist of modern Japan. Her works include Motoori Norinaga: His Life and Work and Social and Political Perspectives in Japan: the 1860s and 1880s (both in Russian). She has published a number of articles on Russian and Japanese cartoons of the Russo-Japanese War and is currently editing a volume on mutual Russo-Japanese images through visual representations. KEITH NEILSON is Professor of History at the Royal Military College of

Canada, and a specialist in British foreign and defense policy. He is the author of Britain and the Last Tsar: The Russian Factor in British Policy, 1894–1917 and, with Zara Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War. His latest book, Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939 was published in 2006. IAN NISH is Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics’

Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD), and a leading authority on Japanese diplomatic history. Among his numerous publications are The Anglo-Japanese Alliance; Alliance in Decline; The Anglo-Japanese Alienation, 1919–1952, and The Origins of the Russo-Japanese War. ONO KEISHI is Research Fellow (on military economics) of the National

Institute for Defense Studies, Tokyo. He has published a number of articles on military expenditures of modern Japan as well as on current issues such as conflict and economic development.

xii

Contributors

NIKOLAY OVSYANNIKOV is a doctoral candidate at the Moscow State

University. At present he is working on his doctoral thesis, the role of the Katsura-Saionji coalition for the political development of Japan in the beginning of the twentieth century, as a research student at the Yokohama National University. DAVID SCHIMMELPENNINCK VAN DER OYE is Associate Professor of

History at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. He is the author of Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan, and co-editor of Reforming the Tsar’s Army, and co-editor of The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero. He is currently completing a study on Russian perceptions of Asia. HUAJEONG SEOK is an Adjunct Professor of History at Sejong University,

Korea. She has published a number of monographs and books on Witte’s East Asian policy, the Franco-Russian alliance, Russo-Japanese relations, and European imperialism in East Asia. Her book on the Russo-Japanese War and the reflection of power politics in cartoons is forthcoming. MARIE SEVELA is associate researcher at the Japan Research Center

(EHESS, Paris), specializing in the social and cultural history of Russia and Japan. She is the author of a number of publications on Russian and Japanese cross-cultural experiences of war (Dmitrii N. Kriukov: Civil Administration on South Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, 1945–1948. Memoirs), as well as on the early teaching of Japanese in Russia. She is currently writing a history of the Soviet occupation of Karafuto in 1945. BEN-AMI SHILLONY is Professor of Japanese History and culture at the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and specializes in twentieth century Japan. He is the author of Revolt in Japan; Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan; The Jews and the Japanese; and the recently published The Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History. EVA-MARIA STOLBERG is Lecturer in East European and Russian History

at the University of Bonn, Germany, and specializes in the history of Russia’s Asian frontiers and Russian cultural relations with Asia. She is author of Stalin und die chinesischen Kommunisten, 1945–1953; SibirienRusslands Wilder Osten, and the recently edited volume The Siberian Saga: A History of Russia’s Wild East. She is currently writing a comparative study of the images of Asia in Central and Eastern Europe from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. NATHAN SUSSMAN is Associate Professor of Economics at the Hebrew

University. He is an economic historian whose research has focused on medieval monetary economic history and on the globalization of the nineteenth century. His co-authored book, Emerging Markets and Financial Globalization: Sovereign Bond Spreads in 1870–1913 and Today was published in 2006.

Contributors

xiii

GORDON T. STEWART is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor of History

at Michigan State University and specializes in British Empire and World History. He is the author of Jute and Empire: The Calcutta Jute Wallahs and the Landscapes Of Empire, and other monographs on eighteenth century British North America and Canadian-American relations. He is currently writing a comparative study of the 1774 and 1904 British missions to Tibet. PHILIP TOWLE is Reader in International Relations at the Centre of

International Studies in Cambridge, and a specialist on the history of international security. Amongst his books are From Ally to Enemy: Anglo-Japanese Military Relations, 1900–45; Naval Power in the Indian Ocean; Enforced Disarmament from the Napoleonic Campaigns to the Gulf War; and Democracy and Peacemaking: Negotiations and Debates. He edited Estimating Foreign Military Power and co-edited Japanese Prisoners of War. GESA WESTERMANN has completed her doctoral thesis about the role of

Japan’s modernization in Southeast Asian colonial discourse at the end of the nineteenth century at the Department of Non-European History at the University of Hagen, Germany. Her areas of research cover Japanese identity, Asianism, modernization, and decolonization, and she has authored several articles about the relation between Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. YISHAY YAFEH is Associate Professor in the School of Business

Administration and the Department of East Asian Studies of the Hebrew University. He is a financial economist who has written extensively about the financial system of Japan, and on other issues in financial economics. His co-authored book Emerging Markets and Financial Globalization: Sovereign Bond Spreads in 1870–1913 and Today was published in 2006. URS MATTHIAS ZACHMANN is Assistant Professor at the Japan Center of

the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. He specializes in modern history of Japan and has published a number of articles on late Tokugawa and Meiji intellectual and diplomatic history. He is currently preparing for publication his doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Heidelberg and entitled “China’s Role in the Process of Japan’s Cultural Self-Identification, 1895–1904.”

List of Maps, Tables and Figures

Map 1. Map 2. Map 3. Map 4.

The War Arena The Land Campaign The Naval Arena The Voyage of the Baltic Fleet

Table 4.1. Table 6.1.

Trade between Vladivostok and Manchuria (1891–1900) Japanese Intelligence Branches and Personnel before and during the Russo-Japanese War The Largest Borrowers on the London Market (1870–1913) Japanese Bond Issues in London Military and Economic Military Strength of Eight Powers (1900–13) Capital Ships Laid down or Completed between 1906 and 1913 Breakdown of Military Expenditures (1896–1913) Payment of Capital Ships Construction from FY1896 to 1913

Table 8.1. Table 8.2. Table 10.1. Table 10.2. Table 10.3. Table 10.4.

Fig. 8.1. Fig. 8.1A. Fig. 8.2. Fig. 8.3A. Fig. 8.3B. Fig. 10.1.

xxv xxvi xxvii xxviii

Japanese and Russian Spreads (1870–1913) Japanese Yields and War News (1903–05) The Composition of Japanese Debt (1870–1913) Domestic and Foreign Debt (1870–97) Domestic and Foreign Debt (1879–1913) Credit Multiplier and Circuit Velocity of Money (1/k) (1891–1913)

List of Illustrations

Fig. 7.1.

Fig. 7.2.

Fig. 7.3. Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3 Fig. 11.4

Fig. 11.5

Fig. 11.6

Fig. 11.7

Fig. 11.8

A volunteer detachment’s surrender in Vladimirovka, Sakhalin (July 11, 1905). Source: Ogawa, 1904–06. Japanese and Russian commissionaires meet in Handasa, Sakhalin (July 31, 1905). Source: Ogawa, 1904–06. Russo-Japanese border, Karafuto/Sakhalin. Source: Postcard. Mitsutani Kunishiro, “The Solider wife,” 1904. Source: Shiokawa, 1996: 19. Ishii Hakutei, “Lament,” 1904. Source: Bijutsu Shimpo, September 12, 1904. Matsui Noboru, “Mementos,” 1985. Source: Tan’o and Kawada, 1996: 18. Mitsutani Kunishiro, “Commander Hayashi’s Death at the Battlefield,” 1897. Source: Okayama Prefectural Art Museum, Okayama: Kunishiro Mitsutani Exhibition, 1993. Kobayashi Kiyochika, “A Soldier’s Dream at Camp during a Truce in the Invasion of China,” April, 1895. Source: Keene, 2001, Fig. 49. English caption: “Japanese soldiers leaving the homes of their country men in Seoul, where they had resided, when on their way to Piag Yang [sic], at the beginning of March. (By our special artist).” Source: Senji Gaho, April 20, 1904. English caption: “The poor-quarter in Shitaya, Tokyo. The husband having been ‘called out’ to serve his country. The wife and daughter age 8 are employed to support themselves by the lowest [labors].” Source: Senji Gaho, July 20, 1904. English caption: “Parents, wives and other relatives of soldiers consulting a fortune-teller, who after studying the Chinese classics, predicts the soldier’s probable fate.” Source: Senji Gaho, April 10, 1904.

xvi Fig. 11.9 Fig. 11.10

Fig. 11.11

Fig. 11.12 Fig. 11.13

Fig. 11.14

Fig. 11.15

Fig. 11.16 Fig. 11.17 Fig. 11.18

Fig. 11.19

Fig. 11.20 Fig. 13.1.

Fig. 13.2. Fig. 13.3

Illustrations “Horrifying Scene during the Withdrawal of Our Settlers.” Source: Senji Gaho, March 10, 1904. “Attack on Japanese merchant ship by a Russian squadron near Vladivostok” Source: Senji Gaho, 1 August 1904. Utagawa Kokunimasa (Ryua): “Russo-Japanese War: Great Japan Red Cross Battlefield Hospital Treating Injured,” March 1904. Source: Museum of Fine Art, Boston. “Instead of Russian Soldiers – Chinese Beauties.” Source: Senji Gaho, July 1, 1904. English caption: “Manchurian women, who used to be horror stricken at the sight of the Russians, come to serve our army.” Source: Senji Gaho, September 20, 1904. English caption: “Honorary members of the ladies volunteer association of Red Cross nurses. The portrait to the right is that of the dowager princess Tomi Kitashirakawa, and to the left that of Princess Tsune Kacho.” Source: Senji Gaho, May 10, 1904. Kosugi Misei, “Japanese nurses attending wounded Russian soldiers in Inchon [Chemulpo].” Source: Senji Gaho, March 1, 1904. Kosugi Misei, “Cry of a Wounded Russian Soldier.” Source: Bijutsu Shimpo, June 5, 1904. Takeuchi Keishu, “Nurse.” Source: Bungei Kurabu, 20 April 1904. Nakajima Shunko, “Mobilization of the postcards’ Army,” May 1905. Source: Haga and Shimizu, 1985: 27. Miura Hokkyo, “Wouldn’t It Become Glory,” 1905. Source: Nihon Bijutsu Hyakunen-shi Henshu Shitsuhen, 1993: 301. Ishikawa, “Beauties Serving Sake at the Front.” Source: Senji Gaho, February 10, 1905. Mariinskaya Community of Nurses Before the Departure to Russia from Port Arthur (Spring, 1905). Source: Larenko, 1906: 751. M.L. Dillon, “Nurse Reading a Letter.” Source: Khronika voiny s Yaponiei, 1905, No 49, Coversheet. I.I. Geller, “Toward the Sacred Deed.” Source: Khronika voiny s Yaponiei, 1905, No 52, Cover-sheet.

Conventions

A

s commonly accepted in the East Asian tradition and in academic writing in the English language, all East Asian names are written with the family name given first, followed by the personal name. The names of persons mentioned in the book follow several transliteration systems. The Russian names are written according to the improved transliteration system of the Library of Congress (but without diacritical marks and ligatures) and in consultation with the Historical Dictionary of the RussoJapanese War (Kowner, 2006). An exception has been made for names so familiar in English that to translate them would mislead the reader; their spelling accords with what is common in English (e.g. Nicholas II rather Nikolai II, Witte rather Vitte). Similarly, names of German origin are written in the usual way in that language. Japanese names are written according to the Hepburn transliteration system and in consultation with the Kodansha Encyclopedia (Itakasa, 1983). Macrons to indicate long vowels in Japanese names are used except in reference to well-known terms such as Tokyo. Chinese names are written according to the WadeGiles transliteration system, and Korean names according to the McCune-Reischauer transliteration system. The terms “Americans” and “American” are used synonymously with citizens of the United States for purposes of terseness and word variations. Names of locations in Manchuria and in China are written according to Wade-Giles system, in consultation with the Historical Dictionary of the Russo-Japanese War, except for names of battle sites in Manchuria in common usage in Western languages during the war (e.g. Dalny). However, to allow the reader to identify these and other sites and link them with present-day locations, Pinyin transliterations are added in the index. Place names in Japan are written according to the Hepburn transliteration system, in consultation with the Kodansha Encyclopedia and the Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary (Masuda, 1991). Names of places of current importance were written in present-day usage, such as Tokyo and Beijing. The dates in the book are according to the Gregorian calendar rather than either the Julian calendar, which was used in tsarist Russia until 1918, or the modern Japanese calendar, which is still in use today. The Julian calendar, used in many books on Russian history, was twelve days “behind” the Gregorian calendar during the nineteenth century and thir-

xviii

Conventions

teen days behind during the twentieth century: so the date of the outbreak of the war, which was January 26, 1904 according to the Julian calendar in Russia, and on the eighth day of the second month of the 37th year of the Meiji Era in Japan, appears in this book as February 8, 1904. Russian archive sources are cited according to the Russian system: f. (fond – collection), op. (opis – inventory), d. (delo – file), l. (list – page), or t. (tom – volume). A number of archives, journals and series often cited in this volume are used by their acronyms, as follows: AVPR BA/MA/RM GARF HIA HHStA, P.A. KA/MS LMDH NA NGK NAI PA PTsRGOIAK RGIA RGASPI RGIA DV RGVIA SA AM BDOW BDFA JT JWM KA NGB

Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossii (Moscow) Bundesarchiv / Militärarchiv / Reichsmarine (Freiburg im Breisgau) Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Russiikoi Federatsii (Moscow) Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford) Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Ministerium des kaiserlichen Hauses und des Äußern, Politisches Archiv (Vienna) Kriegsarchiv / Marinesektion (Vienna) Library of Military History Department, National Institute of Defense Studies, Defense Agency (Tokyo) National Archives/ (Washington) Nihon Gaimusho Kiroku (Tokyo) National Archives of India (New Delhi) Politisches Archiv (Bonn) Primorskii Tsentr Russkogo Geograficheskogo Obshchestva Izucheniia Amurskogo Kraia, arkhiv Arsen’eva (Vladivostok) Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (Moscow) Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyj Arkhiv Sotsial’no-politicheskoi Istorii (Moscow) Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Dal’nego Vostoka (Vladivostok) Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voenno Istoricheskii Arkhiv (Moscow) Sibirskii Arkhiv (Irkutsk) Al-Manar British Documents on the Origins of the War British Documents on Foreign Affairs Japan Times Japan Weekly Mail Krasnyi Arkhiv Nihon gaiko bunsho

Introduction

T

he importance of the Russo-Japanese War seems by now so obvious, certainly for those who research it, that statements about its being more than a mere colonial war or even of its being the greatest conflict of the early twentieth century no longer ignite contention, let alone generate doubting responses. Commemorated across the globe, from St. Petersburg to Tokyo, via London, Portsmouth (New Hampshire), Seoul, and even Jerusalem, the centenary of the Russo-Japanese War in 2004–05 underscored the growing recognition that the war has gained lately. These widespread activities, in the form of scholarly conferences and symposiums, public meetings, films and artistic exhibitions, as well as countless academic and popular publications, were a rite of passage, attesting to the fact that this episode has ceased to be a peripheral issue and deserves much greater attention. More than seeking to affirm the greater significance that the RussoJapanese War has been accorded lately, the present volume aims (as does the companion volume) at a broad and comprehensive reexamination of the origins of the conflict, the various dimensions of the nineteen-month conflagration, and the legacy of the war and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Such an enterprise is timely because of the longer perspective and because at present we have not only greater access to materials and sources but also a growing number of scholars expert at multilingual, multidisciplinary, and comparative research. This volume has benefited from the collaboration of thirty-two scholars with precisely such qualities. Moreover, as natives of twelve different nations and representatives of a broad disciplinary background, this unique team of scholars seemed especially suited for the undertaking we initially aimed at. Without exception all have sought to provide a novel and critical view of the war, facilitated by a century-long perspective, and based on an impressive assortment of primary and secondary sources, many of them unexplored, and in a number of cases unavailable, earlier. Whereas a few of the contributors chose to reexamine well-known issues, the majority focused on topics never researched before. The result of these collaborative efforts is a rich and comprehensive opus, the first of a two-volume project, aiming at broadening our knowledge and understanding of this key event. Despite the growing number of publications on the Russo-Japanese War, an abundance of questions and issues related to this topic remain

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unknown, or call for, if not necessitate, a reexamination. Was the precursor to the war, for instance, mainly a long and inevitable collision course, or was the war sparked by proximate causes in the last few years before its outbreak? Was Japan’s strategy for the war justified, and to what extent did its intelligence-gathering activities render it victorious? How did the Japanese forces take over Sakhalin, and can this final operation of the war shed new light on exemplary Japanese behavior during the war? What was the place of economic factors in keeping the fighting going and in the final decision by both sides for a diplomatic denouement, and what was the place of personal motives in the financial assistance Japan received during the war? How was the war represented in the two belligerent cultures, and what was the legacy of these representations? What were the immediate and far-reaching repercussions of the war for each of the belligerents, and what was its impact on British and German policies in the crucial decade before World War I? What were the echoes of the war in the colonial world, and did they lead to any substantial transformation? To deal with these and many other complex questions, the present volume offers thirty chapters divided into three parts: the causes of the war, its course, and its consequences. The first part, on the origins of the war, comprises three insightful essays. While many studies on the RussoJapanese War have devoted considerable attention to Japan’s progress toward war after 1900, Urs Matthias Zachmann traces a shift in the Japanese public’s attitude to Russia during the Far Eastern Crisis of 1897–98. The growing anti-Russian sentiment in those years, he argues, set a precedent for all further anti-Russian agitation, allowing the manipulation of public opinion as the war with Russian approached. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye engages in the controversial question regarding the role and responsibility of Russia’s prominent finance minister, Sergei Witte, in the events that led to the war. Witte indeed was dismissed from his influential post six months before the war and preached a peaceful solution to the conflict, but his ardor for the Trans-Siberian Railway, a partnership with the Qing dynasty, and his dream of Russia involvement in northeast Asia, Schimmelpenninck van der Oye concludes, played a major role in enhancing the tsar’s dreams of an empire on the Pacific. Eva-Maria Stolberg examines the place of the Siberian frontier in the lengthy Russo-Japanese contention. Her historical survey of the region begins in the 1890s, focuses on its role as the hinterland of the Russo-Japanese War, and ends with the Japanese intervention in Siberia almost two decades later. Throughout this period, she suggests, the Siberian and Manchurian frontiers were intertwined in a complex relationship. Siberia, Stolberg concludes, played an important role in Russian plans before and after the war, it also affected the Japanese strategic and economic view of northeast Asia. The second part is concerned with the course of the war and consists of eleven essays divided into three sections: the military, economic, and cultural dimensions. The military section opens with Ian Nish’s overview of

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the land war. Nish argues that the Russo-Japanese War, despite a number of illustrious naval battles, was in fact a clash between two continental empires, which treated it merely as a war of expansion. Inaba Chiharu and Rotem Kowner overviews the Japanese network of intelligence gathering on Russia during the war and analyze its qualities. Although the Japanese intelligence was much inferior in capability to the organization it evolved three decades later, its activities before and during the war, they argue, provided much of the information necessary for Japan, helping its two military services to conduct their warfare and its leaders to make the necessary decisions. Marie Sevela considers the virtually unknown takeover of Sakhalin toward the end of the war. Sevela reveals a degree of chaos among the Russian defenders, which came as no surprise, and a few cases of cruelty by the Japanese, which were not expected. She explains the motives for the occupation of the island, whose southern part remained in Japanese hands for the next forty years. The economic section in the second part begins with Nathan Sussman and Yishay Yafeh’s chapter on the perception of Japan by British investors during the war. Using data on prices and yields of Japanese sovereign bonds traded in London between 1870 and 1914, Sussman and Yafeh demonstrate that Japan’s victory over Russia did more to establish Japan’s reputation as a trustworthy borrower than most of the preceding events of the Meiji Period. The interests of the financier Jacob Schiff in Russia at the time he decided to underwrite crucial war bonds for Japan is the topic of Daniel Gutwein’s chapter. In a thought-provoking essay he contends that Schiff’s decision did not stem from a desire to take revenge on Russia for the prewar pogroms against Jews, but to assist his business associates in Britain who faced political and financial difficulties in floating the Japanese war loans. Schiff’s financial-political circle, Gutwein suggests, aimed for a Russian defeat in order to strengthen Witte and his economic policy of rapid industrialization, with its implications for Russia’s home and foreign policies. In the final chapter in this section, Ono Keishi analyzes the effects of the war on Japan’s postwar fiscal and monetary policies. While the financial constraints Japan experienced during the war are well known, Ono reveals that Japan experienced serious shortage of specie after the war, and it was only the outbreak of World War I that brought about a large amount of trade surplus and specie inflow, thereby averting the danger of a specie crisis. The cultural section begins with Shalmit Bejarano’s novel reading of Japanese wartime illustrations depicting women in various war-related roles and bereaved families. These images, Bejarano argues, not only narrate the untold stories of those who were excluded from the official histories but also indicate the changing narrative of the modernizing Japanese state at one of its most defining moments. Ury Epstein reexamines the evolution of Japanese nationalism through the unusual prism of the increasingly militant songs taught in Japanese elementary schools. Seen from this angle, Epstein asserts, the virtual starting point of Japan’s attack on Russia occurred slightly before the Sino-Japanese War

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and did not cease throughout the next decade. Russia too had its own female heroines, as Yulia Mikhailova and Ikuta Michiko finely demonstrate. While they find women taking part in many aspects of the Russian war efforts, they were glorified for virtues related to caring for men and were downgraded as independent human beings. Aaron Cohen explores the experience of the war and revolution during 1904–05 in the Russian art world. He finds it to substantially differ from that a decade later. The detachment that Russian art culture felt from the conflict with Japan, Cohen concludes, demonstrates that it was not a “dress rehearsal” for World War I as many have believed. In the chapter closing this section, Anna Frajlich reconsiders the effect of the war on Russian poetry. The poetic testimonies Frajlich brings to light manifest the traumatic experience of the war and revolution in Russia, the vibrant creativity of its poets, and their avid identification with Europe. The third and largest part of the book deals with the reactions to the war and its legacy. It comprises fifteen essays divided into three sections, on the belligerents, on Europe, and on the colonial world. The first section, on the two belligerents, begins with Nikolai Ovsyannikov’s analysis of the impact of the war on internal Japanese politics. The war looms, Ovsyannikov argues, as a landmark in Japanese political history at home. It not only brought about the formation of a new cabinet headed by a non-oligarchic figure and a president of the largest party in the Lower House, it also stimulated the progress of constitutionalism by moving the public opinion up to a new level that made large-scale liberalization possible. Selçuk Esenbel explores the seeds of Japanese Pan-Asian discourse in the 1930s as reflected in the early Japanese contacts with Muslim political activists during and soon after the war. These early interactions, Esenbel maintains, served as guidelines for training Japanese agents to be sent to Muslim countries under Muslim identity decades later when Japan turned against the West. Jan Kusber’s chapter probes the relations between Russia’s defeat at the front and the revolution in the rear. Kusber focuses on soldiers’ unrest during the demobilization process soon after the war and shows that it initiated revolutionary learning and political involvement among the peasant rank and file, which were kept on a back burner until 1917. In the final chapter in this section Alex Marshall assesses the way the war altered both the scope and intent of Russian war planning in Eurasia. Marshall focuses on the policies of Fedor F. Palitsyn, the Army’s Chief of the General Staff between 1905 and 1908, and subsequent reorganization of the army until the outbreak of the Great War. The second section, on the repercussions of the war in Europe, opens with Keith Neilson’s reexamination of British policy in the wake of the war. Neilson finds that British strategic foreign policy until 1907 was strongly influenced by the war, and suggests that British policy in Europe cannot be divorced from extra-European (particularly East Asian) matters. All in all, Neilson regards the war as the most important international event, certainly from the British viewpoint, in the twenty years before World War I. Many of the vivid impressions the British public absorbed

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during the war were due to dozens of war correspondents dispatched to Manchuria by the British press. The numerous books and articles they wrote on the war, Philip Towle concludes, reflected the prejudices, troubles and anxieties of the age. These correspondents were not able, however, to predict or warn against the nature of future massive armed conflicts and their repercussions for Europe, Russia in particular. Bernd Martin reconsiders the impact of the war on Germany. This rising power did not take an active part in the conflict but was evidently affected by the changing balance of power as, at the beginning of 1906, it found itself internationally isolated. Thereafter, he maintains, the Entente was virtually set against the Central Powers, leading irrevocably to a titanic clash eight years later. Based on original reports, Martin overviews German perceptions of the conflict and the effects of its sinuous relations with Russia during the war on its subsequent geopolitical position. In another chapter on Germany, Oliver Griffin analyzes military attitudes to Russia during the war and their subsequent impact. Based on a careful examination of the perception of German military observers of the nature of Russian military leaders, Griffin uncovers much derision as to the capabilities of the Russian army but also conspicuously little attention to the revolution of 1905. The conflict in northeast Asia was echoed in other parts of Europe as well. It was a major issue, for example, in Austro-Hungarian politics, and consequently was prominent in the Austro-Hungarian media. Through a creative analysis of satirical texts and political cartoons, Monika Lehrer finds that in Austria-Hungary great importance was attached to the war. The interest in the war, Lehrer concludes, stemmed from a need to gain information and clues about the activities of both allies and opponents – information that was used with much skill to adjust relations with the “Other.” While the Ottoman government was thought to be emotionally inclined toward the Japanese, Ottoman policy during the war showed no clear sign of it. Reexamining Ottoman neutrality during the war, Halit Akarca contends that the Sublime Porte tried not to invite enmity from the Great Powers, most importantly from Russia. This policy, Akarca concludes, led to the performance of some acts that might be interpreted as beneficial for Russia, rather than maintaining balanced relations with both sides, let alone showing any official liking for the Japanese. In the final chapter in this section, Ben-Ami Shillony argues that the outbreak of the war caused mixed feeling among the world Jewry, half of which dwelt in the Russian empire at the time. Although thousands fought and died on the Russian side, Jews all over the world were elated by Japan’s victories. Shillony overviews the reactions and illuminates the motives for Jewish support for Japan. The last section of the third part is devoted to reactions and consequences of the war in Asia and the colonial world. Huajeong Seok examines the three crucial years from the Russo-Japanese Convention of 1907 to the Japanese annexation of Korea. Although the annexation of Korea, Seok argues, was a by-product rather than the main purpose of the

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convention with Russia, it was not until the convention was signed and the adjustment of interests among the imperial powers was attained that Japan had a free hand in controlling Korea. Gesa Westermann explores the reaction to the war in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Burma. While the news of the Japanese victories certainly caused excitement among the local populations, Westermann reveals that the war did not have the expected effect on the national and independence movements, and she calls into question the assertion that the Japanese victory became a worldwide stimulus for anti-colonial resistance movements, at least with regard to Southeast Asia. The British invasion of Tibet during the early stages of the war is the topic of Gordon Stewart’s chapter. He reexamines the grounds for the allegations that many contemporaries made that there was a direct connection between these two events. Stewart concludes, however, that far from taking advantage of that war to invade Tibet, the British were reluctant to exploit the timing and did all that they could to mollify the Russians and assure them of the limited nature of Britain’s intentions in Tibet. In the last but not least chapter of the book, Rina Bieganiec explores the echoes of the war in the Middle East, and the Egyptian newspaper Al-Manar in particular. Bieganiec reveals much enthusiasm for Japan’s victories among the Ottoman, Persian and Egyptian public, as well as a new, albeit short-lived, regard for Japan as a model for modernization rather than Westernization. Read as a complete whole, this book brings to light further evidence of the importance of the Russo-Japanese War and its place in the history of the twentieth century. While admittedly some of its consequences were short-lived and occasionally even marginal, the participants in this project share a consensus regarding the scope and significance of the conflict. The Russo-Japanese War, they believe, was truly a turning point in modern history, extending far beyond the sphere of Manchuria and East Asia. As the initiator of this project, I join them in the ardent hope that this volume, together with the second volume, will serve as an important contribution to the expanding scholarly works on the war, its causes and its consequences. I am aware that even such a large undertaking cannot cover all aspects, as many of the questions raised here deserve further elaboration, while others — pertaining to ignored or overlooked themes — still require reexamination. Nonetheless, it is my wish that the volume will facilitate the emergence of a new view regarding this event, and serve as a source for further discussion free of the early historiographical constraints and misconceptions so common in past years. Rotem Kowner Haifa, June 2006

Map 1: The War Arena

Map 2: The Land Campaign

Map 3: The Naval Arena

Map 4: The Voyage of the Baltic Fleet

1

The Memory and Significance of the Russo-Japanese War from a Centennial Perspective BEN-AMI SHILLONY AND ROTEM KOWNER

T

he Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) was the first great war of the twentieth century. Advances in communications at that time made it also the most reported war in the world until then, with a flood of news stories, commentaries, analyses, essays, photograph collections, books, and even movies in dozens of languages. To contemporaries, that war looked dramatic, epoch-making and unforgettable, something that many generations would recount and remember. One book of that time, entitled The Japan-Russia War, which appeared in Philadelphia in 1905, opened with the words: “The Japan-Russia War goes into history as the greatest military struggle the world has known.”1 The siege of Port Arthur, the author Sydney Tyler asserted, “has no duplicate among all recorded military achievements.”2 Referring to the nineteenth-century English prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, he affirmed: “Lord Beaconsfield once said that there were only two events in history – the siege of Troy and the French Revolution. It seems more than possible that the Russo-Japanese War will have to be recorded as a third supreme factor in the progress of the world.”3 Other contemporaries were startled by the possible repercussions of the clash. The American war correspondent, Murat Halstead, for example, believed in 1906 that it “is a logical war and it may spread until it sweeps over the Continent of Europe and Asia.” He was certain it would continue “to be of universal and almost unparalleled interest,” and wondered, among all colossal eventualities the war might lead to, whether Europe would conquer Asia, or Asia would conquer Europe.4 These contemporary eulogies and admiring notes notwithstanding, the Russo-Japanese War was soon forgotten. World War I, which broke

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

out nine years later, overshadowed it, and then World War II overshadowed them both. By the middle of the twentieth century, all the countries that had been involved in that war had forgotten it and in time were even pleased to have done so. ORCHESTRATED AMNESIA AND ACTS OF TRIVIALIZATION

The historical amnesia about the war was shared by people of virtually every nation, but principally by the two belligerents. For many years sad and sentimental songs of the Russo-Japanese War, like In Memory of Variag and On the Hills of Manchuria, were sung in Russia, but the war itself was quickly forgotten. The Russians, in both their tsarist and their Soviet garb, had good reason to draw a veil over that war. They wished to forget the national humiliation that they had suffered at the hands of a country which they traditionally regarded as a political and military inferior. They wanted to hide from their newly acquired Asian friends their colonial ambitions in northeast China (once called Manchuria) and Korea. Soviet historians had to decide which side in the Russo-Japanese War was right and which was wrong. If the good guys were the Russians the tsar was right and his expansionist policy was just. But this would mean that the revolutionaries who opposed the tsar and his foreign policy were wrong. When Port Arthur fell in 1905, Lenin declared: “The European bourgeoisie has its reasons to be frightened, and the proletariat has its reasons to rejoice.”5 No good communist would dare to claim that Lenin was wrong, but no good communist could claim either that imperial Japan was right. By Stalin’s time, exonerating Japan’s position in its first war against Russia sounded unpatriotic. When Port Arthur was retaken by the Soviets in the Second Russo-Japanese War in 1945, Stalin declared that “the defeat of Russian troops in 1904 . . . left bitter memories in the mind of the people . . . Our people believed and hoped that a day would come when Japan would be smashed and that blot effaced. Forty years have we . . . waited for this day.”6 The Japanese remembered the war vividly until 1945. The very name of the war in Japanese, nichiro senso, which means Japan-Russia War, can be also read poetically as the war between the sun (nichi, that is Japan) and the dew (ro, that is Russia), in which the sun naturally evaporates the dew. This was their greatest military triumph in modern times, and the last one to be hailed by most of the world. The legacy of the war became a point of departure for any military plan and commemoration until the final days of the empire.7 The date of the victory in the land battle in Mukden, March 10 (1905), was celebrated annually as Army Day, and the date of the victory in the naval battle of Tsushima, May 27 (1905), was celebrated every year as Navy Day. After their deaths, General Nogi Maresuke (1843–1912) and Admiral Togo Heihachiro (1847–1934) were apotheosized as gunshin (war gods) and shrines were built to them in Tokyo — the Nogi Jinja in 1937, and the Togo Jinja in 1940 — where they can still be worshipped today. They were also the two only modern figures who appeared on Japanese postage stamps.

The Memory and Significance of the Russo-Japanese War

3

During World War II, Japan’s bold decision to attack the United States navy in Pearl Harbor was often compared to its bold decision to attack the Russian navy in Port Arthur. In both cases Japan was fighting a gigantic Western adversary and in both cases, it was believed, the spiritual superiority of the Japanese would prevail over the material superiority of its white enemies. It was indeed ironic to some, macabre to others, that the greatest American air raid, which devastated most of Tokyo in the spring of 1945, was carried out on Army Day, which commemorated the victory at Mukden. The war against the United States (the Pacific War, 1941–45) was lost, however, and Japanese heroism and devotion in the four years of titanic struggle was overlooked by most Western historians. Many of them were inclined now also to ignore the campaign against Russia four decades earlier, which heralded Japan’s ascent as a regional and consequently a global power. After the surrender, in fact, the Japanese themselves wished to delete the Russo-Japanese War from their collective memory. Following the collapse of Japanese imperialism and militarism, the previously extolled war looked like a flagrant case of Japanese aggression on the Asian continent, paving the way for the consequent annexation of Korea, the seizure of Manchuria, and the invasion of China. Postwar Japanese historians, like their Soviet contemporaries, were troubled over how to treat that war. If it was so sinister and imperialistic, as they often claimed, then why was it hailed, at the time, by Asian intellectuals and revolutionaries, including Chinese? Why did modern-minded Japanese writers and intellectuals of the time, like Futabata Shimei, Ishikawa Takuboku, and Nishida Kitaro, praise it? And why did the Japanese “masses,” as expressed in the victory demonstrations, favor it?8 Not only did the belligerents wish to forget the Russo-Japanese War by the middle of the twentieth century, so did other countries that in one way or another had been involved in it. The Chinese were ashamed of their erstwhile admiration for Japan, especially of the high hopes that their “national father” Sun Yat-Sen had placed in the Japanese. Sun Yatsen supported Japan in that war, but he also supported Japanese rightwing Pan-Asianist leaders like Toyama Mitsuru.9 The Koreans after 1945, in the south and in the north, rued their former weakness and servility. They repudiated the treachery and incompetence of their Great Han Empire (taehan cheguk), which was unable to stop the Japanese from occupying their country and annexing it with full international support, as a result of the Russo-Japanese War.10 The Americans might have wished to remember the Portsmouth Peace Treaty, for which their president Theodore Roosevelt won the first Nobel Prize for Peace in 1906. But by the mid-twentieth century they too were filled with remorse over their earlier barefaced imperialism in Asia, and preferred to forget it. The British, who had been proud of their victorious ally Japan in 1905, felt by 1923 uneasy about that alliance, and dissolved it out of concern over potential market encroachment by Japan, coupled with both countries’ vying for American political cooperation. After World War II they too preferred to forget the war, in which they had

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

encouraged Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland, which in the event brought about the destruction of their own empire in the 1940s. The historical amnesia about the war on all sides is staggering. If we look at the current English-language history books of Japan and Russia, we may see how little importance they attach to the Russo-Japanese War. Conrad Totman’s recent A History of Japan (2000), for example, devotes only a few lines to the war, or less than 0.1 percent of its 620 pages.11 Even books that focused on modern Japan have increasingly attached less significance to that conflagration. The 540-page Japan’s Modern Century (1970) by Hugh Borton devotes as much as six pages, or 1.1 percent of its length, to that war,12 whereas The Rise of Modern Japan (1990) by William Beasley, dedicates a little more than one page, or 0.4 percent of its 277 pages, to it.13 Finally, The Making of Modern Japan (2000) by Marius Jansen refers to it through just one page, or merely 0.2 percent of its 510 pages.14 Books on Russian modern history do not fare better. Melvin Wren’s The Course of Russian History (1968), for example, has slightly more than a page on the war, or less than 0.2 percent of its 750 pages,15 and Sidney Harcave’s Russia: A History (1968) devotes some four pages to the war, or less than 0.6 percent of its 787 pages.16 Books that focus on modern Russia show no greater interest in the war. Warren Bartlett Walsh’s Russia and the Soviet Union: A Modern History (1958), for example, devotes two pages, or 0.3 percent of its 640 pages, to it,17 and Graham Stephenson’s A History of Russia, 1812–1945 (1969) devotes to it even less space: about a page, or 0.2 percent of its 467 pages.18 Like many other authors they both pay much more attention to the 1905 Revolution. In relative terms, however, the now classic Endurance and Endeavour by J.N. Westwood (published in five editions since 1973) is somewhat an exception. Westwood devotes little more than four pages to this issue, or 0.8 percent of its 551 pages (third edition), but having written several books specifically on the Russo-Japanese War his lack of brevity here is understandable.19 With so little overall interest, no wonder that university graduates who have studied these books do not regard that war as a major event. REASONS FOR REMEMBRANCE: CONTEMPORARY IMPORTANCE AND CONSEQUENCES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As we look back at the Russo-Japanese War of a hundred years ago, we can see how much it influenced the whole twentieth century, and how important it is to resurrect it from oblivion and restore to it its place in history. Why was that war so important? First, leaving aside the Boer War, which was a colonial conflict, this was the first great war of the twentieth century, to be followed closely by the two world wars and the Cold War. While far from a global conflict on the scale of the two subsequent World Wars, being the first, it contained the seeds of the others. On the effect of the war on the road to World War I, see Kowner, 2007d In several respects the Russo-Japanese War was the first modern war, in the first place in terms of its sheer scale. The battle of Mukden, which raged

The Memory and Significance of the Russo-Japanese War

5

for two weeks during February-March 1905, was fought along a frontline of 150 kilometers, on which 300,000 Russian soldiers (275,000 according to other estimates) engaged 270,000 Japanese soldiers, altogether more than half a million soldiers in a single battle.20 This was the largest battle in human history until then, followed in terms of number of soldiers by the battle of Liaoyang six months earlier and the battle of Sedan during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.21 The logistics of that war were tremendous. The Trans-Siberian Railway, which carried the Russian troops from Europe to the Manchurian front, was 9,311 kilometers long, the longest in the world until then and since then. The Baltic Fleet, which in October 1904 sailed from St. Petersburg to reinforce the Russian naval units in the Pacific, carried altogether more than 13,000 sailors and officers aboard fifty-two vessels, and traversed 33,000 kilometers to reach its destination, the longest voyage that any armada had ever sailed. Firepower in that war was unprecedented: During the battle of Sha-ho, for example, forty-eight Russian guns fired 8,000 rounds in forty minutes and at the battle of Tashihchiao a battery fired 500 rounds per gun. It was the first modern war in the massive use of machine guns, land and sea mines, quick-firing field guns, and even in the sheer number of war correspondents and photographers who covered it on both sides for newspapers all over the world. In other respects, however, the Russo-Japanese War can be regarded as the last campaign of the nineteenth century: a classic clash between two colonial powers, fighting each other on the territory of a third party for the domination of weak peoples and rich lands. It could be regarded as a colonial war also in its denouement, as it ended as such wars usually did in a compromise, in which the adversaries agreed to share the colonial spoils. Furthermore, despite the many technological advances, it was still only partly mechanized. Soldiers marched long distances from railway stations to the battlefields; much of the equipment was carried by beasts of burden and men. Although firepower in this war was unprecedented, the 900,000 artillery rounds the Imperial Russian Army, for example, spent during the entire war was only a tiny proportion of the 65 million artillery shells manufactured and imported by Russia alone during World War I, and a fraction of the 360 million shells and bombs the Soviet Union manufactured during World War II.22 Critically, while taking place only a decade before World War I, the Russo-Japanese War missed much of the technological innovations of the former. True, the Japanese Navy used radio telegraph equipment for communication for the first time in military history, and both belligerents employed balloons for artillery observation, but by and large the war did not feature any revolutionary weapon, certainly not on the scale of the airplane, automobile, tank, or submarine, or even the Dreadnought as in World War I.23 All in all, it seems to have resembled the Crimean War or the American Civil War much more than any global conflict of the scale the world would experience twice during the following thirty-five years. Dissimilar to many other modern conflicts, this was the last gentlemanly war, a duel between two antagonists, in which the rest of the

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

world acted as spectators. The fighting was bloody, but only soldiers participated in it. There were few civilians in the war zone, hence little of the atrocities, looting, and uprooting of populations that would characterize the later wars. The rules of war were observed by both sides. They did not use poison gas or any other non-conventional weapon, and they treated their prisoners properly. Whereas the Japanese captured 79,454 Russian soldiers, the Russians captured only 2,088 Japanese soldiers. It was the first time that a nation had to cope with such numbers of war prisoners, and despite the disproportionate size, Japan’s treatment of its prisoners was exemplary.24 They were well fed and treated fairly, the sick and wounded received good medical treatment and all were allowed to correspond with their families. Prisoners were not forced to work, and those who performed camp duties received a salary. Prison camps in Japan were provided with electricity, fresh food, and clean water — better conditions than most Russian soldiers had at home.25 It was a far cry from the mistreatment of prisoners of war by the Japanese and the Russians in World War II. The decent behavior of the belligerents was apparent in the surrender of Port Arthur, when the victorious General Nogi Maresuke met the vanquished Lieutenant General Anatolii Stoessel. Nogi commended Stoessel for his gallant fighting, and the latter consoled the former on the death of his two sons in the war. The two sides toasted each other, and Nogi allowed Stoessel and other high-ranking Russian officers to return to Russia with their swords.26 No other wars of the twentieth century witnessed such an exchange between victors and vanquished. On the geopolitical level, the war had major and indisputable repercussions in East Asia. It stopped Russian expansion there and ensured a Japanese foothold in the continent. By 1904, the Russians had become deeply involved in Manchuria and Korea, with extensive economic enterprises and a formidable military presence. Had the war not erupted, or had the Japanese lost it, these two rich and important areas would have been incorporated into the Russian empire, as they were later incorporated into the Japanese empire.27 It is hard to tell which of the two alternatives would have been better for the Koreans and the Chinese, but it is clear that a third, optimal, alternative, of independence and self-determination for both of them, did not exist at that time. The war’s aftermath pitted the two emerging maritime powers of the Pacific Ocean, the United States and Japan, against each other, preparing the ground for their later collision. The military and naval successes of Japan frightened the Americans and seemed to threaten their position in the Pacific Ocean and southeast Asia. The Japanese victory, which caused the Russians to lose interest in East Asia, worked the opposite effect on the Americans. Thus the RussoJapanese War created the conditions which led ultimately to the outbreak of the Pacific War some thirty-six years later. On the effect of the war on the American policy vis-à-vis Japan, see Tovy and Halevi, 2007. The war had a great impact on internal and external developments in Russia and Japan alike. By losing the war, the tsar, initially eager to wage

The Memory and Significance of the Russo-Japanese War

7

a “short, victorious war” to quell internal unrest, caused that unrest to explode.28 The revolutionary fires that were set by the defeats on the Manchurian front turned twelve years later into a conflagration in the form of the Russian Revolution. On the international level, the tsar, unable to achieve a victory in East Asia to prop up his sagging popularity at home, turned his attention to southeast Europe, where nine years later he supported his ally Serbia against Austro-Hungary, leading the way to World War I. Thus, both the Russian Revolution and World War I can be considerably attributed to the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War. In Japan, the victorious war produced inflated self-confidence, bolstered the position of the conservative leaders, and strengthened belief in military solutions. A generation later these trends would take Japan into a war with China, Britain, and the United States. The Russo-Japanese War provided a spurious model for the Pacific War. It convinced the Japanese that they could again defeat a strong Western adversary, if only they mobilized all their material and spiritual resources. It was widely believed that because yamato damashii had beaten Russia, it would also beat the United States and Britain. The central position that the victory of 1905 occupied in the collective memory of prewar Japan was a major reason for the tragedy of 1945. The Russo-Japanese War has often been described as a historic clash between East and West, in which an Eastern nation, for the first time since the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, defeated a Western, Christian one. Indeed, all movements of national liberation in Asia were inspired by that outcome, which seemed to prove that the white man was beatable. When Sun Yat-sen sailed through the Suez Canal in 1905, the Egyptians, mistaking him for a Japanese, congratulated him, saying that Japan’s victory was a triumph for all the colored peoples in the world.29 Muslims across the world from the Ottoman Empire to the Dutch East Indies celebrated Japan’s victories as harbingers of their own liberation from the European yoke.30 In Russia, and among its European allies, the war was regarded as a confrontation between Asia and Europe, but in an opposite sense. Russia claimed to be the eastern outpost of Christendom, guarding Western civilization against the yellow, heathen hordes. A decade earlier the German Kaiser had warned against the “yellow peril” that was rising in the east, and a German newspaper lamented in 1905 that the Russian debacle must cause grave anxiety among “all these who believe in the great commercial and civilizing mission of the white race throughout the world.”31 However, the Japanese government and people at that time did not regard themselves as representatives of the colored East against the white West.32 From the time of the Meiji Restoration, the government had tried to remold the country into an advanced Western nation. Fukuzawa Yukichi’s call to “leave Asia and enter Europe” (datsu-a nyu-o) was widely accepted. By the beginning of the twentieth century Japan was the most Westernized nation in Asia, with modern institutions, Western education, and the latest technology. The vision of liberating Asia from European

8

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

domination, which many people in Asia attributed to Japan, was not part of Japan’s agenda. Ten years after its victory over China and five years after its participation in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, Japan’s goal was not to free Asia but to carve its own empire on the Asian continent in concert with the Western powers. Japan, in fact, did its utmost before and during the war against Russia to persuade the West, notably public opinion in Britain and the United States, that it was not a weak, effeminate, and semi-civilized oriental nation, but deservedly a member of the civilized nations.33 This view was internalized first in Japan itself. No wonder then that by the time of the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese saw themselves as more Western than the Russians. In the nishiki-e illustrations of the war, Japanese soldiers appear civilized and clad in smart Western uniforms, while the bearded and shabbily dressed Russians look like Asian barbarians. These depictions were not far from reality. The Russo-Japanese War, in this sense, can be seen as a clash between East and West in the opposite sense, because in 1904–05 Russia was probably the “East” and Japan was the “West.” Japan was more democratic than Russia, it had a constitution, an elected parliament, political parties, and a parliamentary opposition, none of which existed in Russia. Its press had more freedom than the Russian press to criticize the government. Japan enjoyed higher literacy: many Russian soldiers could not read the orders or the instruction manuals and some of them could not even speak Russian, while the majority of Japanese soldiers had a basic primary education.34 Overall, the Russo-Japanese War was a momentous conflict in regional and global terms. It affected mostly the two belligerents and the Korean kingdom, but the decline of Russia and the ascent of Japan had far-reaching repercussions on Europe, vast areas in Asia and the Pacific basin. Although in purely military terms it cannot be regarded as a global conflict or anything close to the two world wars, the RussoJapanese War was an important event in modern history. As such it must be given a more prominent place in our collective memory regardless of our national affinity. The recent centennial commemorations of this conflict mark the emergence of a historical perspective sufficient to promote such a view, as well as universal willingness to take it in account in the future. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Tyler, 1905: 5. Tyler, 1905: 6. Tyler, 1905: 16. Halstead, 1906: iv. Cited in Deutscher, 1949: 528. Cited in Deutscher, 1949: 528. On the military legacy of the war see Kowner, 2007a; Wilson, 1999. Okamoto, 1970: 177–178.

The Memory and Significance of the Russo-Japanese War 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25

26

27 28

29 30

31 32 33 34

9

On the legacy of the war in present-day China, the northeast Provinces (exManchuria) in particular, see Wolff, 2005: 307–308. See Podoler and Robinson, 2007. Totman, 2000: 323. The war is mentioned in passim in 312, 319, 335, 357. Borton, 1970: 272–278. Beasley, 1990: 150–151. Jansen, 2000: 439–441. Wren, 1969: 452–453. Harcave, 1968: 384–389. Walsh, 1958: 319–321. Stephenson, 1969: 204–205. Westwood, 1987: 139–144. The fifth edition of this book was out in 2002. For Westwood’s writings on the Russo-Japanese War, see Westwood, 1970, 1974, 1986. For the figures, see Kowner, 2006: 245. As a whole, the two belligerents numbered close to 300,000 in Liaoyang. Kowner, 2006: 48. On technical innovations in weapon development the war missed, the submarine and the airplane in particular, see Kowner, 2007b. For detailed figures, see Kowner, 2006: 308. On the treatment of prisoners of war during the conflict, see Kowner, 2000; Matsuyama Daigaku, 2005; Saikami, 1983; Shimazu, 2005. For a vivid description of the gentlemanly negotiations for the capitulation of Port Arthur, see Ashmead-Bartlett, 1906: 400. For counter-factual history of the war, see Duus, 2007. The desire for a “short, victorious war” is usually associated with Viacheslav Plehve, Russia’s interior Minister during the early stages of the war, although it is possible that his adversaries invented this notorious expression. See Liubimov, n.d., 141–142; Judge, 1983: 171–172. Schiffrin, 1980: 104. See Akmese, 2005; Esenbel, 2004, and in this volume; Rodell, 2005; Laffan, 2007, and Bieganiec, in this volume. Lehmann, 1978: 179. See, for example, Henning, 2007. See Valiant, 1974, Kowner, 2001. Japan’s Westernization was also reflected in the calendar. In Japan, like in the rest of the West, the war was declared on February 10, 1904, but in Russia, which still upheld the old Julian calendar, the date was then January 26. It would take Russia fourteen more years to adopt the Gregorian calendar.

PART I

ORIGINS

I. GEOPOLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND

2

Guarding the Gates of Our East Asia: Japanese Reactions to the Far Eastern Crisis (1897–98) as a Prelude to the War URS MATTHIAS ZACHMANN

T

he Russo-Japanese War is generally acknowledged as the most significant conflict in the first decade of the twentieth century. For the two competing powers in the conflict it was certainly a momentous and also most tragic event. As for Japan, the results of the conflict finalized the transition of the country from a regional power in the years before the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–95 to an internationally acknowledged power among the Western concert of powers. As a result of the RussoJapanese War, Japan switched into the positions which Russia had acquired in the previous years and thereby established a military presence on the Asian continent which would end only with Japan’s capitulation in 1945. Thus the decade between 1895 and 1904 is seen as the center of Japan’s development into an imperialist power, and in this process, the year 1900 often serves as a convenient milestone.1 In 1900, Japan joined the Boxer expedition, and this year also saw the beginning of the immediate confrontation with Russia over the issue of Manchuria (and Korea). Thus, many studies on the Russo-Japanese War and its intellectual sources devote considerable attention to Japan’s progress into the war since 1900, with a special focus on the anti-Russian agitation of the “strong foreignpolicy movement” (taigai-ko undo) starting in September 1900,2 but with considerably less attention devoted to the previous half-decade of the years 1895–1900. This confronts the reader often with results rather than

14

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

a process of shifting paradigms and, to some extent, obscures the intellectual sources of the public attitude toward war with Russia. After all, much of what formed public opinion toward Russia and war in general was prefigured in the first years after the war. Especially the Far Eastern Crisis of 1897–98 saw the definite rise of anti-Russian feelings and a form of agitation which set the pattern for the anti-Russian agitation of the strong foreign-policy advocates in the years after 1900. Moreover, by the end of the year 1898, a large majority among the public was all in favor of Japan assuming a responsible role in continental politics which, however, almost by necessity conflicted with the interests of Russia. The present chapter traces those attitudes and positions in the second half-decade 1895–1900 which shaped the Japanese public attitude toward Russia and on war in general. Apart from the more specific arguments of international politics, it tries to convey some of the “mood” which made the public especially susceptible to the idea of yet another war, merely ten years after the first war with China. THE SINO-JAPANESE WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

The Sino-Japanese War 1894–95 Whatever reasons the Japanese government had for declaring war on China on August 1, 1894, the Japanese public in general was rushed into this first war.3 If we browse, for example, the pages of the newspaper Jiji shinpo, which at the time was notorious for an unusually aggressive stance towards China, we find in the year 1894, until as late as June, hardly any mention of a military conflict with China (but soon after very much so). Thus, the public at first seemed somewhat apprehensive as to the wisdom of the decision to fight China.4 Foreign minister Mutsu Munemitsu observed that until the first decisive victories of the Japanese navy and army, the Japanese population had considerable doubts about the outcome of the war, but changed its opinion completely and became even outright jingoist after those brilliant first successes.5 The initial hesitancy of the public before the Sino-Japanese War is in striking contrast with the popular support of a war with Russia long before the actual war started in 1904 (and the reasons for the difference is one of the questions of this chapter). Apart from the more “realist” justification of the Sino-Japanese War as the result of a simple equation of power politics (this, for example, was the understanding of Mutsu Munemitsu) and the almost universal “culturalist” belief that the war was also a conflict between (Western) civilization and (Chinese) “barbarism,” between progress and retrogression,6 the single most influential way of justifying the war was the “so-called chivalry-argument to help the weak and restrain the strong,”7 i.e. the argument that chivalrous Japan defended the independence of weak Korea against tyrannous China. In this respect, Uchimura Kanzo’s “Justification for [sic] the Korean War”, is one of the famous examples of such an argumentation,8 although – for justice’s sake – it should be mentioned that

Guarding the Gates of Our East Asia

15

Uchimura in 1897 wrote “A Retrospect” in which he confessed to regret very much having defended a war which turned out to be an “avaricious war.”9 To give an illustration of the “sentimental” mood of the concept of chivalry, we may quote the definition which a writer of the Yorozu choho 1898 ventured in an article “On the Spirit of Chivalry” (“Kyofu-ron”): In the feudal times of yore, people cherished justice, helped the weak and crushed the strong. If they saw somebody else in distress or danger, they shied away neither from fire nor from water, but sacrificed their lives without regret. Such spirit of chivalry, where is it today?10

Thus, many Meiji contemporaries justified the Sino-Japanese War as a purely altruistic campaign to rescue Korea from China, no matter what the chances were and what Japan would have to sacrifice. From an ideological point of view, any considerations of personal loss (not to speak of personal profit) in the action were brushed aside as “mean.” Thus, the article quoted above identified any concerns of petty individualism as the manifestation of a “merchant’s spirit” (shonin-teki kishitsu), whereas “chivalry” betrayed the true “warrior’s spirit.”11 The romantic, even quixotic nature of “chivalry” had a strong fascination on parts of the Japanese public even after the Sino-Japanese War and enabled advocates of a strong foreign policy to demand that Japan protect China and Korea against Russia without having to pay too much attention to rational arguments such as the power balance or the costs of war. One might argue that it was all the easier to take such a chivalrous stance, as the victories in the Sino-Japanese War were won with so much ease. This was also the prevalent impression during and after the SinoJapanese War. Thus, the journalist and writer Miyake Setsurei in his autobiography recalled the impression that the actual fighting of the Sino-Japanese War had been “easier than drill maneuvers,” a phrase which frequently turns up in comments on the war.12 In addition, the war was exciting. A continuous flow of “extras” (gogai) poured forth in the heyday of the war and each heralded a new triumphant victory with gory details, accompanied by equally colorful illustrations of war scenes in prints,13 all of which helped to dispel the taedium vitae of everyday life, overcome its schisms and rouse an enthusiasm for the war which united the nation. Thus, it is well known that Japanese newspapers became almost a mass medium through the SinoJapanese War.14 It can be well imagined that the ease and the excitement of the Sino-Japanese War, combined with the heroism and the glory of it did not deter the public from fighting another war. The Three-Power Intervention The Sino-Japanese War considerably widened the perspective of the Meiji contemporaries with respect to Japan’s status. Thus, the literary critic, Sinologue and journalist Taoka Reiun in 1900 on the occasion of the

16

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

Boxer expedition recalled the salutary effects of the Sino-Japanese War as follows: The war of 1894–95, even if we would not have obtained Taiwan, or the huge indemnity, still had the use of making the world acknowledge us and, at the same time, of making our people, with their insular mindset, broaden the range of their perspective and make it global [sekai-teki to nashitaru].15

Unfortunately, to the same degree as the Sino-Japanese War “opened up” the perspective of the Meiji contemporaries to the world, the war caused the Western nations to turn their attention increasingly to the East Asian region, as well. The first effect of the new globalization of the East Asian region was the Three-Power Intervention in late April 1895, by which the powers Russia, Germany and France “persuaded” Japan to retrocede the Liaotung Peninsula.16 The Three-Power Intervention, it is often argued, was felt as an “unjustifiable insult” at the hands of the Western powers, which provoked shock and anger among the Japanese leadership and the population alike.17 The argument, moreover, implies that the Intervention set Japan on a trajectory of power politics which led it inevitably into the Russo-Japanese War and other wars beyond. However, as far as the focus of this study is concerned, it should be cautioned that the public reaction to the Intervention was far more ambiguous than often assumed, especially with respect to the role of the Tripartite powers. Thus, soon after the news of the Intervention was broken to the public in mid-May 1895, there were voices to be heard which did not consider the Intervention as an insult, but, on the contrary, as the manifestation of Japan’s globalized status. The journalist and ownereditor of the newspaper Nippon Kuga Katsunan commented in June 1895 on “International Interventions” (Kokusai kansho): International intervention in domestic politics is an irregularity, but in foreign politics we must say it is rather the rule. In our times, where there are means of transport provided on land and on water, and the paths of trade span East and West, the interest of all countries of the world are naturally interrelated, and from these interrelations arise rights and obligations in a rather haphazard fashion. If the so-called active opening up of our country [kaikoku shinshu] really is to be our foreign policy, then we should be aware right from the start that we invite intervention by other countries in all matters. And if consequently we, too, intervene in the foreign affairs of other countries, is that not in the awareness that it is necessary for the extension of our national interest?18

We should note that, although the above argument sounds rational enough, it was also distinctly self-serving. Kuga Katsunan in a later passage of the editorial argued that the time may come when Japan might

Guarding the Gates of Our East Asia

17

intervene in a fight between Britain and Russia in the Mediterranean, or between Germany and France at the River Rhein.19 Thus, during the Far Eastern Crisis, Katsunan was one of the most vociferous strong foreignpolicy advocates who called on the government to intervene on behalf of China against Russia and Germany (see below). After all, if Japan had the right (and “moral duty”) to intervene at the River Rhein, so much more was it entitled to intervene at the River Amur. Of course, the studied calmness which Kuga and other commentators displayed towards the Intervention was also designed to calm the readers and should not hide the fact that emotions were running high. Indeed, a part of the resentment of the public was directed against the Tripartite powers. The slogan “sleeping on brushwood and licking bile” (gashin shotan), which gained new currency in the days after the Intervention, is often cited to illustrate this feeling.20 The phrase is based on a famous story in the Chinese classic Shiji which tells of sweet revenge after a long period of perseverance and hardship. However, what is often ignored when citing the example is the fact that the slogan was regularly used to defend the government’s foreign policy against its critics and called for patience and forbearance, rather than for revenge.21 Whatever the feelings of the public toward the Tripartite powers was (which is difficult to surmise, since the government tightly controlled the press at the time), it should be noted that a considerable portion of the ill-will of the public was directed against the Japanese government rather than against the powers. Thus, according to Tokutomi Soho, his first reaction when he heard about the Intervention was not ill will against the Tripartite powers, but rage against Ito Hirobumi and his weak cabinet which had given in to the Intervention.22 We will observe a similar reaction of turning discontent with foreign affairs inward (or vice versa) during the Far Eastern Crisis. Moreover, it should be added that the Three-Power Intervention obviously did not preclude an alliance with Russia. Thus, one of the most significant effects which the Three-Power Intervention had on the public mind was that it convinced many Japanese of the necessity to act in a “concert of powers” and pursue a strategic alliance with another European power.23 The Tokyo Asahi shinbun in August 1896 observed: We can divide the discussants of foreign policy in recent times broadly into two factions: there are the ones who advocate an Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and there are the ones who advocate a Russo-Japanese Alliance. Since the retrocession of the Liaotung peninsula, many have realized that Japan cannot maintain peace in East Asia by its own powers and, therefore, are sure that Japan must cooperate with one of the strong powers. They differ in the selection of the partner, either Britain or Russia, but concerning the impossibility of walking alone and standing apart (doppo koritsu), one can say that they both share the same opinion. But are they not the kind of people who moan even after the illness has left them?24

18

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

Thus, although this might have been a minority, a fraction of the public obviously did advocate an alliance with Russia, even after the Three-Power Intervention. Moreover, another fraction (to which the author of the above article belonged) supported the government’s postwar policy of withdrawal from foreign politics and continental “neutrality.” In sum, the public “mood” after the Sino-Japanese War and the ThreePower Intervention could be described as a disposition highly receptive to the “glory” of war, acutely aware of Japan’s risen status in the world, but also of the intense competition which this new status brought. However, although Russia might have been considered as the prime rival in East Asia, now that China had been defeated, there was no organized expression of anti-Russian feeling, yet. This would definitely change with the Far Eastern Crisis. THE FAR EASTERN CRISIS 1897–98

The Crisis and the reaction of the Japanese government On November 1, 1897, two German Catholic missionaries were killed by Chinese in the province of Shantung. The German government seized the unfortunate incident as a golden opportunity to realize its plans and, on November 14, 1897, occupied the fort of Tsingtao as a form of reprisal. In March 1898, the occupation was clad in legal terms and Germany obtained a lease of the whole Kiaochow Bay for a period of ninety-nine years. The German action triggered the so-called Far Eastern Crisis.25 In a chain reaction, Russia occupied Port Arthur and Dalny (December 1897) and procured a lease of both in March 1898. The Russian action in turn provoked a member of the British cabinet to declare in January 1898 that Britain, even at the cost of war, would seek to guarantee the integrity of China’s territory and “that the door should not be shut against” Britain.26 This declaration was accompanied by the dispatch of British warships into Port Arthur, thus anchoring side by side with the Russian warships. However, already by the end of March 1898, the Crisis de-escalated. At the end of March, the British government decided that China was not worth a war with Russia and, instead, sought to procure a lease of its own in Weihaiwei to counterbalance Russia’s presence in Port Arthur, but also to appease the British public.27 Critics called the British capitulation in stark terms the “crime of a century.”28 However, the deed was done and on the Queen’s Birthday (24 May), a British squadron took possession of Weihaiwei. The base of Weihaiwei had been occupied by Japanese troops as a security until the final payment of the last installment of the Chinese indemnity, as stipulated in the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty of 1895. However, the last installment was duly paid at the beginning of May 1898, and the Japanese troops were withdrawn soon after. The position of the Japanese government during the Far Eastern Crisis was one of careful neutrality, necessitated as much by the “explosive” situation in the region as by domestic difficulties of the “postwar management” (sengo keiei). In July 1895, i.e. soon after the Three-Power

Guarding the Gates of Our East Asia

19

Intervention and as a reaction to it, the Second Ito Cabinet had decided upon an ambitious armament expansion program which would commit Japan for at least ten years. The financial burden of the program was immense. According to the budget plan of 1897, for example, the combined costs of both the army and navy amounted to 58 percent of the total budget.29 In a sense, this made Japan the vanguard of an arms race which also took place between the European countries.30 However, as Eric Hobsbawm observed for the European countries, the arms race required “either higher taxes, or inflationary borrowing, or both.”31 In Japan, it was both: first tax raises (1896 and 1898), and when this was not enough, inflationary borrowing (since 1902). The “postwar management” had a disruptive effect on politics as well as on economics. Due to the budgetary power of the Diet, the Meiji oligarchs increasingly had to cooperate with the political parties in the Diet, which in turn led to political instability. In 1898, which was the peak of this development, the cabinet changed four times. When the Far Eastern Crisis started, the Second Matsukata Cabinet was already on the verge of its demise and was formally replaced by the Third Ito Cabinet in January 1898. The economy, too, suffered from the financial difficulties of the postwar management. Thus, after an initial boost of the private sector after the Sino-Japanese War, due to the increasingly restrictive policy of the Bank of Japan, the economy plunged into the First Depression in late 1897, just when the Far Eastern Crisis began.32 In this situation, when “danger without and grief within” (gaikan naiyu) was troubling the Japanese state, in January 1898 the new prime minister Ito Hirobumi convened the genro for an imperial conference to discuss which action Japan should take henceforth. Characteristically, Ito proposed a policy of extreme caution and neutrality with the following argumentation: I respectfully deem that the general situation of East Asia, where huge boars and giant snakes [i.e. Russia and Germany] advance in unison, is on the brink of chaos. Today, it is no longer merely the issue of Korea’s independence, but now, China’s independence, too, is in grave danger. They [the powers] may suddenly begin to divide China at any moment. Under these circumstances, the paramount and imperative goal our country must pursue is this: we must place our own country in the position of unbridled independence [dokuritsu fuki], so that we cannot be touched by anyone.33

The Meiji emperor and the genro agreed with Ito’s proposition and decided on a policy of neutrality and non-intervention. In April 1898, Japan merely secured the promise from the Beijing government that it would not alienate the province of Fujian across Taiwan to a European power, but otherwise refrained from any formal action or intervention, very much to the displeasure of the strong foreign-policy advocates among the public.

20

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

The “Mood” of the Japanese Public in 1897–98 The Three-Power Intervention made the Japanese public realize that Japan, by beating China, had merely traded a comparatively weak competitor with a multitude of formidable rivals, instead. Thus, Fukuzawa Yukichi (like many others) in 1897 cautioned the readers in an editorial entitled “We must not pride ourselves in the vain glory of victory” that the victory against China was “no more than touching a rotten thing and bringing it down.”34 Fukuzawa argued that the Meiji reforms should not be the source of excessive pride, either; after all, the international situation until 1894 had been comparatively easy and sheltered for Japan, and interactions with the Western powers had been largely limited to the revisions of the “unequal treaties.” However, all this had changed with the Sino-Japanese War and the advent of the Western powers. Thus, the real race of civilization had only begun.35 Many observers in Japan saw the Far Eastern Crisis as the starting signal for this race. In 1895, the public had been all for Japan exerting its utmost strength in the coming race and vociferously supported the armament expansion program of the government. However, gradually, the strain began to show, and parts of the public began to voice discontent with the evils of modern society and civilization in general and with the deleterious effects of the postwar years on the public mind specifically.36 In May 1897, Kotoku Shusui, for example, famously complained about the “paralysis of the nation” (Kokumin no mahi) which had taken hold of the people after the “excitement” of the Sino-Japanese War: In general, the corruption of our political world, the economic instability and the moral decay is becoming more and more extreme with each day. All of these factors are pushing the state towards an increasingly dangerous course. And yet, our nation seems to be cool and almost without sensation. One must say that the paralysis of the nation has come this far. Rome of old has fallen like this, and China today will fall like this. [. . .] Now, if people take a stimulant [kofun-zai] in too great a dose, the mood becomes excited at once and slightly disoriented, after a while there is confusion, faintness, and a loss of sensations. [. . .] Today, our nation has suddenly fallen into a state of utter exhaustion after it has become too excited in the Sino-Japanese War and, sleeping the sleep of the utterly exhausted, does not know what is going on. Meanwhile, thieves plunder your coffers and fiends are scheming to take your life, but you are oblivious in your paralysis and idly dream of rising stocks.37

This was not merely the impression of Kotoku only. Commentaries of the time abound with like lamentations, although the general disintegration and “dullness” of the national faculties were attributed to different causes. Fukuzawa, as we have seen above, blamed the excessive and vainglorious pride in the recent victory for it; the Kokumin shinbun blamed the “long peace” since then;38 and in the magazine Taiyo,

Guarding the Gates of Our East Asia

21

Komatsu Midori reflected on the effects of the expansion of empires, which brought exhaustion and the danger of disintegration (1898). It is not difficult to see that such a mood as the above craved new excitement to overcome the “dullness” of the postwar years and welcomed new “stimulation” (shigeki) from without, where there could be had none from within. Thus, “stimulation” was a keyword of the postwar years, and it is a characteristic trait of the strong foreign-policy advocates in Japan that they used the Far Eastern Crisis to create such “stimulation” themselves, not only for the public, but also for the government. Public Reactions to the Far Eastern Crisis As to the reactions to the Far Eastern Crisis, the Japanese public from the beginning was divided into a pro-government minority (represented, for examply, by the Tokyo nichinichi shinbun) which supported the government’s policy of neutrality, and a majority, which protested against the new trend in international politics. As long as the Far Eastern Crisis seemed acutely dangerous (i.e. until the end of March 1898, see above), the protest was directed against the actions of Russia and Germany immediately. Kuga Katsunan, for example, decried the actions as the height of barbarism and hypocrisy. Katsunan at no time doubted that the “reprisal” had been a mere pretext for the occupation of Jiaozhou. Katsunan saw the Russian and German actions as heralding a new “age of the progress of brute force” (juryoku shinpo no jidai): What the Europeans call the Twentieth Century, is this an age of conquest, an age in which conquest by brute force will be approved of? The countries of Europe which, worn out by their arms race, set their hopes on the establishment of international peace, now have come to see that their hope cannot be fully realized and are, at the same time, gradually shifting the scenes of their military actions to regions outside of Europe. [. . .] The area outside of Europe today, is this our Asia? [. . .] The progress of brute force is a retrogression of civilization. The Europeans, although they call themselves a civilized race [bunmei jinshu], strive for the progress of brute force in the future. Does this not mean they themselves throw this honor [of being civilized] overboard?39

In time, the critique of Germany became somewhat subdued, and Russia remained as the prime “villain” of eastward expansion. However, as soon as the Crisis subsided in late March 1898 (see above) and news of Russia’s lease of Port Arthur and Britain’s acquisition of Weihaiwei reached the public, the oppositional public turned inward and directed its agitation and scathing criticism against the Japanese government and its dilatory and weak foreign policy. On April 4, 1898, strong foreign-policy advocates (many of whom were close to the Shinpoto) met at the Kairakuen in Tokyo and decided to call upon the government to adopt a more “active” foreign policy

22

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

against Russia and Germany.40 A delegation of high-ranking politicians (Oishi Masami, Taguchi Ukichi, Kono Hironaka, Komuchi Tomotsune and Kudo Yukimoto) was sent to Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi’s residence in Oiso to remonstrate with him to this effect. The members of the Taigai doshikai (“Society of like-minded fellows in matters of foreign policy”), as they called their pressure group, in subsequent meetings declared that their aim was to “shatter the illusions of the people, who were but indifferent towards foreign politics, and to administer one big stimulus [hitoshigeki] to the authorities.”41 The thrust of their “stimulus” was not always consistent, but in summary it was to the effect that the government should formally “protest” (kogi) against Russia’s and Germany’s actions, or retain Weihaiwei or “lease” some other territory to maintain the balance of power in East Asia, or step down as being incompetent in foreign affairs altogether.42 Thus, the Japan Weekly Mail related the gist of a meeting of the society in mid-April at the Kinki-kan in Kanda (Tokyo) as follows: With the exception of Mr. Koizuka Ryu all the speakers appeared to think that Russia is chiefly to blame for the present complications. Her acquisition of Liaotung and Germany’s action in Shantung had created a situation for Japan which might be compared to that of a house separated by a thin partition from the scene of an armed burglary. England, China, and Japan were the Powers with paramount interests in this region of the globe, and they, too, might be said to have a common policy. Russia, Germany, and France had merely found an opportunity in the results of the war of 1894–95. The war might be said to have broken down the gates of the Far East, and given ingress to States which would otherwise have remained outside. It thus became Japan’s duty to stretch out a helping hand to China. [. . .] The Government seemed to be asleep at this crisis. Its theory was that diplomacy could effect nothing without the aid of armed strength. History showed how completely fallacious was such an idea. Everything would go by default unless some complainant stepped forward. It was for Japan to assume the duty of complainant.43

The Taigai doshikai, short-lived as its existence was (it was already faltering at the beginning of May 1898, due to inner dissent), must be seen as the prototype of the strong foreign-policy societies which after 1900 significantly shaped public opinion toward Russia. There were continuities not only in terms of membership, but also of the methods of organization and agitation. Thus, in April 1903, when Russia failed to withdraw its second batch of troops from Manchuria, the Kokumin domeikai was revived as Taigaiko doshikai.44 The same met in August 1903 at the Kinki-kan in Kanda and reorganized as Tairo doshikai (“Society of like-minded fellows against Russia”). Soon after, members of the society, among them Komuchi Tomotsune and Kudo Yukimoto (see above), repeatedly visited Prime Minister Katsura and warned him

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against Russian insincerity and demand that the government adopt “ultimate measures” to solve the Manchurian problem.45 Moreover, the Tairo doshikai’s declaration that it was Japan’s natural mission to maintain eternal peace in East Asia through the protection of China and Korea against Russia had its beginning in the Far Eastern Crisis, as the case of Kuga Katsunan shows.46 Kuga Katsunan was a founding member of the Taigai doshikai in April 1903 (in fact, he even assumed the position of one of its functionaries), although subsequently, he remained rather in the background.47 However, in his newspaper Nippon, Katsunan certainly supported the aims of the society. Thus, he most vociferously demanded that the government “protest” against Russia’s and Germany’s presence in East Asia, irrespective of the power balance and the chance of success. Katsunan accused the government of aiding and abetting the barbarity of these countries by its inaction which, eventually, proved that its members were of a kindred spirit.48 Katsunan maintained that it was the duty of a “truly civilized country” (shinsei no bunmei-koku), which Japan always claimed to be, to defend “justice, freedom, and universal brotherhood” (seigi jiyu oyobi hakuai) at all costs. He argued: True civilized thought does not view barbaric actions as justifiable. Consequently, it does not view countries which commit barbaric acts as civilized. Consequently, considering how the great powers lately acted in East Asia, the powers are not civilized countries, but barbaric countries. Those who plan to oppose barbaric countries, are they not the true advocates of civilization [shinsei no bunmei-ka]? True advocates of civilization see the use of real power [jitsuryoku] only in opposing barbarism, and if they saw a barbaric action, they would exhaust all their power at their present command to oppose it. To have power in abundance, but not make use of it arbitrarily towards other countries, that makes a real civilized country. To lack power and nonetheless oppose injustice, that too makes a real civilized country.49

The conviction that a nation must fight injustice, irrespective of its powers, we have encountered already in our discussion of the popular justification of the Sino-Japanese War under the heading “chivalry.” Katsunan, being the intellectual elitist that he was, never used the trite word for the concept, but – in his own way – espoused the concept nonetheless. Although usually Britain was considered the most “civilized” (and powerful) country in the world, Katsunan used the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in April 1898 to illustrate his idea of a “truly civilized country.”50 Katsunan presented the United States as a country that used the means of diplomacy and power, limited as they were, to defend the true values of civilization. Thus, the United States, being “master” of North America, lately had extended its protection to South America

24

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

(Monroe Doctrine) and had come into conflict with Spain over the issue of Cuba: Although in America, on the other side of the Atlantic, the United States is master [shujin], from Middle America southwards, Spain even from a distance invokes the Balance of Power [kinsei], and presently there has arisen a great dispute about the problem of Cuba. [. . .] The United States has no business in Europe [. . .] But in America, it maintains its firm policy not to suffer any interference within its domain, and of late it has wanted to further include South America, too. [. . .] In Central and South America, the United States of North America suppresses the high-handed actions of the Europeans. Although it acts upon its Monroe Doctrine [Monro-shugi], recently it also refers to it as “balance of power.”51

Although this passage might sound somewhat unequivocal as to the relative merit of the United States invoking the Monroe Doctrine or the principle of “balance of power” for Cuba, Katsunan in other comments on the Spanish-American War left no doubt that he thought the American action most civilized and laudable. Thus, in May 1898, Katsunan declared: America’s opposition to Spain truly is founded on the wish to free the Cuban people from their fetters. Not heeding its insufficient military preparations, it dared to declare war upon Spain, and what is more, even plans to come to the Southwest Pacific in aid of the Philippine people. This is a just war in the realm of humankind.52

It should be noted that the above description of the events was, of course, slightly contorted. It was rather Spain whose military preparations were insufficient so that the actual fighting was pathetically unbalanced. Yet, Katsunan obviously wanted to draw a parallel with the East Asian situation and the role Japan should assume and thus described the Spanish-American War as a conflict in which the United States “protested” against strong, oppressive Spain from Europe in order to protect its weak neighbor Cuba. In the same article as quoted above, Katsunan began to develop his idea that Japan, likewise was (or should be) the natural “master” of East Asia and assume a similar protective role for its neighbors as the United States. This was Japan’s natural privilege, as it was situated in the East Asian region and closer to its neighbors in terms of culture and race than any other power (although, in other instances, Katsunan regularly brushed away discrimination on the grounds of race or religion as hypocrisy): However, the East Asian continent is distant to these [countries], geographically speaking, and its race is not the same, either. Consequently, if one or two powers perpetrate some unjust action and they do not

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protest, this compares with the fact that our empire does not concern itself much about the Cuban problem. In the Far Eastern situation, Japan should be master [shujin taru beki mono]. Silently watching the actions of Germany and Russia is tantamount to throwing away this privilege of being master.53

Thus, like many other strong foreign-policy advocates, Katsunan envisioned a sort of “Monroe Doctrine” for Japan. However, it should be emphasized that the Doctrine was not directed against the European powers in general. On the contrary, due to the necessities of the time (the “crowded situation” in the “Far East,” that is Northeast Asia), Katsunan envisioned Japan’s action primarily in the “concert of powers” with the “civilized powers” of the world.54 On the other hand, the Doctrine was invariably directed against the “barbaric” powers Russia and Germany. Thus, Katsunan argued at the end of June 1898: Although this may be so, the fact that we do not protest [against the actions of Germany and Russia] does not prove that we approve of them. Therefore, it is a matter of course that our empire, which has to solve the problem of China, in accordance with the Edict on the Retrocession of Liaotung [of May 10, 1895] sooner or later must necessarily impose the appropriate constraints on the actions of Germany and Russia. Today, we must not limit ourselves to merely protecting the balance of power by busying ourselves with a strip of the Chinese coast, but for the sake of peace in the East, nay, of the world, we must insist on the integrity of China as a whole [Shinkoku no hozen], and, adding even a step further, render effective assistance to internal reforms of this country. This is the duty of our empire, due to neighborly friendship, but also to what is just in international intercourse.55

Thus, Katsunan espoused the doctrine that Japan must protect China’s integrity against Russian expansion. The concept, also known as Shina hozen, became widely accepted by the Japanese public at the end of 1898, not only by the advocates of a strong foreign-policy, but to some extent by the pro-government minority as well. On October 19, 1898, one of the last days of the Kenseito Cabinet, Okuma Shigenobu as the prime minister and foreign minister of the cabinet gave a widely-noticed speech in the Tokyo Imperial Hotel before members of the Toho kyokai.56 The speech is often seen as the locus classicus for the Shina hozen-ron, which Marius B. Jansen has introduced to Western readers as the “Okuma Doctrine.”57 However, as we have seen above, the doctrine was the common property of strong foreign-policy advocates, to which Okuma was close. Thus, when Konoe Atsumaro, the figurehead of the future antiRussian agitation formed the Toa dobunkai in November 1898, Shina hozen was one of the principal aims of the society.58 However, much more remarkable than this was the fact that even the minority which until then had supported the neutrality policy of the

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government, due to the continuing series of anti-foreign riots in China and the failure of the Hundred Days Reform in China in September 1898, discarded its neutral stance and – like the strong foreign-policy advocates – suggested that Japan in the concert of the European powers should guarantee China’s integrity and stability.59 Thus, even pro-government circles in the public began to advocate Shina hozen. This should not obscure the fact that there still existed fundamental differences in interpretation. Thus, the pro-government circles until the Boxer War emphasized rather the domestic aspect of keeping China stable and in the rising confrontation with Russia afterwards maintained until very late that a diplomatic settlement with Russia should be sought. However, the fact remains that Japan’s neutrality was generally abandoned in public, that the protection of the integrity and sovereignty of China and Korea became the central issue in the government’s negotiations with Russia and that the strong foreign-policy advocates from very early on believed that this conflict could not be solved peacefully.60 ENTERING THE ROAD TO WAR

In June 1900, the Boxer bands attacked the diplomatic settlement of Beijing and laid siege to it. Seven Western powers and Japan sent expeditionary forces. Japan sent the biggest contingent in response to the request of the British Government which was otherwise preoccupied with the Boer War.61 The Boxer expedition brought back Japanese soldiers to the continent, although they were not to fight a war, but merely conduct an intervention in the name of “civilization.” Thus, the response of the Japanese public was far more subdued than during the Sino-Japanese War.62 Yet, the war fever still lingered in the recesses of the public mind. Thus, Taoka Reiun in his autobiography Sakkiden (1912) remembered what made him join the trek to Tianjin as a war correspondent as follows: The heroic determination which man displays when he has transcended the wish to survive, the wild bravery; I can observe in war the gigantic power of man. War is of all things existing the most heroic, the most sublime, the greatest tragedy, and the most excellent history of tragedy. I, who did not have the chance to see the Sino-Japanese War, thought this incident [the Boxer Rebellion in 1900] a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience what a war is.63

Thus, Taoka professed a dark fascination with war and the wish to experience this heroic spectacle for himself as the chief motivation to go. It should be emphasized again that the Sino-Japanese War served as a model for this experience. However, compared with these high-strung expectations Taoka’s actual experience was a steep anti-climax. All he saw was the mindless shelling of already devastated areas, the squalor of army life and the misery and plight of the civilian population (although one might

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think that in this sense Taoka’s experience was genuine).64 Nonetheless, the above comment (written in 1912) demonstrates that neither this experience nor the Russo-Japanese War (which he supported) greatly diminished his fascination with war in general. Taoka’s disappointment with the “dullness” of the Boxer expedition in a sense paralleled the disenchantment of the Japanese population with the expedition in general. Already at the beginning of August 1900, the population had lost interest in the affair. At the same time, the public shifted its attention to Korea, Manchuria and a possible conflict with Russia. Already, British observers saw a clash between Japan and Russia as inevitable. Thus, the foreign correspondent of the North-China Herald in mid-August 1900 described the national mood in Japan as follows: As I write the outlook of a war between Russia and Japan taking place is more probable than ever it was before. The Japanese have hated Russia ever since she drove them out of the Liaotung Peninsula and have been awaiting an opportunity for taking revenge. [. . .] The reports that have reached them of late from that quarter must have been of an exciting nature, for the other day I encountered a Japanese publicist who was quite excited by a dispatch from St Petersburg to the effect that war was practically certain. “We don’t want war,” he said mournfully, “we are too poor to have any desire for such an expensive luxury, but it’s plain that Russia means to force it on us. So far as Corea is concerned, however, we shall not be the losers. We shall get Corea – and Port Arthur, and Vladivostok – and shall drive Russia back from the Pacific. The one unsatisfactory point, however, is that we shan’t get any indemnity this time!”65

It is questionable whether the “hate” of the Japanese contemporaries for Russia was so ingrained as the British observer probably would have liked it to be (after all, Britain had its own agenda in the affair). However, it is a conspicuous fact that, whereas the Sino-Japanese War had been a decision of the Japanese government and plunged the people into the war in less than three months’ time, the strong foreign-policy advocates and a majority of the public started to agitate for conflict with Russia three years ahead, and much against the wish of the government. Thus, in September 1900, Konoe Atsumaro and others founded the Kokumin domeikai, the spearhead of the anti-Russian agitation in its early years. True, the agitation subsided momentarily in 1902 when an Anglo-Japanese Alliance was forged and Russia showed signs of compromise. However, the agitation returned full-force and gained overwhelming public support when Russia failed to withdraw its troops for the second time in October 1903. CONCLUSION

The foreign policy of the Meiji oligarchs has been often commended for its relative restraint and moderation which, however, was lost with

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succeeding generations.66 One may suspect with Marius B. Jansen that the “Meiji leaders [. . .] were often moderate not by choice, but because of Japan’s international handicaps.”67 This certainly applies to the Japanese government’s decision after the Three-Power Intervention to withdraw from continental politics for the time being and pursue a policy of neutrality during the Far Eastern Crisis 1897–98. The decision was motivated by the situation in East Asia and Japan’s domestic handicaps rather than any other belief of more fundamental nature. However, this should not diminish the relative merit of the realism and moderation which the Meiji leaders displayed in the situation. After all, the above discussion of public reactions to the Far Eastern Crisis has shown popular sentiments and attitudes which often significantly lacked in realism, moderation, or both. The lack of realism and moderation was especially characteristic among the advocates of a strong foreign-policy during the interwar years. The agitation during the Far Eastern Crisis 1897–98 was the first decidedly anti-Russian display of this attitude, which set the precedent for all further anti-Russian agitation in the following years. In a sense, the lack of realism and moderation was part of a grand “pose” which deliberately brushed aside all rational arguments of power and interest in favor of romantic, “chivalrous” action. The attitude, of course, had a decidedly irresponsible twist and was good for agitating, but not for policy-making.68 However, one gets the impression that the younger members of the political elite at the time (such as Katsura Taro and Komura Jutaro) were not wholly sympathetic to the attitude themselves. Whatever the case may be, the arguments of a strong foreign-policy eventually gained wide support in the public shortly before the RussoJapanese War, so much so that it has sometimes been called a “popular war.”69 Thus, we have argued that the positive and “exciting” experience, highlighted by the “dullness” and difficulties of the postwar years certainly did not deter the public from another war. However, neither of the contemporaries, not the decision-makers, not the agitators and certainly not the public in general, arguably foresaw a war of such a horrendous scale or such terrible losses. Thus, the first “great war” of the twentieth century began. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Cf. Jansen, 1965: 76–77. E.g. Sakeda, 1978; Okamoto, 1970. On the Japanese motives, see Takahashi, 1995. Ohama, 2003: 47–48. Mutsu, 1982: 83, 106–112. Cf. Fukuzawa, 1969–71, 14: 321–324. Iwayuru jaku o tasuke kyo o osayuru gikyo-ron, Mutsu, 1933: 47. Uchimura, 1980–84, III: 38–48. Uchimura, 1980–84, V: 193.

Guarding the Gates of Our East Asia 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

51

29

Yorozu choho, July 16, 1898: 1. Bujin-teki kishitsu, cf. Yorozu choho, July 16, 1898: 1. Enshu yori mo yoi, cf. Miyake 1982: 380. Cf. Keene, 1971: 135. Cf. Huffman, 1997: 199–223. “Heisenchu no tenshin,” Kyushu nippo, July 29, 1900, in Taoka, 1969–87, 5: 68–69. Cf. Iklé, 1967; Nish, 1982; Zachmann, 2005. E.g. Iklé, 1967: 122, 129–130. Nippon, June 4, 1895, in Kuga, 1968–1985, V: 104–105. Kuga,1968–1985, V: 105. E.g. Ohama, 2003: 65 for the whole chapter on the interwar years. Cf. Miyake, 1895: May 27. Tokutomi, 1982: 195. Zachmann, 2005: 73–77. “Domei-ron”, part 1, Tokyo Asahi shinbun, August 6, 1896: 2. Langer, 1965: 385–414, 445–483; Wippich, 1987: 325–401; see also Otte, 1995. Langer, 1965: 464–465. Langer, 1965: 462. Fenollosa, 1898: 119. Masuda, 1987: 750. Cf. Hobsbawm, 1989: 307. Hobsbawm, 1989: 307. Takamura, 1987: 818–819. Shunpo-ko tsuisho-kai, 1940, III: 328–329. Fukuzawa, 1969–1971, XVI: 31. Fukuzawa, 1969–1971, XVI: 30–33. Cf. Gluck, 1985: 26–35; Kano, 1969: 481–488, 515–530. Kotoku, 1968–1973, I: 231–232; italics indicate emphasis in the original. According to the JWM, December 4, 1897: 586–587. “Juryoku shinpo no jidai,” Nippon, February 5, 1898, in Kuga, 1968–1985, VI: 19. “Minkan yushi no undo,” Chuo shinbun, April 6, 1898: 2. “Chanben-gumi no naijo,” Chuo shinbun, April 18, 1898: 2. “Chanben-gumi no shuisho,” Chuo shinbun, April 20, 1898: 3. “Meeting of strong foreign-policy politicians, JWM, April 23, 1898: 415. Okamoto, 1970: 62. Okamoto, 1970: 83–85. Cf. Okamoto, 1970: 81. Thus, his contemporary Tokutomi Soho once described him as a “tactician who loved schemes.” In Tokutomi, 1982: 179 “Taigai shiso no kakushin,” Nippon, May 5, 1898, in Kuga, 1968–1985, VI: 71. “Shinsei no bunmei-koku,” Nippon, April 24, 1898, in Kuga, 1968–1985, VI: 62. For further Japanese comments on the Spanish-American War, see Iriye, 1971: 57–62. “Kinseiron: Nihon kore iu wa itsu zo.” Nippon, April 7, 1898, in Kuga, 1968–1985, VI: 55–56.

30 52 53

54

55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68

69

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 “Taigai shiso no kakushin,” Nippon, May 8, 1898, in Kuga, 1968–1985, VI: 70. “Shina naichi no kakushin o unagasu beki gi,” Nippon, May 13, 1898, in Kuga, 1968–1985, VI: 74. Britain, the United States and – to some extent – France, cf. Kuga, 1968–1985, VI: 61, 74. “Tai-Shin mondai wa ikan.” Nippon, June 26, 1898, in Kuga, 1968–1985, VI: 88. Okuma, 1907: 20–38, in a revised form. Jansen, 1967a: 53. Sakeda, 1978: 120–127; Konoe, 1898. See, for example, “Shinkoku no bunkatsu,” Tokyo nichinichi shinbun, October 25, 1898: 2. Okamoto, 1970: 79. Kobayashi, 1986. Cf. Sugano, 1966. Taoka, 1969–1987, V: 611. Taoka, 1969–1987, V: 612–622. “Japan”, North-China Herald, August 15, 1900, reprinted Kokusai nyusu jiten shuppan iinkai, 1989–1993, III: 253. E.g. Hata, 1988: 277; Conroy, 1966: 337. Jansen, 1967b: 188. As the advocates of a strong foreign-policy briefly experienced themselves, cf. Yamaguchi, 1962. Okamoto, 1970: 102.

3

An Invitation to the Aquarium: Sergei Witte and the Origins of Russia’s War with Japan DAVID SCHIMMELPENNINCK VAN DER OYE1

S

hortly before Japan began its war with Russia, the tsar’s former finance minister Sergei Witte had a chat with his erstwhile colleague, War Minister Aleksei Kuropatkin, about the growing tensions in East Asia. Anxious to deflect blame for the Pacific imbroglio, Witte reasoned: Imagine that I invited some friends to the Aquarium [a nightclub in St Petersburg], and they all proceeded to get drunk. Then, going on to a brothel, they ended up starting a fight there. Would I be responsible? I only took them to the Aquarium. They did the rest.2

The question of Sergei Witte’s role in the origins of the Russo-Japanese War is particularly contentious. In its immediate wake, the erstwhile minister became one of the favorite culprits in the search for the fiasco’s scapegoat. Ever sensitive to his reputation, Witte did his best to counter such charges. Thus he granted access to his personal papers to the Russian historian Boris Glinskii, whose Prolog Russko-Iaponskoi Voiny (The Prologue of the Russo-Japanese War) fired a powerful but ineffective salvo at his critics.3 The argument continued well into the subsequent decades. The bestknown Soviet study of the conflict’s diplomacy, Boris Romanov’s Russia in Manchuria, placed the blame for the autocracy’s involvement in its Pacific debacle squarely on Sergei Witte’s shoulders.4 According to Romanov, the official’s policies in the region, including the Trans-Siberian Railway – a “driving belt to the machinery of world imperialism” – and his irresponsible East Asian policy laid much of the groundwork for the conflict. Some three decades after Romanov’s monograph first appeared,

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a Berkeley graduate student, Andrew Malozemoff, devoted his thesis largely to rebutting the Soviet historian’s demonology. According to Malozemoff, Sergei Witte was a competent and honorable statesman. As the author saw it, the war came about largely because of diplomatic bungling. Published as Russian Far Eastern Diplomacy, the book long remained a standard English-language account of tsarist foreign policy leading up to the war. 5 Despite easier access to the relevant archives, the debate over whether Witte, or for that matter any of the other key players, was responsible for taking Russia on the path to war with Japan will not likely be resolved soon.6 But if the role of individuals remains open to discussion, some insights into their motivations may be gained by studying the ideas that drove their actions. The case of Sergei Witte is particularly interesting, since his notions about the primacy of economic forces were relatively unique among tsarist statesmen. PÉNÉTRATION PACIFIQUE

To his contemporaries, it appeared that Sergei Witte lacked a consistent ideology. Because of the volte-faces of his politics, a tendency to intrigue and self-aggrandizement, and an apparent absence of integrity, many concluded that the statesman acted entirely according to the dictates of his own ambition. One official who knew him wrote that “his political and economic conceptions . . . were not really inspired by an overall conception of the state or of the laws that govern human intercourse.”7 The economist Petr Struve felt that Witte “was by nature without principle or ideals.”8 Nevertheless, the finance minister’s actions and writings show his policies were guided by a coherent logic. The clearest statement of Witte’s ideas is in a set of lectures he gave to the tsar’s younger brother and heir, Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich, in 1901 and 1902. In 1900 the emperor had been ill with typhus, and it seemed appropriate to have the finance minister teach the tsarevich the basics about economics and government finance should worse come to worse. Subsequently published as Lessons on National and Government Economics, Witte’s notes were a powerful manifesto for modernization according to European lines.9 The finance minister’s emphasis on Western notions of progress is not altogether surprising when we remember that he attended university in the eighteen-sixties. Not unlike American undergraduates a hundred years later, Russia’s shestidesiatniki (“people of the sixties”) – as the youth of that decade became known – were an intensely rebellious generation. With a passion for progress, materialism and the primacy of scientific reason, they acquired the epithet “nihilist” for their fervent rejection of all traditional notions. The novelist Ivan Turgenev caricatured the type well in Fathers and Sons with his character Bazarov, the hyper-utilitarian medical student who prefers dissecting frogs over poetry and romantic love. Although Witte disdained the rowdy politics of his more extremist

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university classmates, the age left its imprint on the mathematics student too. Despite the occasional genuflection to Slavophil notions of Russian particularity, the finance minister firmly stood in the camp of the Westernizers.10 The overriding message of the Lessons is about the primacy of economic forces. Like Karl Marx, Sergei Witte defined historical progress according to modes of production. The finance minister also agreed with Marx (while disagreeing about the end result) when he explained that all peoples advance along the same path, beginning at the most primitive level of hunter-gatherer, evolving to nomad, then to farmer-craftsmen, and ultimately reaching the apogee as a modern industrial-commercial order. That universal schema, Witte emphasized, applies to every nation, including Russia. The final, industrial-commercial stage is a desirable goal, for it alone affords a people true prosperity and control over their destiny. “Progress is nothing less than man’s emancipation from the yoke of nature,” as Witte put it.11 In contrast, backward societies remained vulnerable. Without a proper manufacturing sector and a money economy, the latter could never fully realize their potential, no matter how populous or well endowed in natural resources. More importantly, as Witte frequently reminded his sovereign, there was a clear link between economic maturity and political power, since “finances are the nerve of war.”12 In a memorandum to Nicholas II in early 1900, he argued: “Only economically independent states can exert their will in the world.”13 Witte admired Britain and Germany as the most-advanced nations. His own country, he taught the grand duke, still had some catching up to do. On an earlier occasion the finance minister put it more bluntly: To this day Russia remains predominantly rural. Given the current international level of political and economic development, an agrarian nation which does not possess its own industry . . . cannot hope to remain sovereign.14

The only solution was for Russia to become more like its rivals. With its parliamentary system and maritime geography, England might not be the best model. The German Empire, however, was another mighty continental power with a strong monarchy. Witte therefore taught that Russia must encourage modern industry along the lines so successfully adopted by its Central European neighbor. The finance minister’s inspiration explicitly came from the early nineteenth-century economist Friedrich List, “the prophet of Germany’s present greatness.”15 List had been an enthusiastic advocate of German economic unity as well as of railway construction. However, he is best known for his National System of Political Economy.16 Published in 1841, the book advocated high protectionist tariffs to speed up industrialization. Among its more important readers was the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, whose economic policies were strongly influenced by its prescriptions. Witte

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was convinced that Russia could replicate German success by adopting List’s advice. The finance minister did not agree with List about everything. While the German economist held somewhat liberal political views, Witte was an unabashed monarchist.17 On other occasions, the minister vehemently opposed institutions that might dilute the monarchy’s power, such as the zemstva system of local self-government.18 Only a strong, centralized state could undertake the vital task of industrialization. He lectured Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich: Every nation must . . . develop its economy, taking all possible steps to achieve this goal . . . Individuals can never accomplish this on their own; this is a matter for the state . . . which acts as the intermediary between man and mankind.19

Witte also taught his august student about peace. According to the finance minister, one of the more worrisome developments of the modern age was the rise of large standing armies. Since the Napoleonic Wars at the start of the nineteenth century, and even more in recent decades, militarism was insinuating itself ever deeper into European politics. The danger was great: As governments are compelled incessantly to prepare for war, they have artificially created and strengthened a class of men devoted to it. Militarism increases the possibility and certainty of conflict.20

More to the point, this phenomenon was a tremendous impediment to prosperity. “Among those factors that retard growth, the first place is occupied by militarism,” Witte noted.21 He reminded the grand duke that the expenses associated with armaments were a major drain on the economy, absorbing between one-fifth to one-third of governments’ budgets. This was money entirely gone to waste: When we consider that spending on the military deprives the state of cash it could devote instead to raising the cultural and productive level of its population, we see even more how heavily the burden of maintaining large armies weighs on the governments of Europe.22

Its effect, he stressed, was pernicious: “The harm unrelentingly done by militarism to the economic well-being of European states is like a chronic illness, which slowly saps their productive vitality.”23 The danger to Russia was particularly great. Witte knew that the empire could not afford to squander its limited resources on the costly paraphernalia of war. Furthermore, like his previous master, Alexander III, he understood that the autocracy was not strong enough to risk the stresses brought about by conflict. Building a modern, industrialized economy above all required peace. Sergei Iulevich never tired of reminding Nicholas:

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35

The art of our diplomacy . . . must be entirely devoted to preserving the status quo. With all our efforts we must play for time. Time is Russia’s truest ally. Every year that your people live in peace accomplishes as much as a good battle.24

Witte’s distaste for militarism strongly echoed that of his former employer, Jan Bloch. Like other tycoons of the era, such as Alfred Nobel and Andrew Carnegie, during his later years Bloch had increasingly dedicated himself to promoting peace. In 1899, the Pole published a detailed six-volume warning about the dangers of armed conflict in the industrial age. Budushchaia voina (Future War) argued that recent technological developments, including smokeless powder, machine guns and rapidfiring artillery, together with an increasing reliance on mass-conscription armies, entirely transformed the nature of combat.25 Bloch predicted that the twentieth century would witness wars that were total, mobilizing all aspects of society in confrontations of unprecedented violence, destruction, and duration. Moreover, the resulting stresses on the home front could lead to domestic unrest that might well topple some of the combatant regimes.26 Budushchaia voina received considerable attention when it appeared, not least because some saw it as the inspiration for Nicholas II’s conference in The Hague, also in 1899, to curb the arms race.27 Bloch’s impact on the finance minister is clear, especially with regard to the latter’s thinking about the economic consequences of militarism. Aside from being costly and dangerous, there was another reason why Russia should avoid war, Witte taught the grand duke. The real contest among the powers was being fought in the economic arena. His lesson about the influence of trade on diplomacy has a familiar tone: One of the priorities of commercial nations is to secure markets for their products. This effort . . . is particularly critical for those countries which, like England, posses an enormous industrial plant but must import raw materials from abroad . . .28

Trying to sustain their industries, the rich countries were drawn in an “unceasing struggle to acquire commercial influence over nations that were at a lower level of development.”29 Meanwhile, this competition was increasingly being conducted by economic means, “since the authority of the metropole over its colonies now more than ever is exercised not by force of arms but by trade.”30 Those nations that could not keep up were bound to come under the control of their wealthier rivals. Russia had already suffered the political cost of its relative poverty when its richer neighbors had used loans to influence its diplomacy.31 At times, Witte saw matters in an even more pessimistic light. He once told the tsar “the economic relations of Russia with Western Europe are fully comparable to the relations of colonial countries with their metropolises.”32

36

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

Witte’s conviction in the supremacy of economics also shaped his geopolitical views. Russian generals invariably thought in terms of military opportunities or vulnerabilities. The finance minister had a startlingly different conception of the empire’s place in the world. As he saw it, a strong manufacturing sector was one characteristic of the modern great powers of the West. But another important feature was their role as entrepots in global trade. Whether by developing a backward region overseas or simply transporting goods from one market to another, certain European states had grown tremendously rich. England was the most obvious example. Russia lacked the maritime capability to establish a global colonial and shipping network like that of its great political rival. However, in the finance minister’s opinion, the empire might well be able to turn its Eurasian geography to its advantage. He reminded Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich: “With its natural borders on Asian countries, Russia occupies an exceptionally favorable position both as a direct trade partner and as a transit point between the East and Western Europe.”33 This line of thinking lay behind Witte’s rationale for the Trans-Siberian Railway. Whereas others had championed the project to help protect Russia’s Pacific flank, the finance minister envisioned it as a means to bring prosperity to the empire. By linking European Russia with the Pacific Ocean, the Trans-Siberian would speed the development of Russia’s own East Asian provinces and thereby “open abundant wellsprings of material prosperity for all people.”34 Just as the recently completed Trans-Canada Railway had created new cities, brought prosperity to the Prairies and helped unify the young North American nation, this project would bestow similar benefits upon Russia’s immense colony.35 Meanwhile, once the tracks were laid, Siberia would inevitably become the most efficient transit route for Europe’s commerce with the Orient. Russian merchants would then be able to wrest the fabled China trade from the hands of the British, who had dominated it for far too long.36 To Witte, the Trans-Siberian was built first and foremost to bring wealth to Russia: Holding in its hands the means by which this rapprochement will take place, it has become the intermediary and must make sure that it profits from this position. Standing guard over the path it has opened between Europe and Asia, it can manipulate this rapprochement to its best advantage.37

Yet there were times when the finance minister mused about a higher purpose. Returning from a trip to the East along the railway in 1902, he wrote the tsar: The completion of the Siberian Railway opens a gate for Europe to this hitherto secluded world, putting it face-to-face with the innumerable tribes of the Mongol race . . . Of course it is hard to predict exactly how

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the yellow and white races will come together, but Russia has a serious responsibility in bringing this about.

Meanwhile, he lectured the grand duke about the empire’s obligations: Russia’s task abroad is both peaceful and, even more fundamentally, cultural in nature. Unlike the West European powers, which hope to exploit the Orient’s peoples economically and often also politically, Russia’s mission in the East must be to protect and enlighten them.38

Sergei Iulevich also referred to a civilizing mission: “Russia long ago appeared among the Asian peoples on her border as the bearer of the Christian ideal, bringing the beginnings of Christian enlightenment to their midst.”39 Like most Europeans, Witte was convinced about the superiority of western civilization. He explained that Christian culture “was more powerful than the culture of the yellow nations, based on idolatry.”40 Although Russia was perhaps more benevolent than such West European rivals as England and Germany, this did not mean that its notions of progress should be fundamentally different. Just as he hoped to convert his own compatriots to Western ways, the finance minister was equally convinced about the desirability of modernizing the East along European lines. On this point, he strongly disagreed with Asianists, like his friend, the newspaper publisher Prince Ukhtomskii, who saw Russia and its Eastern neighbors as thoroughly distinct from Europe. When Russians brought enlightenment to the Orient, Witte believed, they were extending Europe eastward. He wrote about the role his railways played in this important task: At the pass in the Ural Mountains to the Siberian tract there still stands a sign. On one side is written “Europe” and on the other “Asia” . . . For Russians, the boundary marker separating them, as a European race, from the peoples of Asia . . . will eventually stand at the end point of the Chinese Eastern Railway.”41

This did not mean that Witte advocated territorial conquest. He reminded a Dutch journalist: “My motto is – up with trade and industry, down with the army!”42 The finance minister’s distaste for militarism applied equally strongly to the Orient. Russia’s role there, he emphasized, was to be a benevolent trading partner, not a conqueror. His was a vision of pénétration pacifique. Russia’s expansion to the East was a natural process and would continue over time.43 But in the modern age, trade, banks and railways, not troops, were the most effective means for extending Russian influence along the Pacific. In fact, as Witte understood it, this economic goal of his Asian ambitions only reinforced its more humane aspects. England and the other Western powers established themselves in the Orient solely to profit

38

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themselves. Theirs was a zero-sum game. In contrast, Russia’s relationship with its Asian neighbors was symbiotic; it turned to the East both to benefit its own people and those of Asia. This was particularly true of the Qing dynasty, with which Russia always had close ties. Witte stressed: “In our effort to fulfill [our] historic mission we have enjoyed the friendly assistance of the Chinese Empire.”44 During the early years of Nicholas’s reign, as St. Petersburg became more deeply involved in the Far East, Witte continued to stress the commercial aspects of the empire’s interests. When in 1896 the possibility arose of an alliance with China, the finance minister pressed for a railway concession in northern Manchuria. “Building a railway track is one of the best ways to guarantee our economic influence in China,” he told the tsar.45 Four years later, after the war minister accused his colleague of trying to annex all of Manchuria, Witte protested: We did not seize Manchuria, and it would be best of all if we didn’t grab any territory, letting the battle for markets take place instead by trade. We proceeded through all of Manchuria without making any [territorial] seizures. The Ministry of Finance has always insisted that, rather than take any land, we limit ourselves to establishing economic and political influence.46

A little more than a year before the outbreak of war with Japan, Sergei Iulevich once again underscored the peaceful nature of his enterprises: As a result of the Chinese Eastern Railway [which was built under Witte’s aegis] Russia will inevitably be drawn closer to Japan through our commercial and industrial interests. Building close ties among peoples this way is one of the best ways to avoid war.47

According to Witte, commerce and conquest were wholly antithetical. “Russia’s movement to the East is fundamentally peaceful and cultural, and not one that involves annexation,” he frequently reminded the tsar.48 Both on the Pacific and elsewhere, the finance minister never ceased to oppose military adventures. The Soviet diplomatic historian Evgenii Tarle explained that “underscoring all of Witte’s ideas about foreign policy is the deep conviction that Russia cannot and must not go to war.”49 DECLINE AND FALL

For the first eight years of his tenure as finance minister, from 1892 through 1900, Sergei Witte’s policies appeared to be a spectacular success. By many measures, the Russian economy boomed. Between 1890 and 1900 the production of iron and steel, crude oil, and coal all roughly tripled, the length of railway track increased by 50 percent, while the overall value of industrial output doubled. In all, growth rates averaged

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an impressive eight percent per year, at the time the fastest pace in Europe. Meanwhile, investors both at home and abroad showed their faith in the empire’s future prosperity by boosting purchases of Russian stocks from 60 million rubles in 1893 to over 400 million by 1899.50 As one economic historian put it, Russians were witnessing “the great upsurge of industrialization.”51 Alas, as with many booms, the decade ended in a bust. By 1900, the signs of a slump were unmistakable. The Russian countryside had seen mediocre crops in 1897 and 1898. Although yields improved somewhat in the next two years, falling grain prices continued to erode farm incomes. Compounding rural difficulties were the enormous taxes Witte levied on the empire’s peasants to pay for his industrial plans, as well as the ongoing impoverishment of the landed nobility. Meanwhile the West’s economy, with which Russia was becoming increasingly integrated as a result of the finance minister’s efforts, was once again mired in recession. The global recession was accentuated by a slowdown in orders for domestic heavy industry as work on the Trans-Siberian Railway neared completion.52 This same unhappy coincidence of poor harvests at home and stagnation worldwide had torpedoed the ministry of his predecessor, Ivan Vyshnegradskii. Prince Meshcherskii’s Grazhdanin, a paper generally sympathetic to the finance minister, described 1901 as “a most difficult year for Russia’s economy.”53 Share prices on the St. Petersburg Bourse plummeted, prompting intervention by the State Bank to prop up the market.54 More ominously, throughout the empire many expressed their despair in increasingly violent ways. Student unrest had already been plaguing the universities since 1899. In spring 1902, angry peasants plundered dozens of manor houses in the Ukrainian provinces of Kharkov and Poltava.55 The following year, a general strike brought the Black Sea port of Odessa to a standstill. Assaults on the autocracy were also on the rise, with Socialist Revolutionary assassins alone claiming the lives of three of the tsar’s ministers between 1901 and 1904.56 Around 1902, the increasingly apparent failure of Sergei Witte’s economic policies was being paralleled by a dramatic erosion of his political standing. Vain, overbearing, and exceedingly arrogant, the finance minister had never been particularly popular in St. Petersburg. Other ministers often faced the choice of bowing to their domineering colleague or engaging in endless intrigues to undermine his authority. Over the years, officialdom’s respect for Witte’s talents diminished and resentments multiplied. Meanwhile, the capital’s smart set sneered at the provincial’s coarse ways. Fashionable society was shocked when he married a Jewish divorcée, Matilda Ivanovna, “a lady of acknowledged notoriety in the past” in the words of a British diplomat.57 Although Alexander III’s consort, Empress Marie Fedorovna, shared her husband’s respect for his capable administrator, she refused to receive Matilda Ivanovna at court. The new tsarina, Aleksandra Fedorovna, was even less forgiving and openly loathed the minister.58

40

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

There was a deeper reason for Witte’s political ostracism. At the dawn of the twentieth century, imperial Russia’s elite was still predominantly aristocratic. Its economic base remained agrarian. Sergei Iulevich’s plans to industrialize the empire therefore profoundly menaced their way of life. In the short run, the countryside bore the fiscal burden of the finance minister’s costly initiatives, further impairing the nobility’s precarious finances.59 If Witte continued to have his way the future looked even more bleak, as a bourgeoisie inexorably edged out the aristocracy from its dominant position. Such concerns hardly reinforced the minister’s appeal to the ruling class. A friend, State Councilor Aleksandr Polovtsov, wrote: “they are after Witte’s head.”60 As long as he enjoyed the confidence of the tsar, Witte could afford to ignore such feelings. But in the early 1900s he also began to alienate his master. Whereas Alexander III had valued his finance minister’s iron will, Nicholas II was thoroughly awed by his powerful official during the early years of his reign. But as Nicholas grew into his role as autocrat, he became increasingly jealous of his own prerogatives. It was only a matter of time before the insecure monarch would summon the courage to defy the statesman. Witte described the dynamic of their relationship with uncanny accuracy when recounting the dismissal of another one of Alexander III’s ministers: He had lost the favor of the Emperor in part because, like so many of the ministers who had served under Emperor Alexander III and had known Emperor Nicholas II from the cradle, he could not immediately accept the fact that this young man had become the unlimited monarch of the greatest empire in the world and did not always speak to the young Emperor with the necessary respect.61

In August 1902, Sergei Witte celebrated the tenth anniversary of his appointment as finance minister. The press was full of flattering articles to mark the jubilee, and a few months later Nicholas II issued a rescript praising the official for a decade of loyal service.62 Nevertheless, Witte was well aware that imperial favor was on the wane. The tsar had already made it clear that his domestic priorities lay not with industry but with the countryside during an address to noblemen in the Government of Kursk in September 1902. He added, “as for the landed gentry – the ancient stronghold of order and of the moral strength of Russia – it will be my constant concern to consolidate it.”63 Nicholas underscored this predilection by relying more and more on the advice of Viacheslav Plehve, the new minister of the interior and one of Witte’s archrivals.64 In early 1903, the finance minister discovered that his authority in East Asian matters was also fading. In February, he complained to General Kuropatkin that Nicholas had not yet even deigned to return the report he had written about his trip to the Orient six months earlier.65 Towards the end of July 1903, the tsar named a naval officer, Admiral Evgenii Alekseev, Viceroy for the Far East. This move put Alekseev in

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charge of all of the empire’s interests on the Pacific, and was universally understood to be a slap in the face of Witte, who had hitherto dominated St. Petersburg’s activities there. Soon thereafter, on August 28, 1903, the finance minister delivered his weekly report to the emperor at Tsarskoe Selo. As the meeting drew to an end, Nicholas hesitated and grew visibly embarrassed. Suddenly he uttered: “Sergei Iulevich, I am asking you to take the post of chairman of the Committee of Ministers and wish to appoint [Eduard] Pleske as minister of finance.”66 Technically, this was a promotion, but there was no question that Witte was being kicked upstairs. Sergei Witte’s career was not yet over. In August 1905, the emperor sent him to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at the head of Russia’s delegation to negotiate an end to the disastrous war with Japan. Witte’s diplomatic abilities enabled St. Petersburg to extract itself from the military debacle with surprisingly light terms and won him the gratitude of Nicholas, who ennobled him with the title of count. Three months later, when the empire was paralyzed by a revolutionary general strike, Sergei Iulevich convinced the tsar that only serious political concessions could save the dynasty. Largely inspired by Witte, the manifesto Nicholas issued on October 30, 1905 effectively made Russia a constitutional monarchy by establishing an elected legislature and guaranteeing civil liberties. Meanwhile, the former finance minister was now appointed to the considerably more substantial position of Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Witte’s career as Nicholas’ chief minister was brief and stormy. Within half a year, having once again lost the confidence of the tsar while also alienating public opinion, he resigned. This time his retirement was permanent. Sergei Iulevich would live another nine years, engaging in futile polemics and vainly attempting to regain his former standing. He died in March 1915. IMPACT

For a Russian official at the turn of the twentieth century, Sergei Witte had a strikingly modernist view of the world. According to his vision of pénétration pacifique, the fate of nations in future would ultimately be decided by industrial might, not military prowess. Only those states that had the most advanced factories, the best commercial networks and the fittest finances could expect to survive their grim contest for survival. Nowhere was this more true than in Asia, where St. Petersburg’s imperial destiny lay. For these reasons, the tsar had to build a modern economy. The alternative was for Russia itself to succumb to the will of other powers. Witte summed up his ideas about reform, economic strength and imperial power in a memorandum to Nicholas in early 1900: It is imperative for Russia . . . to base its political and cultural structure on sound economic foundations . . . International competition does not wait. We must take vigorous and decisive steps now to ensure that

42

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 within ten years our industry can produce goods to satisfy both the markets of Russia and of the Asian countries that we should influence. If this does not happen, then rapidly growing foreign industries will penetrate our fatherland, as well as the Oriental nations in our sphere, thereby gradually also acquiring malign political influence . . . I fear that the slow growth of our industry frustrates the great political tasks of Your Highness, that the ongoing industrial prostration of our nation saps its political power, that inadequate economic growth also leads to the country’s political and cultural enfeeblement.67

The implications of pénétration pacifique for Russia’s eastward drive were clear. The finance minister never doubted that the Romanov dynasty would eventually rule over China. “The extension of Russia’s railway through Manchuria. . . was far from being the final step in our advance to the Pacific Ocean,” he wrote. “By historical necessity we [are] obligated to go further.”68 But the empire had to do so peacefully and through economic means. Railroads, banks and trading houses should conquer the Middle Kingdom, not troops. Territorial annexations by war, Witte believed, were antiquated and counterproductive. Besides, he often reminded the tsar, “for the sake of the general domestic situation in Russia it is exceedingly important to avoid anything which might lead to foreign complications.”69 The idea that economic forces drove overseas expansion was hardly unique. A number of German Socialists, like Friedrich Engels and August Bebel, had already written about the links between capitalism and colonialism. In 1894, Engels had even predicted: “China is the only country left for capitalist production to conquer.”70 Six years later, the Fifth International Socialist Congress resolved: “that the development of capitalism leads inevitably to colonial expansion.”71 And in 1902, John Hobson, a British Liberal journalist, popularized the term “imperialism” in his treatise about the need for surplus investment to seek higher returns in underdeveloped areas abroad.72 However, among tsarist statesmen Witte was virtually alone in thinking about diplomacy in economic terms. To his colleagues in St. Petersburg, international power remained a matter of armies and navies. While most of Nicholas’ ministers were not particularly bellicose, few would have disagreed with the Clausewitzian notion that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” Even Russian businessmen failed to share the finance minister’s interest in developing the Far East. Unlike West European countries at the time, where trade and industry often supported the acquisition of empire, there were few enthusiasts among entrepreneurs in Russia for Witte’s foreign schemes. Nevertheless, pénétration pacifique was one of the dominant ideologies driving tsarist expansion on the Pacific during the early years of Nicholas’s reign. Witte was influential not because he represented an idea that resonated with deeper intellectual currents in Nicholas II’s realm. Instead, he was able to impose his vision by sheer force of will. From the

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beginnings of the alliance with Beijing in 1896 through the early 1900s, the finance minister dominated St. Petersburg’s policies in East Asia because of the authority he exercised over the emperor. After he fell from grace in 1903, virtually no official shared his beliefs. Ironically, it was one of the autocracy’s most implacable foes that would once again revive the idea that economics drove foreign policy when in early 1917 Vladimir Lenin published Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. During the messy debates that followed Russia’s defeat by Japan in 1905, Witte justifiably stressed that he had always been opposed to going to war. Indeed, throughout his years as finance minister, he did his best to avoid any fighting in the Orient. Witte well understood that a conflict would be disastrous for his fatherland. In a letter to Count Lamsdorf in 1901 he wrote: Military struggle with Japan in the near future would be a major calamity for us. I do not doubt that we would vanquish the foe, but our victory would come at the cost of many casualties as well as heavy economic losses. Besides, and most important . . . it would arouse the strong hostility of public opinion . . .73

At the same time, the finance minister was not entirely blameless for the eruption of hostilities in 1904. His ardor for the Trans-Siberian Railway, partnership with the Qing dynasty, and the Far East’s pénétration pacifique all played a major role in arousing Nicholas’ dreams for empire on the Pacific Ocean. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11 12

13

Parts of this chapter appeared earlier in Schimmelpenninck, 2001. Kuropatkin’s diary, 3/12/1903, in Kuropatkin, 1922, II: 91. See Glinskii, 1916. For an abridged French translation, see Marc, 1914. Romanov, 1952. Malozemoff, 1958. As recently as 2005, there was lively discussion about this question at conferences marking the Russo-Japanese War’s centenary at Keio University and Dartmouth College. Malozemoff, 1958: 152. Struve, 1915: 9. Witte, 1912a. Although Witte had been more sympathetic to the ideas of the Slavophiles in younger years. Ananich and Ganelin, 1999: 30–33, 53; Korelin and Stepanov, 1998: 11. Witte, 1912a: 66. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, Augst 11, 1900 [All the dates in the notes of this chapter follow the Julian Calendar], Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (Hereafter RGIA), fond 560, opis 28, delo 218, list 70. Witte, 1935: 133.

44 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24

25

26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42 43

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 Witte, 1935: 133. Witte, 1912b: 311–374. List, 1991. Guroff, 1970: 34–35. See his impassioned critique of this institution in Witte, 903; Ananich and Ganelin, 1999: 100–110. Witte, 1912a: 199. Witte, 1912a: 81. Witte, 1912a: 80. Witte, 1912a: 82. Witte voices very similar sentiments in a letter to V.P. Meshcherskii, Ananich and Ganelin, 1999: 89. Witte, 1912a: 82–83. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, November 12, 1896, RGIA, f. 1622, o. 1, d. 4, l. 1. Bliokh (Jan Bloch), 1899). A one-volume English-language version claims to be a translation of the concluding volume, but is more of a somewhat clumsy abridgement of the entire work, see Bloch, 1903. For a good summary see Rosengarten, 1957. After World War I erupted, many writers commented about the eerie accuracy of Bloch’s prophetic warnings. The British military historian Basil Henry Liddell Hart remarked: “[Bloch] was near 80% on the main factors - whereas the contemporary manuals were far more often wrong than right.” In Liddell Hart, 1957: 31. For a list of contemporary reactions, see Dungen, 1977. Witte modestly took full credit for the idea himself. Witte, 1990: 284–285. Witte, 1912a: 202. Witte, 1912a: 202. Witte, 1935: 133. Laue, 1963: 13–14. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, March 22, 1900. In Laue, 1954: 66. Witte, 1912a: 217. In Glinskii, 1916: 10. Geyer, 1977: 188–189. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, 10/1902, RGIA, f. 1622, o.1, d. 711, l. 1; Glinskii, 1916: 10–14; Romanov, 1952: 39–45; Laue, 1954: 81–82; Marks, 1991: 142–145; Ford, 1950: 19–24. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, 10/1902, RGIA, f. 1622, o.1, d. 711, l. 1. Witte, 1912a: 203. Semennikov, 1925: 78. Witte, 1990: 237. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, October 1902, RGIA, f. 1622, o.1, d. 711, l. 41. Popov, 1935: 56. This idea was eloquently expressed by Witte in a survey of Russia’s eastward expansion, which describes it as a gradual, inevitable process that began with the merchants of twelfth-century Novgorod. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, August 11, 1900, RGIA, f. 560, o. 28, d. 218, ll. 67–69.

An Invitation to the Aquarium 44 45 46

47

48

49 50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68

69

70 71 72 73

45

Laue, 1963: 155. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, March 31, 1896, KA, LII:. 95. Witte marginal note on Kuropatkin to Nicholas II, memorandum, March 14, 1900, l. 164. Italics in the original. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, October 1902, RGIA, f. 1622, o.1, d. 711, l. 30. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, August 11, 1900, RGIA, f. 560, o. 28, d. 218,, l. 70. Tarle, 1927: 10. Portal, n.d.: 51; Mosse, 1992: 107; Gerschenkron, 1962: 129. For a more recent economic history of the period, see Gregory, 1994. Gerschenkron, 1962: 130. Portal, n.d.: 105–112; Laue, 1963: 211–214; Mosse, 1992: 119; Gershchenkron, 1962: 132. Meshcherskii, 1902: 41. Gattrel, 1986: 169. Oldenbourg, 1975–1977, II: 15–16. Lieven, 1993: 90. Hardinge, 1947: 75. Lamsdorf, 1991: 131, 143; Ford, 1950: 26. Laue, 1963: 277–278; Guroff, 1970: 35–38. Polovtsov;s diary, July 22, 1901. In Polovtsov, 1923, III: 99. Witte, 1990: 263. See, for example, n.a., “Ministr finansov stats-sekretar Vitte (1892–1902),” Novoe vremia, August 30, 1902: 1–2; Meshcherskii, 1902, September 5: 22ff; Witte, 1990: 310. Gurko, 1939: 228. Judge, 1983: 151–153. Kuropatkin, diary, February 16, 1903, KA, II: 31. Witte, 1990: 315. Witte, 1935: 133. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, 11/8/1900, RGIA, f. 560, o. 28, d. 218, l. 69. Witte to Nicholas II, memorandum, 11/8/1900, RGIA, f. 560, o. 28, d. 218, l. 71. Mommsen, 1982: 32–33. Fieldhouse, 1961. Hobson, 1902. Witte to Lamsdorf, letter, November 22, 1901, Bakhmeteff Archive, Witte Papers, f. 24, n. 6.

4

“The Unknown Enemy:” The Siberian Frontier and the RussoJapanese Rivalry, 1890s–1920s EVA-MARIA STOLBERG

I

n the late nineteenth century the Siberian and Manchurian frontiers with their rich natural resources and potential for agricultural and industrial development became an arena of competition and conflict between Russia and Japan. Imperialist ideologies, economic, ethnic and geopolitical tensions, i.e. the Russo-Japanese struggle for supremacy in Northeast Asia culminated dramatically in the Russo-Japanese War that produced political and economic disturbances in the Siberian hinterland. The Russo-Japanese War cannot be understood without the Siberian background. This military conflict was the first significant outburst in Russo-Japanese rivalry that started during the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway and Chinese Eastern Railway and continued during the Japanese intervention into the Siberian Civil War (1918–22). Finally, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 represented again a threat to Siberia that only vanished with the Soviet intervention into Manchuria in August 1945.1 Although the era of Russian and Japanese expansion in Asia, including the Russo-Japanese War, created much interest among international scholarship, it is striking that the complex relationship between the Siberian and Manchurian frontier in the Russo-Japanese War and other conflicts between Russia and Japan still demands a thorough evaluation. Due to the fact that Siberian archives were closed to Western scholars until 1991, there is still much to learn about the role of Siberia in Northeast Asia. For tsarist and Soviet Russia alike, Siberia was a springboard for expansion in Northeast Asia, and the Japanese also had an image of Siberia that shaped, as had Manchuria and Mongolia, Japanese national identity during the era of imperialism.2 This chapter

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puts Siberia’s place in the Russo-Japanese War into the broader framework of Russo-Japanese geopolitics in Northeast Asia between the 1890s and 1920s. OVERLAPPING FRONTIERS: SIBERIAN AND MANCHURIAN COLONIZATION IN THE FRAMEWORK OF RUSSO-JAPANESE GEOPOLITICAL COMPETITION

The rise of the Russian and Japanese empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was combined with technological and industrial progress. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway and Chinese Eastern Railway set the framework for the exploitation of natural resources of the Siberian and Manchurian frontiers.3 The imperial governments in St. Petersburg and Tokyo recognized that railways were not only vehicles for military and economic control over peripheries, but also a symbol for imperial greatness. It was a symbolic act when Nicholas, successor to the Russian throne, laid the foundation stone of the Trans-Siberian Railway near Vladivostok in May 1891. This was a clear manifestation that tsarist Russia participated in “railroad imperialism.” The construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway would safeguard Russia’s political and economic interests in Manchuria against the increasing influence of Japan. Therefore, Russia’s Manchurian policy was connected with the Siberian development. But just a decade before the Russo-Japanese War, the Trans-Siberian Railway could not meet its goal, i.e. to transfer sufficient logistics to the eastern front. When the RussoJapanese War broke out in 1904, the Circumbaikal line was not yet built, military transport to Manchuria had to be organized on icebreakers. There was no double track between the Urals (Cheliabinsk) and Lake Baikal (Irkutsk) to help facilitate the transfer of soldiers and war material to the Manchurian front. After Russia’s disastrous debacle, Russian war minister Aleksei Kuropatkin recognized that the technological condition of the Trans-Siberian Railway contributed to Russia’s weak defense in Northeast Asia.4 In contrast, in World War II, the transcontinental railroad was used more effectively by the Soviet military.5 The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the 1890s had a geopolitical (strategic and economic factors), but also a psychological impact. In 1899, Russian Minister of Transport, K.N. Pos’iet, declared that China and Japan with their extreme population density would present a dangerous threat to deserted Siberia.6 Moreover, in tsarist plans the Trans-Siberian Railway should not only strengthen Siberia’s defense capability, but should also provide a springboard for a strategic and economic infiltration of northern Mongolia and especially of Manchuria. Regional Siberian authorities considered these borderlands belonging to China as a kind of cordon sanitaire against Japanese expansion on the Asiatic continent.7 A report by military engineer A.K. Sidenser reveals the intentions of the Russian army to build a transcontinental railroad through Siberia: 1) as infrastructure in order to exploit Siberia’s

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natural resources for future wars in Northeast Asia, 2) the settlement of a defensive population.8 Although Russian and Japanese political maps of the nineteenth and early twentieth century showed Northeast Asia as divided between relatively distinct political zones, in practice frontiers or borderlands in Northeast Asia between Russian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and indigenous societies were thoroughly intermingled which made hegemony a hazard. Since the 1860s, after Russia’s treaties with her East Asian neighbors, and especially with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway Japanese, Chinese, and Korean settlements became a very important part of the social landscape between Lake Baikal and the Pacific coast. With the increasing economic boom under Sergei Witte and Petr Stolypin, there were Japanese retailers who settled as joiners, smiths, tailors, and owners of laundries in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. Japanese industrial trusts such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui, were also eagerly interested in the exploitation of Siberia’s timber and Sakhalin’s oil; they were also forerunners of Japan’s economic expansion in Siberia before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War.9 Russian Transport Minister K.N. Pos’iet foresaw that Japan’s rising economic vigor might detach Siberia and the Russian Far East from “mother” Russia and make it a Japanese colony. Moreover, he thought, like Priamur Governor Pavel Unterberger, that the influx of Japanese migrants and entrepreneurs would undermine “Russian culture and civilization” in Siberia.10 Russia’s geopolitical ambitions combined with the need of national security on the eastern frontier and the widespread fear of the “Yellow Peril” became apparent after the Crimean War. On March 19, 1857, Emperor Alexander II sanctioned the establishment of military colonies, consisting of Cossacks, on the Amur. However, the English traveler E. Ravenstein warned in 1861 that “Russia’s presence on the Amur and Ussuri, the key rivers in Northeast Asia, does not bear the stamp of permanence, and the Amur region together with nearby Manchuria could prey on Russia’s imperial identity.”11 In actual fact, Ravenstein’s prophecy became a half-truth. Russian and Japanese railroad and migration projects exemplified the reality that both empires developed geopolitical ideas for the Siberian-Manchurian frontier. The increasing modernization and industrialization of this Northeast Asian backwater from the late nineteenth century onward showed that a remote periphery (eastern for the Russian, western for the Japanese) became a central concern for the Russo-Japanese rivalry in Eurasia. But there were several motives behind the Russian and Japanese expansion into the Siberian-Manchurian borderlands. The Meiji reforms, which laid the basis for Japan’s victory in the SinoJapanese War and Japan’s international recognition as a regional power, gave a self-confidence for strengthening the Japanese foothold in Manchuria. In contrast, Russian geopolitics in Siberia and Northeast Asia were a gesture to compensate for Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War and her humiliation as a military power. Russo-Japanese geopolitical rivalry

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was from the very beginning a mental imbalance between Russian humiliation and Japanese self-confidence that created the psychological breeding ground for Russia’s defeat in 1905.12 Thirty years after the defeat in the Crimean War the tsarist government started the Trans-Siberian Railway project in the hope of opening up the Siberian and Manchurian borderlands strategically, and economically as well. Taking up his predecessor’s settlement policy in the Amur region annexed by Russia in 1861, Alexander III wanted to encourage Russian migration in the hitherto sparsely populated borderland by constructing a railroad. In Russian Far Eastern geopolitics, the Amur territory should serve as springboard for the colonization of nearby Manchuria by the means of railroad construction and migration.13 This pattern became clearer after the Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The Treaty of Shimonoseki was not even concluded when Russian Foreign Minister, Prince Lobanov-Rostovskii boasted: “Our goal is the annexation of a number of areas in Manchuria in order to get an ice-free port that would give the Siberian hinterland a suitable access to the Pacific via the transcontinental railroad.”14 Before the construction of the TransSiberian Railway Siberian infrastructure for a military and economic expansion to the Pacific shores was poor. Especially in Eastern Siberia, roads were impassable and, therefore, could not be used for troop transfers. Only with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway by 1891 could Russian geopolitics in Northeast Asia be realized. More than a decade later, Russia’s geopolitical dream ended up with a traumatic disappointment. The reason was not purely military. A major influx of Russian settlers from the Siberian hinterland into Manchuria never took place. The construction of the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern Railways was realized through immense costs, but regarding migration policy it paid for itself only in the case of Siberia. Manchuria was not attractive enough for Siberian colonists and that was the main reason why Russia could not compete with Japan. The dream of a “Yellow Russia” on Manchurian territory proved to be “imperialism from above” not broadly accepted by the Siberian population.15 Scholars’ traditional understanding of Russian imperialism in Northeast Asia in the decade before the Russo-Japanese War also has to be challenged in another respect. Siberian governors were the strongest promoters of Russian expansion in Northeast Asia in order to strengthen their political position toward St. Petersburg. As Murav’ev-Amurskii propagated the annexation of the Amur region in mid-nineteenth century, S.M. Dukhovskii, the Priamur governor-general wanted to develop the Russian Far Eastern borderland by expansion into Manchuria in order to provide the Priamur region with grain, meat, and industrial products. The crux for the Siberians was that on one hand feeding the local population in the borderland depended on Manchurian grain; on the other hand this situation also made food supplies for Siberian troops precarious which became evident during the Russo-Japanese War. Dukhovskii also pushed the Russian government in

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St. Petersburg and the Russian ambassador in Beijing to build a Russian railroad through Manchuria.16 St. Petersburg’s geopolitics on the Siberian-Chinese frontier was a combination of military and economic interests. Russian interest in the Amur region and nearby Manchuria had a good motive: from the midnineteenth century, Siberia’s income from trade with China (via the frontier town of Kiakhta) had been declining, the “golden era” of overland trade was past and with the industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, economic expansion drifted from landlocked Northeast Asia (Baikal region, Mongolia, Northern China) to the Pacific (Amur region, Manchuria).17 The Pacific became the geopolitical playground for Russia, Japan, and Great Britain. Just one year before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War the governor-general of the Amur region and Liaotung Peninsula (Manchuria), General D.I. Subotich, demanded a modus vivendi, a clear demarcation of Russo-Japanese spheres of influence in Northeast Asia in order to prevent a war: For southern, subtropical peoples, as naturally the Chinese as well as the Japanese must be classified, the limits of territorial expansion are set by physical conditions themselves. Both the Chinese and the Japanese lived in the expanses of our Priamur province (along the Amur river), but they did not firmly establish themselves or value their stay here. [. . .] Conversely, regarding southern Manchuria and Korea, it is not feasible to transform them into Russian districts. Indeed to stem the natural influx of the surplus population from Shantung, Chili, and Japan not only is not in our hands, but, I dare say is not even within the powers of the Chinese and Japanese governments themselves because this flood gushes and rolls there with an invincible strength. All resistance will only be a futile waste of time, blood, and money.18

The period between Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56) and in the Russo-Japanese War was characterized by an inconsistent Russian imperialist policy that drifted in different geographical directions. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and the following Russian expansion into Central Asia hindered a successful colonization and a clear military policy in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. Actually being involved in Central Asia and Northeast Asia, Russian imperialism was caught in a contradictory military policy between aggressive expansion and wary defense. This paralyzing tendency intensified through the tugof-war between the central government in St. Petersburg and the regional elites in Turkestan and Siberia, because governors on the southern and eastern peripheries competed for state investment in the economic and military development of their regions. Compared to Turkestan and Western Siberia, the Baikal region, the Amur and Ussuri region, the later strategic hinterland of the Russo-Japanese War were on the losing side in this tug-of-war. Between 1858 and 1882 only 1,800 colonists per year from European Russia, and between 1882 and 1900, 6,000 to 7,000 per

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Table 4.1: Trade between Vladivostok and Manchuria (1891–1900) Year

Sales (in Russian pud)*

1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900

885,312 465,625 873,500 1,011,375 1,675,250 1,675,311 1,606,770 4,567,766 4,168,282 3,981,404

Source: Materialy po statistike Primorskoi oblasti, Vladivostok 1900 (page unnumbered). * A Russian unit of weight equivalent to 36.1 pounds(16.4 kg).

year settled in these remote regions. By 1897 there were only 31,274 soldiers in Siberia (east of Lake Baikal) and the Russian Far East.19 Despite military weakness on the Siberian-Manchurian borderlands, Russia’s economic penetration of Manchuria accelerated with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway and Chinese Eastern Railway and it was Vladivostok, Russia’s and Siberia’s window to the Pacific, that profited from trade with Manchuria as the above table shows. As Primor’e was underpopulated, Manchuria was a very important trade and industrial hinterland for Vladivostok. Therefore, Russia’s strong geopolitical and economic interest in Manchuria made sense. In the decade before the Russo-Japanese War, the most prominent Siberian enterprise that was operating in Manchuria was the Churin Company. On its own, between 1895 and 1904 Churin invested 563.3 million roubles in the Manchurian market. Churin’s investments and transactions, supported by the Russo-Chinese Bank, slumped after the Treaty of Portsmouth when Japanese, United States, British, and German entrepreneurs ousted Russian commerce from the Manchurian market.20 According to the calculations of the American economic expert Charles Frederick Remer, Russian investments in the Manchurian market totalled just 60 million roubles before World War I.21 Two years after the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian administration for settlement and colonization policy in Primor’e warned of an increasing economic “Asianization” of the Russian Far East as the share of entrepreneurs of East Asian origin (China, Korea, and Japan) had doubled compared to the share of Russian and European/American entrepreneurs.22 SIBERIA: THE HINTERLAND OF THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR

In the years between the Japanese victory in the war with China 1894–95 and the Russian occupation of northern Manchuria during the Boxer

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revolt of 1900 the marginal Siberian and Russian Far Eastern troops were permanently dislocated without a clear military strategy. Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East were unprotected. Whereas regional contingents were sufficient to subdue the Boxer Rebellion in Manchuria, they were ill-prepared for a greater war like the Russo-Japanese War. Poor strategic planning was not the main reason for the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War.23 The unsuccessful migration policy in the borderlands and the non-existence of a local human reservoir for future wars in Northeast Asia forced the central government in St. Petersburg to build the TransSiberian Railway. At the same time that the Trans-Siberian Railway was under construction, the British planned to build a railroad through Manchuria.24 As the local troops in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East were understrength, the Trans-Siberian Railway under construction should facilitate troop transfers from European Russia to Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East.25 There was an additional factor that would contribute to Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. The Russian army had no clear topographical knowledge of the Siberian-Manchurian borderlands. Before the outbreak of the war, no cartographical work had been done. During the Russo-Japanese War, explorer Nikolai Baikov produced the first maps of the taiga and the swamps of the Amur and Ussuri regions.26 Russia’s railroad projects attracted the interest of the Japanese secret service in Russia’s Asiatic periphery.27 Before the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Siberia and Inner Asia were a terra incognita for Japanese geography that had specialized in Korea and China.28 On the Japanese mental map, Siberia, Central Asia, and Mongolia were covered in a shadow of obscurity. In 1892–93, the Japanese general staff sent out Fukushima Yasumasa on an espionage expedition into Siberia, the Russian Far East, Manchuria, and Turkestan. Fukushima Yasumasa was an energetic man with a strong self-interest to illuminate the darkest region of Asia. Japan’s geopolitical discovery of Inner Asia began much later than Russia and Britain who sent expeditions three decades earlier and, therefore, had a better topographical knowledge. Due to the “Great Game” with Great Britain and ethnic strife in Turkestan, the Russian military gave intelligence work in Inner Asia priority over the calmer Siberian-Manchurian borderlands.29 Influential advocates of Russian expansionism in Northeast Asia like Nikolai Przheval’skii thought more about a war with China on the Turkestan border than with Japan on the Amur. His conclusion that China’s decadence had its roots in the “moral inferiority of the yellow race toward the European civilization” was a prejudice that ignored the fact that another “yellow nation,” the Japanese was successful. The image of the “yellows” was that they did not know duty and honor – a fallacy concerning the Japanese mentality that was influenced by bushido. In fact, before the Russo-Japanese War, Russians had no clear understanding of East Asian culture and mentality, and, therefore, a distinct geopolitical concept had never been developed.30 The rise of Meiji

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Japan since the late 1860s was not appreciated and Przheval’skii’s geopolitical focus on the Chinese empire had a lasting disastrous impact on Russia’s geopolitics in Northeast Asia. In his research, Przheval’skii compared the Chinese empire with the Ottoman, labeled it as the sick man in East Asia, thereby neglecting Japan as a potential rival.31 But the 1890s were the birth of the geopolitical triangle Imperial Russia-Great BritainJapan in Northeast Asia. Not only the Japanese general staff, but also Japanese paramilitary organizations like the Kokuryukai (Amur Society) and Genyosha (Dark Ocean Society) which decisively molded the anti-Russian imperial ideology from the 1890s to the end of World War II began to recruit agents among Japanese migrants in Siberia and the Russian Far East, especially in Vladivostok and the Amur region. Analyzing the military situation in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East from reports of the secret service, Field marshal Oyama Iwao propagated the idea of a surprise attack before the Russians could have completed the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway.32 It was not until 1903 that Siberian regional police authorities recognized the problem of Japanese espionage and forbade Japanese migrants from settling along the Trans-Siberian Railway.33 When Japan attacked Port Arthur on February 8, 1904, the Russian population in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East was not enthusiastic about the war in Manchuria that seemed to be far away. An eyewitness reported from Vladivostok that the local population did not expect any involvement of the Siberian hinterland in the Manchurian conflict. The attack on Port Arthur was taken for a Japanese aggressive gesture limited to Manchuria and that the war would be over after some weeks. However, the Japanese migrants in Vladivostok were more skeptical and preferred to return home.34 When, on February 25, 1904, Japanese warships under the command of Admiral Togo Heihachiro appeared in the bay of Vladivostok, panic and disorder gripped the population in Vladivostok because of the rumors circulating in the city that provisions would only last for the next eight months. The situation in Eastern Siberia was similar where in Irkutsk looting, murders, and armed robberies occurred.35 Although the war was very unpopular among the population, urban citizens showed a strong xenophobic attitude toward Japanese (but also Chinese) migrants. Shops were boycotted, looted and there were also pogroms that forced the Japanese and Chinese to organize self-defense.36 Expecting a landing of Japanese troops in Primor’e in February, Admiral Alekseev considered that the possible occupation of the Russian Far East would represent a loss of face for Russia’s policy in Northeast Asia,37 and, therefore, ordered troops away from Eastern Siberia in order to defend Vladivostok.38 As the war was very unpopular among the population, only a few men volunteered for the Manchurian front.39 This undermined significantly the Russian readiness for war in the eastern borderlands and was the main reason why the Russian government had to transfer large contingents from European Russia via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Moreover, ammunition had to be transported over the long

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transit route as there was no significant defense industry in the border region.40 Nevertheless, troops from European Russia were not reliable when the revolution broke out in St. Petersburg. Soldiers deserted and lived in the remote taiga. The Russian military as a social institution failed to prosecute deserters who became vagabonds and marauders.41 Although the tsarist government used its propaganda machine, patriotism did not take root in the Siberian frontier society. Large numbers of cartoons, for example, a Cossack devouring a Japanese, made use of the image of the “Yellow Peril,” but numerous official reports from the East Siberian and Russian Far Eastern military districts show that Siberian young men had a strong aversion to participating in the Manchurian war.42 Pacifist tendencies also gripped Siberian schools. M.A. Zaostrovskii, the head of Irkutsk’s school department, complained about juvenile passiveness. Zaostrovskii was a very energetic advocate of the Russo-Japanese War and in the presence of teachers and students, gave many lectures on the significance of the Russo-Japanese War for Russia’s manifest destiny in Northeast Asia. Zaostrovskii emphasized that the Siberian school should be the place for patriotic education. He also stressed that the Russian conquest of Siberia was the most important event in Russia’s national history and that patriotism in Siberia would be the key for Russia’s cultural mission in Asia.43 Zaostrovskii’s patriotic fervor made him miss the reality that there was only little support among the Siberian population for the Manchurian campaign. The Russian military authorities in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East understood that the Russo-Japanese War was not popular among the population, therefore during the Manchurian campaign they organized public parades in all cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Additionally, officers held public lectures about the military feats of Cossacks in conquering Siberia and its significance for the Russo-Japanese War. For example, nearly one month after the appearance of Admiral Togo’s cruisers in the bay of Vladivostok, on March 25, Captain Sobolevskii gave a public talk on the first Russian push to the Amur in the mid-seventeenth century and the development of the Amur region before the Russo-Japanese War in order to demonstrate that there was an historical duty for the Siberian population to form a bulwark against the “Yellow Peril.” Moreover, the colonization of Siberia should be a shining example for Russia’s colonizing efforts in Manchuria. These kinds of public lectures imbued with imperialist propaganda had some success among the nationally-orientated urban upper classes. For example, just after Sobolevskii’s talk, citizens of Irkutsk donated 1,500 roubles for the Russian Pacific fleet.44 The role of Siberia as a hinterland of the Russo-Japanese War was also recognized by some intellectuals in European Russia. On March 8, 1904, the Russian Darwinist Ivan Sikorskii took Siberia as an example of successful assimilation to the Russian culture during three hundred years’ of Russian rule as a “battlefield for the future racial struggle” between Russians and Japanese.45 However, “war education” came too late and

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did not touch the majority of the Siberian population, i.e. the mass of peasants. This was disastrous as Siberia was the strategic hinterland, but the attitude of the Siberian population toward Russia’s Far Eastern “Manifest Destiny” only showed the widespread mood in the Russian empire. Just as at other distant peripheral regions, people in Siberia understood neither the reason nor the aims of the Russo-Japanese War that was provoked by the imperial government in St. Petersburg, some visionaries like Esper Ukhtomskii, who dreamt of Russia’s Far Eastern destiny, and aggressive generals and governors. This mistrust and the psychological damage inflicted by the defeat of Russia created the background of the revolution in 1905. “Why die for a Russian Manchuria when the Siberian homeland needs more development” was the comment of a Siberian contemporary.46 Historians of the Russo-Japanese War have ignored the fact that the Treaty of Portsmouth had far-reaching consequences for Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. Apart from the stipulations concerning Manchuria that invalidated the Soviet intervention into Manchuria in August 1945, Imperial Russia had to concede Japan fishing rights in the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk. This was a violation of Russia’s sovereignty and marked the beginning of Japanese economic hegemony in Russia’s Far Eastern waters. After the Russo-Japanese War, between 1907 and 1911, Japanese zaibatsu like Mitsubishi and Mitsui imported 6.3 million pud of Russian Pacific fish. The radius of the zaibatsu covered a vast region from the Bering Sea to Kamchatka, Sakhalin, and the Kuriles.47 Furthermore, the Japanese secret service supported Russian social revolutionaries and repatriates who after the Russo-Japanese War left Japan for Vladivostok. For the Japanese, Vladivostok was the main base for paralyzing Russian authority in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. Between April 1906 and March 1907, 177,000 socialist leaflets and pamphlets were printed for distribution. This was recognized by the procurator of the Vladivostok district court who argued that the repatriates from Japan were the most radical elements in the city.48 Japanese military circles around General Kodama Gentaro boasted that if the Russo-Japanese War had continued, Japan would have won Eastern Siberia.49 However, the revolutionary turmoil of 1917 renewed Japanese geopolitical interest in Russia’s Far Eastern borderlands. RUSSO-JAPANESE RIVALRY DURING REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR, 1917–22

Russia’s defeat in 1905 and the reluctance of the Siberian population to take part in the Manchurian war revealed the weakness of the eastern frontier. Although the central government in St. Petersburg opted for a rapprochement with Japan, nothing was actually done for the defense and economic development of Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East – a situation that much contributed later to the Japanese intervention into the Siberian civil war. Due to the revolutionary situation in the Russian

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empire after 1905 and continuing rivalries among regional elites on the Asiatic peripheries (Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia) the involvement of St. Petersburg in Siberia was weak, whereas in contrast Japan economically and militarily built up its spheres of influence in Korea and Manchuria. Already in 1907 – exactly when Russia and Japan negotiated over a rapprochement – the Japanese general staff had its own plan according to which Russia was considered the main adversary to Japanese claims in Northeast Asia. In the same year, the general staff set down a new plan: in a future war with Russia the Japanese army should send troops to the Russian Far East. The Japanese army also had economic motives: when Imperial Russia sought Japanese weapons during World War I for her combats in Europe, the Japanese side demanded oil concessions on Sakhalin. The Japanese army viewed oil exploitation on Sakhalin necessary for a future war with Russia in Northeast Asia. The Japanese general staff took advantage of the insecure political situation in the Russian Far East.50 When Aleksandr Kerenskii, becoming head of the Provisional government after the overthrow of the Imperial regime in February 1917, sought a rapprochement with the United States as a counterbalance to Japanese expansion by oil concessions, the Japanese Foreign Ministry under Motono Ichiro51 openly joined the policy of the Japanese general staff by pushing the Kerenskii government for a pro-Japanese stance in the oil policy. The Japanese pressure failed due to the political change in Russia. The Bolsheviks coming to power in October 1917 pursued a harsher line in their policy in Siberia. The Soviet government recognized the Japanese threat, but also the economic strength of the United States in order to develop the Siberian borderlands. But the outbreak of the Russian civil war in Eastern Siberia played into Japanese interests. Since the late nineteenth century, Japanese entrepreneurship had articulated a strong interest in the natural resources of Russia’s eastern periphery; Siberia was considered as a future land of a prospering Japanese economy. Now, during the civil war, these ideas experienced a renaissance. Japanese industrial trusts (zaibatsu) kept a commercial and financial network in the vast region east of Lake Baikal. In March 1918, members of the Kuhara mining company planned with Japanese officers an anti-Bolshevik uprising in the Amur region because they feared an economic rapprochement between the Bolsheviks of the Amur region and the American Siberian expeditionary troops. Two months later, in May 1918, the Kuhara mining company signed a treaty with the local Russian entrepreneur Ivan Stakheev who was strongly anti-Bolshevik and sympathized with the White movement in the civil war. Stakheev and the RussoAsiatic Bank behind him planned a joint economic engagement with Kuhara in order to exploit the natural resources of the borderlands.52 Contrary to the situation during the Russo-Japanese War, in 1918 Japan invaded Siberia east of Lake Baikal, i.e. Transbaikalia, the Amur province, and Primor’e with Vladivostok. Japanese geopolitical strategy in Northeast Asia encompassed for the first time Russia’s eastern frontier

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as necessary for the defense of Japanese spheres of influence in Korea and Manchuria. Moreover, contrary to 1904–05, military and economic planning went hand-in-hand. Shortly after the Japanese intervention, a special governmental commission for Siberian Economic Aid (Rinji Shiberia Keizai Enjo Iinkai) was established in Tokyo in order to coordinate Japanese economic interests in Siberia.53 The main reason for the strong military and economic engagement was the American presence that made the situation very different to that of 1904–05. Now, due to the American involvement, it became a geopolitical problem although even after the October revolution most of the Japanese population had no mental image of the Amur, the Black Dragon river (Kokuryuko), its practical significance for Japanese foreign policy. In order to exclude the Americans from the Siberian market the Japanese government was eager to win over the anti-Bolshevik political groups for an alliance. Tokyo promised military support in exchange for economic concessions, i.e. the White movement would become Japan’s junior partner. This was also the reason why Japan recognized the Kolchak government in Omsk in May 1919. However, Japanese interest in Siberia was for geopolitical reasons concentrated more on the eastern emblematic borderlands than on Western Siberia. The river Amur became a dimension in Japanese military and economic strategies. The Russian Far East, especially the Amur region, was considered as part of the natural boundaries of the Japanese realm in Northeast Asia. The Japanese also understood that, since the arbitrary annexation of the Amur by the Russians in the mid-nineteenth century, Russia had only loose control over this borderland. The image of the Amur (and of the Russian Far East) was a nationalist projection of the Japanese political, military, and economic elite. The idea to establish a special commission with the grandiose sounding name Rinji Shiberia Keizai Enjo Iinkai revealed the rich store for the elite’s geopolitical machinations that anticipated Japan’s vision of a “Greater East Asian Zone of Prosperity” in the 1930s and during World War II.54 The geopolitical vision of the Amur seems to be an exotic touch, but in the 1920s there was a large amount of geopolitical literature in Japan devoted to the “Black Dragon,” and these publications were influential.55 Together with Korea and Manchuria the Russian Far East – although geographically situated to the west of Japan – shaped Japanese geopolitics after the Russo-Japanese War as a kind of Japanese Orientalism that awakened after Japan’s victory over the European power.56 Japanese geopolitical thinkers considered Japan as the rising sun over the eastern borderlands of the Eurasian continent, i.e. a kind of Ex Oriente Lux. Historical geography of the Russian Far East was new in Japan, but after the Russo-Japanese War, especially after the October revolution and the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, it got an anthropological perception,57 a combination of geography (defined by military and economic parameters) and philosophy. This, at least, explains why Japanese geopolitics in Eastern Siberia/Russian Far East was so subtle. But the White antiBolshevik policy was no less subtle. The envisaged military occupation

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of Russia’s eastern borderlands and its economic exploitation were handled between the Japanese and the White forces discreetly. Behind the economic aid propagated by the Japanese Special Governmental Commission (Rinji Shiberia Keizai Enjo Iinkai) Japanese military and business elites (zaibatsu) had no real interest in an economic cooperation with White Russia. Instead, in the regions east of Lake Baikal the Japanese army issued, with the official support of the Japanese finance ministry in Tokyo, fifty million yen (175 million roubles) in order to devalue the Russian rouble. All banknotes bore the inscription “Imperial Japanese Province” and thereby documented Japan’s imperialist claim on Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. Japanese soldiers paid with this money in Russian shops and Japanese banks like the Chosen and the Yokohama Bank bought up estates on a large scale that evoked anti-Japanese resentment among the Russian population.58 In contrast to the Russo-Japanese War that took place on Manchurian territory, Japanese intervention into Siberia during 1917–22 represented a real threat for the Russian population on the Siberian frontier. Observers of the American Expeditionary Corps also considered the aggressive economic exploitation of Siberian economy as a “Yellow Peril” that endangered the United States and West European trade. A report of the American Expeditionary Corps recommended that in order to counter Japan’s economic expansion, the United States, Canadian, and West European entrepreneurs should invest in Siberia in a way that would lead to an economic consolidation of the Kolchak government.59 Whereas the United States traditionally propagated an open door policy, Japan intended to establish its economic superiority over Northeast Asia by the total inclusion of Siberia and the Russian Far East into its economic sphere of influence as the prominent Japanese entrepreneur Shimada declared toward the American press: The freeing of Siberia from the Bolshevik’s power [. . .] is opening the greatest prospects before Japanese manufacturing circles. An economic commission has been organized in Japan in order to define [. . .] the articles which Siberia most urgently needs. Generally speaking, during the war [World War I] a large number of Japanese persons became so rich that the plan for the organization of companies with a capital of over 300 million yen can be easily put into effect. The Russo-Japanese Bank with famous financial men, Mr. Shimura and Baron Megata at its head, intends to open a whole series of branches in towns of Siberia. Two joint stock companies with a capital of some hundred million yen aim to concentrate in their hands the whole export of manufactured goods, jewelry and pharmaceutical supplies.60

These economic and geopolitical factors were the reason for Japan’s Siberian intervention. The expropriation of Japanese entrepreneurs and merchants in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East by the Bolsheviks was a propagandist pretext for intervention. At the beginning of 1918,

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the intervention plan of the Japanese general staff became more concrete. The plan (Kyokuto roryo ni tai-suru shuppei keiryo) scheduled the troop transfers to the coastal province Primor’e (Enkaishu Soka-hahei keiryo) and to Transbaikalia (Zabaikaru-shu Homen ni tai-suru ha-hei keiryo yoko). The Japanese general staff envisioned cooperation with anti-Bolshevik Cossack units in order to establish a pro-Japanese protectorate east of Lake Baikal.61 This provoked the British and American entry into the Russian civil war. On March 1, 1918, the first American cruisers appeared at the Golden Horn of Vladivostok.62 This was the beginning of the far-reaching United States-Japanese antagonism in Northeast Asia. Both Japan and the United States considered the Amur as essential in order to control the Russian Far East strategically and economically.63 In contrast to the Russo-Japanese War, that made the Chinese an object of the rivalry of its neighbors, Japan and China concluded a secret alliance for a joint intervention into Siberia on March 25, 1918. At the same time, the Japanese army established in the Russian Far East a “Russian self-defense-corps” that received 160 million yen in order to equip 30,000 Cossacks. A week later, on April 4, 1918, the Japanese intervention began. Vladivostok and other cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway were occupied. The Japanese issued a curfew and each Russian inhabitant was given a Japanese permit that had to be renewed weekly.64 The anti-Bolshevik atamans were dependent on Japanese good will and were forced to recognize Japan’s economic interests in the Russian Far East as in 1919 the continuation of the Russo-Japanese fishery agreement of 1907 that had been concluded for twelve years was on the next agenda. Japanese zaibatsu Mitsubishi and Mitsui began to exploit the fish resources of the Russian Far East without any consideration of Russia’s sovereignty (jiyu shutsugyo) as there was no internationally recognized Russian government. The plunderings were supported by the Japanese navy and were approved by the Japanese Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Agriculture. The outstanding ethnographer of the Russian Far East, Vladimir K. Arsen’ev, estimated that nearly 125 Japanese vessels were operating on Russian Pacific territory between 1917 and 1922. During the Russian Civil War, the Japanese exploited the fish resources of the Russian Far East (including the Amur) so extensively, that the supply to the local Russian and indigenous population was endangered and that fish had to be imported from China. The atamans of the Russian Far East also granted the Japanese the right to exploit the rich wood resource of the Ussuri taiga with the consequence that the local population of Khabarovskii krai lacked fuel. An American source assessed the whole economic damage for the Russian Far East during the Japanese occupation at 239 million gold roubles.65 The Japanese army and the zaibatsu also forced the local Siberian population east of Lake Baikal to work for them.66 From the very beginning of the Japanese intervention in spring 1918 forced labor conscription was usual. Many Siberian peasants fled into the taiga or into nearby

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Manchuria where they joined the anti-Japanese, pro-Bolshevik partisan movement.67 Brutal requisitions of grain by Japanese soldiers in Siberian villages fueled the anti-Japanese resentment among the Siberian population.68 The establishment of the Far Eastern Republic in 1920 which was formally independent from the Soviet government in Moscow, created a new situation. Now the Japanese concentrated their military and economic control on Primor’e and the harbor Vladivostok. Here they installed anti-Bolshevik vassal regimes whose political authority was very limited as the Japanese censored the press and controlled the telegraph and postal service.69 In Vladivostok, the Japanese had political talks with Russian ultra-right-wingers about the establishing of a provisional parliament for Primor’e from which the Bolsheviks should be excluded.70 In the meantime, the Bolshevik agents of the Far Eastern Republic began with their conspirational agitation in Primor and called upon the Russian workers and peasants to boycott the pro-Japanese government and all Japanese institutions (army, zaibatsu). In cooperation with the section of Korean Communists of the Russian Far East, the Bolshevik agitators of the Far Eastern Republic began also with their infiltration of the Japanese occupation institutions and with psychological warfare among Japanese soldiers who became increasingly war weary.71 In 1921, the government of the Far Eastern Republic and the Japanese started their negotiations for a Japanese withdrawal from the Russian Far East. The Japanese demanded extensive economic shares in mining, forestry, land, and shipping on the river Amur. Like the notorious “Twenty-one Demands” addressed to China, Japan presented “Seventeen Demands” to the Far Eastern Republic or rather indirectly to the Soviet government in Moscow: i.e. the internationalization of the harbor Vladivostok, annulment of the Russo-Japanese fishery convention of 1907 for eighty years’ concession in the mining industry, fishing, forestry and agriculture.72 Contrary to the Russo-Japanese War, Japan’s “northern adventure” following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was a failure due to unfavorable geopolitical conditions, i.e. Japan’s rivalry with Soviet Russia and the United States. In 1922, Japanese troops withdrew from the Russian Far East. Moreover, in the Japanese public the Russo-Japanese War had never been so disputed as the Siberian intervention. At least, among the population of Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East the Japanese military never gained a foothold; its unlimited exploitation of Siberia’s natural resources, the issue of a Japanese currency on Siberian soil stirred up Russian patriotic feeling stronger than in the Russo-Japanese War. This is not surprising as during the years of 1918–22 Siberia was directly attacked by Japan whereas the Russo-Japanese War was a conflict on foreign soil.73 NOTES 1 2

Stolberg, 2005a. Narangoa and Cribb, 2003.

“The Unknown Enemy” 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

61

Stolberg, 2005b. Kuropatkin, 1909: 242; Belov, 1940: 108–110. Stolberg, 2005a. Pos’iet, 1899: 54. GARF, f. 818, op. 1, d. 138, l. 1–3. Doklad, 1886:155–198. Stephan, 1994: 77. Pos’iet, 1899: 54. Ravenstein, 1861: 153–154. Stolberg, 2005. GARF, f. 5869, no. 1, khr. No. 32. Patrikeeff, 2002: 6. Stolberg, 2005. RGIA, f. 1273, op. 1/126. Romanova, 1987: 41–42. Subotich, 1908: 18–20. Subotich, 1908: 24. Liubimov, 1934: 581. Remer, 1933: 581. RGIA, f. 394, op. 1, d. 7, l. 101. Apushkin, 1910: 171–173. See Man’chzhurskaia zheleznaia doroga, 1893. Pos’iet, 1899: 54. Khisamutdinov, 1997: 122. See the secret reports by Colonel Akashi Motojiro, Meiji 37 nen himitsu hi shiharai meisai. Kokkai Toshokan [Library of the Diet], Tokyo. Kobayashi, 1915. Volokhova, 1997: 98–100, 103–105. Semennikov, 1925: 77–79. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 1., d.438, ll.132. Furuya, 1966: 70–72. GARF, f. 102, op. 316, d. 17, l.1f., d. 20, l.9f. SA (1913), 1: 22–24. RGIA DV, f. 1, op. 5, d. 1509, l.3f. ; N.S. Romanov Letopis’ goroda Irkutska (manuscript, Irkutsk library, diary note, October 1904). Hara, 1989: 10. RGVIA f. 400, d. 39034, l.4f. RGVIA f. 400, d. 31840, l.316ff. RGIA DV, f. 1, op. 5, d. 1552, l.8f. Belov, 1940: 108–111. Behrmann, 1905: 315; Poleshchuk, 1954. Poleshchuk, 1955: 296–372. Romanov (diary, February 1904, old style). Romanov (diary, February/March 1904, old style). Sikorskii: Avdeev, 2002: 301. Romanov (diary, February/March 1904). GARF, f. 818, op. 1, d. 96, ll.47–49;

62 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

67 68

69 70 71

72 73

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 RGIA DV, f.520, op. 1, d. 393, ll.26–28. NGB, 1958–1960, V: 252–254. NGK, l. 7.6.4–1. The former Japanese ambassador in St. Petersburg. Yang, 1987; Kitanina, 1962: 427–430. Muroya, 1918. GARF, f. 200, dl. 120, l. 22; NGK, 1.7.6.4–2–1. Kyokuto roryo gyogyo gaisetsu, 1923. Torii, 1943. Bremen and Shimizu, 1999. NA, file 21.-21.3., A. I. Pogrebetsky Papers, HIA. NA, file 21.-21.3., A. I. Pogrebetsky Papers, HIA. Source of the press report not known: see National Archives file 21.-33.5. Sanbo Honbu, 1972, I: appendix, 215–217. George, 1936: 162. Moore and Skvirsky, 1922: 2. A.I. Pogrebetsky Papers, HIA, 80. Kobayashi, 1979; PTsRGOIAK, f. 14, op. 1, d. 56, l.7–8.; A.I. Pogrebetsky Papers, 14; National Archives: file 21–31.5. Far Eastern Republic. Documents concerning the establishment of the Far Eastern Republic. HIA, box 1, accession no. XX317–8–28. Report of an unknown partisan, in RGASPI, f. 71, d. 662, op. 35, ll.1–3. The damage by grain requisitions undertaking by Japanese troops between Lake Baikal and the Pacific Coast amounted to two and seven million yen. See RGASPI, f. 71, op. 35, d. 641, l.3 f. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 35, d. 633, l. 16. RGASPI, f. 372, op. 1, d. 39, l. 28. GARF, f. 602, op. 1, d.4, ll.32–35; RGVIA, f. 221, op. 1, d. 31, l.1–2; A.I. Pogrebetsky Papers, HIA, 92. Eudin and North, 1964: 212. Stolberg, 2003: 43–68.

PART II

THE WAR

II. THE MILITARY DIMENSION

5

The Clash of Two Continental Empires: The Land War Reconsidered IAN NISH

I

n one of the recent books published in Japan on the war, Professor Matsumura Masayoshi uses as his subtitle “Seeking New Interpretations of the War” and this is the main purpose of historians around the world as the centenary comes upon us. The war has been viewed through many prisms: in Japan either the pacifist views of the postwar period which condemned it as Japan’s first step toward imperialism or the Marxist views, once so strongly imbedded in Japan’s history faculties, that the war was the result of Japanese capitalist expansion overseas; in Russia the Bolshevik view that the tsarist state was at the root of this misguided wave of Russian expansion in the East or the Stalinist historians who held that Russia was geographically a Pacific power and had rights in the area which she had lost through bad management. It will be interesting politically to see how the war is remembered in these two countries a hundred years on.1 The war was an international event. Russia and Japan are at the core, but repercussions spread out to China and Korea which were the countries overrun by the belligerent armies, then to Asia and Islamic countries, then to Europe and America. It shows that even limited wars such as this “Manchurian War” (as it is sometimes called) caused ripples, even tidal waves, around the world. We must not forget the fact that it was a war, and a bloody war, which was fought savagely between Russia and Japan with heavy casualties on both sides but which had vast global repercussions. Yet it was not “internationalized” in the modern sense that there was overwhelming international interest. There were a few foreign observers but reportage was relatively modest.

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The twentieth century saw many great world wars. The Russo-Japanese War was one of the first of these and was overwhelming in terms of casualties. The Russo-Japanese War was a clash of two continental empires. Of course Japan was proud of her description as an island empire with growing power at sea; and Russia too had expanded her Pacific fleet by 1900. But this war tilted the balance away from naval empires and further toward continental expansion and the clash of the two imperial armies. There can be no doubt that Russia’s encroachment in the East – in Manchuria from 1900 and at Yongampo in Korea from 1903 – came from a desire for landward expansion on the continent of Asia. Whether it was presented as commercial expansion as in the thinking of Sergei Witte or expansion of a territorial land empire as in the thinking of the tsar and his inner circle in 1903, it was a war of expansion. Russia naturally hoped that she could expand without going to war but was not ready to make accommodations in order to ensure peace.2 So far as Japan was concerned, it was also a war of expansion. There were other public arguments put forward: the Japanese had been humiliated and double-crossed by Russia over Port Arthur (Lushun) from 1895 onwards; the virtual occupation of Manchuria after 1900 and inroads into the north of Korea in summer 1903 were challenges to Japan’s perceived sphere of influence. Japan also claimed to be fighting a war of liberation, that is, liberating part of China from the grasp of the Russians. The army was the body most inclined to promote the cause of expansion before the Russian railroad network was completed and was supported in its tough line by some influential public meetings. But the restraining forces were more effective in Japan than they were in the tsarist court. The navy and the Elder Statesmen like Ito Hirobumi insisted on due process of diplomacy taking place. The foreign minister, Komura Jutaro, in particular was adamant that war was not inevitable and diplomacy had to have a chance. He wanted to cool down the over-heated temperature of the Japanese people.3 The war was fought in the railroad-building age in Asia. Railroad had a strategic, but also a psychological, impact. Russia’s building of the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria linked to the Trans-Siberian over the turn of the century gave confidence to Russia and the tsar in difficult times. The financing, building and running of the Trans-Siberian were remarkable, and for a predominantly agricultural society unexpected achievements for the Russian state. Yet its progress scared the Japanese people at the time and was regarded as an inevitable threat to their security in the future. This penetrated through to the populace and that was perhaps the reason for the attack by the policeman on the tsar when he visited Japan as crown prince in May 1891. Meanwhile Japan was pushing ahead with the building of the two Trans-Korean networks between Pusan and ultimately Wiju (Uiju).4 It cannot be said of the Russo-Japanese War that it was a war of surprise. In the case of the Japanese press, it was spoken of as a possibility for six months before it started. But, in the case of the Russians, they were

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to claim that they were taken by surprise. This should not have been the case. The problem is that the tsar and his close advisers had a strong belief that Japan would not dare to take up arms against an all-powerful Russia. This was because of an excess of confidence in the Russian army and navy.5 In fact, there was in Russia what the Japanese recognized as a power struggle between hawks and doves. Thus, when General Aleksei Kuropatkin, perhaps the most famous of the Russian generals, visited East Asia with a view to inspecting the Russian forces in May-June 1903, he reported that they were in a good state but that the Japanese army, which he also inspected, was equally strong so war with Japan should be avoided at all costs. The first part of his message got through, but not the second. This was not his fault. He presided over the all-important strategic meeting in Port Arthur between 1 and 10 July which endorsed his views. But his political fortunes then declined and Admiral Evgenii Alekseev was appointed as Viceroy of the Far East and his hard, unyielding line and that of Novoe krai, the newspaper of the Russian east, prevailed during the negotiation period.6 Witnesses report that Russian naval officers in the East were also overconfident. Speaking to Admiral Robley Evans, the commander-in-chief of the United States Pacific squadron, they talked of the overwhelming victory they would win if Japan were to attack. That implied, of course, that the Russians themselves did not propose to take the first step. The navy shared the same complacency as the army and seems to have entered the war unprepared and lacking in adequate intelligence from its various attachés.7 This suggests that everything was cut and dried. There was at least one element of uncertainty which existed at the time: would China take part in the war, either at the start or as the war developed? As Britain’s former foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, has written in his Memoirs: “Historians are Professors of Hindsight.”8 With hindsight we know that China did not take part in the war. From an international point of view, China’s entry would not have been desirable since it might have required the French to go to the aid of the Russians and converted the conflict into a world war. But, from China’s point of view, it was hard for her to know that her territory would be the battlefield of the forthcoming war without wanting to take some part. It was hard for the China government to be told by the Japanese that they were about to fight a war for the liberation of its northeast provinces, when it did not seek to be liberated by Japan.9 LAND CAMPAIGNS

So war came about. The Japanese withdrew their minister from St. Petersburg, made a surprise attack on the Russian fleet based in Port Arthur on February 8–9; and fired on and brought about the loss of the Russian cruiser Variag at the port of Chemulpo (Inchon). These were bold and unexpected actions. Japan officially declared war on February 10.

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Admiral Togo Heihachiro, commander-in-chief of the combined fleet, succeeded in separating the Russian squadrons in Vladivostok and Port Arthur and achieved command of the seas from the start. He was able to protect Japan’s advance troops in their landing near the Korean capital of Seoul. Overconfidence and surprise had led to Russia having not more than 150,000 men east of Lake Baikal when war broke out.10 The Russian army was vast and had a reputation for bravery, endurance and success. It had not fought in Europe since the Russo-Turkish war of the 1870s but it was not without experience in fighting in the East, both in central Asia and in the Boxer Expedition of 1900. All sources speak of the weakness of the officer corps who clearly underestimated Japan and lacked initiative in the field. Troops were initially small in number and poor in training. Kuropatkin’s assessment of Russian soldiers after the war was that they had been enlisted “on the basis of the compulsory military service law and we have without doubt been at fault in not having paid sufficient attention, in good time, to the fighting trim of our reserve and second line formations.”11 The Russians’ performance was, on the other hand, assisted by their Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern Railways which, despite their occasional hold-ups, were undoubtedly a great asset for transportation of troops, supplies, and munitions. Japan had the advantage of having some foreknowledge of the area to be fought over and of having formulated a comprehensive war plan. The troop landings which had to be made on the southern coast of Manchuria were broadly similar to those of the war of ten years earlier. But, whereas in 1894 the two strategic objectives had been Port Arthur and Beijing, in 1904 they were Port Arthur and Mukden, the centre of the Ching dynasty’s heartland. China in 1894 had only offered marginal resistance and had not really tried to use her navy. On these two points the Russians were expected to be different and proved to be so. Extrapolating from 1894, the Japanese generals were over-optimistic in their campaign planning, especially for the capture of Port Arthur. At the outset Japan faced the difficulty of getting substantial forces over to the continent. In 1894 she had relied on British transports. In 1900 she had moved a lesser force on her own for the Boxer expedition. In 1904 Britain declined to assist in order to avoid any charge of breaching her neutrality. Despite this, Japan managed to send four separate expeditions: the First Army under General Kuroki Tametomo to Korea and from May the Second and Fourth Armies to the vicinity of Dalny and the Third Army to the Liaotung peninsula under General Nogi Maresuke. In the initial stages, the Japanese armies spent three months marching through Korea, fighting skirmishes in the north. This should have allowed the Russians some time to regroup. But they failed to take advantage of this and were soundly defeated by General Kuroki’s First Army at the battle of the Yalu river early in May.12 Soon the Second Army under General Oku Yasukata landed near Dalny (today Dalian) and scored a victory at the battle of Nanshan, some twenty miles away, on 26 May.

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This brought about the evacuation of the commercial port of Dalny and the lines of communications between Port Arthur and Russians in the north were seriously disrupted. Thereafter the Japanese followed a twopronged strategy aimed at assaulting the naval base of Port Arthur from the land and controlling the railway line leading northeast to the city of Mukden. Shortly General Nogi’s army landed for the first of these purposes. The Russians continued to be complacent and until the defeat in the naval battle of the Yellow Sea in August 1904 and the land battle at Liaoyang in September seem to have felt themselves to be invincible. The large-scale battle at Liaoyang, an important junction some sixty-five kilometers south of Mukden, was indecisive. The Russians were forced to retreat but the Japanese were unable to capitalize on it. This came as a rude awakening to the Russians, who had fought with superior numbers. The basic trouble was that there existed a split in Russian strategic thinking. General Kuropatkin as commander-in-chief from May was skeptical about Russia being able to defend Port Arthur whose survival hung by the thread of the Chinese Eastern Railway which was vulnerable to military attack and indefensible by land. He favored staying in the centre and north of the country. He seems to have followed a strategy of withdrawal and retreat fairly consistently to that end.13 By contrast, Viceroy Alekseev, who was in overall command and Kuropatkin’s superior, being a naval man, would not let go of Port Arthur and had the support of the tsar and leaders at home. He was ultimately told to leave there on May 5 when land communication with GHQ was closed. From his new base in Mukden, however, he continued to argue in favor of holding out in Port Arthur until he left his command on October 25 when he returned to the Russian capital on retirement. In practice, however, the Port Arthur garrison hardly received any reinforcement from the over-stretched armies around Mukden. Russia’s cautious policy of husbanding her resources stands in marked contrast to Japan’s determined aggressiveness. The First, Second and Fourth Armies pushed on toward Mukden. The Battle of Sha-ho in October was a disappointment to both sides. The Russian troops were by this time more numerous but they were dispersed over a very wide front. They were driven back to the north side of the river, where the Japanese, running out of ammunition, could not pursue them. Both sides had suffered heavy casualties so they dug their trenches and prepared for the severe winter. Toward the end of the year attention was switched to Port Arthur, the legendary citadel, which had been leased by Russia in 1898. Japan’s first wave of attacks started in August and encountered stubborn Russian resistance. Nogi attempted several direct frontal assaults but he underestimated the strength of the fortifications. The British minister in Tokyo, himself a military man, reported to London that the Japanese ministries of war and navy and their commanders were over-optimistic about Port Arthur. The campaign settled down to trench warfare, shelling and bitter

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fighting. It came as a surprise to the Japanese that the garrison could hold out so long under constant artillery bombardment. The final siege lasted from November and resulted in Japan gaining control of 203 Meter Hill, an important outer fort overlooking the port. The garrison ultimately surrendered on January 2, 1905. This allowed General Nogi to take the bedraggled, battle-scarred but fiercely enthusiastic Third Army to join the other armies in the encirclement of Mukden.14 Japan’s overall planning was doubly retarded by the delay in the capture of Port Arthur. The number of men and the quantity of arms that were required to take the fort hindered her operations further north. Finally, early in March the combined armies made their attack on Mukden (today Shenyang) before the thawing of the winter snows made fighting difficult. It was a gigantic battle in which the Russian army numbered around 275,000 infantry and the Japanese four army groups of some 200,000. After ten days of hard fighting the Japanese captured the city and routed the Russian armies who retreated north in disorder up to Hsipingkai on the road to Harbin. There was desultory fighting, including skirmishes at Tieling (Tiehling), Kaiyuen, and Hsinking where the Japanese had marginal victories. But they were unable to follow up the retreating Russians because of shortage of transport and the sheer exhaustion of their troops. Relatively short of numbers, the Japanese could not make a major push towards Harbin and instead spent the next few months building up their defenses and coping with the weather. Mukden was one of the largest battles in military history with proportionately high casualty rates. The perception of the Japanese General Staff in Mukden was that Russia had reserves of fresh men and officers to draw on, while they were lacking in both. To some extent they may have been taken in by the skilful rumors circulating that Russia was in a position to send countless forces to the East to recover her superiority, a view put forward by Ignatyev, a Russian officer who later became a Soviet general.15 Hence the recommendation from the army command was that, while agreeing that military operations must be kept in line with national policy, the armies should not go farther north in pursuit and the government should make some diplomatic move for peace. The cabinet on 8–10 April passed a resolution to hold the present position, since the Russian war faction was “persisting with the war, despite their inevitable defeat” but to initiate diplomatic moves for peace using the United States as intermediary. The Mukden recommendation not to attack Vladivostok was upheld. This ran counter to the expectation of most foreign observers that after the capture of Mukden an attack would be launched on Harbin from the south and on Vladivostok from Gensan on the east coast of Korea. But Tokyo showed little sense of urgency, the most probable reason being the looming presence of the Baltic fleet, then passing Singapore. Both sides were awaiting the arrival in East Asian waters of the Baltic fleet and the clash of the two grand fleets which was expected to take place. The war ceased to be continental from this point.16

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The historian has a problem of defining defeat and victory in this war. Russia never won a major battle in the land war, though it claimed some minor successes.17 Her commanders showed some skill and resourcefulness in successfully withdrawing their units without disaster to favorable positions. On the other hand, Japan was never able to capitalize on her victories which were marginal. Can the battles she won at such horrifying cost in human lives be properly called victories? At the peace conference Komura jestingly told his Russian counterpart that he was arguing as if he was the victor. The Russian replied: there are no victors here so there can be no defeated.18 CONTEST FOR COMMAND OF THE SEAS

It is perhaps useful to look at the strengths of the two fleets. Russia had a Pacific squadron based on Vladivostok and Port Arthur consisting of seven battleships and six cruisers. Japan had six battleships and seven (six new) cruisers. Naval strategy was perhaps predictable. Japan tried to confine the Russian ships to their ports by mining the approaches to Port Arthur and Vladivostok and by general blockade tactics. Admiral Togo who had been specially selected for the command of the combined fleet hoped that the war would culminate in a major sea battle as theorists predicted. Instead he had to be content with staying out of range of the Russian shore batteries and protecting the supply lines for armies in the field. Initially taken by surprise, Russia tried to hold on to her two ports of Port Arthur and Vladivostok, conserving her strength in the face of mines and blockade and making only occasional sorties out to sea. Vladivostok had its limitations because of freezing up. If Russia was to secure command of the Yellow Sea and adjacent waters she had long realized that she needed a base of sorts on the south coast of Korea; and her naval authorities had been lobbying for that without success.19 It was possible for Russia to reinforce her Pacific squadron from Europe by sending her Baltic fleet around the world, though few would have initially contemplated such a course. She also had a Black Sea fleet; but Britain opposed its passage through the Bosphorus into the eastern Mediterranean on the ground that this violated the treaty of Paris of 1856. Such a stand was of indirect benefit to Japan. But there was also the controversial use of the Black Sea Volunteer fleet, fully armed merchant vessels which could not be stopped from passing through the Bosphorus and went on to create havoc with merchant shipping in eastern waters. This was the subject of frequent complaints by all trading countries.20 The initial aspect of the naval war was the blockade of Russian squadrons and the mining of the approaches to Port Arthur and Vladivostok. The Russian squadron was ill-prepared and ill-led until Vice Admiral Stepan Makarov took over command which was short-lived. On 13 April he died in action on board his flagship Petropavlovsk which

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struck a mine and lost 649 crew members.21 On 15 May battleships Hatsuse and Yashima were lost in a minefield, leaving Togo’s quota of battleships at four. When the Port Arthur ships again emerged on the tsar’s explicit orders in August to push through to Vladivostok, they were soon in disarray with the new minefields and failed in their objective. After fighting the battle of the Yellow Sea, the surviving vessels had to retreat into harbor. But the flagship Tsesarevich was hit and had to take refuge in the German leased territory of Tsingtao. Rear Admiral Vilgelm Vitgeft was killed in action. Japan also suffered when the battleships Shikishima and Mikasa were hit and put out of action for the time being. The loss of the newly-built Yashima was not disclosed to the Japanese public. Nonetheless Japan had in effect confirmed her command of the Yellow Sea for the rest of the war.22 The spectacular development in the naval war was that from April onwards St. Petersburg was prepared to take the extreme step of sending its Baltic fleet around the world. To reinforce the First Pacific Fleet, a Second Pacific Fleet was formed under the command of Vice Admiral Zinovii Rozhestvenskii. It left Libau (Libava) on September 11 and proceeded via the English Channel, Tangier and Cape of Good Hope. It wintered at Madagascar while it waited for the Third Pacific Fleet under Rear Admiral Nikolai Nebogatov which had been sent east later through the Mediterranean. At this point Rozhestvenskii heard of the fall of Port Arthur with the attendant loss of the squadron there. The terminus ad quem of the joint fleets had been lost, and it was a question of pushing on east or returning west. The decision was taken to set sail regardless for Vladivostok across the Indian Ocean, passing the straits of Malacca and assembling ultimately at Cam Ranh Bay, French Indochina. Around this anchorage it was with difficulty able to repair and coal and plan for conflict. The joint squadron of forty-seven ships moved north, passed close to Shanghai and detached its transports whose disarmament by China was watched over by the Japanese. Fearful of being ambushed by Japan’s fleet, it sailed to the east of Taiwan. Eventually it encountered the rested and refurbished squadron of Admiral Togo and fought the battle of Tsushima on May 27–28, 1905. This ended in the loss of six Russian battleships, seven cruisers, five torpedo boats and about 5,000 men. It was an outright victory for the Japanese – the most clear-cut victory of the war. It was also one of the great naval battles of history, a rare example of a numerically inferior fleet defeating a superior one.23 One of the outcomes of recent research into the epic battle of Tsushima is the claim that Togo wanted to move his combined fleet which was waiting in the Tsushima Straits to the Tsugaru Straits and was only prevented from doing so by colleagues on his flagship, the Mikasa, particularly the maverick Captain Akiyama Saneyuki. What must have been in Togo’s head after all the confusing rumors was his guess about Russia’s intentions after the fall of Port Arthur. Would Rozhestvenskii not have decided to take his armada to Vladivostok by way of Tsugaru avoiding Tsushima? Since we also know that Rozhestvenskii sent two vessels

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as a feint to the east of Taiwan and Japan, Togo’s surmise may not have been so far-fetched. Of course, hindsight tells us that Rozhestvenskii sent his main force by the most direct route through the Tsushima Straits largely because of shortage of coal. It was no small achievement to take such a large fleet on a journey which the Japanese admiringly reckoned at “18,000 ri” despite the difficulty of coaling without bases and attending to repairs on the open sea.24 This struck a chord with the Japanese perhaps because of the fellow-feeling of one maritime nation for another. Certainly Togo and the Japanese admirals in general took a benign attitude to the Russian commanders after their surrender into Japanese captivity. (The war ended tragically for the Imperial Japanese Navy with the accident to the flagship Mikasa on September 9 which put it out of action for two years.) The naval war was an intelligence war where the movements of Russian ships, Russian morale and Russian coaling were essential knowledge for the Japanese war effort. The fact was that an armada as big as the Baltic fleet, forty-seven ships belching forth smoke from their funnels, could not escape detection by journalists, merchant ships’ captains and consuls at ports which it passed by. In the colorful phrase Rozhestvenskii’s squadron was “like a rabbit in a turnip field.”25 While its routes were not entirely clear, the so-called “tortoise Baltic Fleet” stood out and was under regular observation by the ships of all countries among whom Russia did not have many friends. It was subject to a massive intelligence operation in which the British (who kept a close watch after the Dogger Bank incident), Portuguese, Dutch, and Norwegians took part. But, most of all, the Japanese were especially vigilant about Russia’s progress; and Rozhestvenskii’s ships were conscious of this. Engineer Politovskii records that German colliers often carried Chinese and Japanese members in their crews, especially around Cam Ranh Bay during coaling operations. The extent and impact of this intelligence information are not entirely clear to this day.26 It was of course the naval victory, much more decisive and one-sided than the land victories, that enabled the final stage of the war to be reached. With command of the seas it was possible for Japan to undertake the delayed conquest of the island of Sakhalin (see Chapter 7) which had been a bone of contention with Russia since the nineteenth century. Now that army campaigns had been stalled and the Russian failure at sea had further demoralized the armies in Manchuria, Japan could use her unquestioned supremacy to send an expeditionary force to make an amphibious landing on the island on 7 July. By 1 August her l3th Division had moved from the south to occupy the north of the island and receive the surrender of General Ryabunov and his defense force. Though this campaign was a walkover, its wisdom was hotly disputed in Japan herself : it was criticized by some as a sideshow at a time when the main concentration should have been on the Manchurian front. But Japan was not unaware that her hands would be immeasurably strengthened at the forthcoming peace conference by this incursion into sovereign Russian territory.27

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 PORTSMOUTH NEGOTIATIONS

Japan’s delegate, Foreign Minister Komura, set off for peace talks in the United States on July 8, 1905, the day following the landing of the troops on Sakhalin. Paradoxically the future status of the island was to be one of the issues which made the peace-making most hotly contested. The peace conference began at the Navy Yard, Kittery, Maine near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on 10 August when demands were passed over. It was an interesting choice: a site well away, it was hoped, from the prying eyes of the world press, as in the cases of Hiroshima and Shimonoseki in 1895. Japan’s hope was still for negotiation in secret. But this did not work. Secrecy about the proceedings was observed by the Japanese but not by the Russians who appealed to opinion world wide. There was basic agreement between the delegates on the central terms, namely the transfer of the railroad and leased territories in southern Manchuria from Russia to Japan. But the proceedings still reached deadlock after two weeks. Komura found that his demands for Russia to pay an indemnity and transfer the whole of Sakhalin island to Japan were not going to be accepted and asked to be recalled. Anti-Russian groups in Japan were calling for a tough peace. Despite strong popular protests, the Tokyo government, in line with advice from President Theodore Roosevelt, decided at an Imperial Conference on 28 August to accept the final negotiated terms and not to insist on the whole of its auxiliary demands. It was not prepared to remove its delegates, telling them: Through your efforts we have resolved the important issues regarding Korea and Manchuria which were our objects in making war. We have decided, bearing in mind military and economic circumstances, that we have no alternative but to give up the two issues, the indemnity and cession of territory [Sakhalin], and that peace should be brought about.28

By way of a gloss on these “military and economic circumstances,” the cabinet passed a reasoned minute: Judging from our war experience up to now, Harbin might fall to us by the end of the year and we could reach Vladivostok without bringing Russia to her knees . . . We cannot guarantee that we shall not be deeply bogged down in financial difficulties, having exhausted both foodstuffs and ammunition.29

It was obviously a controversial decision for the Tokyo cabinet to overturn the advice of their plenipotentiary. But there were perfectly good reasons for Japan to make concessions apart from intervention by the American president. The military leaders were all cautious: bottlenecks on the Trans-Siberian Railway had been removed and two new army

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corps were allegedly about to arrive from Europe. The harvest in Japan was bad and the farming situation was critical. Japan had had to give up her plan to increase her army by six divisions for financial reasons. In spite of these arguments in favor of an early peace, it was a disappointing outcome for Japan after her victories in battle. But on the Russian side, the situation was quite the opposite. It appears that the tsar, faced with deadlock at Portsmouth and in spite of Roosevelt’s strong advice to clinch the peace, recalled the Russian delegate, Sergei Witte, but the latter would not take responsibility for such a breach. Witte had not really been the first choice of the tsar as plenipotentiary and was only accepted when Aleksandr Nelidov, Aleksandr Izvolskii, and Nikolai V. Murav’ev had declined to serve. The expert on the Portsmouth Conference, Professor Eugene Trani, takes the view that Witte merely ignored the tsar’s order, feeling that it was vague.30 My interpretation is that Witte knew that whoever walks out of a peace conference is blamed at the bar of world opinion and that he personally was likely to be made the scapegoat for failure, not the tsar. Neither side wanted to be seen as the first to break off negotiations. Witte had a strong sense that Komura was on the verge of pulling out of Portsmouth and calling off the talks. He therefore waited to let the Japanese take the blame. He took the personal responsibility for continuing the talks and reaching some agreement, however disagreeable, predicting that it was likely to be accepted by the Russian liberals, who would prevail when a national assembly of some sort was convened. He may also have recognized that the Supreme Autocrat had been severely weakened by events earlier in the year and could be bypassed in the national interest. But the British ambassador at the time, Hardinge, told Komura later that Japan’s climb down was just in time as there were signs that the party in favor of continuing the war in Russia was gaining influence at that precise moment.31 One has to conclude that the peace treaty signed on September 5, 1905 was something of a fluke. Yet it was vitally important and its terms echo through the rest of the twentieth century. The views expressed by the plenipotentiaries at Portsmouth revealed the attitudes of their countries for several decades to come.32 There is a striking contrast in the reaction of the two countries to the peace treaty. In Japan it had been a popular war and became an unpopular peace. Professor Matsumura calls it a people’s war (kokumin senso).33 In Russia it had been a remote and unpopular war and became an acceptable peace. On the day of the signing there were widespread riots in Tokyo opposed to the humiliating treaty, culminating in the burning of police boxes and the offices of Kokumin Shimbun, the only pro-government newspaper. There was remarkable unanimity among the other newspapers in their hostility. Martial law was declared. Tokyo’s experience was replicated throughout Japan. It was a popular movement which linked together many groups who were all disappointed at the terms; and the motives of most were nationalistic and strongly anti-government. But the demonstration was slightly

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flawed as the editorial of the English-language paper, Japan Weekly Mail, suggests: . . . men will begin to wonder whether any principle of constitutionalism demands that a ministry should resign because a mob, instigated by party politicians [members of Kensei Honto], has smashed police-boxes and behaved with unruly violence.34

The evidence suggests that the leader of the other party, the Seiyukai, supported the need for peace. This may have been partly because of the prospect of Katsura Taro’s likely resignation in the near future and partly because of Ito’s influence. Ito was widely regarded by the public as having had the major say in the humiliating climb down. Certainly he was one of those who favored the restoration of peace at any price. But, so far as we know, there was unanimity in the council when it met in the presence of the emperor. These diverse demonstrations around Japan in favor of continuing the war were, of course, democratic voices which had to be heard but they were generally nationalistic and extremist. The myth was created in the mind of the Japanese public that her plenipotentiaries had failed in the peace-making; that they had not put the Japanese case strongly and persuasively enough; and that they had not played the foreign press correctly. These myths were largely untrue. In fact, Komura had been the author of very stringent terms and, judging by the record of the conference, argued very strongly for them. But the plenipotentiaries had differing perspectives on the war and especially on the degree of Russia’s defeat. During the negotiations, Witte stated that Russia did not yet regard herself as having been defeated; she had only failed in battle.35 This certainly made it difficult for Komura to realize Japan’s peace terms. Japan had brought about the crushing defeat of the largest Russian army ever assembled for the purpose of war up to this time, but after eighteen months of war and the loss of 300,000 men, Russia had still over half a million combatants in the field. That Japanese soldiers, though more modest in numbers, had been admirable in battle was not in dispute. Japan had conquered new territories which she continued to occupy and had benefited greatly. But her public opinion had not been handled well. Japan had made errors in her treatment of information during the war, concealing losses, both military and naval disasters and the very high battle casualties. She reaped the whirlwind in the humbling demonstrations that took place in Hibiya Park. In the long term, Japan had closed the chapter of “Russian aggression in Asia,” to quote the conclusion of the British ambassador in Russia, Charles Hardinge.36 After Witte’s performance at Portsmouth, the Japanese were skeptical about this and kept an open mind for a decade to come. Russia was such a big country with a massive investment that she could never turn her back on her eastern Maritime Provinces. Moreover, she continued to be active in central Asia and on the borders of Afghanistan.

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Russia gave up some of the gains she had made in southern Manchuria since 1898 but she was still powerful in the north of the country. She had to continue to be active there in order to ensure the future commercial viability of her railway. She felt deeply the loss of a substantial piece of sovereign territory (Sakhalin). But, overall, she had not made the concessions her performance in battle might have justified. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

Matsumura, 2003b. Nish,1985: 241–242. Okamoto, 1970: 119–121 Tupper, 1965; Inoue, 1990. Lukoianov, 2005: 85–86. Nish, 2003: 69–75. Evans, 2003, I: 76–80 Hurd, 2003: vii. Nish, 2004: 14–15. Times War, 1905: 5991. Quoted in Ignatyev, 1944: 274. The Times, 1905: 559. Steinberg, 2005: 114–115. Matsusaka, 2005: 185–195. Ignatyev: 1944: 286. Okamoto, 1970: 109–171. Ignatyev, 1944: 239. Matsumura, 2003a: 27. Nish, 1966: 70–83. Luntinen and Menning, 2005. Port Artur, 2003, 36–37. Ikeda, 1987, I; Luntinen and Menning, 2005: 240–242; Port Artur, 2003, 79–81. Ikeda, 1987, I: 308–336; Politovsky, 1906; Westwood, 1986: 145–151. Ri in Japanese means 3.927 kilometer. In Ikeda, 1987, I: 293–307. The Times, 1905: 569. Inaba, 2004; Chapman, 2004; Ikeda, 1987, I: 311–313; Politovsky, 1906: 264. White, 1964: 223–4. NGB, Meiji 37/8, Nichiro senso, V: no. 284. Kajima, 1978, I: 350 Trani, 1969: 155; Esthus, 1988: 158. Hardinge, 1947: 116–117; NGB, Meiji 37/8, Nichiro senso, V: no. 284 (2), Komura to Saionji, September 13, 1906. The most exhaustive account in English is Kajima, 1978, I: 237–399. Matsumura, 2004. JWM, September 23, 1905. Kajima, 1978, I: 465–466. Hardinge, 1947: 117.

6

The Secret Factor: Japanese Network of Intelligence-gathering on Russia during the War INABA CHIHARU AND ROTEM KOWNER

M

odern conflicts are characterized by vast intelligence-gathering. Present-day nations run huge infrastructures to gather any possible information and consider them a vital asset, as well as a symbol of national prowess. Today, even laymen can easily obtain information on remote theaters of war, while sitting comfortably in their living rooms and watching TV or surfing the internet. More professional organizations may gather virtually limitless information on any target or issue, using satellites, airplanes, radars, and other means of COMINT, SIGINT, ELINT, IMINT, ISINT, and defense HUMINT.1 In pre-modern times, intelligence organizations were much smaller and less sophisticated, and gathering information was far more difficult. Pre-modern wars were fought with the sides having very little knowledge or careful assessment of the enemy and its capabilities.2 The significance of intelligence gathering began to grow in the nineteenth century, and in this respect the Russo-Japanese War seems to be a crossroads, if not a turning point, in which military intelligence gained major importance affecting the course of the entire campaign. In modern conflicts, intelligence gathered before the outbreak of hostilities enables decision makers to judge the intentions of their enemy, to assess its relative power, and to devise plausible ways to exploit the enemy’s weak points. In wartime, intelligence may make it possible to identify opportunities to undermine the enemy and to facilitate decisions regarding the timing of a diplomatic denouement. The Russo-Japanese War was no exception. Before and during the nineteenmonth war both belligerents were active in assembling data about each other’s military preparations, combat potential, and war plans, as well

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as tactical information for immediate use during a battle. Predicting a conflict between them, both Japan and Russia established networks of agents who collected information, such as the deployment of the enemy’s naval and army units and bases, landing sites, and acquisition of weapons. Whereas the Japanese deployed numerous agents in Manchuria and Korea and were able to assess accurately the strengths and weaknesses of their foes, and pinpoint the deployment of the units of the Imperial Russian Army and Imperial Russian Navy in East Asia, the Russians relied on reports of a small number of agents and attachés, notably Colonel G.M. Vannovskii, who resided in Japan in 1900–1902.3 How badly Russia underestimated the military strength of Japan is evident from Vannovskii’s reports, but the war revealed that it failed in other respects too. It misunderstood Japan’s motives and strategic vision, and it was ignorant of its general capacity and tactical skills. In all these aspects, ranging from gathering and analyzing information, subversion and instigating opposition to disseminating propaganda, Japan fared far better. Foreign observers in 1904–05 and afterwards often expressed their astonishment at the Japanese victory over Russia, whose land army at the beginning of the twentieth century was the world’s largest. None of them mentioned or even considered intelligence gathering as a significant factor in Japan’s military success. Although an increasing number of studies have examined the failure of intelligence gathering and estimates on the Russian side, the importance of this topic on the Japanese side has by and large been overlooked.4 While relatively much has been written on the adventurous but rather unproductive efforts Japanese agents made in Europe to promote subversion against Russia during the war, very few articles, if any, have reviewed systematically the intelligence gathering organizations in Japan in that period.5 Based on archival sources, this chapter aims at filling this gap through a preliminary description of Japanese organizations for intelligence gathering and their activities, as well as assessing their effect on Japan’s war efforts. SOURCES ABOUT INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES DURING THE WAR IN JAPANESE ARCHIVES

Only few primary sources are available today on the intelligence activities of Japan during the Russo-Japanese War. There are a number of private collections, especially at the disposal of Kensei shiryoshitsu, the National Diet Library, Tokyo. This archive contains the papers of Akashi Motojiro, who set up an intelligence network in the Russian Empire as military attaché to Sweden, including some detailed statements about the sums he paid to his spies, and letters from spies; the papers of Nagaoka Gaishi, Deputy Chief of the General Staff, who directly commanded military attachés; the papers of Iguchi Shogo, Chief of the General Department of the General Staff, who settled the

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intelligence accounts; and the papers of Terauchi Masatake, Minister of War, who partly controlled Akashi‘s activity in Tokyo.6 Similarly, there are a few files about intelligence activities during the war in the Diplomatic Record Office (NGK) in Tokyo; the Foreign Ministry did not file them under the title “Intelligence,” but nonetheless has kept documents on each subject. Files about the ministry’s secret funds were almost completely destroyed soon after Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II. Most of the documents related to the war in the General Staff and the Naval General Staff met a similar fate, and the remaining ones were confiscated by the Allied forces and were returned to Japan in the 1950s. Thanks to the Ministry of the Imperial Household, important material on the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, reported to the Emperor, was kept in its library until the 1950s. They were moved to the Library of the Military History Department, National Institute of Defense Studies, Defense Agency (LMHD), under the title Chiyoda shiryo. Today, certain documents about military and naval intelligence, including military and naval attachés’ telegrams and reports, are available there. Finally, documents regarding the fourth intelligence organization, the Foreign Bureau of the Police Department, Ministry of Interior, were reduced to ashes during and especially soon after World War II. INTELLIGENCE ORGANIZATIONS AND THEIR PURPOSES

On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan did not have a combined intelligence structure, either for defense intelligence (joho) or for covert activities overseas (choho). Instead, it relied on three organizations, and all took part in intelligence gathering on Russia. The Foreign Ministry, Political Department (Seimukyoku) The core organization for intelligence gathering at the Foreign Ministry was the Political Department. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the number of staff proper at the ministry was only seventy-four. About ten officials worked in the Political Department. There were no such sections as today‘s Asian Department or European Department. Except for economic affairs, all the staff dealing with political issues were concentrated in these department.7 Although Japanese legations and consulates dispatched fewer telegrams and reports than today, this department seemed to face many difficulties with the amount sent at times of crisis, such as wartime. When information about Russia arrived in Tokyo the officials in charge read it first, and then transferred it to the director of the department, Yamaza Enjiro, for further analysis. If he deemed it important, copies of the particular telegram were forwarded to the organization in charge. Information on the Trans-Siberian Railway, for example, was forwarded to the General Staff, information on the Baltic Fleet to the Naval General Staff, and so on. The Political Department analyzed a

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great deal of information, and once every few months printed a summary entitled Nichiro jiken yoho (Report on Russo-Japanese Affairs), which was distributed to a relatively broad audience, including Emperor Meiji, each ministry, the General Staff, the Naval General Staff, etc.8 The purpose of the ministry‘s intelligence activities was to obtain necessary information for the use of Japanese diplomacy. As the RussoJapanese War was considered to some extent a limited war aimed at obtaining concessions in Manchuria and Korea, both belligerents were willing to conclude a peace treaty under reasonable conditions. The ministry in charge of treaties had to collect information concerning discussions on peace in the Great Powers. The foreign policy of Russia and the other great powers attracted Japan‘s attention too. One crucial aspect was the inclination and willingness of each of the great powers to declare its neutrality soon after the outbreak of hostilities, and consequently the ministry also paid much attention to any violations of neutrality (e.g. an embargo on the export of prohibited goods in wartime and the enemy‘s warships calling at neutral countries‘ ports). Other major issues were Russian plans for raising foreign loans in Europe and America, and the attitudes and conduct of France, Russia’s principal ally. For the purpose of judging Russian capacity of continuing the war, the Political Department kept an eye on Russian internal affairs: political parties, movements of the court, economics, society, public opinion, and activities of revolutionary and other opposition movements.9 The General Staff, The Russian Section of the First Bureau (Roshiya han) Following the military reform of 1899, the General Staff established an independent intelligence bureau, which included the First Bureau (in charge of Russia, Manchuria, Central and North Europe, Balkan Peninsula) and the Second Bureau (in charge of United Kingdom, Holland, and their respective colonies, China except for Manchuria, South-East Asia, and the United States). The largest and most important section in the First Bureau was undoubtedly the Russian Section (Roshiya han), which was in charge of planning operations in case of a conflict with the Russian Empire, as well as gathering and analyzing information about it.10 The head of the section before the war was Major Tanaka Giichi, a former assistant military attaché in Russia and a future war minister and prime minister (1927–29).11 Fluent in Russian and proficient in ballroom dancing popular in St. Petersburg, Tanaka knew the war arena first hand and kept abreast of local affairs. Completing a four-year stint in St. Petersburg in April 1902, he returned to Japan via Siberia. In the tradition of earlier “intelligence riders,” such as Fukushima Yasumasa’s reconnaissance mission in Siberia, Mongolia, and Manchuria during 1892–93, Tanaka explored Russia’s major transport routes and bases in East Asia. He traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Karymskoye and on the Chinese Eastern Railway to Harbin, then sailed down the Sungari

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and Amur rivers and visited Khabarovsk, the vicinity of Vladivostok, and Port Arthur.12 In the months before the war, and more so with the outbreak of hostilities in February 1904, each military unit in the front, and every military attaché abroad, searched for any possible information and additional data on the Russian army.13 The materials gathered were first examined in the Russian Section, and then, important information was quickly distributed to the appropriate organizations. One of the section‘s main tasks was to draw very detailed battlefield maps frequently, and to mark the location of enemy units on them on the basis of the latest data.14 When the Manchurian Army was newly organized in June 1904, most of the staff of the Russian Section were assigned to the general headquarters of the army and dispatched to Manchuria, together with Tanaka. Thereafter, most information was not dispatched to Tokyo but directly to the headquarters in Manchuria and analyzed there. Once a month the headquarters updated the list of Russian military formations in Northeast Asia, together with detailed maps indicating the location of the Russian units.15 After the core organization of the army intelligence moved to Manchuria, the remaining personnel in the General Staff in Tokyo dealt only with information sent by military attachés and forwarded them to the headquarters. Once every few months they produced handwritten reports entitled Rogun no kinkyo (the Recent Russian Military Situation in the Far East) and printed some copies of Saikin no rogun (the Present Russian Army).16 In these publications they provided detailed information on the names, sizes, and places of Russian units newly sent to the front. Judging from the surviving copies, the most important intelligence issue they faced was information concerning the exact scale and place of Russian military units in Manchuria at the given time and their prospects in the near future. Accordingly, the Japanese intelligence organizations were interested in mobilization and military supply in European Russia and the transport capacity of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was virtually the only line of supply for the Russian army stationed in Manchuria.17 Naval General Staff, The Third Bureau (Dai san pan) Out of the fifty-four personnel of the Naval General Staff in Tokyo during the war, sixteen people, including technical officers and printers, were assigned to the Third Bureau, namely the naval intelligence branch.18 This branch dealt with large quantities of information concerning Russian naval activities gathered by intelligence officers in major ports throughout East and South-East Asia, naval attachés in Europe, and personnel observation points on the coast of Formosa, Korea, and Japan, and reconnaissance ships. During the war this intelligence organization issued more than 1,200 mimeographed reports entitled Dai kai jo (Information of the Imperial Naval Headquarters) which were distributed to the headquarter of the Combined Fleet and other significant organizations.19 Reading these reports, we may conclude that the Naval General Staff was concerned

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about the existence of Russian submarines in the Pacific arena at the first stage of war. These baseless fears were the result of the mistaken conviction that the two Japanese battleships Yashima and Hatsuse, sunk off Port Arthur on April 15, 1904, were hit by torpedoes launched from submarines that had arrived shortly before.20 In the following months this organization was concerned mainly with the movements of the Russian naval units in Port Arthur and Vladivostok, and following the departure of the Baltic Fleet in October 1904 it collected information concerning its movements, as well as the name, type, and scale of ships, the names of their captains and the capability of their crews, ports of call, and the arrival and departure time, the future route and the plan of operations.21 INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES OVERSEAS AND IN THE WAR THEATER

The Japanese intelligence personnel abroad included diplomats, military attachés, and naval attachés. Each group collected information only for a specific organization: the Foreign Ministry, General Staff, and Naval General Staff, respectively. Legations and Consulates In January 1904, the foreign ministry ordered its branches overseas (see Table 6.1), consisting of legations, consulates, and commercial agents‘ offices, to gather information on Russia. The demand exerted extreme pressure. The legation in Paris, for example, consisted of only seven staff members, apart from the military and naval attachés, their assistants, and local personnel. Of the seven diplomats, only two or three were able to collect the information requested from Tokyo.22 Part of the daily assignments of diplomats stationed in legations overseas was to scan the main newspapers in their respective spheres, occasionally with the help of translators, and determine whether news items were important. They attended parties sponsored by the government or legations of the great powers, and exchanged information with foreign diplomats and leading figures of the host country‘s government. In addition, they gathered information using agents of Japanese trading and shipping companies, as well as newspaper correspondents stationed abroad. Finally, some specific information was purchased from nonJapanese people who visited the legations to sell it.23 The diplomats had to request the ministry in Tokyo for permission to pay for such information. Naturally, this source was unreliable and there were more than a few cases where high prices were paid for false information.24 Japanese intelligence agents actively employed spies and local agents. This activity was not new: and a decade earlier, during the Sino-Japanese War, Japanese diplomats had begun to practice it widely.25 Outside the war arena the Army and Navy had to entrust the collection of military and naval information to the Foreign Ministry, because neither organization had sufficient trained intelligence officers able to take an active part in intelligence gathering in foreign countries.26 On January 12,

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1904, the Foreign Minister, Komura Jutaro, ordered his personnel to employ two spies each in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and Vladivostok.27 In Odessa and Vladivostok the order was fulfilled.28 In St. Petersburg, however, even the crafty military attaché to Russia, Colonel Akashi Motojiro, failed to follow the instruction due to the strict surveillance of the okhrana (tsarist secret police). As the prospects for war increased, the ministry hurried in February to set up a legation in Stockholm as part of an attempt to establish an intelligence network in the Russian capital and control it from abroad.29 Further calls to establish a spy network in Russia were made soon after the battle of Liaoyang (August 28–September 4, 1904), the surrender of Port Arthur (January 2, 1905), and the battle of Tsushima (May 27–28, 1905).30 Japanese intelligence activities against Russian missions in Asia took place in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and in a few other places where Japanese legations or consulates were established. Shanghai, probably the biggest business center in East Asia at that time and the terminal of a submarine telegraph cable between Japan and the outside world, became a particular venue of the intelligence struggle between Japan and Russia.31 When Japanese legations and consulates decided to employ spies they asked Tokyo for funds. After permission was obtained payment was effected via telegraphic transfer. The diplomats asked the spies for detailed and signed receipts, which they forwarded to Tokyo.32 Overall, the Foreign Ministry spent huge sums on intelligence. Makino Nobuaki, Japan’s minister to Vienna, for example, dispatched an Austrian spy to Russia for forty-eight days, and paid 4,500 yen (worth about 36 million yen today, or about $US330,000), including transport and accommodation fees.33 On the basis of this figure, Makino‘s payments to two spies employed throughout the war (nineteen months) reached almost 110,000 yen ($8 million), and the total expenditure of Japanese covert intelligence activities in Europe may have exceeded 400,000 yen ($30 million).34 Another aspect of the expenditures was telegraph fees, especially diplomatic telegrams, which were extremely expensive at that period. For example, a telegram with approximately thirty-three words between Paris and Tokyo cost 85 yen ($640).35 The Japanese legation in Paris sent 280 telegrams to Tokyo in 1904, which alone cost 23,800 yen ($1.8 million). There were six legations in Europe where intelligence work was conducted. On the basis of those figures, more than 250,000 yen ($19 million) was spent simply on telegraph use between Europe and Japan during the war. ARMY INTELLIGENCE

The intelligence activities conducted by the army in the theater of war were partly centralized and partly decentralized. Each of the five armies and the thirteen divisions which took part in the war dispatched its own scouts to obtain HUMINT combat intelligence in the war zone and its periphery in Korea and Manchuria. As the scouts went on horseback,

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their range was somewhat restricted. Before the war the army had not had a special training program for scouts, and as a result, intelligence officers were occasionally unable to report accurate information to their headquarters.36 In Manchuria, both the Japanese and the Russians employed many Chinese agents, some of whom were eventually captured and executed as enemy spies. Japanese ability to infiltrate Russian positions using Chinese was thorough; they could even bribe a Chinese translator in the Russian general headquarters in Manchuria and acquire through him some important information.37 In many cases, Japanese intelligence officers could themselves infiltrate the Russian lines disguised as locals. A case in point is the almost legendary exploits of Ishimitsu Makiyo, who collected information on Russian activities in Manchuria before the war while residing in Harbin under the guise of a laundryman, photographer, barber, and trader.38 Direct and indirect contacts with agents were handled by intelligence officers of each army and division. Colonel Aoki Norizumi, the military attaché in Beijing, cooperated with Yuan Shikai, a Chinese official and statesman, who supported Japan’s war effort and became president of the first republic of China a decade later. Yuan acquired information on the Russian army in Manchuria, which was sent at first to the General Staff in Tokyo, and then sent back to the general headquarters of the Japanese Manchurian Army, where it was useful in planning operations.39 The exploits of Colonel Akashi in Europe merit probably the greatest consideration. On January 12, 1904, when the Imperial Conference determined the day the war would be launched, the General Staff ordered Akashi to establish an intelligence network within Russian territory. Under the eyes of the Russian police, Akashi was able to subvert an officer of the Russian general staff, but could not organize the network effectively in St. Petersburg. After the outbreak of war he moved to Stockholm and started to reorganize in cooperation with Finnish ex-officers and officers of the Swedish general staff. He also employed a Hungarian mediator and dispatched agents to the main stations of the Trans-Siberian Railway.40 Akashi, however, was not the only player in the Russian intelligence sphere. Japanese military attachés stationed in the capitals of the great powers, assistant attachés, and diplomats were also involved in the endeavor to establish a network to monitor Russian war activities. The military attaché in Berlin, Colonel Oi Kikutaro (Shigemoto), for example, analyzed public information in German newspapers and journals. Colonel Utsunomiya Taro, the military attaché in London, received large amounts of information on the Russian army from the intelligence section of British War Office.41 This information was one of the most important British contributions to the Japanese war effort, and it was given on the basis of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance concluded in 1902. Naval Intelligence The military potential of a given navy is determined by the number and quality of its warships. In contrast to the army, naval potential is roughly

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equal in peacetime and in wartime. For this reason, the main task of naval intelligence in wartime is to locate the positions and routes of enemy naval units rather than to assess size and quality of performance. After the victory at the battle of Chemulpo (off Inchon, Korea) on February 9, 1904, the Imperial Japanese Navy began its blockade of the main part of the Russian Pacific Fleet stationed in Port Arthur. While these efforts were by and large successful, the navy was unable to block the activities of the Vladivostok Independent Cruiser Squadron which harried Japanese military transport until late summer 1904.42 The monitoring failure resulted in the sinking of fifteen Japanese transport ships and almost led to the dismissal of Admiral Kamimura Hikonojo, commander of the Second Fleet, who was in charge of tracking the Russian cruisers. Eventually, however, on August 14, 1914, the Japanese efforts were successful, and Kamimura managed to redeem himself. On that day his force encountered the Russian squadron and sank the Rurik in the ensuing battle of the Korean Straits. This stopped the activities of the Russian squadron until the end of the war and eliminated a significant strategic menace. The Baltic Fleet in its new garb as the Second Pacific Fleet set the Japanese Navy a much greater task of monitoring activities. It became critical when the fleet approached Northeast Asia and the war arena in May 1905. To fulfill this task, the Navy constructed a large number of observation posts and watchtowers on the Goto islands, the Tsushima islands, and the southern coast of Korea, and deployed numerous patrol boats and ships to screen any naval movement in the area between the north of Kyushu and the south of Korea. Despite some justified pessimism, these efforts were eventually fruitful. In the early morning of 27 May, the armed merchant cruiser Shinano maru detected the Russian armada and cabled the exciting news to the Combined Fleet anchoring in Chinhae, near Pusan on the southwest coast of Korea.43 The ultimate success in the battle of Tsushima a few hours later was the end of an eight-month endeavor, starting from the very day of the departure of the Russian Fleet in October 1904. It could not have materialized without the continuous flow of intelligence reports regarding the position of the fleet. Right from the start of the voyage Japan established a broad network to keep a constant eye on the movements of the fleet. Naval attachés stationed in main cities in Europe and port cities in Asia took an active part in gathering information on the movement and progress of the Baltic Fleet, as well as its formation, arms, morale of crew, supply, and routes. They cooperated with diplomats, and stationed agents along the German Baltic Sea coast and the straits between Sweden and Denmark. They were unable to station them, however, along the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and of Africa. In those areas Japan was helped by the British Admiralty, which provided the necessary information to Captain Kaburagi Makoto, the naval attaché in London and the intermediary at the Admiralty.44 Japan also acted independently at certain sites along the route of the Russian fleet. The Navy dispatched an intelligence officer, Commander

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Tonami Kurakichi, to Egypt to monitor the movement of a detachment of the Baltic Fleet under the command of Rear Admiral Dmitrii von Felkerzam (Fölkersam) and the possible and much feared sailing of the Black Sea Fleet via the Suez Canal.45 To fulfill his mission, Tonami slipped inside the harbor of Port Said impersonating an employee of Nihon Yusen Kaisha, Japan’s biggest shipping company. Other high-ranking naval officers were sent to ports believed to be the final stations of the Baltic Fleet en route to Vladivostok, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. They monitored the movements of Russian vessels, supply ships employed by Russia, and activities of the Russian agents in those ports. To support this network, the Japanese consul in Singapore ordered his agents stationed at Malacca, Sunda, and the Lombok Straits between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific to observe the passage of the Russian fleet, and he received the information from ships of friendly nations.46 In spring of 1905, the Naval General Staff also dispatched naval officers to main ports in China such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Yantai to collect information on Russian naval activities in East Asia and the western part of the Pacific Ocean.47 Evidently, these monitoring activities were not the cause of the Japanese victory in the battle of Tsushima, but without them it would not have materialized in the first place. OUTCOMES AND GENERAL ASSESSMENT

Intelligence activity is not only “the missing dimension of most diplomatic history,” as one diplomat described it, but is also the missing dimension of most military history.48 This is all the more apt in respect of Japan’s modern wars due to the destruction of many of the materials relevant to this activity soon after Japan’s surrender in 1945. Indeed, it is difficult to measure or even assess the success of an intelligence network. Usually the importance of intelligence is revealed when it is missing or when it fails to provide essential information, but what does success mean? In retrospect, the role of Japanese intelligence during the RussoJapanese War was to gather accurate information on Russia, thereby allowing the decision makers in the government and both the army and the navy to assess the potential and limitations of Russian power projection. It is, however, almost impossible to perform flawlessly and acquire not only all the necessary information on one’s opponent‘s affairs, but also to analyze them correctly. The Japanese intelligence services were far from perfection. They overestimated, among other things, the capacity of the Trans-Siberian Railway and ability of the Russians to deploy submarines in the Pacific arena. Some of the errors were caused by faulty analysis. In the case of the Trans-Siberian Railway, for example, an intelligence officer of the General Staff simply calculated the railway transport capacity on the basis of calculable Russian data. The railway, however, did not function according to theoretical calculations as the Japanese expected, and moved slower and carried fewer troops.49 The officer responsible for this

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analysis was unable to visualize the Russian climate and vast territory, to fathom the Russian temperament, or to assess and quantify their effect on military movements. Nonetheless, and unlike their attitude before and during the Pacific War (1941–45), during the Russo-Japanese War Japanese intelligence officers soberly carried out their task of gathering information and analyzed it with virtually no prejudice or sense of superiority, resulting occasionally in a slight overestimation of Russia’s capacities. A further issue is the operational outcome of intelligence activities. In the Russo-Japanese War, intelligence information and analysis were transferred immediately to other relevant branches of the two services, whereas in the Pacific War, such information was not reflected well in Japanese military policy and operation-making. Although it is difficult to compare the two wars, it seems that intelligence activities during the former were successful partly due to careful information gathering, modest analysis, and transferring the information to operational units which treated it seriously and incorporated it in their planning. Finally, the Japanese intelligence services suffered during this war from very limited cryptanalysis capabilities. Even considering the limited technologies of cryptanalysis at that time, Japanese capabilities were inadequate, and certainly inferior to those of Russia.50 In the first place, the Japanese intelligence organizations were unable to intercept Russia diplomatic correspondence, as their rivals could, and if ever they succeeded they were probably unable to decipher it.51 The materials found in the Japanese archives shed no further light on this issue, and there is some kernel of truth in Andrew and Dilkes’ assessment that the absence of this dimension condemned the Japanese intelligence community to “second-class status.”52 In a broad view, however, Japanese intelligence was efficient and provided much of the information necessary for Japan, helping its two military services to conduct their warfare and its leaders to make the necessary decisions. It certainly lacked many of the capacities known today, or even those possessed by the great powers at that time, and by imperial Japan during the Pacific War. Nevertheless, Japanese intelligence gathering during the Russo-Japanese War should be examined against the backdrop of either its capacity in the first Sino-Japanese War or the Russian intelligence gathering in 1904–05. Compared with their performance a decade earlier, the Japanese intelligence organizations had undoubtedly grown more efficient and professional. Now they did not have to contend only with their familiar Asian front, but also with the European arena and along the route from Europe to Asia, where their agents did not have much experience in such activities. The Japanese intelligence skills are even more obvious when compared with Russian intelligence activities. By the end of the war the services of both nations emerged as mature and seasoned organizations, yet when examined from the perspective of the eve of the war in 1904 the Japanese organization proved much better in assessing the manpower

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Table 6.1: Japanese Intelligence Branches and Personnel before and during the Russo–Japanese War Diplomat

Army

Navy

London

Hayashi Tadasu (M)

Paris

Motono Ichiro (M)

Berlin

Inoue Katsunosuke (M)

Colonel Utsunomiya Taro Major Hisamatsu Sadakoto Colonel Oi Kikutaro

Vienna Rome Madrid The Hague Brussels Stockholm

Makino Nobuaki (M) Oyama Tsunasuke (M) Akabane Shiro (M) Mitsuhashi Nobukata (M) Kato Tsunetada (M) Akiduki Satsuo (M)

Captain Kaburagi Makoto Commander Ichijo Saneteru Captain Takigawa Kazumasa – – – – – –

St. Petersburg* Kurino Shin’ichiro (M) Odessa*

Iijima Kametaro (C)

Vladivostok* Washington, D.C.

Kawakami Toshitsune (CA) Takahira Kogoro (M)

Istanbul Port Said

Iijima Kametaro (SA) –

Simla, India

–

Bangkok Singapore

Inagami Manjiro (M) Tanaka Tokichi (C)

Hong Kong

Noma Seiichi (C)

Shanghai

Odagiri Masunosuke (CG)

Yantai, China

Mizuno Kokichi (C)

Tianjin

Ijuin Hikokichi (CG)

Beijing

Uchida Yasuya (M)

Yingkou

Segawa Asanoshin (M)

Seoul

Hayashi Gonsuke (M)

Major Johoji Goro – – – – Colonel Akashi Motojiro Colonel Akashi Motojiro Captain Muto Nobuyoshi Major Ishizaka Zenjiro Colonel Tachibana Koichiro – – Captain Azuma Otohiko – – – Lieutenant Colonel Tsuneyoshi Tadamichi Major Morita Toshito Major General Sennami Taro Colonel Aoki Norizumi Captain Kawasaki Ryosaburo Major General Ijichi Kosuke

Captain Sakai Tadatoshi – – Lieutenant Commander Takeshita Isamu – Commander Tonami Kurakichi – Captain Mori Yoshitaro Lieutenant Tojo Akitsugu Lieutenant Miyaji Tamisaburo Captain Nishi Shinrokuro – Lieutenant Commander Yoshida Masujiro – Lieutenant Commander Yoshida Masujiro

* Before the war (M) Minister, (CG) Consul General, (C) Consul, (CA) Commercial Agent, (SA) Secret Agent

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then available to Russia in Northeast Asia, its actual capabilities, and its course of action in case of a conflict. Japanese intelligence organizations were also more skillful in gathering tactical information using reconnaissance parties in Manchuria and Korea, and were more competent in recruiting the local population to assist in their needs. Russian intelligence services, by contrast, underestimated Japan’s capacities and misjudged its hostile intentions. They failed to create any significant intelligence network in Japan, and were oblivious most of the time to the deployment of their enemy‘s land and naval units.53 All in all, Japanese intelligence organizations and information gathering activities before and during the Russo-Japanese War were deficient in certain aspects, but they were adequate for a regional conflict with a foe such as Russia, whose intelligence gathering functioned worse. Japan‘s intelligence organizations were not large at that stage, but they focused closely on the genuine strategic needs of a nation at war and provided much of the information necessary to open hostilities by a surprise attack, conduct a successful military campaign, and conclude the war with a reasonable agreement around the negotiating table. In this sense, the RussoJapanese War perhaps marks the zenith of Japanese intelligence gathering. In later stages Japan’s intelligence organizations grew bigger and more sophisticated but they never performed so adequately again. NOTES 1

2 3 4

5

6

7 8 9

10

Acronyms for communications intelligence, signals intelligence, electronic intelligence, imagery intelligence, open source intelligence, and human intelligence. See, for example, Keegan, 2004. On Vannovskii, see Marshall, 2004: 394. For studies on intelligence activities and assessment before, during and after the war, see Inaba, 1993; Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, 1996; Inaba, 1993, 1998; Marshall, 2004, 2006, Sergeev, 2005: 283–285. For studies of various aspects of Japanese intelligence activities during this period, see Fält, 1976; Nish, 1984, 1987; Akashi, 1988; Inaba, 1992, 1994a, 1995; Wolff, 2005; Kujala, 2005; and the classic book of Tani, 1966. Inaba, 1994. See also Nagaoka Gaishi Monjo Kenkyukai, 1989; Iguchi Shogo Monjo Kenkyukai, 1994. Documents concerning intelligence in the Terauchi Papers have not been published yet. Gaimusho shokuin roku, 1903–08, NGK. Nichiro jiken yoho, No.1–7 [Bunko, Chiyoda shiryo 6, 214–20], LMHD. Kakkoku naisei kankei zassan (Rokoku no bu) [1.6.3.2–9], Nichiro kowa joyaku teiketsu ikken (Kakkoku no taido narabi ni yoron) [2.2.1.3–3], Nichiro sen‘eki kankei rokoku baruchikku kantai toko kankei ikken [5.2.2.20], Nichiro sen‘eki kankei kakkoku no churitsu zakken [5.2.14.8], Nichiro sen’eki kankei teikoku ni oite mitteisha shiyo zakken [5.2.7.3.], NGK. Hata, 1991: 479; Ariga,1994: 42–44.

The Secret Factor 11 12 13

14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21

22 23

24

25

26 27

28

29

30

31

32

33

91

Tanaka, 1958: 183. Tanaka, 1958: 185–214. Important telegrams from each commander were filed in Gogai denpo ([Bunko, Chiyoda shiryo, 362–83], LMHD) and reports from each military attaché in Toku denpo ([Bunko, Chiyoda shiryo, 384–402], LMHD) . Kyokuto rogun haichi zu, January 1904 [Bunko, Chiyoda shiryo, 1000], LMHD. Tani, 1966: 281. Manshu gun soshireibu [11, Nichiro, M37–426] LMHD. Rogun no kinkyo [Bunko, Chiyoda shiryo, 987–95], Saikin no rogun, No.14 [Bunko, Chiyoda shiryo, 996–99] , LMHD. Tani, 1966: 253.. Mitsuhashi to Komura, telegram No. 9 on January 9, 1905, Nichiro sen‘eki kankei teikoku ni oite mitteisha shiyo zakken. Hata, 1991: 418; Ariga, 1994: 237–239. Dai kai jo [9, Chiyoda, 156–66], LMHD. These battleships were sunk by mines. Mitsuhashi to Komura, telegram No.9 on January 9, 1905, Nichiro sen‘eki kankei teikoku ni oite mitteisha shiyo zakken. See Gaimusho shokuin roku. The most renowned foreign agent Japan employed before the war was probably Alexander von Siebold, the son of the German Japanologist Philipp Franz von Siebold. See Nish, 1977: 45, 270–272. Motono to Komura, telegram No. 1 on January 2, 1904, Komura to Motono, telegram No. 3 on January 7, 1904, Nichiro sen’eki kankei teikoku ni oite mitteisha shiyo zakken. On permission for such activities, see a message from Foreign Minister, Mutsu Munemitsu, to diplomat Kurino Shin’ichiro, December 15, 1894, quoted in Mutsu, 1982: 271. Tani, 1966: 299. Komura to Kurino Shin’ichiro, telegram No. 16 on January 12, 1904, Komura to Iijima, telegram No. 23 on January 12, 1904, Nichiro sen‘eki kankei teikoku ni oite mitteisha shiyo zakken. Iijima to Komura, telegram No. 36 on January 14, 1904, Nichiro sen’eki kankei teikoku ni oite mitteisha shiyo zakken. Kurino to Komura, telegram No. 31 on January 14, 1904, Hayashi Tadasu to Komura, telegram No. 83 on February 5, 1904, Nichiro sen‘eki kankei teikoku ni oite mitteisha shiyo zakken. Makino to Komura, telegram No. 58 on September 8, 1904, telegram No. 1 on January 4, 1905, telegram No. 29 on June 1, 1905, Nichiro sen‘eki kankei teikoku ni oite mitteisha shiyo zakken. Zai Shanhai ryoji raiden, January-June 1905, Microfilm, Telegrams, 1905 No.4290–5229 (TEL 64), No. 5230–6023 (TEL 65). See also Uyehara, 1954: 155; Inaba, 1993: 34–36. Mitsuhashi to Komura, report No. 130 on March 31, 1905, Exposes from 16/2–2613, L 81.37, A. Browne. Receipt from the 16 April to 16 May : the sum of 137.7, etc., Nichiro sen‘eki kankei teikoku ni oite mitteisha shiyo zakken. Makino to Komura, telegram No. 97 on June 15, 1904, Nichiro sen‘eki kankei teikoku ni oite mitteisha shiyo zakken.

92 34

35

36 37

38

39 40 41

42 43 44

45 46

47

48 49 50

51 52 53

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 Kurobane Shigeru estimated that the entire amount spent by Akashi surpassed one million yen ($75 million). In Kurobane, 1976: 86–87. “Tokuyaku denpo tsukibetsu tsusu narabi ni ryokinhyo,” Himitsu nikki, 1905 [Sanbohonbu, Nichiro sen‘eki, M38–2], LMHD. Tani, 1966: 277–282. On the Japanese superiority in recruiting Chinese agents in Manchuria, see Wolff, 2005: 321–328. See Ishimitsu’s memoir, Ishimitsu, 1958. On Ishimitsu’s exploits, see also Nish, 1985a. Tani, 1966: 278–281, 293–296. See also, Ch’en, 1961. Inaba, 1995: 17–43; Akashi, 1988: 37. Utsunomiya to Sanboo socho, report on October 13, 1903, Hi hokoku, October 1904 [Bunko, Chiyoda shiryo, 470], on June 18, 1904, Hi hokoku, June-July 1904 [Bunko, Chiyoda shiryo, 469], LMHD. Toyama, 1985: 106–134. Gunreibu, 1934: 232. Telegrams between Kaburagi and Chief of the Naval Staff, Meiji 37–8 nen senshi genko [11, Nichiro, M37 320] LMHD. Tonami chusa shutcho hokoku [10, Gaichuin, M30–12], LHHD. Kaigun gunreibu, Gokuhi, Meiji 37–8 nen kaisen shi, II [392. 15.G], LMHD, 1–25. See documents in Teikoku rikukaigun shoko kaigai haken zakken (Kaigun no bu), vol. 1 [5.1.10.4–2], NGK. Sir Alexander Cadogan, in Dilks, 1971: 21. Tanaka, 1958: 229–242. With French assistance, Russian intelligence organizations were able to decrypt Japanese telegrams during the war. The two nations also cooperated during the Moroccan crisis of 1905 and were able to decrypt German telegrams. Inaba, 1994b: 225–226. Andrew and Dilks, 1984: 8. See an analysis of Russia’s general intelligence capabilities in Sergeev, 2005: 304.

7

Chaos versus Cruelty: Sakhalin as a Secondary Theater of Operations MARIE SEVELA1

A great many people have recently been puzzled to comprehend what there was about a barren Arctic island to make Japan almost willing to break off the peace negotiations rather than fail to get the whole of it. As [the author] shows, the interest taken by the Japanese in the island of Sakhalin, or, as they call it, Kara[f]uto, is a mixture of the sentimental and the material.2

T

he above commentary by the editor of an American journal perfectly reflects Japan’s attitude towards this, if paraphrasing Anton Chekhov’s “most hellish place on earth”. Nature and climate made this island inhospitable for human life. On the other hand, its natural resources: coal, timber, fish, and, later on, gas and oil had transformed it into a “treasure island.” And what’s more, due to its geographic location, Sakhalin controls the only two outlets from the Sea of Japan to the Sea of Okhotsk. Consequently, it had rapidly become of prime strategic importance for both Russia and Japan and, understandingly, since having “discovered” it in the mid-seventeenth century neither country would willingly ever let it go. Until the nineteenth century, the island served as a mere buffer zone between Russia and Japan. However, from that time on, Sakhalin was permanently present in all territorial claims between the two countries. In 1855, by the Treaty of Shimoda, it became their mutual possession, but a mere twenty years later Russia took hold of it all in exchange for the Kurile Islands. Having lost ownership, Japan had nevertheless obtained, in addition to significant compensation, considerable privileges: dutyfree access for its vessels, fishing and commerce rights and the opening of a consular office.3 Thirty years went by. While the Russians were busy turning the island into the country’s largest penal colony and place of political exile, they

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seem to have ignored one important fact: Sakhalin (Karafuto) had always been regarded by the Japanese as theirs. They had been linked historically, economically and emotionally for over two centuries. Contrary to the Japanese, for whom Karafuto in those days meant nostalgia for the partially abandoned rich waters and vital minerals as well as a hurt national pride, for an ordinary Russian, Sakhalin was, above all, closely associated with horror. Indeed, Sakhalin’s insularity made it a perfect location for a penal colony. Settling it with forced and therefore free laborers was considered intelligent both politically and economically – reinforcing Russia’s presence and exploiting the island’s main natural wealth, the much-needed coal. The experience, which started so enthusiastically in 1869 and promised to be a success, rapidly attracted harsh criticism from all intellectual circles to finally become, in Russia’s collective consciousnesses, a symbol of the failure of the tsarist regime.4 When the war reached the island, its population numbered some 46,000 people, of whom 15 per cent were the island’s natives. Whereas initially, close to 80 per cent of its inhabitants were convicts, as years went by, however, the latter were gradually becoming free settlers, and by 1900 they were the majority. Prior to the war, there were 147 settlements, with ten churches and thirty-six schools on the island.5 We can therefore argue that in spite of the generally accepted view at the time that Sakhalin, with its penal history, was an economic and social fiasco and had therefore no future, its established communities and prosperous individual farms, on the contrary, were indications of its potential to become an agricultural and industrial colony. The Russo-Japanese War would put an end to the penal servitude (officially in 1906) and would also reduce Sakhalin’s population to less than 8,000. WAR

Despite Japan’s proximity, up until 1903 no plan for the defense of Sakhalin existed whatsoever. This was an island of convicts, and its military governor, Lieutenant General Liapunov,6 considered it unreasonable to keep troops there, apparently assuming that some 1,500 soldiers stationed on the island and a handful of prison guards would handle the situation if the need arose.7 Priamur Governor-General Nikolai Linievich as well as the war minister, General Aleksei Kuropatkin, after the latter’s visit to Sakhalin in 1903, saw it differently and frequently expressed their concern. They considered the defense of Sakhalin to be as crucial as that of Vladivostok. Most importantly, the fortification of the two strategic posts, Korsakov in the south and Aleksandrovsk in the north was, in their eyes, an emergency. Consequently, a special commission was set in Sakhalin to develop a defense strategy. Full plans were put on paper, but just as soon drowned in bureaucratic chaos while the different parties could not reach an agreement as to the costs involved in such operations. As a result, next to nothing was accomplished. General mobilization in Sakhalin was declared as early as mid-February

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1904; a month later it became part of the Maritime Province’s defense plan. This plan stipulated, among the rest, that the local forces were to be reinforced from the continent but, again, no urgency was felt in putting this into practice. On the other hand, apart from the formation of companies, an order was issued to form the so-called “voluntary detachments.”8 This was to become the particularity of the Sakhalin theatre of war. They were initially to be formed out of convicts, but eventually counted all settler categories present on the island, including the free population. All in all, twelve detachments were formed, with 200 soldiers in each.9 These people, often unfit for fighting either physically or mentally, or both, volunteered in exchange for one major privilege – a shortened sentence. This being said, it is highly unlikely that many of them were motivated to defend a land that was their prison. Moreover, by the time the fighting had actually started, a considerable number of them had served long enough to be freed and were therefore keen to avoid action at the first opportunity. With time their number per detachment dropped to a hundred. Oddly, during all this time, they were hardly trained and continued to work in fishery and coal mining as before, General Liapunov being more concerned with the production quotas than the ongoing war. Officers who were to train them arrived from Manchuria only in March 1905 and, naturally, could not turn them into efficient soldiers in a mere few months. These were, and we will develop it further, Russia’s first, albeit voluntary, penal battalions. The war’s first appearance on the island’s shore took place on August 20, 1904. A Japanese vessel approached post Korsakov, in the south, and opened fire before disappearing at sea. The same day, the Russian cruiser Novik, having escaped from Port Arthur, came to anchor at Korsakov. While refueling, its radiotelegraph intercepted a conversation between two Japanese ships; Novik left the harbor at full speed, but was found by Tsushima. Both opened fire and consequently suffered serious damage. Novik returned to Korsakov, but the following day Tsushima was back accompanied by Chitose. The two Japanese cruisers shelled the Novik until it was destroyed.10 On August 22, the following official announcement appeared in the Russian press: “[. . .] Our navy had lost one of its fastest and speediest cruisers, the pride of our forces and the terror of the Japanese [. . .].”11 This incident supplied the island with unexpected ammunition as fiftythree members of the crew were left on shore to disarm the Novik and build a battery out of its guns. As for the cruiser, it was decided to sink her in shallow waters till the end of hostilities. What the Russians could not know at the time was that the Novik would land in the hands of the Japanese along with the southern part of the island. This warning signal, announcing the imminent danger from Japan, however, did not make the due impression on the local authorities. A year passed. While the Russian command, having lost the battles of Mukden and Tsushima, concentrated its forces on the defense of the

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Maritime Province, the Japanese landed effortlessly in Sakhalin. And this despite the fact that the Russian government had been informed on the possible attack a month prior to the actions. When the military summit, held in Tsarskoe Selo on June 6, 1905, in the presence of Nicholas II and his top advisers, was called up to evaluate the situation and consider the pros and cons of seeking immediate peace with Japan, Sakhalin was at the top of the agenda, described as “in critical state, surrounded by the Japanese at sea.” Moreover, the participants were informed through a letter received from a Russian secret agent in London that the Japanese will most likely invade the island since “the local public opinion and deputies demand its return.”12 No conclusion was reached and the situation was allowed to follow its own course. Sakhalin was left to survive on its own means. Later, the battles on the island would be known as part of the “secondary theater of operations.” They were indeed of little military significance. Their legacy, on the contrary, was of much political and diplomatic importance. The attack on Sakhalin in July 1905 received little world attention. The main battles in the Japan Sea were over, the war was heading to a close. It goes without saying that, technically speaking, the defense of Sakhalin was from the start close to nonexistent. Due to the obvious weakness of the Russian troops, their lack of ammunition and absence of artillery, fighting the enemy at sea was unconceivable. It was, therefore, decided to wage guerrilla warfare, its main goal being to prevent the Japanese penetrating the inland. As a result, two distinct battlegrounds emerged: in the north, with the island’s only town, Aleksandrovsk and in the south, with the post of Korsakov. The area between the two, the centre, was almost impassable, the sea route was in the hands of the Japanese, and consequently the troops had to fight independently, not relying on each other’s help. By the time of the Japanese landing on the island, the Russian troops counted between 6,000 to 7,000 men (most of them in the north), twelve machine-guns, eighteen cannons and some 800 horses. Four field ambulances with a total of fifty-one beds were set up.13 The perfectly trained Japanese 13th Infantry Division, under the general command of Lieutenant General Haraguchi Kanenari, counting 14,000 ideally equipped men, attacked on July 7. Landing in the south, at Jorei in Aniwa Bay, the troops rapidly progressed northwards, smashing the five Russian partisan units, under the command of Colonel Kazanovich, Captains Bykov and Polubot’ko, and Staff-Captains Dairskii and Grotto-Slepikovskii. Of prime importance was the excellent organization of the troopships, supervised by the Vice-Admiral Kataoka Shichiro. All in all, the battles in the south lasted eleven days.14 In northern Sakhalin, since July 24, four partisan units were fighting under the general command of Lieutenant General Liapunov, when Lieutenant General Haraguchi, having handed over the command of the southern front to his subordinates went by sea to conquer the north. The first strategic maneuver undertaken by the Japanese navy there was to

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Figure 7.1: A volunteer detachment’s surrender in Vladimirovka, Sakhalin (July 11, 1905).

Source: Ogawa, 1904–06.

cut off the island from the mainland by positioning its ships in the Tartar Straight and, at the same time, destroying the Russian military installations in De Castries Bay. Following this, Aleksandrovsk fell rapidly, while the remaining, and by then definitely separated, Russian forces were desperately holding on in Derbinskoe and Onor.15 The much counted on support from the continent turned out to be more than disappointing: navigation being closed until mid-June, the southern units received no help whatsoever, and the northern ones received theirs, badly trained and unfamiliar with the area, just before the start of the military operations. On July 31, the Japanese offered terms of capitulation to General Liapunov. General Haraguchi sent a list of conditions – total surrender of all men, ammunition, maps and documents; the same day, Liapunov ordered all officers to address their views on the situation to him in writing. Officers replied stating that soldiers were demoralized and ready to lay down their arms and, consequently, they considered capitulation as still preferable to a shameful flight. Having secured the needed voices in favor of accepting the victor’s terms, Liapunov surrendered two days later in the village of Rykovskoe.16 In the meantime, important amounts of bank notes as well as documents related to the island’s defense were hastily burned by the defeated army.17 The following day the Japanese gave a parade in Rykovskoe to celebrate their victory and proclaimed the

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

establishment of a military government. Sakhalin was thus conquered, or “annexed as a just restoration of Japan’s historical rights,” depending on interpretation.18 Like the Soviet invasion of southern Sakhalin (Karafuto) in 1945, the Japanese attack in 1905 came at the final stages of the war, and incidentally lasted the same number of days. Following this brief overview, I would like to examine two distinctive features of this theater of war. CRUELTY

Cruelty and mistreatment is not something which immediately comes to mind in a discussion of the Russo-Japanese War. And this in spite of, for example, F.P. Kupchinskii’s well-known account on POWs’ life in Japan and his mentioning that the treatment of prisoners got satisfactory only after their settling in the camps.19 This war is, as a rule, on the contrary associated with humanity, often referred to as the only “civilized” one of the twentieth century. In terms of quantity, this is certainly true. And yet, in the case of Sakhalin, this conflict can hardly pass as merciful: prisoners were tortured and shot, the wounded were finished off, and civilians were not spared either.20 Voluntary detachments undoubtedly suffered most from the above treatment. Acts of torture, for example, are meticulously shown in a testimony kept in the Russian State Archives, revealing sadistic practices.21 As a matter of fact, the Japanese side had bluntly warned from the very start, that it would not consider convicts turned soldiers as regular army and, consequently, would not accept their surrender, obviously aiming to dissuade civilians from joining the troops.22 One could therefore presume that their chances of survival were low, but this did not appear to be a concern for the Russian command. A.M. Netupskii, son of a political exile, was a twelve-year-old boy then living in Aleksandrovsk. His rare first-hand account describes the events as following: The Russian administration announced the recruitment of ex-exiles into the army before the Japanese had actually landed [. . .] They were given army overcoats, caps, rifles, and they were all under the age of forty-five.23 As soon as Sakhalin was invaded all those volunteers were shot, nobody managed to survive. While the Japanese considered the regular conscripts as untouchable, the voluntary detachments, on the other hand, were sent to fight the enemy by the very same government that convicted them earlier; and this, according to the Japanese reasoning, was not acceptable.24

Voluntary detachments, however, were not the only ones concerned. Although the following archival document has attracted the attention of both Russian and Japanese historians in the past, due to its relevance, we also take the liberty to refer to it here.25 Arkhip Makenkov surrendered

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and was sent to Sendai’s POW camp on November 6, 1905.26 A few days later his report was recorded and dispatched to Russia. Makenkov, an exmotorman from Novik, was fighting in the south under the command of Staff-Captain Dairskii. His unit clashed with the Japanese in the taiga; after loosing ten of their men, they were encircled and obliged to lay down their arms. Makenkov managed to escape and observed the events from his hiding. Here is his testimony as written down by the StaffCaptain Pulevich: Dairskii first was at loss [. . .] but then ordered: “Save your skin, fellows, if you can. Those who will not make it, will have to surrender” [. . .] We put a white cloth on a stick. The Japanese stopped firing [. . .] did not bayonet anyone, just took away the rifles, bounded all [. . .] and started shouting: “Come out the rest of you, we’ll do you no harm” [. . .] about 130 of ours came out [. . .] All were taken to Otradnoe, I followed [. . .] There they cleared up a ground in the taiga, put our men against the trees and started bayoneting their hands and feet. I do not know what happened later [. . .] but settlers who went there told me that everyone was shot [. . .] Later I went to that place myself. Among the buried were only Dairskii and Khnykin, both slashed into pieces, the others lay in the taiga, shot and bayoneted [. . .] I stayed in [the village of] Pokrovskoe and worked as shoemaker, all through September. The Japanese started taking a census of settlers [. . .] so I went into hiding in the taiga for that period [. . .] on October 9 [. . .] I surrendered myself to the Japanese authorities [a month and a half after the signing of the peace treaty]. They told me to either stay with them [in Karafuto] or to go back to Russia. I asked to be repatriated, and was then taken to [Sendai]. But sometimes, even after the end of hostilities, someone would surrender and the Japanese would cut his head off [. . .].27

Cruelty is also mentioned in the diary of the archbishop Nikolai,28 but this time it refers to the treatment of civilians: November 30, 1905 Kh. P. Birich, a prisoner of war in Hirosaki, paid me a visit.29 He used to be an industrialist in Sakhalin, and during the war served there as head of a voluntary detachment. He told me of such Japanese cruelties, that one cannot but feel horrified. There were no foreign correspondents there [. . .], so the Japanese appeared as their real selves: civilians were beaten, women raped, and together with children slayed and shot, just like men; many of the convicts [. . .] were shot under the pretext that “these people were good for nothing” [. . .] or left to die without food; even the mentally sick were taken out of the hospital and shot [. . .]30

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This disturbing account remains the only one to our knowledge on the mistreatment of the free civilians.31 At the same time, it reminds us of crucial evidence: Sakhalin, unlike the rest of this war’s battlefields, had no foreign observers, whether journalists or Red Cross representatives. Going back to Netupsky’s memoirs, we read the following: The Japanese treated the civilians very well. They paid for all the goods they needed, albeit not always the full price. They distributed to the population everything there was under [the Russian] military control, such as sugar, flour, grains and canned food for soldiers, nearly free of charge [. . .] Also, when leaving [the north], they took nothing [of their own abundant provisions] with them, giving it all to the Russian people as gifts [. . .] Before departure, they burned down all prisons and some town administration buildings.32

Mary Gaunt, an Australian traveler, was one of the very rare Western visitors on the Russian half of the island after the war. Although not a direct witness, here is what she saw and heard during her short stay there in 1914: Aleksandrovsk is a place of empty houses. When the Japanese came the people fled, leaving everything exactly as it was; and though the Japanese behaved with admirable restraint, considering they came as an invading army, many of the people never came back [. . .] All down by the long wooden pier which stretches into the sea [. . .] [there is] a monument, if they needed it, to the courteous manner in which the Japanese make war. They had burnt the museum, they told me, and opened the prison doors and burnt the prison, but the other houses they had spared.33

An other indirect account, that of B. Ellinskii, a former political prisoner, confirms the former two: I did not witness the fall of the island since I left the place in March 1905, when my sentence [. . .] was over. However, once in Blagoveschensk, I met with many of my former Sakhalin students and acquaintances, and the stories that I heard from them were all identical [. . .] The military governor Liapunov organized a number of voluntary detachments out of convicts while I was still on the island [. . .] The promised privileges were most incredible and people joined in masses: food was still better than the prison ration and the training was not overwhelming. Governor and his staff ingratiated themselves [to attract people]. All went well as long as the Japanese troops were still far away [. . .] But when the enemy landed in a totally different location than programmed for him by the General [. . .] there was no other way but to retreat again and again [. . .]

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[. . .] Civilians who stayed did not suffer at all. All looting and robbery were punished mercilessly. A woman [. . .] told a story when she appealed to a Japanese officer that a soldier stole a chicken from her. . . After a direct confrontation of the two [. . .] the soldier was immediately shot despite her pleading to save the thief [. . .] They acted differently, however, when it came to the Museum. Everything was neatly packed and dispatched to Japan.34

But here is what the same author writes further on: When the Japanese saw an overcrowded prison [. . .] they asked the local authority, Sobolev [. . .] whether these people were fit for anything, and having gotten “no” for an answer, they [. . .] took them away and sliced them all in two. Around 300 people were killed, among them many peasants and settlers who came to the prison to seek shelter from their war-devastated villages.35

We can presume that once the hostilities were over, no more “excesses” were tolerated toward the free civilians, even after the announcement that the northern half of the island was to remain Russian. However, as far as the treatment of the convicts, the military, and especially that of the voluntary detachments is concerned, the presence of cold-blooded murder and cruelty leaves little doubt. An official Japanese report on “Russian POWs in Karafuto” states that “[. . .] the convicts fled or were freed before our forces reached the prisons, and consequently there is the danger that those human scums of society might disturb peace in this area.”36 Moreover, considering that Liapunov himself was quoted as warning the Japanese of the danger in having the criminals running free on the island and suggesting to them “not to bother with the convicts,”37 puts a heavy part of the responsibility on the Russian command. Liapunov, while a POW in Japan, also paid a visit to the archbishop Nikolai and complained to the latter “nearly in tears, that all his petitions to Saint Petersburg were ignored, and he was left with no troops.”38 The responsibility of the Central and District authorities is of course unquestionable. It must be noted, however, that the general believed that Sakhalin’s insularity and climate made its invasion highly improbable,39 which was obviously a gross mistake and showed his full ignorance of the Japanese military capacity. His troops were small in number, for sure, but also untrained and clumsily commanded. This brings us to the second aspect to be examined – the state of the Russian army in Sakhalin. CHAOS

The following archival documents are reports addressed to the same person, the commander-in-chief of the Priamur military district, P. Rutkovskii. Both were written in Khabarovsk, with a mere three weeks

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between them. The first of them, dated April 23, 1906, is a meticulous description of the northern Sakhalin battleground by one of its commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Domnitskii. A thirty-four-page report is in fact a prelude to the petition that follows: to seek justice for himself and his subordinates. What provoked his soliciting Rutkovskii’s help was the military order no. 68 (of the year 1906). This order stipulated that all those having served on the Sakhalin front were to be stripped of special career privileges that (normally) serving in this district in peacetime would have made them eligible for. It also took away entitlement to medals and honors such as those given, for example, to the combatants of Port Arthur.40 Domnitskii points out that not a single maneuver was organized in Sakhalin during the entire training of its defenders. A total absence of supplies from the mainland during the period of seventeen months that separated the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War and the beginning of operations in Sakhalin; and this despite nine months of navigation, during which twenty ships came to Sakhalin shores empty, departing back to continental Russia loaded with coal, and despite numerous telegrams, urging Priamur authorities to act. Also, there was scarce food, absence of field-kitchens, of clothes and boots, of transport facilities. To illustrate the pitiful state of weapons, the author reveals how four out of their eight cannons, written off since the Russo-Turkish War and barely functioning, were thrown down a precipice, since pushing them up the hills was too difficult and they had no horses . . . And he draws a parallel with the opposing army, not only perfectly armed, but in which each corporal had a watch, a pair of binoculars, a compass and a detailed map of the area to which he was assigned.41 He insists that all – officers and soldiers alike – understood the hopelessness of the situation since, he points bitterly: “Sakhalin troops had all the necessary means to lose the war.” Moral was low and panic that turned into hysteria characterized battles in the north. Finally, he quotes officers having served in other battles prior to their transfer to the island, as saying that “a few days in Sakhalin were worth a few months in Manchuria.”42 The second report is that of the former commander of the First Sakhalin battalion in the south, Colonel Boldyrev, written on 29 March. With much sarcasm, the author explains the reasons for the defeat through a most puzzling portrait of General Liapunov: Your Excellency, [. . .] Upon my arrival, I went to introduce myself together with my unit to General Liapunov, who seemed clearly disinterested. After a couple of irrelevant questions, the General was distracted by a lady. [. . .] The longer we stayed in Sakhalin, the more my first impression was confirmed. In spite of the serious character of the war-time situation [. . .], we witnessed that all professional discussions between the

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General and his staff ran in the presence of nurses and other ladies.43 [. . .] Such matters of prime importance as reconnoitering and area inspection turned into promenades and picnics. As a result, in view of the absence of exact information I, for example, had to advance in the unknown locality without maps. On my first meeting with [. . .] the Lieutenant-Colonel Mel’nikov, he told me straight forward that on the island “the nurses were the ones in charge.” He repeats these same words, albeit in a different form, in his official communication, addressed to me on March 12, 1906, which copy is included. You can see from his letter that there were neither preparations nor means for the defense of Sakhalin [. . .], and that the officers were demoralized by the nurses’ interference. [. . .] Here are a few other examples that characterize General Liapunov’s professional attitude: – Commander of the sixth unit [. . .] Bolotov informed me that he stopped a [presumed] Japanese spy, who was then gracefully allowed to leave Sakhalin after a friendly dinner at the General’s; the Japanese forces landed on the island a few days after this incident [. . .] – Nurses followed the army all the way, and in the camp of Sergievskii they all gathered in a little house. When the exchange of fire had started (please see the journal of operations of July 15), none of them had left the house [to join us in fighting], and when it ended, we could hear the General and see, through the open door, a fair number of bottles on the table. As to the amount of alcoholic beverages one can judge from the following curious fact: when the house was surrounded [. . .] the Japanese naturally were keen to try the drinks. They did not want to take the risk, though, in case the wine was poisoned, so they ordered a medical attendant of ours to try each bottle [. . .] and eventually he dropped drunk. At the same time, a dead drunk Captain Kevrolev was taken out [. . .] by the soldiers. [. . .] All the above was going on not only in front of us, the officers, and in front of the civilians, but also in front of soldiers. This naturally could have had a bad influence on them since their [moral] quality was not excellent to start with, taking into consideration the presence of Sakhalin convicts among them. [. . .] I have heard that the Staff-Captain Pulevich [head of the Sakhalin temporary headquarters], upon arrival on the island, was appalled by the local situation [. . .] But a young officer that he was, he was naturally incapable of changing whatsoever.44

Even if we allow for the probability that order no. 68 was a powerful reason for the two reports to be written at that particular moment and not earlier, we can hardly doubt its veracity, since both quote documents and names, readily available for verification or testimony. It must also be noted in passing that contrary to the treatment reserved to his subordinates, General Liapunov, after his return from Japan, received permission for a four-month vacation in the capital “to rest and determine his future

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duties.” Due to his poor state of health he was subsequently relieved of his function as governor of Sakhalin and attached henceforth to the General Headquarters.45 Lieutenant-Colonel Domnitskii at one point in his report asks a pertinent question: knowing the absence of defense in Sakhalin, and having lost all the main battles, why did not Russia simply give the island up to the Japanese without a fight, thus saving lives and avoiding unnecessary suffering?46 While General Liapunov was having a jolly time awaiting captivity, the Russians and the Japanese were tensely watching each other’s readiness to make the first move towards peace negotiations. After winning the battle of Tsushima, and having destroyed almost the entire Russian fleet, Japan had no further reasons to continue the war. On the other hand, not trying to appropriate Sakhalin at this point would have been unthinkable.47 Watching the Japanese invade it, the Russians of course were aware that they would eventually claim the entire island and were perfectly prepared to bargain over it. Foreign minister Komura’s suggesting, on May 31, that Theodore Roosevelt should invite the two parties to talk provoked the above-mentioned Russian emergency meeting. Nevertheless, it took two long months for the negotiations to finally get underway. Meanwhile, no cease-fire was proclaimed. Figure 7.2: Japanese and Russian commissionaires meet in Handasa, Sakhalin (July 31, 1905).

Source: Ogawa, 1904–06.

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In Japan’s conditions for peace, Sakhalin appeared among those of secondary importance, to be bargained for depending on the situation. However, as negotiations progressed, Russians were still resisting on a few crucial issues which led the process to a deadlock on more than one occasion, turning Sakhalin into a perfect trump card for both protagonists. The Japanese had already been celebrating victory over Karafuto for more than a fortnight when, on August 17, Sergei Witte, who only two days earlier flatly refused to hand over Russian territory, advised Nicholas II, that the Americans were inclined to see Sakhalin become Japanese.48 On August 20, Prime Minister Katsura announced his government’s willingness to compromise and be content with half of the territory, while President Roosevelt was adding pressure, insisting that having refused to pay all war indemnities, Sakhalin’s south was the least of concessions to be made.49 The tsar gave in on August 23. Sakhalin’s future was settled, subsequently embodied in articles 9 and 10 of the Treaty of Portsmouth. EPILOGUE

General Aleksei Kuropatkin’s postwar mea culpa, summarized in the fourth volume of his Russo-Japanese War,50 presents a pertinent analysis of Russia’s global defeat. If we were to dissect the specificity of the Sakhalin theater of war and Russian defeat, we would have, no doubt, to name the following: excellence of the Japanese army, underestimated importance of Sakhalin by the central government, badly organized communication with the mainland, insufficiently trained soldiers, and Figure 7.3: Russo-Japanese border, Karafuto/Sakhalin.

Source: Postcard.

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General Liapunov’s personal incompetence. However, having said that, a general conclusion can be drawn: Sakhalin is a case study, albeit an extreme one, of a multidimensional decomposition of Russia’s military apparatus on the eve of this country’s first revolution. As to the island’s resistance over the period of three weeks, it is undoubtedly the merit of individual excellence and courage of officers and soldiers, such as those refusing to surrender despite the capitulation of their superiors.51 In August, the Japanese proclaimed the annexation of Sakhalin, the only Russian territory ceased in this war, emphasizing that this time the island was theirs for good.52 A month later, their joy was halved, as they were finally to become the rightful proprietors of only the southern part, leaving the coal- and oil-rich north to their hostile neighbor. They were to settle a land of a milder climate and better conditions for agriculture and cattle-breeding, but this was of little consolation, and the Japanese frustration remained strong. It would eventually materialize in their brief re-occupation of the north in 1920. Meanwhile, the locally taken POWs were dispatched to Japan, the surviving convicts were set free, and the remaining civilians could choose to either stay in the Russian north, to go back to the Japanese south, or to leave for the mainland. It took three years for the island to have a proper frontier.53 On both sides of it, two independent colonial societies started taking root.54 Russian, and later on, Soviet Sakhalin and Japanese Karafuto were to coexist, albeit tensely, for forty years, when a very similar war scenario would change the island’s geography all over again. NOTES 1

2

3

4

5 6

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Galina I. Dudarets in St. Petersburg, Vladislav M. Latyshev in Iuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Iwaki Shigeyuki in Tokyo, for their help and enthusiasm in my research. All translations from the Russian are the author’s. In citations, dates are reproduced as in the original text. Introduction of the editor to the article What Sakhalin means for Japan. In Adachi 1905: 618. Japan had largely profited from the above rights until the outbreak of the war, especially when the shortage of fish was greatly felt. In Sbornik russkago chteniia, 1905: 208. Anton Chekhov’s journalistic account of his 1891 visit, Sakhalin Island, is perhaps the most renowned, but a number of other travelers to the island had also left poignant testimonies. Vysokov et al., 1995: 94–100. Liapunov, Mikhail N., born in 1848. A noble from the Saint Petersburg Province, he graduated from the Military-juridical academy in Odessa. Occupied a number of posts – military inspector, military judge, military prosecutor, in different regions of Russia, received numerous rewards. Was appointed Military governor and chief of local troops in Sakhalin in 1898. Officially dismissed on January 31, 1906, three months after his return from captivity in Japan.

Chaos versus Cruelty 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23

24 25

26

27 28

29 30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38

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Voenno-istoricheskaia komissiia, 1910, IX 91. RGVIA, f. 487, d. 914, l. 2. Sokolov, 1977: 356. Latyshev, 1994. On Novik’s last days, see memoirs of her crew members Shter 1908, and Freilikhman 1998. KA, 1928, III: 191–204. Voenno-istoricheskaia, 1910, IX: 98. Latyshev, 1985: 58; Ito, 1925: 49–94 passim. Samarin, 1993; Ban and Ishikawa, 1935: 142–146. RGVIA, f. 186, op. 16, d. 10064, l. 180b. Gubernatory Sakhalina, 2000: 55. For example Zenkoku Karafuto Renmei, 1978 : 227. For full details of the military operations in Sakhalin, see two fundamental readers: Voenno-istoricheskaia komissiia 1910, IX, and Kaigun Gunreibu 1909–10, III. Kupchinskii: 1906. A comparative analysis of Japanese and Russian wartime conduct is beyond the scope of this chapter. On this subject see, for example, Kowner, 2000: 134–151. RGVIA, f. 846, op. 16, d. 21194, l. 325. RGVIA, f. 487, d. 915, l. 15. In reality their uniform was as following: grey dressing gown, breeches, cap sheathed with a red braid and a cross; they were armed with the “Berdan” rifles (340 cartridges); their age was up to sixty-four years old. In RGVIA, f. 487, d. 914, l. 1, 2, 36. Netupsky, 1971: 14. Latyshev, 1985: 63–64; Latyshev, 1994: 75–79; Hara, 2004: 147–150; Ban and Ichikawa, 1935: 171–173. A mention of his captivity is in Bukhe 1907: 38, and in Nakamura et al., 1994: 678. RGVIA, f. 846, op. 16, d. 10064, l. 71–74. Nikolai Iaponskii (St. Nikolai of Japan), alias Ivan D. Kasatkin (1836–1912). Archbishop, founder of the Russian Orthodox Church in Japan, where he arrived in 1861. On Khrisanf P. Birich’s biography, see Kurata, 2003. Nakamura et al., 1994: 682. The term used by the Japanese army was jiyumin. See, for example, Oyama, 1973. Netupsky, 1971: 14. Gaunt, 1919: 192. Ellinskii, 1925: 55–57. The museum was the pride of the local intelligentsia, its main collection being ethnographical due to the particular efforts of two political exiles, L. Shternberg and B. Pilsudski. According to some unofficial sources the displays of the museum ended up at the Waseda University in Tokyo. Ellinskii, 1925: 58. Shatsillo, 2004: 374. Samarin, 1993: 101. Nakamura et al., 1994: 678.

108 39 40

41

42 43 44 45 46

47 48

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Troitskaia, 1998: 52. A total of 90,000 top decorations, the St. George cross, were awarded to participants in this war (Shatsyllo 2004: 396). Domnitskii mentions at one point that the Japanese 13th Division was mainly composed of those who had fought previously in Port Arthur. If we take into consideration the Russian misconduct towards the Japanese in the final stage of this operation (see, for example, McCormick, 1907, I: 266), this could perhaps partially explain the exceptionally cruel character of the Sakhalin battleground. RGVIA, f. 846, op. 16, d. 10079, l. 1a-17b. Nurses’ Red Cross detachment arrived in Sakhalin in November 1904. RGVIA, f. 846, op. 16, d. 10064, l. 90–94. Troitskaia, 1998: 53. All in all, Liapunov surrendered together with eighty-one officers and 4,318 soldiers. Eight officers and approximately 270 soldiers managed to escape to the mainland. Close to 1,800 were killed or reported missing. The number of murdered civilians is not recorded (Voenno-istoricheskaia komissiia 1910, IX: 133). Hiratsuka, 1999: 141. Witte has subsequently earned a hardly flattering surname, Graf Polusakhalinskii (Count Halfsakhalin), given to him by his opponents. Portsmutskaia mirnaia konferenciia, 1906: 61. Kuropatkin, 1906. RGVIA, f. 186, op. 16, d. 10064, l. 178–178b; d. 10067, l. 2. The Times, August 2, 1905, quoted in Stephan, 1971: 80. e.g., Oshima, 1998: 75–83; AVPR, f. iaponskii stol 1906–08, d. 965, l. 16–20. Sevela, 2005.

III. THE ECONOMIC DIMENSION

8

The War and the Perception of Japan by British Investors NATHAN SUSSMAN AND YISHAY YAFEH1

H

istory is typically written with hindsight; many years after events take place, historians pick the ones that made a difference ex post, and these are the events that end up in history books. But it is often unclear if contemporaries shared the views of later historians regarding the importance of certain events. For example, is it clear that certain events in Europe, the Balkans and North Africa that, with hindsight, were often described as leading “inevitably” to World War I were really viewed as signals of an impending catastrophe by contemporary observers? The battle of Gettysburg, from today’s perspective, was clearly decisive; but were there other battles and turning points in the Civil War that contemporaries regarded as important at the time but did not reach modern textbooks? One way to approach these questions is to read commentaries and text written by contemporaries; another approach, the one taken in this chapter, is to observe the behavior of financial markets and the pricing of traded assets around the time of major events. This enables researchers to infer from the behavior of contemporary investors what they thought about on-going events. For example, Willard, Guinnane, and Rosen use data on fluctuations in the gold price of “greenbacks,” a currency issued by the Union during the American Civil War, to assess the perception of war-time events by contemporary investors.2 They find significant differences between what contemporaries regarded as important (that is, events that resulted in substantial changes in the prices of “greenbacks”) and what historians writing about the Civil War many years later described as crucial. Similarly, one of today’s most prolific historians, Niall Ferguson uses data on several European stock markets in the years preceding World War I to

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refute some of the claims about the inevitability of the war, at least as far as contemporary investors were concerned.3 Assessing the perception of Meiji Japan by British investors using data from the London Stock Exchange is also an exciting intellectual exercise. Japanese government bonds were traded in London starting in the early 1870s, and events taking place in Japan were reported regularly in the British press. What events, then, impressed British investors and made them change their minds about the credit worthiness of the Japanese government? What types of news from Japan were interpreted as credible signals of development and modernization? In this chapter we use data on prices and yields of Japanese sovereign bonds traded in London between 1870 and 1914 to establish the importance of Japan’s victory over Russia in this respect, both in absolute terms, and relative to other events of the Meiji period. We argue that the variety of reforms and new institutions established between 1870 and the beginning of the twentieth century did little to affect the way Japan was perceived by British investors, at least not in the short term (one exception to this statement will be discussed below). Neither did the war with China have a major effect on the image of Japan in the London Stock Exchange. By contrast, Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 did far more to establish Japan’s reputation as a trustworthy borrower than most of the preceding events of the Meiji Period; indeed, in the first decade of the twentieth century the Japanese government was, by some measures, the largest foreign borrower on the London market, and borrowing terms (cost of debt, collateral required, and so forth) were better than at any time in the preceding four decades. Our empirical analysis focuses on what economists and financial observers usually call the “risk premium.” In general, a risk premium is the additional interest payments a risky borrower has to offer investors in excess of the risk-free rate in order to be able to borrow. In the context of sovereign debt, risk is typically the risk of default – the likelihood that a country will not be able to pay off its debt, as has happened many times in many countries throughout history. In the context of Meiji Japan, the risk premium is defined as the yield differential between Japanese government bonds traded in London and British government “consols” (perpetual bonds with no redemption date) which were regarded as risk free. Using stock market data from The Times, London we measure the risk premium on Japanese sovereign bonds at the end of each calendar month between 1870 and World War I. This enables us to derive an objective measure of the impact of events taking place in a given month on the risk premium. In other words, changes in the risk premium measure changes in the perception of Japan’s country risk in the eyes of British investors. In general, we find that the risk premium, or yield differential (typically called “spread”) between Japanese and British government debt declined substantially during the period from 1870 to World War I. In addition, Japan’s ability to raise capital and borrow abroad increased

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significantly. Indeed, spreads on Japanese debt declined despite the fact that the volume of borrowing abroad increased substantially, both relative to total government debt, and relative to government revenues. More specifically with respect to the war with Russia, we find that market participants initially expected a Russian victory – Japanese spreads increased dramatically in the months preceding the war and during its early stages. But the decisive victory led to a decline in spreads and, more importantly, to a substantial increase in Japan’s ability to raise capital abroad: collateral on Japanese debt was no longer required, investment banks vied for the business of underwriting Japanese loans, and non-government entities in Japan (e.g. the Tokyo Harborworks) were able to tap the London capital market, the largest and most liquid financial market in the world. The relative importance of the war with Russia in comparison with institutional changes of the Meiji Period suggests that some certification of borrower quality can be achieved more quickly through military victories on an ex ante stronger rival (victory over a weak rival – China – had no similar effect), than by means of a modern constitution or other state of the art institutions of the Meiji Period. This is not to say that institutional foundations did not matter for economic growth in Japan; the point is that institutional changes were not swiftly rewarded by financial markets; by contrast, the victory over Russia was. In passing, note that this conclusion is not Japan-specific. Mauro, Sussman, and Yafeh, who examine the history of sovereign borrowing of eighteen developing countries in the period 1870 to World War I, reach a similar conclusion: institutional changes are rarely rewarded by financial markets in the short run, whereas wars and political instability typically elicit an immediate and sharp response from investors.4 THE LONDON MARKET FOR SOVEREIGN DEBT BEFORE WORLD WAR I

The period starting around 1870 and ending with the onset of World War I was an era of unprecedented, and in some respects, unsurpassed globalization, characterized by large international capital flows from Europe, primarily Britain, toward developing countries. Indeed, although today’s size and form of capital flows to “emerging markets” had not been observed for several decades, they would not have surprised British investors and other market participants operating before World War I. And while the large volume of sovereign bond issues by emerging markets starting in the early 1990s is a phenomenon not seen for nearly three-quarters of a century, it pales in comparison to the size of the London market during its heyday – indeed, by many measures, the globalization of the 1990s has yet to match the globalization of the forty years preceding pre-World War I.5 The London Stock Exchange was the most liquid capital market of its time, serving both for new issues and as a secondary trading market for a large number of bonds, including several bonds issued in other European

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Table 8.1: The Largest Borrowers on the London Market, 1870–1913 Net Proceeds from Bond Issues by Large Borrowers Country

In millions of Pounds

Total Proceeds in percent of total net issues on the London market by all countries (excluding Britain)

Canada Argentina Brazil Japan Russia China Chile Turkey Greece Mexico Egypt Uruguay

116.22 73.24 72.81 72.62 55.60 47.56 26.07 24.07 15.65 15.19 14.16 8.88

8.75 5.50 5.48 5.47 4.19 3.60 1.96 1.80 1.18 1.14 1.06 0.67

Total

542.07

40.80

Reproduced from Mauro, Sussman, and Yafeh, 2006: Chapter 2. Source: Stone, 1999.

financial centers. The total market value of government bonds traded in London was £3.0 billion in 1875 and £4.1 billion in 1905. To put these figures in perspective, Britain’s GDP amounted to £1.4 billion in 1875 and £2.2 billion in 1905, according to Mitchell’s Historical Statistics. As early as 1870, almost 220 government bonds issued by an impressive range of sovereign nations and British colonies and dominions and traded in London were listed in the British press, most notably the Economist’s monthly publication, the Investor’s Monthly Manual. By 1905, as many as 300 bonds were listed in the Investor’s Monthly Manual. Stone lists the largest borrowers of the period (see Table 8.1).6 These aggregate borrowing figures (referring to the entire period) mask substantial within-period variation: as we will see below, the largest borrower in 1905–1909 was the Japanese government, and one of the primary reasons for this appears to be Japan’s impressive victory over Russia. JAPANESE SOVEREIGN BONDS ISSUED IN LONDON AND DATA USED IN THIS STUDY

Japanese debt was first issued in London in April 1870. The Times described this relatively small issue of £1 million as follows: The radical changes which have recently taken place in Japan and their important effects, not only on the Japanese themselves, but upon

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Table 8.2: Japanese Bond Issues in London Year

Issue (pounds)

Interest Rate (%)

Maturity (years)

1870 1873 1897 1899 1902 1904 1905 1905 1907 1910

1,000,000 2,400,000 4,390,000 10,000,000 5,104,000 22,000,000* 60,000,000* 25,000,000 23,000,000 11,000,000

9 7 5 4 5 6 4.5 4 5 4

13 25 53 55 55 7 25 25 40 60

Use of Proceeds railways misc. military railways, telephone military, telephone military military misc. misc. misc.

Reproduced from Sussman, and Yafeh, 2000. Source: Suzuki, 1994. * denotes total proceeds raised in two separate issues of similar terms. Slightly different figures are provided by the Bank of Japan.

the commercial relations with foreign countries, have been recognized by all who have knowledge of the vast resources and the productive power of that Empire. The natural result of this improved state of things has been the desire on the part of the government of Japan to develop the resources of that Empire by the introduction of railways, and to the accomplishment of that object the present loan is mainly designed.7

Table 8.2, which is drawn from Suzuki,8 displays the dates, volume and coupon interest rates for Japanese government debt issued in London. From 1870 to the early 1900s, coupon interest rates on newly issued Japanese government bonds declined from 9 percent (or about 200 percent higher than consol yields at the time), to about 4 percent. Fast capital accumulation in Japan during the period, as well as the increased integration of world capital markets, may have led to a lower risk premium in the long-run.9 It is also evident that the volume of debt issued in London (as well as in other markets) increased dramatically, especially around the turn of the century. The data we use in this study on the prices and yields of Japanese government bonds traded in London are calculated from The Times, and include both the coupon interest rate and the actual closing price on the London market at the end of each month. Because coupons on Japanese bonds were payable in pounds sterling in London, no exchange rate risk was associated with their yields. Data on British consol yields for the calculation of the Japanese risk premium are obtained from the NBER Macroeconomic History data set. Japanese bond yields between 1870 and August 1914 are calculated as the ratio of the coupon interest rate to the actual market price, and the spreads are the difference between the calculated yield and yield

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on British consols. This calculation is exactly right if the bond is a non-redeemable perpetuity (like the British consols), and a reasonable approximation for long-term bonds. The first bond issue, in 1870, was with maturity of thirteen years, to be redeemed in ten annual drawings starting in 1873. Starting in 1873, the Japanese government issued twenty-five-year bonds, which could also be redeemed before maturity. Indeed Japan withdrew much of the 1873 debt by 1897 through a series of “lotteries” in which a fraction of the outstanding bonds was redeemed. Post-1897 bonds were mostly long-term, with maturity of up to sixty years, although during the war with Russia short-term bonds were issued as well. Alternative estimates of bond yields (using both modern formulae and formulae used by contemporary investors), which are described in considerable detail in previous works,10 do not qualitatively affect any of the results reported below. Annual data on the volume of Japanese government debt as well as on government revenues and other macroeconomic variables are drawn from the Bank of Japan’s Hundred Year Statistics of the Japanese Economy, supplemented by data on long-term capital flows and GNP from Mitchell’s International Historical Statistics. It should be noted that GNP data for Japan are not available before 1885. To supplement the statistical information, we record the contents of every single article on Japan reported in The Times between 1870 and 1913. These data,11 as well as articles from The Economist, are used here to evaluate the nature of information British investors had on reforms in Japan and on other events that could affect the risk associated with Japanese government bonds. We note that before Japan was connected to the international telegraph system in 1876, it took news from Japan two months to reach Britain by mail steamers. After 1876, news from Japan could be reported without delay. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Figure 8.1 describes the spread (yield difference relative to British consols) on Japanese and Russian government debt (denominated in pounds sterling and traded in London) from 1870 to 1913. While yields on Japanese bonds fell in the 1870s,12 they increased moderately from the early 1880s until the mid-1890s, even though the 1880s witnessed the establishment of some of Japan’s most important institutions, including the Bank of Japan, a modern system of government, and an elected parliament. The culmination of these institutional changes was the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889, which explicitly guaranteed the protection of property rights and the rule of law. A large number of articles in The Times described the Meiji Constitution, so that the absence of a strong market reaction to its promulgation could not have been because investors were unaware of the institutional changes taking place in Japan. Nevertheless, no effect is

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Figure 8.1: Japanese and Russian Spreads (1870–1913). Spreads are yield differences relative to British perpetual bonds (consols) 0.07 0.06 0.05

Russo-Turkish war Meiji Constitution

Sino-Japanese war Russo-Japanese war

0.04 0.03 Gold standard

0.02 0.01

Witte’s ministry 1870 1871 1872 1873 1875 1876 1877 1878 1880 1881 1882 1883 1885 1886 1887 1888 1890 1891 1892 1893 1895 1896 1897 1898 1900 1901 1902 1903 1905 1906 1907 1908 1910 1911 1912 1913

0

Assassination of Alexander

Russia

Japan

Reproduced from Mauro, Sussman, and Yafeh, 2006.

discernible in the market perceptions of Japan’s country risk. Similarly, the volume of foreign borrowing and the composition of the Japanese government debt on the London market (Figure 8.2) failed to react to Japan’s institutional reforms and development. With the exception of two debt issues floated in London during the early 1870s, the period of institutional reform was characterized by net capital outflows, largely accounted for by payments to service and retire foreign debt. This outflow of capital is mirrored in the steady decline in the share of foreign debt in total debt prior to 1897. The trends of both the share of foreign debt and capital flows were reversed following the adoption of the gold standard in June 1897. As is evident in Figure 8.1, Japan’s cost of borrowing declined dramatically as a result – the yield differential between Japanese and British bonds declined from approximately 4 percentage points to a 2 percent premium. One interpretation for this is that the gold standard was viewed as a form of commitment to macro-economic stability – Minister of Finance Matsukata was a strong advocate of this view.13 For the purpose of the present chapter, however, it is interesting to note that the gold standard must have played a role in enabling Japan to raise large

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amounts of capital from abroad, sums which were later used to finance the war with Russia, to which we turn next. JAPANESE BORROWING AND THE WAR WITH RUSSIA

As noted above, the main conclusion of this chapter is that, of all the political events of the Meiji period, the political event that had the strongest impact on Japan’s cost of raising capital in the London bond market was the Russo-Japanese War. To investors in London, not only did the war prove Japan’s military might, it also proved its capacity to produce arms and armaments, and was followed by a “boom” for Japan’s heavy industries. Figure 8.1 (which shows spreads – yield differentials relative to British bonds – for the entire 1870–1913 period) and Figure 8.1A (which shows daily yields – interest rates – during the war period) clearly show that the Russo-Japanese War had a major impact on the cost of debt of both countries. Before the war, Japan was perceived as the underdog, and yields on Japanese government bonds rose dramatically, reaching the highest level of the decade in early 1904. Contemporary news reports in The Times suggest that fears of an impending war between Russia and Japan spread from London to investors in New York, Paris, and Berlin. Articles from early February 1904 attribute low trading volumes in the Paris Bourse to uncertainty regarding the political situation in the Far East. (In general, Japanese bonds were mostly traded in London, where their prices were determined, whereas trade in Russian bonds was particularly active in the Paris Bourse, where Russia was a very large borrower.) Subsequent Japanese victories over Russia led to a decline in the perceived risk of Japanese bonds, and Japanese spreads returned to their prewar levels in 1905. Commentary on April 15, 1904 attributed the rising prices (declining yields) of Japanese bonds (and the opposite trends of Russian bonds) to the surprising Russian naval defeat. In early May 1904, a new 10,000,000 pound Japanese loan was in such high demand that The Times expressed regret that its scale was not large enough to satisfy all the investors who wanted to participate. The Japanese victory at Chinchou (Kin-chau) elicited praise in the financial press: “The recognition of the completeness of the Japanese victory at Chinchou . . . [led to] praise for Japanese skill, courage,. . . Even more than the Japanese valor, does the Japanese deliberation, thoroughness and scientific conduct of their military operations [deserve praise].”14 Following a sequence of Japanese victories later in the year and commensurate headlines in the British press, The Times commended Japanese bonds precisely because “[military victories] show that Japan is as ready to work on the best modern methods in finance as in war.”15 Indeed, the news reports generate the impression of a direct link between the enthusiasm for Japanese bonds in London and developments on the front, ranging from relatively minor victories such as the sinking of a Russian battleship in early December 1904 to the fall of Port Arthur, around which

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Figure 8.1A: Japanese Yields and War News (1903–05). 7.0% Russian naval defeat

6.5%

Japanese victories at Kin-chau Russian defteat

6.0%

203 Meter Hill battle and seige of Port Arthur

Fall of Port Arthur War Buildup

5.5%

Vladivostock fleet destroyed

Sinking of the Russian Baltic fleet

Japanese advance to Mukden

5.0%

4.5% Peace treaty signed

08/01/1906

30/09/1905

22/06/1905

14/03/1905

04/12/1904

26/08/1904

18/05/1904

08/02/1904

31/10/1903

4.0%

Source: Daily yield data from The Times, London.

Japanese bond prices rose by about 15 percent. Similarly, “the progress of the Japanese army towards Mukden encouraged the bulls of Japanese bonds,”16 and the swift subsequent military successes raised bond prices (lowered yields) even further because markets were apparently concerned that any Russian military success might prolong the war. The impact of some of these events on Japanese bond yields is illustrated in Figure 8.1A. (In passing, note that the impression that the war would not last long, seems to have had a positive impact on Russian bond prices as well.) Following Japan’s victory and the end of the war, Japanese spreads continued to decline, albeit slowly, until about 1910 (see Figure 8.1); in part, this decline was due to a global trend described earlier.17 As for Russia, despite being the favorite power of investors at the beginning of the war (initially, spreads did not rise as sharply in Russia as they did in Japan), Russian spreads rose through much of the war period, with the prospects of a Japanese victory, although investors in Russian bonds responded positively to the peace agreement and to the absence of war indemnity. The Revolution of 1905 and the subsequent turmoil kept Russian spreads high for another couple of years after the war; spreads declined gradually only as the internal situation stabilized. Not only did the war affect the yields on Japanese debt (bonds), it also had a profound impact on the size and composition of Japanese sovereign debt. The need to finance the war with Russia prompted Japan to increase

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

massively her overall borrowing, but foreign debt increased far more than domestic debt. As a percent of government revenues, total debt roughly doubled between 1900 and 1905. Most of the new debt was issued abroad: foreign debt accounted for about half of total outstanding Japanese debt after the end of the war with Russia, compared with one fifth around 1900 (Figure 8.2). Not only did Japan become one of the largest borrowers on the London market – Japanese debt accounted for about a fifth of new sovereign debt issues in London during this period – Japan was now able to issue debt in foreign bond markets other than London, for example, Paris, New York, Hamburg, and Berlin.18 The Japanese government seems to have been eager to tap the enthusiastic foreign markets: the government issued debt in London five times within a period of less than two years around the war. New long-term bonds at low interest rates quickly replaced the costly, short-term bonds issued during the war (see Table 8.1). Moreover, following the victory over Russia, foreign debt was issued not only by the Japanese government itself, but also by quasi-governmental institutions (e.g. Tokyo Harborworks, Osaka Electric Tramway, the South Manchurian Rail Company, and the Imperial Industrial Bank of Japan), municipalities and even some private Japanese companies (e.g. Kanegafuchi Spinning). And there is yet more evidence on the impact of the war on the perception of Japan on the London market: underwriting commissions on Japanese bonds, another measure of risk, declined by a third after the victory over Russia, and furthermore, the Japanese government was no longer required to back its debt by securities (e.g. customs income) deposited in London.19 Figures 8.3A and 8.3B shed more light on the development of foreign and domestic borrowing. During the period of institutional reform, until about 1897, the Japanese government preferred to borrow at home and to liquidate much of its foreign debt. The government financed the successful war with China from domestic sources. After the adoption of the gold standard, the government borrowed more abroad, but changes in the composition of Japan’s sovereign debt became much more pronounced following the initial success in the war with Russia – the Japanese government was able to increase the volume of its foreign debt, and retire the domestic debt assumed in preparation for the war. This analysis of “quantities” – the volume of debt – confirms the conclusion drawn from the analysis of prices-yields and spreads – namely that institutional reforms prior to the Gold Standard were not enough to enable the Japanese government to raise substantial amounts of capital abroad, in sharp contrast with the victory over Russia. The fact that military victory over Russia improved Japan’s credit rating in subsequent years is explicitly stated in many news articles. For example, starting in 1905 there was concern in Britain over the burden of Japan’s war expenditures. The Economist, however, advised its readers not to worry because “the sagacity with which the finances of Japan have been administered during a period of stress and anxiety is a good augury. . .”20 A later Economist article, entitled “Japan as a Borrower,” explained

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Figure 8.2: The Composition of Japanese Debt (1870–1913).

capital flows/gov. revenues

foreign debt/total debt

Reproduced from Sussman and Yafeh (2000).

the “phenomenal success” of Japan’s loan operations as “. . . due about equally to the enhanced reputation of Japan by reason of her military and naval exploits, and the skillful manner in which her loan flotations ha[d] been conducted. . . ”21 It seems that the reputation acquired during

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

Figure 8.3A: Domestic and Foreign Debt (1870–1897).

Reproduced from Sussman and Yafeh (2000).

the successful war with Russia made it possible in later years for Japan to withstand investors’ concerns (expressed in many news articles) regarding its increasing fiscal deficit. Apparently, the London market for sovereign debt was much more interested in, and impressed by, the outcome of the war against Russia than by the institutional changes and reforms in the decades prior to the war. It is interesting to compare the effect of the war with Russia with that of the war with China a decade earlier. Although the outbreak of the Chinese war caused an increase of 10 percent in Japanese bond yields, overall, the war brought about no substantial change in the yield difference between Japanese and British bonds, or in the volume of Japanese debt issued in London. The market, it seems, could not make much out of these internal Asian affairs, and did not view Japanese success in this war as a sign of economic modernization. This is despite an interesting report in The Economist,22 in which the results of the war with China were described as evidence that Japan’s military might was comparable to that of a European power. Even the huge reparations imposed on China, which were crucial for the adoption of the gold standard two years later, did not seem to impress market participants in London, who were well aware of China’s weakness. Before concluding this chapter, it may be of interest to note that a political event that did seem to impress British investors (i.e. raised prices

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Figure 8.3B: Domestic and Foreign Debt, 1879–World War I.

Reproduced from Sussman and Yafeh (2000).

or lowered yields on Japanese bonds) was the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 190223 – unlike the war in China, and more in line with the subsequent victory over Russia – this political event conveyed a clear signal to market participants in London that Japan was an upcoming power. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Institutional reforms in developing countries are difficult to evaluate, and may take a long time to gain credibility and influence. This is why, during the entire Meiji period, British investors did not upgrade their perception of Japan in response to most of the institutional reforms. They did, however, respond to two, very dramatic and very credible, signals that Japan was on the right track to becoming a developed county. The first was the gold standard – which was regarded as a symbol of macroeconomic stability in contemporary developed economies; and the second, the focus of this chapter, was the military victory over Russia. From this perspective, the unexpected victory in 1905 did more to improve Japan’s “credit rating” than all of the reforms of the preceding generation.

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 NOTES

1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

This chapter is based on our previous work on topics related to the pre-1914 era of globalization and international capital flows, in particular on Sussman and Yafeh, 2000; and Mauro, Sussman and Yafeh, 2006. Willard, Guinnane, and Rosen, 1996. Ferguson, 2006. Mauro, Sussman, and Yafeh, 2006. Mauro, Sussman, and Yafeh, 2006. Stone, 1999. The London Times, April 26, 1870: 8. Suzuki, 1994. Mauro, Sussman and Yafeh, 2006. Sussman and Yafeh, 2000; and in Mauro, Sussman, and Yafeh, 2006. Used extensively in Mauro, Sussman, and Yafeh, 2006. A trend which is discussed in detail in Sussman and Yafeh, 2000. See Sussman and Yafeh, 2000; and Mauro, Sussman and Yafeh, 2006, for much more on this issue and the related debate in the economic literature on the importance of the gold standard more generally. The London Times, May 30, 1904: 5. The London Times, August 27, 1904: 11. The London Times, March 7, 1905: 11. See Mauro, Sussman and Yafeh, 2006. Suzuki, 1994; Tamaki, 1995. Suzuki, 1994. The Economist, February 23, 1905: 2072 The Economist, July 20, 1907: 1212. The Economist, January 26, 1895. For details, see Sussman and Yafeh, 2000.

9

Realpolitik or Jewish Solidarity? Jacob Schiff’s Financial Support for Japan Revisited DANIEL GUTWEIN

T

he Japanese success in securing loans in Western financial markets during the Russo-Japanese War is considered to be a substantial factor in Japan’s victory.1 A key role in this success was played by Jacob H. Schiff, the senior partner of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., who was at the time the most powerful American-Jewish financier and community leader.2 Schiff helped the Japanese to overcome the difficulties they had been facing in their negotiations with bankers in New York and London, difficulties that nearly thwarted their initial efforts to raise the sums they needed. As the loans were being negotiated, Schiff explained his involvement in the deal as a reprisal for the brutal suppression of Russian Jewry by the antisemitic tsarist regime.3 A military defeat, he argued, would hasten the downfall of tsarism and bring about its replacement with a more enlightened regime that would reform the Russian government and improve its attitude toward the Jews. This reasoning, which was reiterated over the years by Schiff’s relatives and associates,4 was in line with his call before the war for Jewish bankers in Europe to deny the Russians any access to Western money markets and with his command to his heirs to continue this financial embargo as long as the Russians did not change their antisemitic conduct.5 Over the years, Schiff’s account of the “Jewish motive” that informed his assistance to the Japanese has become the accepted version in historical research and, as such, has not aroused any critical discussion.6 One possible reason for this uncritical approach is that it fits into accepted ideological rubrics, such as “Jewish solidarity” or “Jewish financial power.” The ideological nature of this accepted version, however, is unveiled when juxtaposed with scholarly discussion of the anti-Russian policies of

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yet another Jewish banking family, indeed the most powerful one, the Rothschilds. Like Schiff, the Rothschilds, too, imposed financial sanctions against Russia in order, so they proclaimed, to bring about a change in the tsarist policy toward the Jews. However, in contrast to Schiff’s case, the standard interpretation of the Rothschilds’ motive holds, that, whereas a measure of Jewish solidarity played a certain role in their Russian policy, the question of whether to exert financial pressure on Russia was ultimately bound up with their own financial interests and with the diplomatic considerations of the Rothschilds’ respective countries.7 In light of the prevailing scholarly attitude toward the Rothschilds, the disassociation between Schiff’s assistance to the Japanese and his economic and political interests seems unreasonable. Like the Rothschilds, Schiff’s ability to exert pressure on the Russians and to support the Japanese was a consequence of his financial and political power as one of Wall Street’s leading investment bankers. The difference between the “ideological” narrative regarding the motives behind Schiff’s involvement in Japan’s war loans and the “interest” interpretation of the Rothschilds’ attitude toward Russia is, inter alia, a reflection of the existing state of historical research. The Rothschilds’ economic and political interests in the half century prior to World War I have been widely discussed, whereas the interests that informed Schiff’s support of Japan have received only marginal scholarly attention and coverage. This deficiency explains the ease and willingness with which historians have accepted Schiff’s own narrative. To help fill this gap, the present chapter will probe the economic and political interests that brought about Schiff’s financial support of Japan and examine the validity of the accepted “Jewish motive” narrative. SCHIFF AND THE LOANS TO JAPAN: MYTH AND HISTORY

According to the accepted version, Schiff became involved in Japan’s war loans by chance, while attending a dinner party during a visit to London; the following morning, he already announced his willingness to float part of the loan. The casual and immediate fashion in which Schiff became involved in the loan is central to the prevalent “Jewish motive” narrative. In order to examine this reading, it is necessary first to check whether the “casual interpretation” adequately describes the circumstances in which Schiff became involved in the Japanese loans. The “casual interpretation” is based on the memoirs of Takahashi Korekiyo, the vice president of The Bank of Japan at the time of the Russo-Japanese War who served later seven times as Japan’s Finance Minister and was appointed Prime Minister in 1921.8 According to Takahashi’s account, he was sent to New York and London at the outbreak of the War to raise a war loan of £10 million. After he failed to obtain access to Wall Street, Takahashi moved to London and negotiated the loan with banks with whom the Japanese government had previously worked and with other leading financial figures, among them Lord Revelstoke of Baring Brothers & Co., Sir Ernest Cassel and the

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Rothschilds. After lengthy negotiations, during which the Japanese government several times rejected the harsh terms set by the British financiers, Takahashi signed a draft agreement with Parr’s Bank and the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation. Both banks, together with the Yokahama Bank, underwrote half of the Japanese war loan, £5 million, and postponed the underwriting of the other half to a later, undetermined date. However, in light of the unsatisfactory and harsh conditions to which its request had been subjected, the Japanese government hesitated to ratify the draft agreement. According to Takahashi’s account, he first met Schiff at a dinner given to celebrate the signing of the draft agreement. Takahashi found Schiff “uncommonly interested” in Japanese affairs, and although he was unaware of Schiff’s standing in Wall Street, Takahashi tried to satisfy this interest; and they parted as “casual acquaintances.” The following morning, a surprised Takahashi was informed by Parr’s Bank that Schiff was willing to float the other £5 million that the British bankers had intended to postpone. Schiff’s consent paved the way to a new agreement, according to which the British group committed itself to issuing a war loan of £10 million, while Kuhn, Loeb & Co., committed itself to purchase half of this amount and to float it in the United States. Reexamination of Takahashi’s account, however, shows that the “casual interpretation” should be rejected. Methodologically, Takahashi’s memoirs include two consciously divided layers. One is the subjective layer, in which the Japanese banker described the events as he understood them at the time. The second layer is the historical-critical one, in which Takahshi attempts to analyze the unfolding of the entire sequence of events, using data and information that actually were unknown to him at the time. An analysis of the “casual interpretation” in light of the historical-critical layer of Takahashi’s memoirs reveals the accepted version to be groundless. Takahashi showed great interest in a central question regarding the circumstances of his meeting with Schiff: Was it a coincidence, allowing the American Jewish banker an unexpected chance to “punish” the Russians, or was it a calculated move, arranged to promote the underwriting of the Japanese war loans? Takahashi wrote:9 How Mr. Schiff became interested in Japan, I did not know fully at the time. . . . It was later in my increasingly friendly intercourse with him and Sir Ernest Cassel, that I gathered the motives and circumstances that led to Mr. Schiff’s participation in the Japanese financial operation. By reason of his connection to Sir Ernest, Mr. Schiff must have been especially well posted in all aspects and bearings of Japan’s conflict with the Northern power. He must have been aware that American participation in the Japanese loan was already desired in England.

As an “historian” Takahashi concluded, then, it was Cassel, a banker of German-Jewish origin who became a leading figure in the City at the

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beginning of the twentieth century, who had introduced Schiff to the political and financial complications of the Japanese war loan as they were seen from London.10 Takahshi’s conclusion that Schiff did not join the loan accidentally is corroborated by Philip Ziegler, the historian of the Barings, who states that the Barings “persuaded Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb to take up a £5 million loan.”11 Ziegler explains that for the Barings, who served both the Russians and the Japanese before the war, the inclusion of Kuhn, Loeb was a convenient escape from a business conflict of interests: on the one hand, Barings’ name did not appear on the loan prospectus, and therefore it would not antagonize the Russians; on the other hand, it helped the Japanese, and gained both their gratitude and handsome profits by being indirectly involved, through Kuhn, Loeb, in the loan. The Barings’ original dilemma is echoed in the words of Takahashi and his secretary, Fukai, who indicated that the British bankers wanted American participation in the Japanese loan because they were afraid of Russian retaliation.12 Contemporary evidence makes it clear, therefore, that before he met Takahashi, Schiff had already been aware of Japan’s difficulties in raising the full sum of the war loans in Britain and he had been asked by British bankers whether Kuhn, Loeb would issue in New York the remaining sum of £5 million. These facts alone are enough to challenge the accepted “casual interpretation” and to justify a reexamination of the factors that led to Schiff’s support of the Japanese. Contemporary sources are in dispute, however, whether it was Cassel or the Barings who initiated Schiff’s participation in the loan; but, as will be seen, these versions are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive, in light of the close personal and business relationships among all three bankers and their firms. Up to World War I, relations with Europe were essential for American investment banking, because the rapid industrialization of the United States was financed by European capital.13 Accordingly, Kuhn, Loeb nurtured a network of unofficial ties with a number of associates in Europe, and Cassel was its chief ally in London. Schiff’s business relationship with Cassel began in 1879, and over the years they developed into deep business trust and personal friendship.14 Likewise, Kuhn, Loeb had close relations with Barings, and the cooperation between the two firms grew as they developed their respective international businesses.15 Cassel, too, had a “close friendship” and “an alliance” with Lord Revelstoke, the senior partner of Barings, and this became most evident in 1906, when Cassel organized a syndicate that saved Barings from bankruptcy in the specter of their failure to float a Russian loan of £10 million.16 Schiff, Cassel, and Revelstoke belonged, then, to the same business sphere; accordingly a joint effort on the part of Cassel and Revelstoke to bring Schiff into the Japanese loan seems not only probable but even reasonable. This conclusion refutes the “casual interpretation,” and points to business motives that led Schiff to join the Japanese loan. Thus, the “business motive” undermines the accepted “Jewish motive” narrative and calls for an alternative interpretation.

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THE DISCORD IN THE BRITISH ELITE REGARDING FOREIGN POLICY AND JAPANESE WAR LOANS

The loans to Japan were a political even more than a financial issue. The financiers that worked to assist the Japanese belonged not only to the same business sphere, but to the same political sphere as well. Cassel, like Lord Farquhar of Parr’s Bank, was part of a circle of leading financiers that formed King Edward VII’s informal, private “cabinet,” through which the King effectively influenced British politics.17 Cassel was the model of this “cabinet” and its modus operandi: he was Edward’s confidant, supported him financially, and used his power in the City to advance the King’s private foreign policy.18 Cassel acquired his wealth and power in colonial banking, which by its very nature mixed finance and politics. Cassel served British colonial interests in Egypt, Turkey, and Morocco. In Egypt, for example, he was deeply involved in banking and monetary aspects of the British colonial rule, and worked closely with another Baring, the Earl of Cromer, the British High Commissioner there, who used Cassel’s services not the least because he was Revelstoke’s closest ally. Cassel not only profited from his political connections economically, he used his economic power to support those politicians and policies that would secure these profits.19 The influence of King Edward’s “cabinet” had grown since the end of the Boer war as Britain began moving away from its traditional “splendid isolation.” Another factor that informed the influence of the King’s “cabinet” was the controversy that split Lord Balfour’s Conservative government into two rival factions over the goals of British foreign policy.20 One faction, led by the Foreign Minister, Lord Henry Lansdowne, viewed Germany as the main source of danger to Britiain’s national security and thought that it should draw closer to the Franco-Russian alliance. The other faction, led by Balfour, considered Russia to be Britain’s main rival and argued that strategically Britain should warm its relations with Germany. King Edward was one of the champions of the “Franco-Russian Faction” and played, personally and through his “cabinet,” an informal role in the events leading to the negotiations of the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale of 1904.21 Likewise, the King encouraged the efforts of his “cabinet” financiers to help the Japanese and gave a private dinner in honor of Schiff in appreciation of his role in facilitating the loans.22 It appears, then, that like the Anglo-French entente, the Japanese loans deal was just another case in which King Edward used private diplomacy to decide an inter-faction struggle in the British Government. In order to probe this hypothesis, the political controversy in Britain over the Japanese war loans will be examined. When Takahashi arrived in London in early 1904, he started negotiations with several financiers – Parr’s Bank, Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, Lord Revelstoke, the Rothschilds, and Cassel – who had handled Japanese financing before the war, especially since the conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902.23 However, the Japanese

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loans were mainly a political issue by this time. In the fall of 1903, when the war with Russia became imminent, the Japanese started to examine the prospects of raising loans in Britain.24 In October, Hayashi Tadasu, the Japanese ambassador to London, asked Marcus Samuel of Shell, with whom Japan had done business previously, if he would be able to raise large Japanese loans. Samuel responded that it would be possible, provided that the British Government guaranteed them. Accordingly, the Japanese decided to approach the British Government directly. In December, Hayashi asked Lord Lansdowne whether the British Government would guarantee a £10–20 million Japanese loan. Lansdowne brought the issue before the cabinet, where it became a point of contention between him and Balfour that reflected their disagreement over British policy in view of the upcoming war between Russia and Japan.25 At the same time, this dispute essentially duplicated the basic controversy between the “Franco-Russian” and “German” factions. With regard to the loans, Lansdowne, like King Edward, supported the Japanese request and Balfour rejected it. As for the looming war, however, Lansdowne and Edward demanded that Britain mediate between Russia and Japan in an attempt to prevent hostilities and bring about a peaceful solution. Balfour, for his part, was opposed to any British involvement in the Russo-Japanese conflict, maintaining that a war between those two countries, in which Japan would be slightly defeated, would not be detrimental to British interests. It appears, then, that Lansdowne, Edward, and the “Franco-Russian faction” in general wanted to prevent the war, but at the same time worked to secure a Japanese victory if war eventually broke out, whereas Balfour and the “German faction” was interested in a war that would result in a Russian victory. Some aspects of the political logic behind the opposing views dividing the British cabinet – a division that informed the enlistment of Schiff by King Edward’s “cabinet” to rescue the Japanese loan – will now be discussed. THE DISCORD IN THE RUSSIAN ELITE REGARDING ECONOMIC POLICIES AND THE WAR

On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, a controversy on Russia’s policy in Northeast Asia divided the tsarist regime between the “hardliners,” led by the Minister of the Interior, Viacheslav von Plehve, and the “moderates” led by the former Finance Minister Sergei Witte.26 The controversy over “Far Eastern” policy overlapped a much deeper dispute over the manner and pace of Russia’s industrialization. This dispute split the Russian ruling class into the same two rival factions: the “traditionalists” led by Plehve and the “modernists” led by Witte.27 The “traditionalists” preached a gradual modernization of Russia – like that was pursued in the West – through the development of agriculture and light industries that would increase the purchasing power of the rural population and promote the growth of the internal market. This policy reflected the interests of the agrarian elements, especially the

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lower nobility, who formed the bulk of Plehve’s supporters. The “modernists,” on the other hand, argued that in order to maintain its international power, Russia should close the gap with the West through modernization “from above” by rapid development of heavy industry and infrastructure based on foreign investments and loans and on massive state entrepreneurship, orders, and adequate monetary and fiscal protectionist policies. The primary burden of financing rapid industrialization was placed upon the rural sector that was heavily taxed and thus was increasingly being impoverished. This policy turned Witte into the arch-enemy of the agrarian elements in Russian society, on the one hand, and into the ally of the high aristocracy and high bourgeoisie, which served as state entrepreneurs and financial mediators between Russia and the capital markets in the West, on the other. The Russian policy in Northeast Asia was a direct extension of the ongoing dispute between the traditionalists and the modernists.28 The hub of Witte’s system was a continuous growth of heavy industry, which meant a perpetual strain to create artificial state demand. Northeast Asia was exceptionally suited for such massive state entrepreneurship and, accordingly, Witte wanted to secure Russia’s political hegemony and economic monopoly in Manchuria. Toward this end, he worked to attain a Russo-Japanese agreement that would recognize, in exchange, Japan’s claim of a similar status in Korea. A Russian monopoly in Manchuria increasingly became essential for the further implementation of Witte’s policy: it created new artificial markets and demand for Russia’s otherwise redundant heavy industry, and it secured the continuous flow of foreign capital and loans that enabled the recycling of Russia’s foreign debts, the halting of which would result in the collapse of Witte’s policy. The importance of the monopolization of Manchuria to Witte informed the traditionalists’ fierce objection to a Russo-Japanese agreement regarding their respective control of Northeast Asia, and Witte’s opposition to the traditionalists’ policy, led by the tsar, of Russian economic and military expansion in Korea, a policy that threatened to thwart any agreement with Japan. Russian policy in Northeast Asia clearly reflected the changing and fragile balance of power between the modernists and the traditionalists. Following Witte’s appointment to the Treasury in 1892, his faction became the dominant power in the Russian administration. After Plehve was appointed Minister of Interior in 1902, however, Witte’s standing increasingly diminished, and in 1903 he was dismissed from the Treasury and appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers, a powerless position in the Russian system of government. Witte’s loss of power and the strengthening of the traditionalists manifested itself in the belligerent policy that Russia adopted in Korea in 1903, a policy that made a military confrontation with Japan inevitable. In terms of the inter-faction struggle in the tsarist regime, a Russian victory in the war would have been, in fact, a victory for the traditionalists and the consolidation of their rule, whereas a Russian defeat would

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have meant a victory for the modernists that would open the way for Witte’s return to power. Witte’s interest in a Russian defeat becomes clear from an analysis of the “peace policy” he conducted during the war. After Japan’s initial victories, Witte endeavored to bring about a speedy ceasefire. This “peace policy” attempted to end the war before Russia could exercise its military advantage over Japan, the realization of which demanded time both for recruiting troops and for transferring them from Europe to the Korean front.29 And indeed, the eventual peace that was concluded after a series of Russian defeats, which signified that Russia lost the war, paved the way for Witte’s return to power. The power struggle between the traditionalists and the modernists had a direct effect on Russia’s foreign policy. The traditionalists’ policy of gradual industrialization and development of the home market assumed that Russia would import the heavy industry products it required from the West in exchange for the export of agricultural and light industry products. The natural partner for this kind of division of labor was Germany, and therefore the traditionalists, led by Tsar Nicholas II, aspired to improve Russo-German relations, a desire that culminated in the abortive Björkö Treaty of 1905.30 In contrast, the basic condition for Witte’s rapid industrialization policy was to secure the monopoly of Russian heavy industry by pursuing a protectionist policy of high tariffs. This policy was aimed primarily against Germany, and Witte indeed played an active role in weakening Russia’s political and economic relations with Germany.31 At the same time, Witte nurtured friendly relations with France in order to secure Russia’s access to the French money market, which became the main source of capital for rapid industrialization. Accordingly, Witte was one of the chief architects of the FrancoRussian alliance and the major party behind the foiling of the Björkö Treaty.32 Witte’s anti-German, pro-French foreign policy made him a natural ally of the “Franco-Russian faction” in Britain, which had a clear interest in supporting the Russian modernists in their struggle with the traditionalists. As mentioned, this interest was revealed in the similar positions taken by Lord Lansdowne and King Edward in regard to a possible Russo-Japanese War and to the Japanese loans: they both worked to prevent the war, but at the same time worked to facilitate British financial support to secure a Japanese victory if war eventually broke out. There were business interests, too, that informed the support of Witte and his rapid industrialization system by the financiers associated with the “Franco-Russian faction” in Britain. The Barings, for example, were intensively involved in Russian railways at the beginning of the twentieth century; Russia, in fact, was the only European country with which the Barings had wide-scale business.33 Still more significant was Witte’s cooperation with the Rothschilds, mainly through his close relations with Alphonse de Rothschild, the head of the family’s Paris branch. Witte described Alphonse as an old friend and as one of two European bankers in whom he had complete trust and confidence.34 The second banker was

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Mendelssohn of Mendelssohn & Co., in Berlin, that was a part of the Rothschild sphere of interests.35 The Rothscilids played an important role in the implementation of Witte’s policy.36 Since 1895, Witte’s main advisor and confidant was Adolph Rothstein, a leading St. Petersburg banker who served as the Paris Rothschilds’ agent in Russia. Witte appointed Rothstein as head of the Russian-Chinese Bank, which was one of Witte’s main agencies for implementing his policy in Northeast Asia.37 Witte’s assistance was of great significance in promoting the Rothschilds’ interests in Russia, in particular their involvement in the Russian oil industry; this involvement had important implications for the bitter struggle in the international oil market between the American Standard Oil Company and its European competitors, among them Shell, which was controlled by Marcus Samuel and the Rothschilds.38 Witte’s opponents considered his close relations with the Rothschilds to be critical to the promotion of his policies in Russia and Northeast Asia, and accordingly they denounced these relations – with antisemitic allusions to the Jewish origin of Witte’s wife and the Rothschilds – as detrimental to Russia’s national interest.39 The Rothschilds who were part of King Edward’s “cabinet” supporters of the Anglo-French entente,40 showed great concern at the growing tension between Japan and Russia and before and during the war they supported Witte’s policies. In London in January 1904, Alfred Rothschild promised Hayashi to assist the Japanese financially. In Paris, following a conversation with Alphonse, the German ambassador reported that the Paris Rothschilds were hostile to the Russians because of the tsar’s policies toward the Jews, and therefore they did not float Russian war loans.41 The Rothschilds’ “hostility towards Russia” effectively meant support for Witte, whose standing was bound to be strengthened from the difficulties that the traditionalists were encountering in funding the war, as he would profit politically from financial assistance to the Japanese. After the war began, the Franco-Russian faction in Britain had clear political and economic interests in a Japanese victory, the effect of which would be to consolidate Witte’s power in Russia and to strengthen theirs in Britain, as well. This interest explains the efforts that King Edward’s “cabinet” made to secure the success of the Japanese war loan. After Lansdowne’s failure to pass a resolution to that effect in the British cabinet and after the British bankers agreed to float only half of the required Japanese loan, the King’s “cabinet” worked to circumvent these obstacles by selling the other half in the American market, which for both political and financial reasons was the only suitable market for this endeavor. Accordingly, it seems that Cassel and Revelstoke, whether apart or in coordination, turned to their business ally, Schiff, who was in London at the time, and asked for his assistance. Before giving his answer, Schiff wished to inquire into Japan’s economic, political, and military condition, and it was for that purpose that his meeting with Takahashi was arranged, after which Schiff joined the Japanese loan.

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 THE ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL FACTORS BEHIND SCHIFF’S SUPPORT TO JAPAN

The refutation of the “casual interpretation” undermines the other component of the accepted narrative regarding Schiff’s support of the Japanese, the “Jewish motive” that allegedly informed his anti-Russian stance, and accordingly, it should also be reexamined. The accepted version bases Schiff’s “Jewish motive” primarily on his letter of April 1904 to Lord Rothschild, in which he called on the Jewish leading financiers in the West to adopt a joint anti-Russian policy in case of a Russo-Japanese War. Schiff wrote: I am afraid troubled times are still in store for our unfortunate coreligionists in the tsar’s dominion, and it can only be hoped for their sake as well as for the good of Russia itself, that the conflict between Russia and Japan will in its consequences lead to such an upheaval in the basic conditions upon which Russia is now governed that the elements in Russia which seek to bring their country under constitutional government shall at last triumph. Until that day arrives, and come it must, I fear the Russian Jewish question will be impossible of any real solution.42

Schiff voiced similar thoughts to Takahashi, who wrote that Schiff “had a grudge against Russia on account of his race”: He was justly indignant at the unfair treatment of the Jewish population by the Russian government, which had culminated in the notorious persecutions. He harbored no ill-will towards the Russian people; but he thought the Imperial regime of Russia was utterly antiquated. A system of government which was capable of such cruelties and outrages at home as well as in foreign relations must be overhauled from the foundations in the interest of the oppressed race, the Russian people themselves, and the world at large. For this purpose, it was deemed desirable to admonish the ruling class of Russia by an objective lesson. Happening to be in Europe, Mr. Schiff saw in the war callously embarked on by the Russian government a welcome opportunity for giving effect to his cherished idea. He felt that if defeated, Russia would be led in the path of betterment, whether it be revolution or reformation and he decided to exercise whatever influence for placing the weight of American resources on the side of Japan.43

Contextualizing Schiff’s and Takahashi’s words in the framework of contemporary Russian politics suggests that Schiff’s anti-Russian attitude meant supporting Witte and the modernists in their conflict with Plehve and the traditionalists. The contemporary depiction of the intra-Russian conflict portrayed Plehve as the representative of agrarian Russia, Moskovitism, autocratic tsarism, and warmongering, whereas Witte’s

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image was that of the champion of the Russian bourgeoisie, modern industrial economics, Western values, constitutionalism, and peace. Witte deliberately cultivated this “progressive” image in Western public opinion, both to increase investors’ confidence in Russian loans and to gain allies in his struggle against Plehve.44 These conflicting images were reflected in contemporary Western views of Plehve’s and Witte’s attitudes toward the Jews, as well: Plehve was considered the initiator of the tsarist pogrom policy, which culminated in the Kishinev pogrom of spring 1903, for which he was held perennially responsible; Witte, on the other hand, was considered to be sympathetic to the Jews and their aspiration for civil rights as part of his support of a more constitutional regime in Russia.45 These prevailing opposing images of Plehve and Witte seem to confirm Schiff’s “Jewish motive” as posited by the accepted version: a Japanese victory should weaken Plehve’s “war” traditionalist, and antisemitic faction and restore to power the modernist, “peace” faction led by the pro-Jewish Witte. And indeed, this scenario did take place. After Russia’s defeat, Witte was appointed head of the Russian delegation to the peace talks in the United States; later, he became Prime Minister and initiated a series of constitutional and administrative reforms that potentially could have improved the legal and civil conditions of the Jews in Russia. Moreover, Schiff supported Witte openly. He pointed to this stance explicitly in letters to Paul Nathan, head of the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, who had established close relations with Witte as part of the effort to improve the conditions of Russia Jewry.46 In a letter to Nathan of July 1904, Schiff referred to Plehve and his faction as targets for the pressure of “international Jewry.”47 In another letter to Nathan, Schiff wrote that he believed in Witte’s efforts to free the tsar from the influence of reactionary forces.48 Schiff’s support of Witte clearly manifests itself in their correspondence between 1905 and 1906, following their meeting at the Russian-Japanese peace conference. Schiff gave Witte credit for instituting the reforms that Russia had undergone at the time and wished him strength “in body and in mind . . . so that you may be able to carry through successfully the task of the regeneration of Russia and its passing from the medieval conditions . . . into a modern state.” 49 Schiff’s support of Witte was most explicitly expressed on the financial level. In summer 1905, while addressing a closed meeting of bankers in New York, Schiff announced that until Russia changed its policy toward its Jewish population, he and his heirs would not participate in any Russian loan.50 However, by the end of 1905, in the midst of a new wave of pogroms that took place after Witte had become Prime Minister, Schiff’s objections had already faded. The reason for this turnabout is quiet clear: Witte at that time was busy trying to raise “the loan that saved Russia,” the success of which was crucial to his own political survival.51 And indeed, in November 1905, when it looked as though J.P. Morgan & Co., would float the Russian loan in the United States, Schiff wrote to one of Morgan’s’ partners:

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Recalling what I have said to you when we recently discussed Russian financing, I deem it proper to say now that if the new order of things in Russia will work out properly, as I hope and believe, it will entirely change our own attitude. In such an event we should not hesitate to give your firm any support it might wish to have from us in any endeavor to open the American market to Russian loans.52

This was not Schiff’s only retreat from his pledge to block Russian loans from the American money markets. In winter 1905–06, Cassel became involved in “the loan that saved Russia” in order to rescue from bankruptcy the Barings, who had failed to float their share in the loan. Initially, Schiff tried to dissuade Cassel from this venture, claiming that it was against the best interests of Russian Jewry; but later, in contradiction to his pledge, he promised Cassel not to interrupt the latter’s efforts, presumably because the success of this loan served the interests of both Witte and the Barings.53 This last episode is illuminating when reviewing Schiff’s allegedly “Jewish motive.” The pro-Russian turnabout of the financiers who were associated with the Japanese loan was not accidental; it was due to Witte’s return to power in the wake of Russia’s defeat. Schiff’s seeming change of opinion took place in the midst of a wave of pogroms that broke out concurrently with Witte’s return to power. This juxtaposition, of course, does not harmonize with the alleged “Jewish motive” supposedly informing Schiff’s support of the Japanese. It seems, therefore, that his immediate, practical goal in supporting the Japanese was, as he himself indicated, a change of regime in Russia that would lead to the improvement of its policy toward the Jews. The question should be asked, therefore, whether Schiff had financial or political interests unrelated to the “Jewish motive” that could explain his support of Witte, a support that informed his antiRussian and pro-Japanese attitude during the Russo-Japanese War. Schiff’s support of Witte was a direct consequence of his financial and political interests. Financially, Schiff and Kuhn-Loeb worked closely with the pro-Witte Rothschilds’ sphere of interest.54 Kuhn-Loeb’s main ally in Germany was M.M. Warburg & Co., which took part in the Japanese loan.55 The intimate alliance between these two firms was based on family and marriage relations, which created a sort of personal union between the firms.56 In the second half of the nineteenth century, as the Warburgs upgraded themselves from commercial to investment banking, they increasingly became part of the Rothschilds’ banking sphere.57 A substantial proportion of the Warburgs’ business was conducted with the Paris Rothschilds, with whom they maintained particularly close personal relations. The Warburgs had extensive business dealings in Russia, and a key figure in those activities was Adolph Rothstein, the middleman between the Paris Rothschilds and Witte. Schiff’s support of Witte was in harmony not only with his business interests, but also with his political interests in the United States. Schiff was a long-time supporter of Theodore Roosevelt in the president’s power

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struggles within the Republican Party,58 which was torn between rival factions, each backed by different elements in the American business world. Schiff’s loyalty to Roosevelt, which was based on shared economic and monetary agendas, generated a deep trust between the two men,59 as well as between Roosevelt and other partners in Kuhn-Loeb, all of which culminated in the president’s support of the appointment of Paul Warburg as the first chairman of the Federal Reserve.60 Roosevelt clearly preferred Witte and the modernists in their struggle with the tsar and the traditionalists.61 He denounced the Russian autocracy, personified by the tsar, whom he referred to as “a small and ridiculous creature,” and he praised Witte’s struggle to free Russia from the spirit of Ivan the Terrible and to lead it into the twentieth century. Accordingly, Roosevelt supported Witte’s Far-Eastern policy and clashed over this stand with his Secretary of State, John Hay, who was a son-inlaw of one of the founders of Standard Oil and belonged to a rival faction in the Republican Party. Roosevelt’s support of Witte was manifested throughout the Russo-Japanese War: he worked to bring about an early resolution of the war, a policy that suited Witte’s interests. Both leaders cooperated to achieve this goal during the peace conference that eventually concluded the war.62 CONCLUSIONS

The foregoing discussion clearly challenges the accepted version regarding the “Jewish motive” that informed Schiff’s decision to join the Japanese war loans. The accepted version is based on Schiff’s statements that a Russian defeat would bring about a change in the tsarist regime and the ascendancy of a more liberal administration that would be more accommodating to the Jews. Schiff’s explanation of his actions consists of two layers: the goal – changing the regime; and the motive – improving the situation of the Jews. The accepted narrative posits the change of the tsarist regime solely as a means of improving the situation of the Jews. However, the proximity of Schiff’s attitude toward Russia to his views of the power struggle within the tsarist regime suggests that his motives should be examined in the larger context of his business and political interests. A close analysis of Schiff’s support of the Japanese within a broad political context links the change in the tsarist regime, and the support of Witte and his policies, with Kuhn-Loeb’s business and political interests, and posits this as the main goal of Schiff’s assistance to the Japanese. Given this perspective, the improvement of the situation of Russian Jewry was more of a by-product of Schiff’s support of the Japanese, but not the essential motivation for it. The “interests perspective” suggests that Schiff joined the Japanese war loans in order to assist his business allies in Britain – the financiers of King Edward’s “cabinet” and the Franco-Russian faction – who faced political and financial difficulties in floating the Japanese war loans. Schiff worked closely with this financial-political circle, and it is safe to

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assume that he would have helped them, as he did both before and after the war, with no relation to the “Jewish question.” The loans were essential in order to secure a swift Japanese victory over Russia, before the latter could transfer its armies to Northeast Asia and gain military advantage. Schiff’s financial-political circle aimed for a Russian defeat in order to strengthen Witte and his economic policy of rapid industrialization, with its implications for Russia’s home and foreign policies. Support for Witte could seemingly confirm Schiff’s claim about the “Jewish motive,” since Witte was considered in both Russian and Western public opinion to be more accommodating to the Jews than were his Moskovite rivals, led by Plehve and the tsar.63 In practice, however, this image was groundless. Witte’s economic policy actually hurt the development of Russia’s rural economy and internal market, on which the Jewish economic activity in the Pale of settlement, depended. Thus, rapid industrialization undermined Jewish existence in Russia.64 Schiff’s support of Russia’s attempts to raise loans in the West during Witte’s postbellum premiership despite the ongoing pogroms is another indication that Schiff’s motives for his actions on behalf of either the Japanese or the Russians should be analyzed in the broader context of his economic and political interests, not on the basis of his self-proclaimed “Jewish motive.” All in all, this chapter suggests that Schiff’s financial assistance to Japan during the Russo-Japanese War did not stem from any altruistic “Jewish motive,” but rather from his support of Witte and his economic policy in Russia. Witte’s changing position in the tsarist regime, and not the constant distress of Russian Jewry in 1903–06, is, then, the more reasonable variable explaining Schiff’s turnabouts regarding the loans to Russia. In the same vein, it can be safely assumed that despite the “Jewish question,” Schiff would have assisted Russia rather than Japan, had such an act served Witte’s policy. So why did Schiff repeatedly raise the “Jewish motive” at all? The reasons for this should be sought in a different arena: that of Jewish communal politics. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, with the gradual democratization of Western societies, the traditional plutocratic control of Jewish communities in the West had also been challenged. In these circumstances, exerting political and financial power in favor of distressed communities – or the impression of doing so – had become one of the main factors by which the Jewish economic elites retained the communities’ sense of dependency and secured the perpetuation of their control. The public statements by Schiff, as well as those of his relatives and associates, regarding his “Jewish motive” attest, then, not to his considerations in assisting the Japanese, but to the challenge to his plutocratic leadership.65 NOTES 1

On the Japanes loans, see Miller, 2005: 465–483; Ogawa, 1923: 65; White, 1964: 167. Suzuki, 1994; 83–127.

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3 4 5 6

7

8

9 10

11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18

19

20 21

22 23 24

25 26

27

28

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On Schiff, see Adler, 1928; Best, 1972: 313–324; on Kuhn, Loeb & Co., see Carosso, 1976–77: 76–82; Carosso, 1970: 32–35, 44–49, 81–89, 116–122, 142–143. Adler, 1928, I: 217–218, II: 121–122. Adler, 1928, I: 356; Birmingham, 1967: 308. Adler, 1928, I: 120–143; Best, 1982: pp. 93–99. See, for example, Sherman, 1983: 59–73; Aronsfeld, 1973: 99–103; Gartner, 1980: 87; Shillony, 1981a: 146 (and also chapter 23 in this volume); White, 1964: 168; Carosso, 1976–77: 81; Best, 1982: 91–113; Best, 1972: 314–315; Szajkowski, 1967: 75–77; Tokayer and Swartz, 1979: 46; Baron, 1977: 186, 202–203. Gutwein, 1991: 23–45; Sherman, 1983: 59–73; Aronsfeld, 1973: 87–103; Davis, 1983: 229–233; Ferguson, 1998: 905–910, 922–923, 931–935. Adler, 1928, I: 213–229; Best, 1982: 113–119, 314–315; Best, 1972: 315. On Takahashi and his involvement in obtaining foreign loans for Japan, see also Smethurst, 2007. Adler, 1928, I: 216–217. On Cassel and his standing in the City, see Grunwald, 1969: 119–161; Emden, 1938: 331–336; Chapman, 1984: 54; Cassis, 1984: 49. Ziegler, 1988: 311–312. Adler, 1928, I: 214; Best, 1982: 315. Faulkner, 1960: 684. Adler, 1928, I: 9–14, 27–28, 36–37, 114–115; Carosso, 1970: 92; Grunwald, 1969: 126–129; Emden, 1938: 335; Birmingham, 1967: 189, 369–70. Adler, 1928, I: 18, 80, 116, 172, 194, 230, II: 336; Ziegler, 1988: 293–294, 303–304, 311–312. Ziegler, 1988: 276, 289; Grunwald, 1969: 143–146; Baster, 1977: 105. Emden, 1934: 289–290, 294–302; Roth, 1943: 355–366 Emden, 1934: 279; Emden, 1938: 337–338; Roth, 1943: 362; Brook-Shepherd, 1976: 131–134, 147–148, 269. 351; Jullian, 1967: 211, 232, 278. On Cassel’s colonial business and political involvement, see Ziegler, 1988: 276; Grunwald, 1969: 134–137, 140–146; Baster, 1977: 73–76, 106; Earle, 1923: 181–186, 220–221. Monger, 1963: 44–45, 63–65, 97–99, 112–113; Langer, 1968: 485–532, 711–742. Monger, 1963: 67. 83–84, 99–103, 127–128, 160; Maurois, 1933: 137–179, 285–287; Newton, 1929: 278–293. Adler, 1928, I: 216; Monger, 1963: 152–153. Nish, 1966: 253–255; Feis, 1965: 22–24. Nish, 1966: 276–279; Gooch and Temperley, 1967: 227–230; Emden, 1943: 240–241. Nish, 1966: 273–279; Gooch and Temperley, 1967: 227–230; White, 1964: 116 On the dispute regarding Russia’s policy in Northeast Asia, see Nish, 1985b; Langer, 1969: 3–45. On Plehve, see Judge, 1983; on Witte, see Laue, 1969. Ular, 1905: 48–52, 135–136; Laue, 1969, 145–146, 164–165, 178–187, 201–202, 289–290; Judge, 1983: 38–92, 175–198; Gerschenkron, 1962: 5–51; Kahan, 1967 : 460–477. Nish, 1985b: passim; Malozemoff, 1958: 69–76, 93–95 ,103–104, 112–116; Sumner, 1968: 15–19; Zabriskie, 1946: 30–41, 84–89; Laue, 1969: 150–154;

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33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65

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Judge, 1983: 153–159; Langer, 1968: 188–189, 397–411, 462–463, 677–693, 695, 765–770; White, 1964: 19–20, 84–86. Trani, 1969: 138–155; Dennet, 1925: 171–214, 236–261; Esthus, 1967: 77–94. Laue, 1969: 123–129; Witte, 1921: 72, 181–183, 403–404. Laue, 1969: 109–110; Witte, 1921: 38–44, 63–70, 425–429. Nish, 1966: 185–203, 280; Maurois, 1933: 156–159, 170–177; Langer, 1968: 747–786. Ziegler, 1988: 245–246, 311. Laue, 1963: 297. Riesser, 1911: 412, 445. Laue,1969: 142–143. On Rothstein see Laue, 1963: 140, 150, 213, 288; Witte, 1921: 50; Malozemoff, 1958: 93, 177. Fursenko, 1962: 32; Graetz, 1985: 355–377, Landau, 1939: 269–285. Laue, 1963: 246; Graetz, 1985: 358; Ferguson, 1998: 905. Ferguson, 1998: 921–922. Corti, 1928: 459–460 Adler, 1928, II: 121–122. Adler, 1928, I: 217–218. For contemporary opinion, see Dillon, 1918: 117, 118–119; Ular, 1905: 135–136; Witte, 1921: 191–192, 209, 237–249, 273; this image also found its way into research in Laue, 1963: 92, 252. On the manipulation of the media see Laue, 1963: 106–107; Sherman, 1983: 63–64. Malozemoff, 1958: 184–185, 196; White, 1964: 13–14, 36–37; Greenberg, 1951, II: 48–52, 103–107; Baron, 1976: 56, 137–138, 369; Judge, 1983: 93–110; Feldman, 1970: 137–150. Szajkowski, 1967: 5–6; Feder, 1958: 60–80; Feder, 1952: 3–26 Szajkowski, 1967: 75 note 21. Szajkowski, 1967: 5 note 8. Adler, 1928, II: 134–135. Adler, 1928, II: 133. Witte, 1921: 285. Adler, 1928, II: 133 Szajkowski, 1967: 77–91. Ferguson, 1998: 923–924; Carosso, 1976–77: 76–77. Farrer, 1975: 49–50; Best, 1974: 67; Best, 1972: 313, 319; Miller, 2005: 477. Farrer, 1975: 40, 45–46, 63; Adler, 1928, I: 16; Rosenbaum, 1962: 121–147; Rosenbaum and Sherman, 1979: 86. Rosenbaum and Sherman, 1979: 59–67, 84–90, 96, 110–111,138. Adler, 1928, I: 302–310. Adler, 1928, I: 36, 44–47, 111–112, 132–140, 179, 274–276. Farrer, 1975: 60–61. Dennet, 1925: 188, 256; Trani, 1969: 53. Dennet, 1925; Trani, 1969; Esthus, 1967: 40–94. Moreover, Witte’s rivals often emphasized the fact that he was married to a Jewess. Gutwein, 1994: 197–221. Gutwein, 1997.

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The War, Military Expenditures, and Postbellum Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Japan ONO KEISHI1

E

conomic historians of modern Japan have argued that the RussoJapanese War marks the beginning of a second phase of early industrialization, that of a “big spurt” period.2 Ohkawa Kazushi and Henry Rosovsky, for example, pinpointed 1905 as the end of the first phase of Japanese modern development. After the war, they and others noted, Japan witnessed the emergence of large-scale manufacturing enterprises producing Western industrial commodities, while the government reduced its need to compete domestically for investments, thereby allowing the saving rates in the private sector to rise.3 While it is evident that the Russo-Japanese War laid a heavy financial burden on the Japanese economy, it is less clear what the effects of the war on Japan’s fiscal and monetary policies were, and how Japan managed to overcome this burden during the war and especially in the postwar era.4 One of the foremost studies regarding the effect of wars on fiscal policy is that of Peacock and Wiseman, who focused on the British case from the Napoleonic Wars to World War II.5 Emi Koichi and Shionoya Yuichi adopted their methodology and examined the Japanese fiscal policy from Meiji to mid-Showa era.6 The latter study traced mainly long-term economic variation but overlooked the effect of each wartime fiscal policy on the postwar public finance, since its objective was to analyze the public finance as a whole and military finance is regarded as a part of it. The present chapter, however, discusses Japanese fiscal policy from the end of the Sino-Japanese War to the outbreak of World War I in terms of relation of financial policy between wartime and peacetime using the analysis method of Peacock and Wiseman as well as Emi and Shionoya.

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In addition, it analyzes the effect of the fiscal policy during the RussoJapanese War on that of the postbellum period. Both the army and navy planned arms expansion of substantial size after the war, but their plans were dependent on the fiscal condition and vice versa. The character of arms expansion was different not only between the post Russo-Japanese War and the post Sino-Japanese War, but also the army and navy. Setting the military expenditure as the main research objective, the characteristic of Japanese fiscal policy in relation to war expenditures may become intelligible, especially postbellum policy. More specifically, this chapter focuses on the army and navy expansion programs and changes in military expenditure during the postbellum period. Finally, the chapter examines the effect of the fiscal expansion after the Russo-Japanese War on trade deficit, which, in turn, led to specie (money in the form of coins) drain marring the maintenance of the gold standard. ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWER OF MAJOR COUNTRIES IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

In the case of a major war, war-related expenses become so high that certain national economies cannot afford them. Therefore, wartime fiscal policy that is aimed to finance wars affects postbellum government finance. This section overviews the study of Peacock and Wiseman (1961), the leading work in this field, and that of Emi and Shionoya (1966), who applied the Peacock-Wiseman method to analyze the Japanese case. In addition, this section surveys economic and military power of eight major powers, including Japan, between 1900 and1913. Economic and Military Power of Major Countries Table 10.1 shows economic and military strength of Japan, European powers and the United States in 1900, 1910, and 1913. In the former part of this period, the following three countries out of the eight experienced major wars: Great Britain (Boer War), Japan and Russia (Russo-Japanese War). During the latter half, European countries faced diplomatic and military tension in the Balkan Peninsula. At the beginning of this section, the trend of economic power and military expenditure of Japan is reviewed briefly, with reference to other powers. The size of the gross national product (GNP) of Japan was the smallest among the eight throughout the period, nevertheless the growth rate was the highest. GNP of Japan in 1913 was 2.1 times as large as in 1900, and the only country which recorded the same GNP growth other than Japan was the United States (2.1 times). They are followed by Russia (1.7 times), Germany and Italy (1.5 times), Austria-Hungary (1.4 times), Great Britain (1.3 times), and France (1.2 times), all of which had much lower growth of GNP than Japan and the United States. Therefore, the relative size of the Japanese economy improved dramatically during the period. Japanese GNP in 1900 was 42 percent of Italy, 24 percent of Austria-Hungary, 20

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Table 10.1: Military and Economic Military Strength of Eight Powers (1900–13) (in current prices, million dollar) Japan Great Britain GNP

USA

(1900) 1,200 9,400 18,700 (1910) 1,900 10,400 35,300 (1913) 2,500 12,000 39,600

Germany France Russia Italy 9,300 11,700 13,600

6,100 8,300 2,800 6,900 11,300 3,200 7,500 14,300 4,300

Austria –Hungary 5,000 6,200 7,100

Military (1900) expenditure (1910) (ME) (1913)

66 92 95

253 340 384

191 313 348

205 307 554

212 262 284

204 312 441

78 122 141

68 87 182

Navy (1900) expenditure (1910) (1913)

29 42 48

146 146 237

56 123 140

37 103 112

73 74 90

42 47 118

24 41 49

9 14 38

ME/GNP

6% 5% 4%

3% 3% 3%

1% 1% 1%

2% 3% 4%

3% 4% 4%

2% 3% 3%

3% 4% 3%

1% 1% 3%

Navy/Army (1900) 0.78 ratio of (1910) 0.84 expenditure (1913) 1.02

1.36 0.75 1.61

0.41 0.65 0.67

0.22 0.50 0.25

0.53 0.39 0.46

0.26 0.18 0.37

0.44 0.51 0.53

0.15 0.19 0.26

(1900) (1910) (1913)

Source: Author’s calculation based on the following: United States Department of Commerce 1987: 224, United States Department of Commerce 1989: 1,114, Ohkawa, et al. 1974 :200, Ministry of Finance 1955: 128, 220–223, Bairoch 1976: 281, 292; Peacock and Wiseman, 1961: 153, Wright, Quincy 1971: 670–671.

percent of France, 14 percent of Russia, and 13 percent of Germany and Great Britain. In 1913 it became 58 percent of Italy, 35 percent of AustriaHungary, 33 percent of France, 17 percent of Russia, 18 percent of Germany, and 21 percent of Great Britain. However, because the economic growth of the United States at that time was as fast as Japan, Japanese GDP stayed at between five and six percent of the United States during the period. Turning to military expenditure, the change of its ratio to GNP of Japan is rather in the opposite direction to other countries. In Germany, France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, this ratio rose from 1900 to 1913, while in Great Britain, the United States and Italy it kept the same level throughout the period. Only Japan out of the eight powers experienced its decline. In fact, the pace of increase of Japanese military expenditure was lower than the other seven countries, most of which was in the middle of diplomatic and military tension before the outbreak of World War I. During the thirteen years from 1900 to 1913, Japanese military expenditure had risen 1.4-fold, compared to Germany and AustriaHungary 2.7-fold, Russia 2.2-fold, the United States and Italy 1.8-fold, and Great Britain 1.5-fold. Only France had slower growth of military

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expenditure of 1.3-fold than Japan. Another characteristic of military expenditure of Japan was its relative preference for the navy. The Japanese expense on navy had been more than 80 percent of the expense on army, and the former surpassed the latter in 1910. Great Britain expended approximately the same amount on the navy as on the army, or sometimes its expense on the navy exceeded the army, whilst other countries’ expenditure on the army was much more than that on the navy. However, Japan’s naval expenditure had been sixth or seventh largest among the eight powers because the total military expenditure of Japan during the period became smaller in relation to other countries in spite of its preference on the navy. Displacement Effect The expansion of government expenditure after a large-scale war has been widely observed. Peacock and Wiseman referred to it as a “displacement effect” by a war on government expense, and they analyzed the influence of World War I and II on British government expenditure.7 It is commonly accepted that the interest payments on wartime loans increase government expenditure after a war. In Britain, the share of the loan repayment in the government expenditure after the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century was trending downwards, while it stayed around the same amount. Contrary to this, after World War I, this ratio began to increase to reach a little less than 30 percent. The government expenditure after the war dropped substantially; however, the government expenditure less debt related dropped more. The share of debt related to the total government expenditure recorded its peak around 1924, and shrank rapidly from 1934 to 1939. This movement reflects the war loan issue in World War I period and loan rollover from 1932 to 1934. Although, a similar movement of government expenditure can be observed after the Boer War (1899–1902) and World War II, the ratio of the debt related to the total government expenditure became smaller after World War II than World War I. Peacock and Wiseman listed two reasons for this: low interest rate policy and inflation after World War II. In addition to it, they pointed out the long-term upward trend of the government expenditure less debt related expenditure, and its relation with the emergence of wars. Emi and Shionoya investigated the Japanese military expenditure of modern Japan from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century employing the Peacock-Wiseman method.8 In the course of their research, they said that the expansion of military expenditure stemming from wars brought about the increase of total government expenditure, and most of the causes of the increase remained even after the wars. Therefore, they concluded, the total government expenditure would not return to the prewar level. However, this rule does not apply to World War I. The growth of military expenditure from 1890 to 1916 exceeded that of total government expenditure, while it reversed from 1916 to 1936. A similar tendency could be perceived in Britain at that time.

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According to Emi and Shionoya, Japanese military expenditure recorded rapid increase during a war period and decrease after the war, nevertheless the movement of total government expenditure was not like this. The government expenditure, which increased due to military related expenditure in wartime, stayed at the same level even after a war. In other words, the displacement effect of Peacock-Wiseman was observed also in Japan. They offered the following reasons for it: development of the newly acquired colony as the result of the war, maintenance of industry level temporally augmented by the war, and repayment of wartime loans. Emi and Shionoya define the government expenditure less debt interest, military expense, and other war-related expenses as “government expenditure for general purposes” to study its trend from 1879 to 1944. They found the fact that the government expenditure for general purposes had fluctuated more than total government expenditure, and the former has been squeezed by the war-related expenditure mainly in war periods. In addition, Emi and Shionoya regarded the development of military technology as a factor that increases military expenditure in the long term independently from the displacement effect. They understood that widening the battle area and the rise of equipment-personnel ratio generated by development of military technology and tactics increased the war expenditure in later years. This conclusion is based upon the analysis by Shima Yasuhiko that studies the relation between expense of the army and military technology development from mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century.9 Shima divided the expense of the army into the expenditure that represented the level of military technology development (expense on arms procurement, maintenance and repair, and on facility construction) and others (expense on salaries, provisions and clothing, and on transport, etc.) in order to compare the trend over time of these two categories. The former category increased in amount from 1887 to 1911, nonetheless its share in the army expense was in decline. Therefore, it was from the 1910s that the advancement of military technology appeared in the breakdown of the expenditure. IMPERIAL DEFENSE PLAN (1907) AND THE EXPANSION OF THE ARMY AND NAVY

When the Russo-Japanese War ended, the army and navy tried to launch arms expansion programs as they did after the Sino-Japanese War. Their requests were restricted by the fiscal authorities due to the deteriorated financial condition after the war, while arms expansion hampered postbellum financial adjustment. Arms expansion during the post RussoJapanese War period was not like that after the Sino-Japanese War, and the feature of the arms expansion was different between the army and navy. This brought about the characteristic of Japanese fiscal policy in post Russo-Japanese War, which was not the same as that post SinoJapanese War nor the British case.

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Expansion of the Army At the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the army had thirteen divisions. During the war, four divisions were newly established as follows: one in March 1905 (13th Division), another in April 1905 (14th Division) and another two in July 1905 (15th and 16th Divisions). The number of divisions totaled seventeen after this.10 However, these divisions were created after the battle of Mukden, which occurred in March 1905. After the battle of Mukden, the Army General Staff created “Operation Guideline after March 1905,” which insisted on the necessity of being able to mobilize thirty-five divisions in wartime.11 This was because the Army General Staff estimated that Russia could send thirty-six divisions to the Northeast Asian arena in wartime. At the battle of Mukden, the Japanese army committed reserve forces equivalent to twelve divisions as well as thirteen regular divisions. Therefore, in order to attain the objective of thirty-five divisions, six divisions were to be created in addition to the above-mentioned four divisions. Even after the Russo-Japanese War, Russian expansion into Northeast Asia remained the largest threat to the Japanese army, and the arms buildup program of the army at that time imagined Russia as the potential enemy. Lieutenant Colonel Tanaka Giichi, who was in the Operation Division, Army General Staff and deeply involved in drafting the postbellum arms build-up program, wrote Zuikan Zatsuroku (Miscellaneous Notes) soon after the war.12 According to it, the Russian army could mobilize one hundred divisions in time of war, and fifty-five of them could be deployed in Northeast Asia when a conflict happened there.13 Then Tanaka said that in order to cope with the Russian threat in Manchuria, the army should have twenty regular divisions and forty-five divisions including wartime mobilization, and it must be prepared within ten years. Though the “Imperial Defense Plan” approved by the Emperor in April 1907 stated the necessary size of the army force as fifty divisions (twenty-five of which were regular), the government decided to scale down the army strength to nineteen regular divisions in total due to the financial situation. On the other hand, in November 1906, the army and navy submitted arms expansion plans to the Cabinet; however, because of the financial burden, Sakatani Yoshiro, Minister of Finance showed his disagreement over it.14 In spite of the original request to have twenty regular divisions with three divisions newly created, the army settled for the creation of two divisions by a seven years program from 1907. Whether the remaining one division is to be created or not would be decided later with reference to the fiscal condition. In November 1907, two divisions were established (17th and 18th divisions) and the number of regular divisions reached nineteen. This means postbellum army expansion was lowered due to the financial deterioration. The number of regular divisions of the army remained at nineteen until the creation of two more divisions in December 1915 after the outbreak of World War I. In 1888, when the Japanese army introduced the division system, it had only seven divisions. The number of divisions increased to thirteen

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in the arms expansion after the Sino-Japanese War, then seventeen in July 1905, and finally nineteen in November 1907. Only two divisions were created after the Russo-Japanese War, whereas it was six after the Sino-Japanese War. The former figure becomes six if the four divisions, which were formed in the last stage of the Russo-Japanese War, are taken into account. Even so, the number of divisions increased only by about 50 percent after the Russo-Japanese War, while it almost doubled in the post Sino-Japanese War period. Arms expansion was financed by the Chinese indemnity after the Sino-Japanese War that paid 54 percent of the postbellum army expansion expense. On the other hand, division creation after the Russo-Japanese War was mainly funded by the Special Account for the Extraordinary War Expenditures, which backed the establishment of the four divisions out of the six. Therefore, it can be said that the expansion of the army after the Russo-Japanese War was relatively smaller in size than that after the Sino-Japanese War. Expansion of the Navy The expansion of the navy after the Russo-Japanese War was much more complicated than that of the army, for of a number of reasons. Firstly, the number of capital ships was temporarily boosted after the war because captured ex-Russian warships were repaired to hoist the rising sun ensign. Secondly, soon after the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the British Royal Navy commissioned HMS Dreadnought, which revolutionarily changed the building concept of capital ships. Thirdly, though the navy decided all the first-line capital ships should be less than eight years old, existing ships got older as the building of new ships progressed. This section reviews the navy expansion program after the Russo-Japanese War, which had such characteristics. The Japanese navy, which had no battleship nor armored cruiser when the Sino-Japanese War ended in April 1895, possessed six battleships and eight armored cruisers in December 1903, two months before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. Japan lost two battleships in the war, however she ordered two battleships (Katori and Kashima) from Britain and started to build two armored cruisers (Tsukuba and Ikoma) at Kure Naval Shipyard.15 Furthermore, seven ex-Russian capital ships captured by Japan (six battleships and one armored cruiser) were commissioned to the Japanese fleet in 1905. Therefore, in April 1908, when Mikasa, which sank at Sasebo Naval Port by accident (September 1905), was salvaged to return to the fleet, the Japanese navy had eleven battleships and eleven armored cruisers.16 In addition, two battleships (Satsuma and Aki) and two armored cruisers (Kurama and Ibuki) were under construction at the naval shipyards of Kure and Yokosuka. However, the appearance of Dreadnought in December 1906 rendered all those Japanese capital ships obsolete. In September 1906, Minister of the Navy Admiral Saito Makoto, submitted Kaigun seibi no gi (Opinion on Navy Expansion), which was the first plan of naval expansion after Dreadnought’s keel was laid in October

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1905, to Prime Minister Saionji Kinmochi.17 This was drafted by Captain Takarabe Takeshi, who was in the Navy General Staff at that time and later became admiral, Minister of the Navy. It said only five battleships (Katori, Kashima, Satsuma, Aki and another projected), all of which were commissioned after the Russo-Japanese War, would be able to be used as battleships in a few years’ time.18 This meant that only two (Katori and Kashima) out of the above eleven battleships could be serviceable in a battleship squadron in the early 1910s. Therefore, Saito said the construction of three battleships (20,000-ton class) and four armored cruisers (18,000-ton class) was necessary. If this warship-building plan had been carried out, the Japanese navy would have had an “8–8 formation” that is a fleet composed of eight battleships and eight armored cruisers.19 However, in light of the financial condition, Saito requested one battleship and three armored cruisers in Kaigun seibi no gi, saying the construction of the remaining two battleships and one armored cruiser would be reviewed in the future. In December 1906, this warship construction requirement was changed to the building of two battleships and one armored cruiser by the Navy General Staff, which attached more importance to battleships than to armored cruisers. At that time, the navy had already projected one battleship and three armored cruisers, so the total number of capital ships to be built became three battleships and four armored cruisers. The 8–8 formation in Kaigun seibi no gi contains small and obsolete ships, two 16,000-ton-class battleships (Katori and Kashima), two 14,000ton-class armored cruisers (Tsukuba and Ikoma), and two 15,000-ton-class armored cruisers (Kurama and Ibuki). In the Imperial Defense Plan (1907), which was also based on the 8–8 formation for fleet building, its 8–8 lineup was consolidated into 20,000-ton-class battleships and 18,000ton-class armored cruisers. However, in contrast to the army, which still clearly regarded the Russian advance into Northeast Asia as a threat even after the Russo-Japanese War, the navy no longer looked on the Russian Pacific Fleet as its enemy. Instead, the navy gradually recognized the United States as a threat. At that time, the Japanese-American relationship was deteriorating due to the Manchurian issue and anti-immigrant sentiments in the United States. In spite of this, the naval expansion plan of Japan after the Russo-Japanese War was grounded in the comparison not only with the United States but also with European powers. This implies that the basis of the size of force required by the navy was not as clear as the army. The building requirement of three battleships and four armored cruisers, which was approved by the Imperial Diet, was given assent by the Emperor in March 1907 as a seven-year plan starting from FY1907 with the budget of 240,514,000 yen (FY1907 Plan). However, the recession that happened in 1907 forced the government to revise the warship building plan, and only two battleships (Kawachi and Settsu) and one armored cruiser (battlecruiser Kongo) were constructed according to the FT1907 Plan. The building of the remaining one battleship and three

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Table 10.2: Capital Ships Laid down or Completed between 1906 and 1913 Plan

Type

Displacement

Laid down

Completion

A Katori A Kashima B Satsuma B Aki C Kawachi C Settsu A Fuso D Yamashiro

a a b b c c d d

15,950t 16,400t 19,372t 20,100t 21,443t 20,823t 30,600t 34,700t

Apr. 1904 Feb. 1904 May 1905 Mar. 1906 Apr. 1909 Jan. 1909 Mar. 1912 Nov. 1913

May 1906 May 1906 Mar. 1910 Mar. 1911 Mar. 1912 Jul. 1912 Nov. 1915 Mar. 1917

B B B A C B A A

a a a a d d d d

13,750t 13,750t 14,636t 14,636t 27,500t 27,500t 27,500t 27,500t

Jan. 1905 Mar. 1905 Aug. 1905 May 1907 Jan. 1911 Nov. 1911 Mar. 1912 Mar. 1912

Jan. 1907 Mar. 1908 Feb. 1911 Nov. 1909 Aug. 1913 Aug. 1914 Apr. 1915 Apr. 1915

Tsukuba Ikoma Kurama Ibuki Kongo Hiei Haruna Kirishima

Building plan A: Third Navy Expansion Program (FY1903 Plan) B: FY1904 Plan C: FY1907 Plan D: Urgent Naval Expansion Plan (1912) Type a: pre-Dreadnoughts b: semi-Dreadnoughts c: Dreadnoughts d: super-Dreadnoughts Note: Type designation follows Fukui 1992: 236. Displacement tonnage shows normal figure. Source: Gray, 1985: 227–234.

armored cruisers was postponed until FY1911 under the name of previous plans, a part of which remained unattained.20 In 1913, one battleship (Yamashiro) was laid down, which was approved by the Urgent Naval Expansion Plan (1912) (Table 10.2).21 POSTWAR FISCAL EXPANSION AND ITS EFFECT ON MILITARY EXPENDITURE

As indicated in the previous section, the arms expansion in the post Russo-Japanese War period did not display the same characteristics as in the post Sino-Japanese War years. To illuminate further the characteristics of the military expenditure post Russo-Japanese War, the following

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Table 10.3: Breakdown of Military Expenditures (1896–1913) Post Sino-Japanese War period (FY1896 – FY1903) (Unit: thousand yen) Army

Navy

Total

Personnel related 185,592 57,876 243,468 Material supply 5,738 18,532 24,270 Arms procurement/ 137,212 239,511 376,724 maintenance Facility construction 23,956 24,809 48,766 Transport/travel 11,569 2,473 14,042 Postwar affairs/ 58,384 9,808 68,192 Operation in overseas Total with others

445,206 365,291 810,497

Army

Navy

Total

41.7% 1.3% 30.8%

15.8% 5.1% 65.6%

30.0% 3.0% 46.5%

5.4% 2.6% 13.1%

6.8% 0.7% 2.7%

6.0% 1.7% 8.4%

100.0% 100.0% 100.0%

Post Russo-Japanese War period (FY1906 – FY1913) (Unit: thousand yen) Army Personnel related Material supply Arms procurement/ maintenance Facility construction Transport/travel Postwar affairs/ Operation in overseas Total with others

Navy

Total

Army

Navy

Total

388,409 142,363 13,014 48,628 160,481 361,332

530,773 61,642 521,813

45.8% 1.5% 18.9%

21.8% 7.4% 55.3%

35.4% 4.1% 34.8%

22,713 27,940 191,852

60,575 32,372 228,366

2.7% 3.3% 22.6%

5.8% 0.7% 5.6%

4.0% 2.2% 15.2%

37,862 4,432 36,513

847,777 653,157 1,500,935 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%

Source: Ono, 1922: 268–298; Toyo Keizai Inc., 1975: 198–260.

section compares this period with that of the Sino-Japanese War, and examines the influence of this expenditure on the fiscal policy in that period.22 Table 10.3 shows the details of military expenditure from FY1896 to FY1903 (post Sino-Japanese War period) and from FY1906 to FY1913 (post Russo-Japanese War period) on a nominal basis. The military expenditure in the table is the expenditure of the Ministries of the Army and Navy from the general account, and it does not include the expenditure from the special accounts for the extraordinary war expenditures of the SinoJapanese War and Russo-Japanese War.23 Total military expenditure during the post Russo-Japanese War period is about twice as much as post Sino-Japanese War. The average annual inflation rate of the former period was 5.6 percent while that of the latter was 3.6 percent. The government expenditure soared over the Russo-Japanese War even when these inflation rates are taken into account, and it could be said that a “displacement” effect by the war is observed. The share of military expenditure in

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total government expenditure was in decline from 41.5 percent in the post Sino-Japanese War period to 32.9 percent in the post Russo-Japanese War. This was caused by the expansion of the total amount of government expenditure that stemmed from the increase of debt-related expense, which accounted for 14.0 percent of the total government expenditure post Sino-Japanese War, and the figure increased to 27.3 percent post Russo-Japanese War by the loan issue during the war. The same tendency appears in the British case. However, loans issued earlier by the Japanese government were hardly repaid during the post Russo-Japanese War except for conversion to lower interest loans. This means the sudden increase of debt-related expenses stemmed mainly from interest payments of wartime loans for the Russo-Japanese War. At the same time, the Japanese government could not afford to repay its loan capital due to the necessity to finance the military expansion after the war. Like Britain after the Napoleonic Wars studied by Peacock and Wiseman, the ratio of total government expenditure to GNP rose in Japan after the Russo-Japanese War. The average ratio of the government expenditure to GDP post Sino-Japanese War was 10.8 percent, and it rose to 13.9 percent post Russo-Japanese War. However, it did not increase steadily as in Britain. In Japan, the ratio rose until 1908 to a peak of 16.9 percent, nevertheless it turned to fall gradually from that peak to 11.4 percent in 1913. The same movement was followed by military and administrative expenditures, which composed government expenditure (general account). This difference between Japan and Britain reflects the economic growth gap of the two countries. The average annual economic growth rate of Japan in real terms from 1906 to 1913 was 2.4 percent whereas that of Britain was 1.4 percent. When we examine military expenditure, both in post Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War periods, expenses of the ministry of the army surpassed that of the navy. The share of the army in the military expenditure was 55 percent in the former period while 57 percent in the latter, and there is not so much of a difference between the two. However, there are some discrepancies in the details of the expenses. As mentioned above, expense on arms procurement and maintenance during the post Russo-Japanese War period was more than during the Sino-Japanese War period both for the army and navy, while its portion of military expenditure was less. The expense on arms procurement and maintenance covers both temporary and running expenses: the former means purchasing arms and the latter includes payment for arms maintenance, repair, ammunition, and other expendables. The number of divisions had expanded from seven to thirteen during the post Sino-Japanese War period, and it reached nineteen before World War I. This indicates the number doubled before the Russo-Japanese War, whereas it increased approximately by half after the war to slow the pace of increase. The creation of six divisions before the Russo-Japanese War was financed by the general account; however four out of the six divisions established after the war were funded by the Special Account for the Extraordinary War

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Expenditures of the Russo-Japanese War. Due to this, the share of the expense on arms procurement and maintenance of the army declined in the post Russo-Japanese War period more than post Sino-Japanese War. The same trend can be observed in arms procurement and maintenance of the navy. The number of capital ships (battleships, battlecruisers and armored cruisers) commissioned in the post Sino-Japanese War period was fourteen: six battleships and eight armored cruisers, of which two battleships (Fuji and Yashima) were laid down during the SinoJapanese War and a part of their purchase price was paid from the general account during the war, and two armored cruisers (Kasuga and Nisshin) were procured with the Special Account for the Extraordinary War Expenditures of the Russo-Japanese War. In the post Russo-Japanese War period, twelve capital ships (six battleships, two battlecruisers and four armored cruisers) were completed.24 Two battleships were laid down in 1904 and most of their purchase expense was financed with the general account during the post Sino-Japanese War (FY1903) and Russo-Japanese War (FY1904 and 1905). In addition, all the building expense of one armored cruiser (Tsukuba) and a part of the expense for two battleships (Satsuma and Aki) and two armored cruisers (Ikoma and Kurama) was paid from the Special Account for the Extraordinary War Expenditures of the Russo-Japanese War. Another five capital ships, two battleships and three battlecruisers, were laid down during the post Russo-Japanese War period, and completed after FY1914. A large portion of their building expense was met by the general account in the post Russo-Japanese War period. Table 10.4 shows the payment of capital ships construction from FY1896 to 1913. As it illustrates, in the post Sino-Japanese War period, the payment of most of the related ships started and completed within the period, while in the post Russo-Japanese War period, the majority was incomplete. The payment for two battleships (Satsuma and Aki) and two armored cruisers (Ikoma and Kurama), a part of whose construction expense was made in the post Russo-Japanese War period, started with the Special Account for the Extraordinary War Expenditures of the RussoJapanese War. Consequently, it can be said that the navy expansion during the post Sino-Japanese War period was preparation for the coming war against Russia, whereas that in the post Russo-Japanese War period was along the lines of long-term fleet building. In the post Sino-Japanese War period, expense on postwar affairs / operations overseas shared 8.4 percent of the total military expenditure, and this figure rose to 15.2 percent in the post Russo-Japanese War period. In amount, it more than tripled from 68,192,000 yen to 228,366,000 yen. Approximately half of this expense of the army in the post Sino-Japanese War period was for postwar affairs of the Sino-Japanese War and most of the remaining was for the operation over the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. In contrast, expense on postwar affairs of the Russo-Japanese War accounted for about 75 percent of the expense of the army on that item. That is to say, expense on the postwar affairs after the Russo-Japanese War was five times more than after the Sino-Japanese War. This expense includes

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Table 10.4: Payment of Capital Ships Construction from FY1896 to 1913 (Unit: number of ships) Post SJW

Battleship Battlecruiser Armored cruiser Total

Special Account RJW

Post RJW

All

Partial

All

Partial

All

Partial

4 – 6

4 – –

– – 3

2 – 2

2 1 1

6 3 2

10

4

3

4

4

11

Source: Minister’s Secretariat of the Navy, 1970: 73–166, Muroyama, 1986: 37–62.

operational costs to secure newly-occupied territory or colonies, which was mainly carried out by the army. However, the expense of the army for the troops dispatched to Korea, Manchuria, and Karafuto (Sakhalin) after the Russo-Japanese War was less than 20 percent of the total expense of the army during the period. As this figure shows, in spite of remarks by some previous works on the burden of military expense to secure occupied territory or colonies, its actual effect on the total government expenditure was rather marginal. There are large differences in details of the postbellum extraordinary war expenditures between the Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War.25 In the post Sino-Japanese War period, 53.8 percent of the extraordinary war expenditure (general account) was for personnel-related expense (personnel expense, provisions, clothing, and medical expense), while arms procurement and maintenance expense was 12.2 percent and facility construction expense was 6.9 percent. The figures became 18.4 percent, 44.5 percent and 31.1 percent in the post Russo-Japanese War period, respectively. As just described, unlike the post Sino-Japanese War period, the extraordinary war expenditure (general account) of the Russo-Japanese War, which was paid out after the war, was used for arms expansion as well as postwar affairs. The payment of extraordinary war expenditure (general account) decreased each year, however, military expenditure of general account other than extraordinary war expenditure succeeded the arms expansion triggered by it. Therefore, it can be said that the special account for the extraordinary war expenditure, which was originally established to manage the temporary revenue and expenditure to finance the military operation for the war, worked as initial payment of consecutive postbellum arms expansion.26 The payment for military expansion was taken over by the extraordinary war expenditures (general account), then by normal military expenditure of the general account. This is the feature found in the government and military expenditure of Japan after the Russo-Japanese War, which is one of the reasons that brought about the displacement effect.

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Fiscal and monetary policy during the Russo-Japanese War influenced postbellum monetary system as well as fiscal policy. One of the reasons for it is the fact that approximately half of the specie gained by the foreign war loan issue was not used to settle the trade deficit during the war period. Another is bank note issue by excessive guarantee-reserved issue, which was not reserved with specie nor highly credible securities, by which the Bank of Japan could meet the money demand during the war.27 The fiscal expansion after the war created trade deficit and caused specie outflow. Therefore, without additional accumulation of specie, the Bank of Japan that already depended on excessive guaranteereserved issue could not issue bank note. In the latter half of the postwar period, the banking system, which developed its credit creation capabilities, successfully supplied deposit money to meet money demand. In this section, the postbellum influence of wartime fiscal and monetary policy is discussed in relation with banking system development. Postbellum fiscal and monetary policy of the Russo-Japanese War was under the powerful influence of the foreign war loan, which was issued to finance the Special Account for the Extraordinary War Expenditures of the war. As is widely pointed out in the previous studies, more than half of the money the Japanese government acquired by foreign war loans was not used for foreign payments during the wartime. The revenue of the Special Account for the Extraordinary War Expenditures of the Russo-Japanese War was 1,508,473,000 yen, of which 236,309,000 yen was paid to foreign countries. Another 71,138,000 yen was also paid abroad from the general account, of which 42,076,000 yen was payments made from 1904 to 1905. The Japanese international account less inflow of the proceeds of the foreign loan issue from 1904 to 1905 had a deficit of 406,608,000 yen. Meanwhile, the government received specie of 694,485,000 yen by foreign war loan issues. The government sold 313,189,000 yen of specie to the Bank of Japan during the two years.28 In conclusion, over half of the specie that government received by the foreign war loan issues was not used for international settlement nor sale to the Bank of Japan during the war period, and even when the peace was made it was still in government coffers. The Bank of Japan issued bank notes during the war period to meet the money demand of the government. The balance of bank notes issued increased by 79,870,000 yen or by 34.3 percent in the two years from December 1903 to December 1905. This increase of bank notes was made by excessive guarantee-reserved issues. Such irregular issues of bank notes were indirectly backed by the specie held by the government that was acquired by foreign war loan but not sold to the Bank of Japan during the war period.29 Even in the postbellum period of the Russo-Japanese War, this excessive guarantee issue continued to sometimes share approximately one fifth of the total balance of the bank note. Bank note issue reserved with specie held abroad characterize Japanese monetary

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Figure 10.1: Credit Multiplier and Circuit Velocity of Money (1/k) (1891–1913).

5.00 4.00 3.00

Credit multiplier 1/k (GNP/M2)

2.00

1911

1906

1901

1891

0.00

1896

1.00

Source: Statistics Department, Bank of Japan, 1999: 170; Fujino, 1994: 534–535; Okawa, 1974: 200.

policy at that time as well as excessive-guarantee issue. In 1896, the Bank of Japan incorporated specie held abroad into the specie reserve for the specie-reserved bank note issue. In spite of being called off in the following year, it was resumed in 1904, the first year of the Russo-Japanese War. The resource of the specie held abroad to reserve bank note in the post Sino-Japanese War period was the Chinese indemnity; however, it was succeeded by the proceeds of foreign war loan. In other words, bank note issue by excessive guarantee-reserve or specie held abroad during the Russo-Japanese War constrained monetary policy after the war. In the post Russo-Japanese War period, in spite of the continuous trade deficit, the balance of bank note kept increasing until 1912. This mechanism is described by Nochi Kiyoshi in relation to the government’s specie held abroad.30 According to his analysis, bank note issue by excessive guarantee-reserve or reserved with specie held abroad, which is indirectly backed by the government’s specie, brought about money supply increase despite the trade deficit in that period and it disturbed the adjustment capability of the gold standard. In order to reach this conclusion, however, it is necessary to add a little more analysis. Price level, which is a key variable to adjust international balance of payments, is subject not to the balance of bank note but to money supply including deposit money, and the credit multiplier of Japan at that time was increasing due to the development of the banking system (Figure 10.1). That is to say, during the period that the monetary policy by the Bank of Japan and the government became less influential on the balance of money supply. Figure 10.1 provides the credit multiplier (the ratio of balance of M2 to base money) and circuit velocity of money (the ratio of GNP to the balance of M2 or inverse

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of Marshall’s k) during the postbellum period of the Russo-Japanese War. Throughout this period, the former was in upward trend while the latter remained approximately at the same level especially after 1910. It is usually the case that the credit multiplier increases and the circuit velocity of money decreases as time goes by. The cessation of the fall of circuit velocity of money means that trade deficit during the latter half of the period forced drain out of specie and this resulted in the stagnation of bank note issue and money supply.31 This implies that the expansion mechanism of monetary system stems from bank note issue by excessive guaranteereserve or reserved with specie held abroad faced deadlock. Nevertheless, the credit multiplier kept increasing at the same time. The banking system of Japan steadily developed its credit creation capability even under such sagging of bank note issue, and the balance of money supply increased.32 CONCLUSION

Opting for a micro economic viewpoint, the present study focused on postbellum Japanese military expenditures, thereby revealing the structure and characteristics of the direct influence of the wartime fiscal policy. This policy seems different from the policy a decade earlier, soon after the SinoJapanese War. At that stage, the army and navy had the common objective of preparing for the Russian threat in Northeast Asia, and it had to be completed in a relatively short period. In 1896, the year following the end of the Sino-Japanese War, both the army and navy launched arms expansion programs. The military expansion at that time was on such a large scale that public loans had to be issued to reinforce the general account revenue. Nonetheless, the government issued wartime loans (a total of 122,445,000 yen), and the market had no margin to accept additional public loan issue.33 Hence, most of the military expansion during the post SinoJapanese War period was financed by Chinese indemnity of the war and the Deposit Bureau fund, Ministry of Finance, with which public loan was accepted in the period to transfer the money to the general account.34 During the post-Russo-Japanese War period, however, the army and navy regarded other nations as a threat, although less immediate, and therefore the setting up of new army divisions and construction of new capital ships went through at a slower pace.35 The arms expansion after the war, for both the army and navy, was triggered with the Special Account for Extraordinary War Expenditures during the war and the extraordinary war expenditures from general account after the war. Their purpose was to finance the military operation or maintenance of the troops on foreign soil until their transport to homeland for reintegration, most of which was expense on personnel and provisions. However, they had worked to establish the budget for the postwar military expansion and then it encouraged the financial expansion. Japan’s trade balance after these two wars remained in deficit in general and it was inevitable that the specie flowed out. In the post Sino-Japanese War, the specie for the arms expansion was supplied by Chinese indemnity,

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while it was the unused proceeds of the foreign war loan in the post RussoJapanese War period. In both cases, the specie outflow was covered by invisible accounts; however, the surplus of it with the proceeds of the foreign loan required interest repayment in later years. Nevertheless, Japan, which had to carry out military expansion even after the Russo-Japanese War, could not afford to repay the capital of the wartime loan, and managed to repay interest with refinancing the loan at lower rates. Though the specie outflow restricted bank note issue under the gold standard, the development of credit creation of the banking system filled the money demand after the war. In spite of this, Japan experienced serious shortage of specie in the early 1910s, and it was not until the outbreak of World War I, which brought about large amounts of trade surplus and specie inflow to Japan, that it successfully averted the danger of specie crisis. NOTES 1

2

3

4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15

The author thanks Yishay Yafeh and Rotem Kowner for the their constructive comments. Ohkawa and Rosovsky, 1960; Hayami and Ruttan, 1971: 221. Even Kelly and Willamson, who argued that Japan experienced rapid industrialization performance as early as in the 1880s, pointed out that there was an acceleration in the rate of industrialization after 1903–07, and that the return to peacetime conditions after the war contributed further to rapid rates of capital formation. see Kelly and Willamson, 1974: 152–154. For example, Ohkawa, 1970: 32. See also, Rosovsky, 1961; Ohkawa and Rosovsky, 1970. For a short discussion on the the burden of military expenditures before and during the war, see Kelly and Williamson, 1974: 114–115. On the contribution of Meiji militarism to Japan’s success, notbably in the techonology realm, see, Yamamura, 1977. Peacock and Wiseman, 1961. For another classical study on the relations between military spending and national economy, see Barro, 1987. Emi and Shionoya, 1966. Peacock and Wiseman, 1961: 52–61. Emi and Sionoya, 1966: 18–23. Shima, 1943: Part 2. Ch.2. The army had sixteen numbered divisions and one Imperial Guard Division. Ministry of the Army, 1979: 485. Tanaka Giichi later promoted to general and was appointed Minister of the Army and Prime Minister. Tanaka regarded that the Russian could not dispatch forty-five divisions to Northeast Asia even if a war happens in that area, because they had to prepare fifteen divisions against Britain, seventeen for border control, and thirteen for domestic security maintenance. In Military History Division, National Defense College, Japan Defense Agency, 1967: 137. Sakatani was the Vice Minister of Finance during the Russo-Japanese War period. Tsukuba was the first capital ship build in Japan.

156 16

17

18

19

20 21

22

23

24

25

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One of the ex-Russian battleships was so old that it was degraded to coastal defense ship six months after it was placed in the Japanese fleet. Admiral Saito was the Vice Minister of the Navy (vice admiral) during the Russo-Japanese War. The battleship referred as “projected” in Kaigun seibi no gi is Settsu that was laid down in January 1909. The lineup of the 8–8 formation would have been six pre-Dreadnoughts (two battleships and four armored cruisers), two semi-Dreadnoughts (two battleships) and eight Dreadnoughts (four battleships and four armored cruisers). The idea of making one tactical unit with eight warships is strongly affected by two naval officers; Akiyama Saneyuki and Sato Tetsutaro. Akiyama was a commander, a staff of the Combined Fleet during the Russo-Japanese War, while Sato was also a commander, a staff of Second Squadron during the war. Both of the two were foremost experts on naval operation and tactics in Japan at that time, and later promoted to vice admiral. Fuso (battleship), Hiei, Haruna and Kirishima (battlecruiser). Another two battleships (Ise and Hyuga) were constructed under this plan. Both of them were laid down in May 1915. For the relation between Japanese military expenditure and fiscal policy during the post Sino-Japanese War period, see Ono, 2004b: 403–414. Expenditures for a war at that time were divided into the Extraordinary War Expenditures and Extraordinary Wartime Administrative Expenditures. The former was for military operation and presided over by the Ministries of Army and Navy. The latter was for other than military operations, i.e. diplomatic expense, prefectural police operation, interest payment of national debt. The Extraordinary Wartime Administrative Expenditures was controlled by the Ministries of Foreign Affaires, Home Affaires, Finance, Army, Navy, etc. In order to manage the Extraordinary War Expenditures independently from annual revenue and expense of the general account, the Special Account for Extraordinary War Expenditures was established. However, necessary expense for military operations after closing the Special Account for Extraordinary War Expenditures was paid from the item of Extraordinary War Expenditures of the general account. For the Extraordinary Wartime Administrative Expenditures, ministries concerned paid out from their budget of the general account. Four armored cruisers (Tsukuba, Ikoma, Kurama and Ibuki) were reclassified as battlecruisers in August 1912. The extraordinary war expenditure of the two wars are allocated between special account and general account as the table below.

Sino-Japanese War Russo-Japanese War

(Aug. 1894 – Apr. 1895) (Feb. 1904 – Sep. 1905)

Special account

General account

Jun. 1894 – Mar. 1896 Oct. 1903 – Mar. 1907

FY1896 – FY1901

*Fiscal year of Japan is from April to next March.

FY1907 – FY1911

The War, Military Expenditures 26

27

28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35

157

Arms expansion during the post Sino-Japanese War period was mainly financed with the Chinese Indemnity of the war. Bank note issue at that time was classified into specie-reserved and guaranteereserved. For specie-reserved issue, the Bank of Japan had to prepare specie (standard coin, gold /silver bullion or gold exchange) for bank note issue reserve. The bank held specie not only domestically but also abroad. Guarantee-reserved issue was covered with government bonds, treasury bills and other highly credible securities or commercial bills, and its upper limit was decided by the government. The Bank of Japan, however, could issue more bank note than the limit with permission of the Minister of Finance and paying the tax on the excess issue. This is called excessive guarantee-reserved issue, a kind of guarantee-reserved issue. Specie of 221,559,000 yen by exchange selling in bulk and another 122,018,000 yen by conversion flowed out from the Bank of Japan during the same period. For bank note issue during the war period, see Ono, 2005a: 111–119. See Nochi, 1981. In this period, the share of excessive guarantee-reserved issue rose as the decrease of specie of the Bank of Japan and the government. Goldsmith, 1983: 47; Asakura, 1991: 83–95. Revenue of the general account of FY1894 was 98,170,000 yen. Almost all the fund was composed of postal savings. The sluggish pace of capital ship construction in the time of the Dreadnoughtclass benefited the navy as they avoided having lots of that class of warship, which soon became obsolete with the appearance of the Super-Dreadnought class. See Muroyama, 1986: 59–60.

IV. THE CULTURAL DIMENSION

11

The Widow’s Tears and the Soldier’s Dream: Gender and Japanese Wartime Visual Culture SHALMIT BEJARANO1

T

he Russo-Japanese War was well observed and documented. Depictions of soldiers in combat, brave generals, battleships, smoke, and flames were depicted in numerous photographs, prints, and illustrations. Causing a great deal of contemporary excitement, they still remain among the most powerful and founding images of war. Women, however, play a minor role in the war images, despite their providing for the war both in public and private domains. Women maintained the wartime economy, health system, and semi-official welfare system.2 The Meiji regime, already in the process of turning women into loyal citizens, made a skilled usage of the situation, and the anxiety in which women followed the fate of their loved ones fighting overseas was channeled into national ardor.3 It is often through the image of the other that cultural undercurrents become visible. I will examine images of Japanese women not as illustrating their historical roles but, rather, as reflections of the cultural arena. The female roles discussed below were often associated with anguish and reactivity. In its centennial perspective, I suggest an alternative reading of these images as supporting the formulating narrative of the modernizing Japanese state.4 THE WARTIME ART WORLD

The Meiji government’s striving for international hegemony was manifested in conscious promulgating of European painting techniques and

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themes. What was sometimes sarcastically seen as a superficial aping of European manners,5 was essentially the adoption of teleological philosophy combined with the prevalent evolutionistic approach. Accordingly, Japanese traditional arts were seen during the Meiji period as primitive; and their Westernization as an inevitable step on the way to power.6 It had reached such an extreme level that the usage of traditional styles was seen as anti-patriotic and a hindrance on the road to progress.7 In reaction, Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzo formed the nihon-ga (Japanese style paintings) movement and called for the acknowledgement that local styles were unique and fundamental for the construction of the modern nation-state.8 Bitter debates over the desired national style divided artists, theoreticians, and politicians and led to the production of numerous manifestos, as well as artworks.9 It is important to note that the artistic choice of Western style may testify to support of the government’s increased steps of modernization and nationalization, as demonstrated in the examples below. Nevertheless, most Japanese artists at the beginning of the twentieth century employed hybrid styles that variously relied on both Asian and European models and themes. Young and beautiful women were an important theme for all artists. The war, on the other hand, did not become a major subject for the non-mass-produced arts. In fact, catalogues of annual exhibitions for the years 1904–05, organized by both established and avant-garde groups, register a surprisingly small number of works with contemporary relevance. Among them, nihon-ga concentrate on samurai, and can be interpreted as historical allegories and as manifestations of the growing militaristic identity. Kamakura period handscrolls with their abundance of armored men, blood and fire were a favored model for such paintings produced during the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese wars.10 Nevertheless the modern adaptations reveal a strong stylistic and thematic influence from European war paintings. The yo-ga (Western style paintings) depict combat scenes or bereaved families, similar to themes favored by the popular media. Additionally drawings by painters who joined the army overseas as correspondents were reproduced in newspapers. Still, the overall number of wartime museum pieces is surprisingly limited due, perhaps, to the invasive censorship of the day.11 One can learn of the atmosphere prevailing among the art producers and consumer interests when browsing through the pages of the popular journal Bijutsu shimpo (Art News). For a few sen the readers could get updates for the latest exhibitions in town, read critics, browse through art supplies advertisements, and learn about masterpieces in European museums. During the time of the Russo-Japanese War, the paper’s first page was dedicated to European war paintings, the kind of images where brave generals point to the horizon from the back of a horse, victories adorned, and death in battle glorified. These choices may indicate the editors’ hopes to spur such victory using their own artistic means, or simply to satisfy the strict censorship.

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Concurrently, popular magazines proliferated with the war. In those days of growing mobilization of the public, but prior to radio broadcasts, periodicals answered the growing needs of a population struggling through a sudden modernizing of their lives. Illustrated magazines, constrained by escalating censorship, combined news, stories, photographs, and drawings based on European graphic models, addressed a broad but not necessarily educated audience. Their visual contents were often aimed at the heart of the viewer through the portraying of dramatic scenes and battlescapes; their nationalist messages were unambiguous. Similar attitudes towards women appear in the all genres, in spite of the stylistic and thematic distinctions deriving from their different functions. Periodicals tended to focus on the warriors, and representations of women’s life against the background of the war were marginal. Thus among the abundant images from the war-front and the home-front which appeared in the popular magazine Senji gaho (Illustrated War Time Magazine) – only 10 percent of the painted figures are females, and even fewer appeared in Nichiro senso shashin gaho (The Russo-Japanese Illustrated News). The only exception I found was the socialist magazine Heimin Shinbun (The Commoners’ Newspaper), which pronounced a rare anti-militaristic stance from its inception in 1903 until its closure by governmental edict in 1905. Approximately half of its illustrations included women, a fact that accords also the feminist position of the socialistic movement at the time. Among those images – the overwhelming majority portrays Red Cross nurses and volunteers to the Aikoku-fujin-kai (Ladies Patriotic Association). The remainder concentrates on bereaved families, women in the occupied regions, recruits’ families and working women. This later group, depicting the less familiar face of the war is discussed in the following pages. WIDOWHOOD

Several months after the outbreak of the war, Mitsutani Kunishiro (1874–1936) exhibited his painting The Soldier’s Wife (Figure 11.1).12 A young widow dressed in black is solemnly holding a tray on which are neatly laid the sword and uniform of her husband, probably killed in one of the first battles. She looks down, holding her tears, but the dark hues surrounding her reveal her loneliness and grief. The painting is, no doubt, intended to evoke empathy for the young woman’s tragedy. But was it also made to provoke political protest? Examining similar images – written and visual – provides an equivocal answer. In March 1904, the literary magazine Myojo (Bright Star) published an essay by Ishii Hakutei (1882–1958) calling for the production of pacifistic works of literature and art.13 In August the same year, Hakutei exhibited his Western-style painting Lament (Figure 11.2) depicting a widow overwhelmed by her grief.14 The fact that Lament received the first prize in the annual salon of the Pacific Painting Society (Taiheiyo gakai)15 may attest to the silent consent of other Western-style artists with the artist’s views. In September 1904, Myojo published Yosano Akiko’s renowned

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Figure 11.1: Mitsutani Kunishiro, “The Solider’s wife,” 1904.

Source: Shiokawa, K.K. (1996). E no naka no kurashi: kodomo, onna, rodo [Living as Depicted in Paintings: Children, women, Workers], Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

poem “Please Do Not Die,” where she pleads to her brother to think of the tears, the loneliness and gentility of his young wife: “[. . .] your young wife cries alone behind the curtain. [. . .] You only spent ten months together. Please think of a young woman’s heart.”16 Both artists used weeping for anti-militaristic protest; however, voices condemning the war were in the minority even among those artists who acknowledged the suffering of the individual. The most renowned painting of a war widow was painted against the background of the Sino-Japanese War, and is now named Mementos (Figure 11.3).17 As in Mitsutani’s Soldier’s Wife, the sword and the uniforms of the deceased are laid in front of the mourning family. The high social status of the mother and her young children is shown by their elegant kimonos embroidered with autumn flowers that traditionally connote farewell. The chrysanthemums decorating the widow’s scarf are also the emblem of the emperor and imply patriotic support. Each figure represents a different attitude towards the loss. The young girl weeps, her

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Figure 11.2: Ishii Hakutei, “Lament,” 1904.

Source: Bijutsu Shimpo, September 12, 1904.

mother retains an admirably noble expression, full of sorrow, yet restrained. She looks at her son, sad and thoughtful – a young samurai who does not shed a tear. Is she thinking “when you’ll grow up you will be a brave warrior like your father,” or is she dreading the day her son will also die in combat? Replying to this question is not limited to art historical analysis. Images of war widows reflect the way the military and society narrate the individual sacrifice for the good of the state, and thus can affect the way the next generation constructs its images of war and nationalism. Not incidentally, in the 1960s this painting was one of the issues in a debate between the historian Ienaga Saburo and the Ministry of Education; the ministry refused to permit the publication of Ienaga’s textbooks unless they were revised. Ienaga included this painting in his manuscript as exemplifying the victims and pain inflicted by war, while the education ministry demanded an emphasis on the expression of determination and conviction appropriate for a military-man’s family.18 The usage of women’s tears as a charged cultural sign is discussed in Nancy Huston’s article “Tales of War and Tears of Women,” where she explores the roles of women in war narratives from the Iliad to the New York Times.19 War narratives, she claims, give war its significance, by distinguishing it from bestial fighting. The warriors depend on war stories to give suffering a form and a reason. Despite the absence of

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

Figure 11.3: Matsui Noboru, “Mementos,” 1895.

Source: Tan’o, Y. and Kawada, A. (1996). Imeji no naka no senso: Nisshin Nichiro Kara reisen made, [War in Images: From the Sino/Russo Japanese War to the Cold War], Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

women from the battlefields and from the policy-making tables, their presence among the audience of war narratives is often implied. Notwithstanding the versatility of roles women fulfilled in war narratives from ancient to contemporary, all can be interpreted as reaction to the needs of the male warriors. This reaction is signified by tears. Thus tears become signs for heroic death on the battlefield. Her semiotic inspired and subversive reading decodes images of the pain of women as conveying a message in support of the war. In other words, tears act to purify the warriors’ fears of senseless death, and consequently the fighting is justified. “[T]he woman must know that the enemy is going to kill or has killed her man; she must fear this beforehand and weep about it afterwards. [. . .] That is what gives meaning to war narratives.”20 The implied relation between women’s tears and men’s heroic death in battle is further supported by an earlier painting by Mitsutani Kunishiro Commander Hayashi’s Death at the Battlefield (1897) (Figure 11.4).21 In the foreground lay the bodies of Japanese soldiers, among them the dying captain Hayashi who is tearing a document, probably to prevent it falling into the hands of the troops approaching in the background. Comparing the two paintings by Mitsutani suggests that the depiction of the sword

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Figure 11.4: Mitsutani Kunishiro, “Commander Hayashi’s Death at the Battlefield,” 1897.

Source: Okayama Prefectural Art Museum, Okayama: Kunishiro Mitsutani Exhibition, 1993.

and uniform carried by the Soldier’s Wife is a metonym for the heroic death of her counterpart; her suppressed pain and sacrifice signify his suppressed pain and sacrifice. With this background it is not surprising to realize that both Commander Hayashi’s Death in Battle and Mementos belong today to the imperial household collections.22 Commander Hayashi’s Death thematically belongs to the senso-ga (battle paintings) genre. The overwhelming majority of such paintings was woodblock prints produced during the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese Wars. The popular prints accompanied news of victory, and portrayed in highly dramatic compositions imaginary moments of supreme heroism.23 One unusual example from 1895 concentrates on the dream of a soldier regarding his glorious homecoming (Figure 11.5).24 Contrary to the genre’s conventions, women play an important role in this fantasy: his sister and wife kneel in front of the returning hero, while his old mother wipes her tears as she holds his young son. The boy wears a military cap and holds a bugle – both signifiers of heroism – and is framed by cherry blossoms and waving Japanese flags. The overall atmosphere conveys rejuvenation and nationalist fervor. Here the combination of reactive female roles that soothe men’s fears of oblivion, male heroism, and militaristic education aimed at conveying nationalistic agenda – cannot be denied. That widowhood was a charged construct in the ideological discourse

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Figure 11.5: Kobayashi Kiyochika, “A Soldier’s Dream at Camp during a Truce in the Invasion of China,” April 1895.

Source: Keene, D. (2001). Japan at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Woodblock Prints from the Meiji Era, 1868–1912, Selections from the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

is further testified by the following quote, published in the socialist Heimin Shinbun on January 17, 1904, that is, prior to the outbreak of the war. It reads (English in original): “perhaps the worst thing that a war will bring upon a nation is that it produces many innocent widows and children straitened to a life of almost hopeless penury and distress.” This claim reinforces the conjecture that representing war widows was not intended as a documentation of a personal tragedy, but reflected an ideological stance regarding the war. At the same time, war widows were not a rare sight during the war. Since men under thirty-seven years from all social strata were recruited, and nearly 90,000 killed, many left behind orphans and widows.25 Traditionally widows – termed in Japanese mibojin
a person who has not yet died – were expected to cut their hair and never remarry since their children belong to the husband’s family.26 As many women in the cities were unable to work out of the homes, those who did not marry into wealthy families were destined for a life of destitution, since the government paid only a third of the deceased’s former salary to the bereaved family.27 Nevertheless, all of the artworks aimed at narrating the widow’s experience merely make use of her sorrow to promote political views in support of, or in protest at, the war. SOLDIERS’ FAMILIES

Tears in relation to separation and death are represented in various other sources. One correspondent described how he was deeply moved when watching the separation of Japanese soldiers, who were going to sacrifice

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Figure 11.6: “Japanese soldiers leaving the homes of their country men in Seoul, where they had resided, when on their way to Piag Yang [sic], at the beginning of March. (By our special artist).”

Source: Senji Gaho, April 20, 1904.

their lives in Manchuria, from a Japanese family which accommodated them in Seoul (Figure 11.6) (Senji Gaho, April 20, 2004). As in other images, only the women and children cry bitterly; the soldiers, explains the reporter, could hardly hold back their tears when the children clung on to them. It is interesting to compare this Japanese illustration with the impressions of the British photographer Herbert Ponting, who covered the war for Harper’s Weekly. His travel memoirs In Lotus-Land Japan compile a fascinating record of infatuated Orientalism. One example is the chapter “concerning Japanese women,” where he goes out of his way in praise of the submissiveness of Japanese women, which cannot be taken today at its face value. He wrote: Many a time I saw a soldier bidding his last good-byes to wife and mother before embarking for the war; but I seldom saw any tears. Often there were even smiles, for in Japan the smile is a mask which hides the agony of the heart. The women exhibited a front so firm and unquailing as it seemed well-nigh impossible such gentle little creatures could show. [. . .] I saw tears sometimes, however, for every Japanese woman is not a Spartan, and the poorer people cannot always control themselves on such occasions as can the better-educated classes. During the war, correspondents often wrote that “Japanese women never cry,” but I have seen women of the lower classes weeping bitterly when parting from their husbands.28

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Figure 11.7: English caption: “The poor-quarter in Shitaya, Tokyo. The husband having been “called out” to serve his country. The wife and daughter age eight are employed to support themselves by the lowest [labors].”

Source: Senji Gaho, July 20, 1904.

This quote implies that descriptions of unconcealed misery were considered legitimate in the war discourse only when ascribed to lower classes. Beyond emotional distress, many families whose breadwinners were recruited for long months suffered economic hardships. The socialist Commoners’ Newspaper repeatedly condemned the low allowances allocated to the families of low-ranked soldiers.29 Several rare illustrations in the Illustrated War Time Magazine reveal cases of destitution and hunger. In Figure 11.7, we gaze downwards into a poor house in Tokyo, where a skeletal mother looks at her daughter comforting her weeping younger brother.30 According to the caption, this is the family of the recruit Tanaka Seijiro – his old mother is ill and his wife works part time interlacing geta stripes. The five-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter support the family by selling fortune-telling notes. The picture is centered on the crying boy; his sister pats his back mercifully, while the mother affectionately observes them from the side. The childish warmth contrasts with the surrounding straits and evokes the viewers’ empathy. It is interesting to compare this painting with Mementos (Figure 11.3). In both, we witness a mother’s relation to her son and daughter against the background of the wartime distress. While the museum-piece portrays the ideal “good wife and wise mother,”31 who is a firm anchor of confidence

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Figure 11.8: English caption: “Parents, wives and other relatives of soldiers consulting a fortune-teller, who after studying the Chinese classics, predicts the soldier’s probable fate.”

Source: Senji Gaho, April 10, 1904.

to her children, the mother in the popular painting is untidy, fragile and helpless, hardly capable of supporting herself or her children. Perhaps this picture was meant to reflect the situation of some of the paper’s readers – additionally, it conveyed a socialistic protest disguised as news. The girl’s employment indicates another sign of the times. Although suppressed during early Meiji as a primitive sign – fortune telling flourished during the wars, attesting to the growing uncertainties of life on the home-front.32 A second example (Figure 11.8) depicts the shop of an I-Qing fortune teller close to the naval base in Sasebo.33 The caption explains that the wives and parents of the sailors gathered to find out whether their relatives survived the fierce battles at sea. Here again is reflected the convention of women in the empathic and supportive roles while men maintain a firm posture. Nonetheless the acknowledgements of the families’ hardships are unusual examples in comparison to the abundant images of glorious self-sacrifices and victory marches. ASSAULTED WOMEN

According to Huston, women’s tears signify another common motif in war stories: their potential violation by the enemy. She wrote:

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Figure 11.9: “Horrifying Scene during the Withdrawal of Our Settlers.”

Source: Senji Gaho, March 10, 1904.

[. . . R]aping the women of the enemy is a highly symbolic act. Just as the woman is made to suffer through the death of the man she loves, the man is made to suffer through the rape of the woman he loves. This is why these messages must be communicated to their intended receivers. The woman must know that the enemy is going to kill or has killed her man; she must fear this beforehand and weep about it afterwards. The man must know that the enemy is going to rape or has raped his woman; he must fear this beforehand and be humiliated by it afterwards.34

Contrary to what one may expect to find in a family-oriented magazine during the Victorian inspired Meiji Japan, the Illustrated Wartime News of March 10, 1904 published a frontispiece captioned “Horrifying Scene during the Withdrawal of Our Settlers” (Figure 11.9). The picture portrays Russian soldiers, identified by fur hats and moustaches, shooting at defenseless citizens at the top right. In the foreground, three soldiers drag a Japanese woman; barefoot and disheveled she struggles in vain. A man raising a pistol pulls another terrified woman. The attached text explains that although the Japanese settlers in Siberia and Manchuria always treated the Russians warmly, they could not but feel abhorrence when this picture was published in the local newspaper. Though this appears to be a Japanese illustration, it may well refer to true events.35 Another case of assault is implied in the frontispiece reporting an attack on a Japanese merchant ship by a Russian squadron near

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Figure 11.10: “Attack on Japanese merchant ship by a Russian squadron near Vladivostok.”

Source: Senji Gaho, August 1, 1904.

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Figure 11.11: Utagawa Kokunimasa (Ryua): “Russo-Japanese War: Great Japan Red Cross Battlefield Hospital Treating Injured,” March 1904.

Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Vladivostok (Figure 11.10).36 In addition to acts of plunder, drunkenness, and beating, a Russian sailor reaches his hand for a fleeing Japanese woman at the bottom right. Such terrifying narratives were presented as news, and were, besides giving voyeuristic pleasure to their audience, aimed at reconfirming the necessity of fighting the Russians. Attack against women as a clear means of mobilization is detected in Utagawa Kokunimasa’s (1874–1944) Russo-Japanese War: Great Japan Red Cross Battlefield Hospital Treating Injured which was published shortly after the fighting began (Figure 11.11). Against the depiction of the devoted Japanese medical team are portrayed two “barbaric Russians” torturing a child and woman. This print demonstrates the formulating of the new Japanese national image as an inversion of the European construct of the barbaric other and humanistic self: Japan turns progressive when its enemy is redefined as bestial. Nevertheless, the implementation of this common paradigm was complex considering the charged attitude of Japan to the Occident, with whose progressive values Russia was identified. Against this background, it was necessary to portray the expressions of both “barbarianism” and “humanism” as aimed – not at each other’s men – but at neutralized social others. It is not by chance that Russian brutality was depicted as expressed towards women, and that often it was juxtaposed with descriptions of Japanese chivalry towards Asian women or towards injured Russian men. Choices that reflected the change of national identity in terms of gender. Two more examples of this attitude were published at the Illustrated Wartime Magazine. The frontispiece of the July 1, 1904 edition was entitled

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Figure 11.12: “Instead of Russian Soldiers – Chinese Beauties.”

Source: Senji Gaho, July 1, 1904.

Instead of Russian Soldiers – Chinese Beauties (Figure 11.12). The English text reads “after the battle of Feng Hung castle, there was a rumor that a large number of Russian soldiers had retreated to the mountain of Feng Hung, and were like to die from want of food. Troops of gendarmes were sent out but they found instead some 200 Chinese women servants who had escaped from the Russian cruelty.” The illustration depicts the women in fancy traditional clothes kneeling in gratitude before the Japanese soldiers, whose masculinity is emphasized by their erect standing and weapons. The myth of the Asian woman willingly serving the Japanese troops after the withdrawal of Russians is described in Figure 11.13 via another traditional feminine role – the feeding mother.37 In the paper’s words it “shows how Manchurian women, who used to be horror stricken at the sight of the Russians, come to serve our army.” The woman and her son are wearing Manchurian attire, which resonate with the barefoot coolie on the right, in contrast to the modern Western uniforms of the Japanese soldiers to the left. This cultural juxtaposition reflects the political paradigm of Japan as a progressive Asian nation liberating other primitive Asian nations. Signifying the dichotomies conqueror/invader, progressive/traditional with gender constructs of male/female, dominant/ serving modifies the political messages of the images to appear as natural.38 Thus, what may be superficially perceived by the viewers as the heart-warming human faces of the war, sustained the propaganda regarding Asia’s need to be colonized by Japan.

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Figure 11.13: English caption: “Manchurian women, who used to be horror stricken at the sight of the Russians, come to serve our army.”

Source: Senji Gaho, September 20, 1904.

MILITARIZED WOMEN – VOLUNTEERS AND NURSES

The adorable faces of noble ladies, princesses, and wives of high-ranking officers who volunteered to serve in patriotic associations and in hospitals decorated many pages in the wartime magazines, and, as aforementioned, were the most dominant images of wartime women. Dressed in kimonos or fancy crinolines, they portrayed a model patriotic woman for the commoners (Figure 11.14).39 The discourse regarding the volunteer women used terminology associated with the fighting men: patriotic fervor, firmness, self-sacrifice, and fulfilling one’s duty for the homeland. News images signified this equality by placing photos of high-ranked officers next to their volunteering counterparts. Such images were exclusive to the nobility. A representative quote of Ponting’s claims: The Japanese girl of tomorrow will perhaps consider herself as good as her brother, and may even not hesitate to match her opinions against his. The time is far distant, however, when Japanese women will clamour for votes; though its has come, and passed by, when they were able to demonstrate to all the world that their services were almost as vital to the country in time of war as those of men.40

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Figure 11.14: “Honorary members of the ladies volunteer association of Red Cross nurses. The portrait to the right is that of the Dowager Princess Tomi Kitashirakawa, and to the left that of Princess Tsune Kacho.”

Source: Senji Gaho, May 10, 1904.

The American doctor Anita Newcomb McGee who served in the Japanese military hospitals also attested to the changing women’s roles during the war, although her tone is different: [Y]et as every one knows, the growth which contact with the West has produced has but slightly affected its women. I maintain that a people whose men progress without its women is like a man trying to walk vigorously with one foot free while the other is wrapped in confining bandages. That the Japanese are beginning to appreciate this became evident in various ways. [. . .] The women of this country have taken a great step in advance, since this war began, in finding how much they can do, in public and private, which before they never dreamed possible for them.41

These quotes reveal not only the common discourse about the virtues of the women volunteers, but acknowledges that joining the pro-military organizations served as temporary means of political empowerment for Japanese women. Indeed, the Patriotic Women Association was practically the only legitimate channel for women’s public activity during the war,42 and assisted in reformulating the identity of the Japanese women as part of the kokutai (national entity).43

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Figure 11.15: Kosugi Misei, “Japanese nurses attending wounded Russian soldiers in Inchon [Chemulpo].”

Source: Senji Gaho, March 1, 1904.

Portrayals of nurses and volunteers to the Red Cross emphasized medical progress, humanism, and women’s modernization; their acclaimed images were reproduced in numerous photos, prints, postcards, and paintings which were widely distributed in Japanese and world media. A fine example is Japanese nurses attending wounded Russians in Inchon by Kosugi Misei (1881–1964), an artist who served as correspondent for the Illustrated Wartime News (Figure 11.15).44 Kosugi’s Cry of a Russian Soldier (Figure 11.16) was probably drawn against this background, depicting the bandaged head of a young blond man resting on a Red Cross marked pillow. Kosugi exhibited this picture in the Pacific Association salon of 1904, together with Mitsutani’s Soldier’s Wife (Figure 11.1) and Ishii’s Lament (Figure 11.2).45 Against the merciful attitude conveyed here, Tan’o and Kawada cynically note that humanistic attitudes towards the enemy’s injured soldiers and empathy for the defeated were absent from the discourse that accompanied the SinoJapanese War.46 The massive emphasis in the media on the treatment given to the Russian men served the overall discourse legitimizing the new position of Japan as a hegemonic modern state. It is not only the cries of wounded Chinese that were absent from the Japanese war paintings; the cries of wounded Japanese men were also banned from public images.47 Tears, as I argued before, were constructed in the national discourse as associated with female reactive support of the warriors. Consequently, ascribing the role of crying to a defeated Russian soldier within the

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Figure 11.16: Kosugi Misei, “Cry of a Wounded Russian Soldier.”

Source: Bijutsu Shimpo, June 5, 1904.

imagined war narrative desexualized his potential dominance as an occidental male. Within these new cultural formulae, the traditional dichotomy of dominant male and passive female could be inverted, thus giving rise to a new image. Japanese women were described as dominant, while the passive role was attributed to the defeated Russian men. There are far fewer images of Japanese men caring for Russian men, or Japanese nurses attending Japanese men, although the latter were probably more representative of the historical events. In other words, by deconstructing the image of the nurses, I am not trying to devalue the service of the Red Cross nurses, but to subvert the nationalistic messages of their images. A short remark in the book Cassel’s History of the Russo-Japanese War, published in London in 1905, may hint at the fact that in practice the volunteers and nurses did not always receive the admiring attitude conveyed by the media. After superlatively praising the Japanese medical system, it states the following: It would seem, however, that army nursing is taken more as a matter of course in Japan than it is in this country, for it is stated that, though the Japanese Red Cross nurses are ladies, they are treated more as servants. They are described by an American lady doctor at Hiroshima as sympathetic and willing, but lacking in practical experience and knowledge and in “the faculty of making the patients obey.”48

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Figure 11.17: Takeuchi Keishu, “Nurse.”

Source: Bungei Kurabu, April 20, 1904.

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Figure 11.18: Nakajima Shunko, “Mobilization of the postcards’ Army,” May 1905.

Source: Haga, T. and Shimizu, I. (1985). Nichiro sensoki no manga [Russo Japanese Wartime Manga], Tokyo: Chikuma shobo.

The public admiration may conceal an opposite reaction these women may have suffered in private. In fact, the majority of the nurses worked to make a poor living in harsh employment conditions.49 An additional function of the acclaimed nurses’ images is revealed in the popular prints and postcards. The woodblock print Nurse by Takeuchi Keishu concentrates on the delicate movements of a pensive young woman giving water to wilting flowers (Figure 11.17).50 Her white uniform and the hospital ship in the background retell her act as a contemporary allegory to the treatment she gives the injured soldiers. At the same time, her posture and the usage of flowers imply moods derived from ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) techniques, and lead to the assumption that the nurse image was an updated version of bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful girls) aimed at the desiring male gaze.51 A caricature mocking the wartime success of the postcard industry supports this conclusion (Figure 11.18). The inscription reads that the patriotic slogan “army, march on!” printed on the postcards, veiled Osaka merchants call “commerce, march on!” Looking closely, in the first row of the postcards’ army march among the pretty girls postcards, we can recognize the puffy hat of the Red Cross adorned nurse.52

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Figure 11.19: Miura Hokkyo, “Would Not It Become Glory,” 1905.

Source: Nihon Bijutsuin Hyakunen-shi Henshu Shitsuhen (1993). Nihon bijutsu hyakunen-shi, vol. 3. Tokyo: Nihon Bijutsuin.

Several references to women’s images can be detected in the painting of Miura Hokkyo (1882–1974), dated at 1905, whose title can be roughly translated as Would Not It Become Glory (Figure 11.19).53 Glory is personified in the center of the painting as a beautiful goddess. Adorned in esoteric Buddhist style drapes and jewelry, she emerges above the bodies of two slain soldiers, Japanese and Russian. On the Russian

The Widow’s Tears and the Soldier’s Dream Figure 11.20: Ishikawa, “Beauties Serving Sake at the Front.”

Source: Senji Gaho, February 1905.

181

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soldier’s finger there is a ring, suggesting the tears of a wife waiting in vain at home. The Japanese is flanked by unrolled Red Cross bandages implying the vain outcome of the efforts of the women volunteers. In his right hand he holds a sword, symbolizing a samurai-like death in battle. The painting conveys the idea that though the Japanese and the Russian are distinct in their hair color, they are equal in their death. The heroic death that brought Japan’s glorious victories over a Western nation were made possible on the killing fields. The vain attempts of the women at the home-front culminate in this abstract notion personified as an attractive Asian woman. This symbolism testifies to the influence of Western concepts, but may also allude to the nihon-ga ideology which sought Japanese identity within the Asian context. CONCLUSION: NATIONAL IDENTITY AS GENDER IDENTITY

The fundamental change of Japanese identity during the Meiji period, and particularly during the Russo-Japanese War can be rephrased in postcolonial terms as a shift from the Orient to the Occident, and consequently in gender terms as transmission from the feminine to the masculine. Chino Kaori pointed out this shift in her discussion of Japanese art.54 Signed Ishikawa in English and concentrating on a girl in a fancy Western dress pouring wine, Figure 11.20 illustrates this transformation. It portrays an amusing incident occurring during the New Year party celebrated at General Kuroki’s headquarters. Both Japanese and British military men, who happily gathered at the Western-style banquet following the fall of Port Arthur, were excited by the rare presence of women. They found it most amusing to realize later that the attractive girls were actually “handsome young men of the band in disguise.”55 Perhaps the encounter with women impersonators was less of a shock for an audience fostered in Kabuki culture. Nevertheless, the rejoicing over the reversed gender roles reveals on the cultural level that the military victory marked Japan’s change in the international arena – what was believed to be a “lady” disguised a “man.” Visual images critically examined as historical documents narrate the untold stories of those who were excluded from the official histories. Furthermore, concentrating on images of women and deconstructing them as the “other,” reflect cultural undercurrents in wartime Japan. The weeping faces of widows and wives, willingly sacrificing or forcefully violated, narrate the growing mobilization of Japanese women and men to the service of the state. Moreover, such images reveal the changing self image of Japan in the modern period from domestic seclusion to international dominance. NOTES 1 2

This chapter is dedicated to my teachers and friends in Doshisha University. See Robins-Mowry, 1983.

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5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

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On the national mobilization among women of the lower social classes, see Tamanoi, 1998. For discussion of women’s images and propaganda, see, for example, Wakakuwa, 1995. On satirical images of Westernizing Japan, see Meech-Pekarik, 1986. Harada, 1974. Clark, 1986: 218. Tanaka, 1994. Shively, 1971. It is interesting to note that also in the Kamakura period battle scenes women were othered and depicted as weeping and victimized. See Ikeda, 2003. The limited number of museum pieces (a term I use in order to avoid the values related to “high art”) known today deserve further research. Some of the most renowned Western style painters joined the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars, among them Kuroda Seiki, Koyama Shotaru, Asai Chu, Yamamoto Hosui, and Kosugi Misei. But contrary to what one may expect, the war seems to have had a minor influence on their work, if any. Perhaps they preferred to censor themselves; perhaps later researchers or curators avoided such works for their politically sensitive content as implied by Tan’o and Kawada, 1996: 2. Shiokawa, 1996: 19. Tan’o and Kawada, 1996: 20. Bijutsu Shimpo, 1904. Reported in Bijutsu Shimpo, September 12, 1904. The painting’s whereabouts are today unknown. It is interesting to note that Yosano Akiko is using the same term “lament” (nageki) when she turns to her brother. Bamba, 1978: 252. Tan’o and Kawada, 1996: 19. Tanaka, 1985. Huston, 1982. Huston, 1982: 278. Okayama Prefectural Museum, 1993. Clearwaters, 1996: 24; Tan’o and Kawada, 1996: 19. Sharf and Ulak, 2000; Swinton, 1991. Keene, 2001. Heimin Shinbun, October 9, 1904; Hattori and Konishi, 1954. This information is inferred from the situation of the widows after World War II. See Storm,1992. Heimin Shimbun, January 17, 1904. Ponting, 1910: 241–242. Heimin Shimbun, April 17, 1904. Senji Gaho, July 20, 1904. The term ryosai kenbo (good wife and wise mother) and its relation to mobilization are discussed in several sources. See, for example, Koyama, 1994; Nolte and Hastings, 1991. Konishi, Oka, and Oshikiri, 1984. Senji Gaho, April 10, 1904. Huston, 1982: 278.

184 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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Satow and Lensen, 1968: 279. Senji Gaho, August 1, 1904. Senji Gaho, September 20, 1904. The paradigm Occident/male/progressive/dominant versus Orient/female/ primitive/passive is discussed in numerous sources, inspired essentially by Said, 1978. Senji Gaho. Ponting, 1910: 233. Sharf, Rhode, and Connor, 2001: 8. Hayakawa, 1996. Tamanoi, 1998. Senji Gaho, March 1, 1904. Mitsutani’s exhibition is mentioned in Tan’o and Kawada, 1996; clearwaters, 1996 . Tan’o and Kawada, 1996: 20–21. According to Ponting, sighs and tears were indeed never parts of the vocabulary of Japanese men: “I often saw the bandages removed from injuries so terrible as to make my blood run cold. More than once, too, I stood beside poor wasted heroes, shaking at their last grasp, but I never saw a Japanese soldier give way to tears, or heard a conscious man utter a groan.” In Ponting, 1910: 248–249. Cassell, 1905, II: 550. Nolte and Hastings, 1991: 162. Meech-Pekarik, 1986: 214. Sharf and Ulak, 2000: 10. Haga and Shimizu, 1985: 27. Nihon Bijutsuin, 1993: 301. Chino, 2003: 33. Senji Gaho, 1905.

12

School Songs, the War, and Nationalist Indoctrination in Japan URY EPPSTEIN

A

ccording to the history books, the Russo-Japanese War broke out on February 8, 1904. In actual fact, however, as far as Japan is concerned, this war’s beginnings date back to 1894, the year in which the SinoJapanese War broke out. This war’s significance as the real starting point of Japan’s attack on Russia can be observed if one examines the school songs published in Japan even before the Sino-Japanese War and immediately after Japan’s victory in that war, from 1894 on. This assertion may, perhaps, strike one as surprising. School songs (shoka), naive and innocent as they may sound and appear, are not commonly perceived in the West as related to matters of war or government policy. Such a connection does not seem possible or even plausible if one is not aware of the fundamental difference between shoka in Japan and school songs in the West. In the West, school songs are usually selected from existing songs according to the taste of the compiler or the music teacher. There are no defined rules that limit the selection, only a preference for easily singable melodies and understandable texts. The songs’ content is not taken into consideration so long as it does not offend conventions of morals or good behavior. This is not the case with regard to shoka in Japan. Shoka songs are an invention of the early Meiji period, since in traditional Japanese music there were no kinds of songs with easily singable melodies and texts suitable for instruction in schools – except for folksongs. But folksongs were associated with the locations where they had originated, and were, therefore, not considered suitable for instruction on a national level. The introduction of music instruction in schools, an innovation stipulated by the Education Law of 1872, called for the training of music teachers and also for preparing new songbooks as tools for music instruction. These tasks were entrusted to the Ministry of Education and a special

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department established there for this purpose, unassumingly called “Music Investigation Committee” (Ongaku Torishirabe Gakari). For these new textbooks the Ministry commissioned songs from writers approved by the authorities. The first school songbook was published in 1881 – Shogaku shoka-shu1 (“Collection of school songs for elementary schools”), edited by the Ministry of Education’s Music Investigation Committee. Most of the songbooks that followed in the Meiji period were also published by the Ministry of Education or were authorized (kenteizumi) by it. Only these books were permitted for use in schools. The Education Ministry did not function as a mere rubber stamp for approval of the songs and songbooks submitted to it. Certain songs were returned to the editors with detailed comments by a senior ministry official, demanding corrections and alterations in order to make the texts conform to the principles of morals and policies determined by the authorities. There were also cases when song collections were returned in order to make the editors add songs that would convey ideas or principles that the authorities insisted on instilling into the pupils’ minds, such as patriotism, emperor worship, discipline with regard to parents, teachers, and seniors, and relevant rules in the spirit of the Confucian Weltanschauung that then prevailed in the official Japanese education system. The examination of shoka books may, then, provide a veritable voyeuristic experience for anyone wishing to obtain information on the official standpoint or policy in matters that were perhaps veiled – intentionally or not – and confusing or controversial in other official pronouncements, but had to be formulated unequivocally in order to be absorbed properly into the tender young consciousness. School songs functioned, consequently, as a tool – not necessarily the only one, but one of the most efficient – in education, indoctrinating and brainwashing the young generation in all matters relating to morals, civic duties, and political views that the authorities wished to impose. It is, therefore, difficult to exaggerate in evaluating the decisive influence of these songs on the character formation of the young people who were educated in the elementary and secondary school system from the beginning of the Meiji era onward. The songs in the first shoka books dealt mostly with natural phenomena, such as flowers, birds, the wind, and the moon, likely to foster love of nature and also love of the fatherland where these beautiful things exist. These songs, apparently innocent, thus frequently function as camouflage of a patriotic education that presents natural phenomena also as models for emulation – for the cultivation of morals, good conduct, and proper manners. There are also songs that convey clearer patriotic messages, such as emperor worship, and traditional values drawn from history and mythology. Positive character traits such as diligence, reliability, honesty, and studiousness also rank prominently among the values sometimes implied in a more or less veiled fashion. In these first songs, patriotic values were presented in quite reasonable and

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not obsessive proportions, as in every culture that educates its youth to the love of the fatherland. Emphasis was placed on peace and harmony as national and universal ideals. SONGS BEFORE THE WAR

An abrupt and dissonant change took place in 1891, when for the first time the term “enemy” (teki) appears in one of the school song collections. Up to that time these were populated only with family members, friends, teachers, historical heroes and, of course, the Emperor as an object of adoration. The songbook Kokumin shoka-shu2 (“Collection of school songs for citizens”) by Koyama Sakunosuke (1863–1927), however, includes a song entitled Teki-wa ikuman (“Ten thousands of enemies”). This was by no means the personal caprice of a hot-headed songwriter. In those days, Sino-Japanese relations had already deteriorated, and it was still three years before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The Japanese authorities had obviously already determined that the time had come to inject a martial spirit into school pupils’ minds. In the same year, the term gunka (“military song”) also appeared in the context of school education. Gunka songs had indeed existed earlier. But they were common in the army, and from there they penetrated to civilians’ consciousness and throats. But the credit for the deliberate and systematic introduction of gunka into the school system belongs to no less a personage than the Minister of Education, Inoue Kowashi (1843–95). He issued an order to elementary schools nationwide in 1891: “When military gymnastics are assigned to elementary school male pupils, gunka should be used to raise the morale of gymnastic drill.” The educationalist Kaigo Tokiomi comments on this seventy-four years later:3 Gunka were thus quickly introduced into school education . . . At the time, such gunka surpassed the shoka on flowers, birds, the wind, and the moon, and those on virtue, and school music, too, was opened to gunka, and was swept with gunka.4

Military songs appeared from then on as part of the official school curriculum. The volume Shogaku kyoiku gunka-shu (“Collection of military songs for education in elementary schools”) was produced in 1892, the year following the publication of the Education Minister’s order. A “Collection of school songs for Grand Festivals and for National Holidays” (Taisai shukujitsu shoka-shu),5 edited by Oka Yakichi in March 1892, includes nine military songs. These are still relatively harmless, doing no more than praise historical war heroes, Japanese as well as foreign, who should serve as models for emulation. Taira-no Shigemori (1138–79) was eulogized, with his father Taira-no Kiyomori (1118–81), for rescuing the Emperor who had been abducted by the Hogen rebels, thus suiting the Meiji era cult of Emperor worship. Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98) was

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celebrated for his “victorious return” from Korea, contrary to the historical truth of an inglorious retreat without achieving any victory over that country – something that Meiji schoolchildren apparently were not supposed to know. On a more contemporary level, the Kumamoto rojo-no uta (“Song on the siege of Kumamoto Castle”) glorifies the heroic imperial government forces defending the castle against the Satsuma rebellion led by Saigo Takamori (1827–77). The term “enemy” (teki) refers in this case to Takamori and the Satsuma rebels – not to a foreign adversary. Since the Meiji brand of nationalism also encouraged openness to the West and to Western ideas in order to demonstrate progressiveness and the wish to make Japan competitive with the West in the fields of science, technology, economy, and warfare, heroic Western figures such as the admiral Robert Blake (1599–1657) and Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758–1805), among others, also figure prominently as models for emulation. In April 1892, Nihon gunka6 (“Military songs of Japan”) also appeared, edited by Nassho Benjiro (1865–1936), who in his preface frankly emphasizes the combination of studies and a martial spirit: “Songs for stimulating the spirit of loyalty and patriotism, and the enthusiasm for diligent study and strict conduct.” The first song, Umi yukaba (“When going to the sea”), still camouflages militaristic intentions by resorting to almost literal quotations from the Manyoshu, admittedly a collection of classical lyrical poetry of the highest order, evidently considered appropriate for legitimizing any purpose whatsoever, however aggressive. The Manyoshu is replete with war imagery too, and this was made use of to convey nationalistic ideas of heroism: When going to the sea – Corpses of those drowned. When going to the mountains – Corpses sprouting grass. By the August Emperor’s Very side may we die – Regret there is none.

From this poetical diction it is only one step to a more overt encouragement of aggression and self-sacrifice. Dying for the Emperor, rather than living for him, is advocated as the most sublime purpose of life, as expressed in song No. 6, Susume, susume (“Advance, advance”): Taro’s corpse is falling, Jiro’s corpse is falling too. Whether dying or living – For the Emperor advance, advance!. . . My soul and this body too I sacrifice for my Emperor. Through water, through flames too, Through whatsoever – advance, advance!

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This song was sung to the melody of the “March Song of the American Civil War,” while the first song, as befits the hallowed text of the Manyoshu, was in the traditional Japanese tonality called Yo. Song No. 10, Kirubeshi (“One must cut down”), incites a merciless attack on the enemy: They must be cut down, cut down – cut, cut, cut! Enemy soldiers in any number, many as they may be, Until the Japanese sword breaks They must be cut down – cut, cut, cut!

A so-called “Meritorious war” (Kosen), in song No. 21, is characterized by a total disregard for human life: . . . While stepping over a mountain of corpses – advance, advance! While raising the war cry – advance, advance! Make a raid! . . . While jumping over a sea of blood – attack, attack!

It is noteworthy that all this, and more in the same spirit, was published in 1892 – still two years prior to the Sino-Japanese War, at a time when Japan was not yet at war with any country. These school songs provide early evidence that the government was already busy with the mental preparation of school children for the war to come, when they would be soldiers fighting in that same spirit. The subtitle “For elementary school pupils’ sports-day marches,” on the title page, elucidates the purpose of the collection Shinpen gunka7 (“New military songs”) by Oku Yoshiisa (1858–1933) of 1893. The connection between military songs and spiritual education as well as foreign relations is explicitly emphasized in the same year also in Seishin kyoiku taigai gunka8 (“Military songs for spiritual education and foreign relations”) by Yuchi Fumio. All these are school songs, or songs explicitly intended for schools, even if called “military songs,” published on the initiative of the Education Ministry, or at least authorized by it, during the three years preceding the Sino-Japanese War. Without dealing here with the question whether the Japanese leadership had already expressed any intention of going to war or not, official Japan, in any case, had already begun to educate its youth toward war, and to nurture the spiritual climate that might serve as a background for war, if and when it should break out. Still in the year of the Sino-Japanese War, in 1894, immediately after Japan’s victory and before the peace treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, the Japanese Education Ministry hurried to authorize the publication of a seven-volume-series entitled “Military songs on the Great Victory” (Daisho gunka),9 edited by Yamada Genichiro. This series was granted the official rank of textbooks (kyokasho) for the instruction of school songs (shoka) in elementary schools (grades 1–4) and secondary schools (grades 5–8) – although editing and publishing were still not carried out by the Education Ministry itself. The purpose

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of these songs and their publication is formulated in the introduction to the first volume: Our educators ought to induce energetically the aspiration of patriotism into these little citizens, according to their obligation of educating the second nation, namely the successors of the valorous nation, and should devise a method for evoking a spirit of enmity. Consequently, it is desirable that the educators in the military state (gunkoku), through consulting with each other and publicizing the heroic military songs (gunka), should in a small way make this a part of their duty. That is to say, the writing of this volume here has been done on these grounds. This volume, although published not at a determined time, will make the spreading of our Expedition Army’s victory news necessarily be believed in future, and then one ought to create anew the necessary military songs (gunka) in order to improve in the course of time the matter’s treatment and to make them renowned in the world. Also, by collecting together in this volume all the resulting grand distinguished services of our loyal and courageous warriors and their other glorious deeds, we look forward to the exaltation of our nation’s fighting spirit and patriotism.10

The “spirit of enmity” (tekigai), then, is one of the purposes for whose inculcation one ought to strive. This is in sharp contrast to the spirit of peace, calm, and harmony that the earlier school songs had preached. Japan is openly presented here as a “military state” (gunkoku). Moreover, it is emphasized that military songs, and not necessarily regular school songs, are the kind of songs whose diffusion is an educator’s duty. Some of the songs describe the course of the most important and well-known battles of the Sino-Japanese War. The descriptions are detailed and vivid, and emphasize heroic feats in a style that is not only florid but also presents them as models for imitation. Values that are particularly highlighted are self-sacrifice for the sake of emperor and fatherland, and also the worthlessness of life, in the spirit of the Shinto revival, as opposed to the sanctity of life represented by Buddhism. The soldier offering his life to the Emperor and to the country – Advances on and on . . . In their traces – rivers of blood, mountains of corpses.11

Another value emphasized in some of the songs is the pride of the unit: Wherever turns the august army To serve its august country – no enemy is left there anymore . . . 12

One of the basic values featured again and again, in many variants, is courage, especially of the few against the many:

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Grasp the gun, shout “strike, strike!” To the enemy approaching right and left.13

Warriors’ camaraderie also figures among the values that these songs encourage: Forgetting even the pain Of his dripping blood, he draws near the [wounded] captain: “Go and escape, flee to safety, Mount this horse of mine, My end will be here, You will go back” . . . 14

The texts also supply models for imitation based on knowledge newly acquired in the wide world and especially the West, in order to emphasize the Japanese army’s glory. Thus they compare the Yellow Sea battle to celebrated naval battles of the European past: This day’s great war, The present battle, Outshines the ancient battles of Trafalgar and The Crimea – This joyful victory.15

These songs not only celebrate Japan’s great victory over China, as the series’ title suggests, but also crown the warriors with garlands of glory, and commemorate the war dead. Beyond that, one cannot but regard these songs also as the beginning of systematic education toward self-sacrifice “for the emperor.” The songs unequivocally express Japan’s adoption of a militaristic course in a deliberate and well-calculated manner. They indicate an intensive spiritual preparation of the youth for the next war – no matter when, where, and against whom it might break out. According to this long-range planning, if and when Japan would go to war again, it would find its youth prepared, on the basis of the education received before the Sino-Japanese War and also after it, and of which the school songs are a significant and integral part. This education trend, clearly reflected in the school songs, gradually and consistently grew stronger in the course of the ten years between the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese Wars. In 1895, the year when the Sino-Japanese War ended, Chukun-aikoku shogaku shoka-shu16 (“Collection of school songs on loyalty and love of the fatherland for elementary schools”) appeared. Besides shoka for national holidays and traditional feasts this book also contains a significant number of gunka. This indicates that the militaristic tendency did not come to an end when the Sino-Japanese War was over, but continued with undiminished vigor. One year after the end of the Sino-Japanese War, in 1896, Shinpen kyoiku shoka-shu17 (“New edition of an educational school song collection”)

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appeared. This was a set of eight volumes for grades 1–8 of elementary and secondary schools, containing twenty-seven to thirty-six songs each, published with the authorization of the Education Ministry, that is, expressing the official view of the Japanese authorities regarding all the subjects dealt with. The songs show that even in the absence of hostilities and any defined enemy, the militaristic tendency increased and, simultaneously, indoctrination activity in this spirit intensified: Instead of swords – The sound of hundreds of guns. Drive away The advancing enemy!18

It should be noted that at this time no country was defined as an “enemy” of Japan. But this seems to be a minor detail that did not prevent the Japanese leadership from preparing the youth for fighting a future enemy and for the next war. Some of these songs appeared in the second edition of the collection, in 1905, and as long as the two editions are not collated, it is difficult to say with certainty, which songs were added in the later one. But examination suggests that there are only a few additions, and that most of the songs were already included in the edition that appeared eight years before the Russo-Japanese War. At all events, a clear and increasing tendency of militaristic education is evident in this collection. This education is implemented systematically from the lowest grades onward. Already in grade 2 a “Battle Song” is taught in which the two main corps are eulogized – the army and the navy: The Army Those who are coming – oh horror! – are the enemies . . . The bullets’ hail is scattering in confusion . . . Look! The army is striking forward, The enemy’s defenses are crumbling . . . The Navy . . . Burning ships and sinking ships! Unable to do anything, The remaining enemies Make every effort to escape. Rescue the drowning enemy soldiers! Pursue the fleeing enemy ships!19

The chivalrous attitude toward the enemy here is conspicuous. These songs indeed encourage the fighting spirit in florid language, and the enemy’s escaping ships have to be pursued. But the enemy soldiers who

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have already been defeated and are drowning must be rescued, in the samurai spirit of bushido in which most of the Meiji period political leaders of Japan had been educated. This is in striking contrast to the spirit and conduct of the Japanese army in World War II, when nothing of this generous tradition survived so far as the treatment of the defeated enemy was concerned. The melody of this song was taken from Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du Village, formerly adapted to the popular Japanese children’s game song Musunde hiraite. The title “Snow in the Capital,” in the volume for grade 7, seems likely to arouse expectations of an idyllic song about the enchanted snowy landscape of the ancient capital Kyoto, of the kind that appeared abundantly in the first songbooks, at the beginning of the Meiji period. But after the poetical opening a chilling continuation follows: More immense than the snow is the glitter of the sword, Redder than the flower is the blood of the hero . . .20

In 1900 appeared the collection Kyoka tekiyo yonen shoka21 (“School songs for the instruction of children”) by Tamura Torazo (1873–1943) and Nassho Benjiro, authorized by the Education Ministry. Its main purpose was purely pedagogical: to introduce texts in the spoken, everyday modern language on subjects close to children, such as games, school life, family life, familiar tales, contrary to the earlier songbooks’ heavy, difficult literary language that was largely incomprehensible to children, and their poetic and ethical subjects, mostly beyond their understanding. Even here, these serious pedagogues could not refrain from including military songs too, in the spirit of the new age and according to the instructions of the Education Ministry. Already in the volume for grade 2 we find the song “Soldiers:” Japan’s soldiers, of high reputation, Take care well and obey orders, Know how to advance, Do not know how to flee. We too shall soon become soldiers . . . If we go to the battlefield We shall not flee even if we die.22

This song may serve as an example of the future envisaged for these children, even at such a tender age in grade 2 (“we too shall soon become soldiers”), the spirit of discipline instilled into them (“obey orders”) and that readiness to die which would lead to the piloting of kamikaze planes in World War II. The melody of this song is taken from a disarmingly innocent German folksong, Jäger und Hase (“Huntsman and Hare”), which opens with the idyllic words “Gestern abend ging ich aus, ging wohl in den Wald hinaus” (“Yesterday evening I went out, went for a stroll in the forest”). The original is not credited in the Japanese

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songbook. An examination of these songs and of others from the same period clarifies the ideals toward which young people were systematically educated throughout their school years, from elementary school onward. One of the most conspicuous among these ideals is self-sacrifice. It is featured, for instance, in the song “The Subject’s Duty” for grade 3: We, the subjects of Japan, Have a duty toward the country. On our shoulder – a gun, at our side – a sword. Come, get up, boys, for the emperor! . . . Defend, boys, throw your lives away!23

This self-sacrifice is channeled to the figure of the emperor in whose name all the purposes of fighting are defined. Thus in the song “For the Emperor,” for grade 4: For the emperor forget your body, Throw away your life without hesitation. This is, unequalled in the world, The way of the court-faithful in the Rising Sun’s country.24

This education, then, propagates the spirit of self-sacrifice not only as a demand. It becomes an integral part of human nature, and as such is common to all the citizens of Japan. This ideal is further consolidated in grade 6, in the song “This body of mine:” To the emperor I consecrate this body of mine, Even one drop of blood is precious indeed. If I do not let it flow in this way, I cannot escape the shame of unfaithfulness.25

The spirit of self-sacrifice figures in the higher grades in its most concrete expression, as in the song “Subjects of the August Country,” in grade 7: Even amidst raining arrows and bullets – fearlessly advance! Even under striking swords – undauntedly advance! . . . Rifles’ noise resounds, battle cries are heard. Consecrate your heart to the Emperor! Step even over mountains piled up with corpses – advance! Dance even over rivers of blood – advance!26

Another notion that these songs advocate is colonialism. In the song “For the Emperor,” for grade 4, these lines appear: . . . The dignity of the imperial throne – Has it not the fame of ruling the world?

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The reputation of the country called the Rising Sun’s – Has it not the fame of shining over the earth?27

This idea is formulated still more forcefully in the song “Strong Man – Strong Country,” for grade 6, that defines the rule of force as a privilege awarded by nature to the strong over the weak. The pride of the yellow race is also appealed to here against the axiom of the superiority of the white race that had dominated up to that time, and also the Oriental pride of the East that refuses from now on to regard itself as inferior to the West: The strong man exists, the weak man is destroyed, The strong country prospers, the weak country collapses. Ever since the creation of the world – Who has ever deviated from this principle, and when? The strong body knows no trouble, The strong will also achieves its aims. This one, the strong one, be his skin White or yellow – what does it matter? . . . The strong country, be its location West or East – what does it matter?28

More human values, especially camaraderie, also rank among the ideals that these songs propagate. The principle that the wounded and the fallen should not be deserted on the battlefield occupies a central position in the song “The Medical Corps,” for grade 5, that praises this corps and its heroism, evident even in the course of the most violent combat: At this time, it will not abandon to the enemy The honorable fallen, and will not let the injured die. It takes them away with it in the midst of bullets’ rain – Ah, the courageous Medical Corps! The dead are led to sleep in peace, The injured are rescued in large numbers . . . 29

This ideal of battle ethics applies also to wounded prisoners of war. These should be treated without discrimination from the moment of their imprisonment. Here, too, a tremendous change occurred in World War II, when this chivalrous treatment of the captured enemy vanished. By insisting on fair treatment of imprisoned war casualties Meiji Japan wished also to be regarded as a civilized nation by international standards, as is evident in the song “The Women’s Military Service Expedition,” for grade 6, approvingly describing the devotion and compassion of the nurses in the Women’s Corps: She washes and removes the flowing blood, Ties the bandage. The sleeve Of her own white cloth-dress is stained with blood.

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 Does this apply to soldiers of our side only? Even someone whose language is unintelligible Is cared for very kindly. The heart’s color is that of the Red Cross . . . 30

All these songs appeared, as has already been pointed out, in the years that preceded the Sino-Japanese War, and up to one year after it. One might reasonably assume, therefore, that the songs were presumably intended to prepare the background for that war, to educate the school pupils for it, and finally – to celebrate Japan’s victory, to eulogize the heroism of its warriors, and to commemorate its glory and the memory of the war victims in the Sino-Japanese War. But such an assumption would be erroneous. At this point one is obliged to realize who in fact were those young soldiers that fought so heroically in the Russo-Japanese War, ten years later, under enormously difficult conditions, against a Western power whose army was quantitatively vastly superior to the Japanese one. These Japanese soldiers were none other than the former pupils who had learned the songs at school, some ten and more years earlier, singing them with child-like enthusiasm under the guidance of their patriotically, militaristically inspired teachers, and had undergone the whole process of systematic indoctrination and brainwashing among whose significant and effective tools these school songs ranked. A child who acquires such an inspiring song at school will continue to sing it also after returning home, on the playground and in any other context. When he does so, he will always be sure of earning the approval and encouragement of parents, siblings, relatives, friends, and all the adults around him who influence his personality from childhood until adolescence. The question may even be asked, whether, without having learned and sung these hypnotic songs, with complete self-identification and without any personal critical thinking, these young soldiers would have gone to this frightening Russo-Japanese War and fought “for the emperor” and “for the country” with that same heroism, determination, self-sacrifice, and belief that there would be no retreat at any cost but only advance, in the face of all the grave risks? Perhaps there is no unequivocal answer to this question in any reliable official source. But the character, content, and systematically tendentious instruction method of these songs suggest that there may be a reasonable doubt, whether without this indoctrination, preceding the Russo-Japanese War, these soldiers would have gone to fight with such vigor, determination and readiness to become cannon-fodder. THE SONGS OF THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR

In 1904, in the course of the Russo-Japanese War, before the Portsmouth Peace Treaty of 1905, Senso shoka31 (“War School Songs”) appeared. These are two volumes for the higher elementary school grades, containing nine and ten songs respectively, published by the Education Ministry.

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The song texts were written by anonymous officials of the Ministry itself and Sasaki Nobutsuna (1872–1963), and the melodies by Ue Sanemichi (1851–1937), Koyama Sakunosuke (1863–1927), and Kusumi Onsaburo. The educational purpose of the songs, as stated in the introduction to the second volume, was “to have the children sing this respectfully . . . and to display brave men’s morale.” The first song, “The Song of the Russia Expedition,” surpasses in aggressiveness all that had preceded it. Strike, oh, strike, strike Russia, strike, oh!32

But immediately after this the song goes on with an almost apologetic argumentation intended to justify the war. It takes pains to point out that Russia is the one that disturbed “our Eastern peace,” presenting Japan as the one that takes care to safeguard not only its own interests, but principally those of all the East Asian countries, including China and Korea. The song presents Russia as one who “took advantage when the Sino-Japanese War occurred,” namely – interfered in internal affairs not its own business, and “occupied Manchuria” – then a territory of China, of course, not of Japan. Therefore, Manchuria is mentioned in the song by the Chinese term, san sho, though in the Japanese pronunciation, corresponding to [Dung] san sheng in the Chinese pronunciation, which means “The Three Eastern Provinces” of China, namely Hilungkiang (the Amur river), Kirin, and Liaoning. The song goes on to emphasize that the time of Russia’s agreed retreat from Manchuria has already passed without its having carried out that commitment, and that if Manchuria were a Russian possession, Korea would collapse, and that consequently the “hoped for Eastern peace would not be attained.” The song also points out, with chronological accuracy, that after half a year of negotiations Russia not only did not show any readiness for concessions and flexibility but even hurried to invade Korea, and again Japan is defending the peace of Korea – not its own. The song ends with a rhetorical question: “Are these actions of love for peace?” There is indeed something to be learned from the Japan of those days as far as political propaganda is concerned. The other songs describe the course of the most important battles in the war. Each song deals with one engagement. The language is floridly poetic, though rather stereotyped as, for instance, in the “Song on the Occupation of Chiuliench’eng (Yalu):” Like scattered autumn leaves The enemy army is dispersing in disarray.33

Nature imagery appears also in the continuation: Like a heron suffering from the storm The white flag is fluttering among the trees. Near twilight, with monkey-like agility, The enemy is fleeing through the ravines.

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Whether this is a Japanese ironic response to Tsar Nicholas II who called the Japanese “monkeys” before the outbreak of the war, can only be left to conjecture. Notwithstanding the pseudo-poetic language of the songs, the course of the battles is described in accurate detail. The official records of the Japanese navy command are difficult to locate, but already in 1911 and 1912 official versions of the course of the battles appeared in German and English translations.34 Following these, it is possible to identify the place names, names of ships, and dates of battles mentioned in the songs, and to confirm how accurate and close to the facts they were. Whatever the faithfulness to reality, the battles are described with emphasis on the dangers and the unbearably difficult fighting conditions, the soldiers’ heroism, the memory of the victims, and the pride of victory. Thus, in the same breath as the announcement of the Port Arthur harbor blockade, the battle’s many victims are commemorated too, in the “Song of the Blockade Squadron:” Here the task has been accomplished completely, But the brave men of four ships Vanished out of sight with their ships35

(that is, they drowned in the sea). On the almost superhuman heroism of the soldiers and their spirit of self-sacrifice the “Song on the Occupation of Nan-Shan” declaims: Swords and bullets too – what are they? Mines and trenches – what are they? The advance is for the emperor, If they die – it is for the country . . . Stepping over corpses, walking on blood, Holding the breath, unhesitatingly . . . Is this a human’s deed?36

The enemy’s losses are mentioned too. But in a manner characteristic of the Japanese Samurai tradition at that time, this is done without malicious joy, in the context of commemorating the losses of the Japanese army, as in the “Song on the War in the Vicinity of Telissu:” The enemy’s losses are some thousands of men and 330 prisoners. Ah! Our soldiers threw their lives away, Winning a glorious victory . . . 37 THE MELODIES

All the contemporary written comments on these songs, official as well as others, refer only to words and subject matter, not to melodies or any musical elements. This silence with regard to musical matters is not new in the context of Japanese school songs in the Meiji period. Already with

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regard to the first Japanese school songs – Shogaku shoka-shu,38 published by the Music Investigation Committee of the Education Ministry in 1881, and the controversial Kyoka tekiyo yonen shoka39 by Tamura Torazo and Nassho Benjiro in 1900 – everything that was written concentrated on textual matters only, and did not refer to the musical aspects of the songs. This does not mean that composers, editors, educationalists, or policy makers did not have well-defined opinions regarding the music. But since they refrained from expressing them, one can understand the songs’ melodic characteristics only by examining them. In the eight volumes of Shinpen kyoiku shoka-shu melodies of Western origin are found in only three of twenty-two War songs, namely 13.6 percent: a melody from the opera Le Devin du Village by Rousseau (volume 2, No. 9 Sento-ka, “Battle Song”), that had appeared already in the first songbook in 1881, although with a different text, as a peaceful song on changing seasonal phenomena; the Wedding March from Wagner’s Lohengrin (volume 7, No. 16 Kihei, “Cavalry Soldiers”), and the melody of the Scottish folk song Comin’ thro’ the rye (volume 7, No. 17 Ikaiei, “Weihaiwei”). This is a very low percentage of Western melodies, especially in comparison with the three volumes of the first songbook40 where they represent 65.6 percent of all the songs. From this one may understand that the initial indiscriminate enthusiasm that prevailed in the early Meiji period for all Western values had already passed, and that narrow nationalism had begun to replace the former internationalist tendency. Six of the war songs in these volumes are in a major key (27.3 percent), which is also of Western origin, but the melodies themselves were written by Japanese composers. Most probably this key was chosen because it suits the binary rhythm of the military marches. There are no war songs in a minor key in these volumes – and this is certainly not by chance. The melodies of the remaining thirteen War songs contain traditional Japanese elements. The tonality of some of these songs is based on the pentatonic modes taken from koto and shamisen music and from folk music. The melodies of most of the other songs can, apparently, be analyzed in terms of a major key. But such an analysis would ignore the most characteristic tonal element that appears consistently in most of these songs – a melodic model based on a traditional tetrachordal pattern. A tetrachord, according to the definition by the Japanese musicologist Koizumi Fumio (1927–83),41 is a tonal unit consisting of three tones – two nuclear notes a fourth apart with an intermediate tone which takes various positions between them, from a minor second to a major third above the lower nuclear note. According to the location of this intermediate tone it is possible to distinguish between different kinds of tetrachords that give the unique Japanese character to a melody. A tetrachord can be expanded by the addition of a major second below the lower nuclear tone or above the higher nuclear tone, and thus be turned into a pentachord. A tetrachordal pattern may appear in the course of a melody in a major key without contradicting its major definition, but it will give a different character to the melody.

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In most of the war songs in Shinpen kyoiku shoka-shu such tetrachords, and sometimes pentachords, figure conspicuously in each of the song’s phrases, or at least once or twice in its course. Together with the songs in a pure Japanese tonality, the percentage of war songs that include traditional tonal elements amounts to 59 percent – i.e. more than half. This may be understood as unequivocal evidence for the tendency to strengthen the songs’ Japanese nationalist character, here reflected musically, at the expense of a decline in the percentage of songs from Western sources. This tendency increases in the songs of the Russo-Japanese War itself, Senso shoka. Melodies from Western sources do not appear here at all. Melodies in a major key appear in four of nine songs (44.4 percent), as opposed to five (55.5 percent) songs in a tonality based on traditional Japanese elements – two in the tonality of folksongs, called yo, and three that include tetrachordal patterns. The increase of the nationalist tendency is thus reflected in the tonal structure of the melodies, especially if we take into consideration that the major key, despite its Western origin, here serves the militarist character of the marches. CONCLUSION

The details presented above lead to an obvious conclusion: the beginnings of the Russo-Japanese War can be observed through an examination of Japanese school songs, and not necessarily only in terms of the bilateral relations between the two countries prior to the outbreak of war. These beginnings clearly grew within Japan itself, out of motivations developing there even before the Sino-Japanese War. When one evaluates these songs as tools of deliberate and well-planned indoctrination, one can understand that they indicate a tendency of Japanese nationalist-militarist policy that became visible many years before the RussoJapanese War. The question arises whether Japan would have achieved its surprising, stunning victory over Russia if that fighting spirit had not been instilled systematically into its young soldiers when these were still even younger school children in the elementary and secondary schools. It would, consequently, also be correct to regard the songs of the RussoJapanese War period as not an isolated phenomenon. They are more than an expression of victory celebrations, and a proud final flourish of that war. They can be seen as a midway station in the continual process of Japan’s advance on the militarist path from one war to the next. A chilling confirmation of this can be found in the Japanese school songs that appeared at a later stage, in preparation for the Pacific War and in the course of it. But this phenomenon is beyond the limits of the present study, and has already been described elsewhere.42 NOTES 1 2

Japanese Ministry of Education, 1881. Koyama, 1891.

School Songs, the War, and Nationalist Indoctrination 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

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All translations from the Japanese are the author’s. Kaigo, 1965: 645. Oka, 1892. Nassho, 1892. Oku, 1893. Yuchi, 1893. Yamada, 1894. Kaigo, 1965: 191. From “The Battle of Cheng Huan,” v.1 nr. 2. In Kaigo, 1965, 193, Seikan-no tatakai. From “The Brave Naval Soldier,” v. 3 nr. 3. In Kaigo, 1965, 198, Yukan-naru suihei. From “A Model Soldier,” v. 3 nr. 4. In Kaigo, 1965, 199, Heishi-no kagami. From “A Model Soldier,” v. 3 nr. 4. In Kaigo, 1965, 199, Heishi-no kagami. From “The Yellow Sea Battle,” v. 1 nr. 4. In Kaigo, 1965, 194, Kokai-no tatakai. Watanabe, 1895. Shinpen kyoiku, 1896. From “Four thousand, more than forty thousand.” Shinpen kyoiku, I: 71, nr. 34, Shisen yoman. Shinpen kyoiku, II: 19, nr. 9, Sento-ka. Shinpen kyoiku, VII: 494, nr. 27, Miyako-no yuki. Tamura and Nassho, 1900. Tamura and Nassho, 1900, Heitai, I: pt. 2, 17. Shinpen Kyoiku, III: 32, nr. 16, Tami-no tsutome. Shinpen Kyoiku, IV: 10, nr. 4, Kimi-no tame. Shinpen Kyoiku, VI: 64, nr. 27, Waga kono mi. Shinpen Kyoiku, VII: 490, nr. 26, Mi-kuni-no tami. Shinpen Kyoiku, IV: 10, nr. 4, Kimi no tame. Shinpen Kyoiku, VI: 71, nr. 30, Kyosha kyokoku. Shinpen Kyoiku, V: 63, nr. 29, Eiseitai. Shinpen Kyoiku, VI: 15, nr. 7, Fujin jugun-ko. Japanese Ministry of Education, 1904. Japanese Ministry of Education, 1904, I: nr. 1, Roshia seito-no uta. Japanese Ministry of Education, 1904, I: 25, nr. 5, Kyurenjo senryo-no uta. Japanischer Admiralstab, 1911; Great Britain, Committee of Imperial Defence, Historical Section, 1912. Japanese Ministry of Education, 1904, I: 29, nr. 6, Heisokutai-no uta. Japanese Ministry of Education, 1904, I: 35, nr. 7, Nanzan senryo-no uta. Japanese Ministry of Education, 1904, I: 40, nr. 8, Tokuriji fukin senso-no uta. Japanese Ministry of Education, 1881. See note 21. Japanese Ministry of Education, 1881. Koizumi, 1958: 127–188; Koizumi, 1977: 73. Eppstein, 1987: 431–447.

13

Forgotten Heroes: Russian Women in the War YULIA MIKHAILOVA AND IKUTA MICHIKO

W

ars, especially if they are perceived as national exploits, usually produce mythology about heroes whose images are symbolically used for the purposes of national consolidation. It is well-known that in Japan the Russo-Japanese War was an important stage in the process of building the nation-state, so that its main heroes, such as General Nogi Maresuke or Admiral Togo Heihachiro, were adulated as “war gods” and venerated as symbols of loyalty to the emperor and the country. Shrines were constructed in honor of each and, until 1945, children were taught to remember their biographies and to draw their portraits. In imperial Russia, the Russo-Japanese War was remembered with sorrow and regret, though the crew of Variag, on its return to Russia, was greeted with honor to the surprise of the sailors themselves who did not regard their attempt to sink the cruiser as something glorious. In the Soviet Union heroism was always seen through the lens of class ideology; hence the disgraceful war with Japan, the defeat in which was attributed to “the rotten tsarist regime,” was used as a set-off-against mechanism for the construction of Soviet patriotism.1 A national disaster and an object of shame, moreover draped with ideological clothes of class struggle, the Russo-Japanese War appeared to have no heroes on the Russian side. However, does this really mean that there were no heroes among Russians? Do heroes appear only when they sacrifice their lives for the sake of the Motherland? Who is actually seen as a hero of war and why? This chapter will address the above-mentioned questions from the viewpoint of gender theory using the case-study of Russian women. Until the rapid growth of gender studies in the second half of the 1980s such historical phenomena as nationalism, nation-state, modern wars, etc. were perceived as purely “masculine” phenomena.2 Since that time, scholars, especially female ones, have published a number of works

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aiming to demonstrate that women, no less than men, are important actors in these processes. It was pointed out that women not only biologically reproduce the nation, but actively participate in its ideological and cultural construction and its political and military struggles.3 Some recent developments in actual life and academia, among them women’s participation as regular army soldiers in the Gulf War (1990–91) and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, instigated interest in the topic of women and war. Hot discussions about Korean “comfort women” also alerted female scholars to reflect more thoroughly on the issue of Japanese women’s war responsibility.4 The policy of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union made possible the publication of new materials about World War II and stimulated reconsideration of the previous one-sided assessment of Soviet women’s activities in this war which tended to hide their victimization by the state.5 Russian history of the twentieth century was abundant in wars and social cataclysms. This opened unprecedented opportunities for women’s activism in various spheres of life – they often had to replace men as family heads or as workers at plants and construction sites. However, paradoxically, traditional gender stereotypes did not disappear in Russia and continue to exist even today. The Russo-Japanese War as an event which influenced the process of the development of Russian society may give us some clues for understanding the subsequent fate of Russian and Soviet women. Generally speaking, war stands among those extreme situations when the existing notions of gender relations may be subject to reconstruction: The extreme situations when women have to play traditionally male roles are favorable for the emergence of the heroic type of women who are able to protect themselves, their near ones, and their motherland; who are able to take responsible decisions and put them into practice. . . . In these situations boundaries between the stereotypes of male and female behavior change, at first slightly, then more considerably: women take part in military activities not only as nurses, but as soldiers wearing men’s clothes, they risk their lives in battles and during military espionage.6

However, it is not sufficient to point out forms and ways of women’s engagement and presence in war; it is no less important to examine how women (and men) described and interpreted this activism: “activism is nothing unless it is researched and interpreted by actors . . . It is language that transforms experience into consciousness.”7 Women may have various impediments in writing about such “masculine space” as war. Nevertheless, as will be demonstrated below, many Russian women felt it necessary for themselves to describe their participation in the RussoJapanese War and to explain what this experience meant to them. There is no lack of men’s stories (mainly written by war correspondents) about women who participated in this war. It seems important to compare

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narratives of each side in order to find out the perception of women in the Russian society of the time, to assess their role in war, and the role of war in their lives. Finally, we must find out what changes, if any, this war brought to the position, perception, and representation of women in Russia. SISTERS OF CHARITY

The active emergence of women in the social arena and their engagement in professional activities began in Russia after the liberal reforms of the 1860s. In the 1870s, several educational institutions for women were established with various medical courses among them. The profession of a nurse or sister of charity became one of the most popular for women of the time, especially after several stories about nurses who participated in the war against Turkey (1877–78) became known to the public.8 Ideas of feminism began to penetrate Russia from the West at the end of the nineteenth century and the first groups of feminists appeared. At that time, communities of sisters of charity were organized in Russia. Usually they were affiliated to the Red Cross, relied on private financial support of members of the aristocratic society (including the tsar’s family) or merchants, and had several hospitals of their own, such as Mariinskii Hospital in Petersburg which later established a branch in Port Arthur (Figure 13.1), In peaceful times, sisters of charity were engaged in the struggle with epidemics of typhoid, cholera, plague or famine. The communities of nurses also attempted to earn money by their own efforts. For example, the Community of St. Eugene earned money by publishing postcards and other printed matter. In sum, by the time the Russo-Japanese War started Russian women already had some professional experience which was well known in society. To some degree, the war affected all women of the country because husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers of many were sent or went to the front. This often ended with the loss of the breadwinner. Wartime life became harder, especially for lower-class women who now had to earn money by themselves in order to make both ends meet. Those who belonged to the gentry had to carry the burden of managing estates. However, there were also women who came to be involved in war more directly as its active participants. These were nurses, female combatants, war correspondents, and female inhabitants of Port Arthur. Sisters of mercy comprised the main category. According to statistics, 720 nurses worked at military hospitals (i.e. not affiliated to the Red Cross). As to the Red Cross hospitals, 439 nurses, five doctor assistants and one female surgeon worked in the front district only.9 What stimulated these women to become nurses and go to the front? Reasons could, of course, be different in each particular case. Because the nurse was already a well-established profession for women, some were simply dispatched to the front by their superiors. For example, Olga Aleksandrovna von Baumgarten, a nurse of the St. George Community of Sisters of

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Figure 13.1: Mariinskaya Community of Nurses Before the Departure to Russia from Port Arthur (Spring, 1905).

Source: Larenko, 1906: 751.

Charity, wrote in her diary that she was called by the Mother Superior and appointed to work as a nurse on the floating hospital Mongolia in Port Arthur on just the second day of the war. Their group was dispatched on February 1, 1904. Olga Aleksandrovna von Baumgarten was born in 1877 in a noble family and was a Lutheran. She already had the experience of nursing in the Boer War and published a book entitled Reminiscences about Transvaal of a Sister of Mercy.10 She was well-educated, knew three foreign languages, and was well versed in literature. Later she published two books in the form of diaries about the Russo-Japanese War and subsequent return to Russia.11 Her writing style is very laconic and almost no emotions are expressed. Most of the diary consists of the descriptions of work and living conditions of medical personnel and patients. She tells us various details about the linen, including its colors and design, the type of medical equipment, food, counts the number of beds in the rooms, and so on. According to her description, these conditions were not bad, even in the besieged Port Arthur. But we should take into consideration the fact that the book was written for the benefit of the Community of St. George and was dedicated to its sponsor Princess

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Oldenburg. Obviously, this kind of book was not supposed to be very critical. Baumgarten described many cases of wounded and dying people, but she never ever expressed her own attitude toward war. It seems that for her the nurse was first of all a profession, a job which she performed diligently and honestly. Contrary to von Baumgarten who was a professional nurse, many women volunteered to master this profession during the war. One of them was Olga Pashchenko. She described her decision to become a nurse in the following way: News about the beginning of war reached me in a quiet and remote provincial town, deeply immersed into everyday routine. I decided to go to the field of war as a nurse as soon as I heard the news . . . I naively believed that everyone should be young and energetic, should search for an ideal and feel the same as I did.12

However, she continued, it seemed that no one noticed her feelings. Although, on the way to Northeast Asia, the public greeted their train with speeches, dining, and wining, the atmosphere was official and stiff. By the end of the journey her romantic feelings began to evaporate, but then returned again in anticipation of work: Quicker, quicker! Where are the wounded? Where will we accept them? We are thirsty for the real work, such work that would let us forget our own wishes . . . Oh, we were naïve, we felt ourselves so childish with our new rising feelings, strong and youthful.13

She explains this eagerness for work by the patriotic fervor and belief in Russia’s victory which existed in the beginning of war. Then, Pashchenko passes on to descriptions of life at the front hospital. She was appointed to do housekeeping, and though the task was not an easy one she was proud she could manage to fulfill her obligations. With great compassion she writes about the suffering and death of people she was witness to and becomes tortured by the question of why so many people have to die. She wonders who is guilty for their suffering. So, as the war progresses, her mood changes, but she still gets great satisfaction from her work, because it gives her the opportunity to help people: We are still longing for work but do not expect heroic deeds any more, because we understand the absurdity and uselessness of everything that goes around and brings harm to people. Our efforts to release people from suffering are a drop in the ocean compared to the efforts of others who cause this suffering.14

At the end Pashchenko understood that all her heroic dreams were meaningless. She returned to Russia seriously ill and with a broken heart.

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Many wives of military men also became nurses during the war. According to the explanation of one journalist, seemingly a male writer, they just could not bear the idea of staying at home while their husbands were at the war theater and also went to the battlefield. One nurse of a field hospital allegedly confessed to this correspondent that the only way to get away from distressing thoughts was to immerse oneself in work: “It is easier when you cannot stand on your feet [tired of work – Y.M.], when it is dark in your eyes and the head is dizzy; then you have no time to think.”15 Some nurses came from the upper stratum of society – Baroness OstenSaken, Princess Urusova, the wife of General Kazerin were among them. Nurse Evdokiya Alekseevna Voronova who was involved in transportation of the wounded, though she did not belong to the nobility, reportedly was a very rich woman. Together with some of her friends she established a mobile ambulance. Her activity was first described by a well-known writer Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko who worked as a war correspondent and his article was then reprinted in numerous magazines. Voronova had already participated as a nurse in the Chinese Campaign of 1900–01, i.e. the suppression of the Boxer rebellion, where her husband served as the Head of a Dragoon Regimen, and was awarded the Ribbon of St. George. Nemirovich-Danchenko portrayed her as a thin, small, and apparently weak, but “having a strong will, as if it was made of iron.” He admired her energy, organizational skills, and ability to exert herself in work forgetting about food, fatigue or weariness. Once she dressed wounds of twenty-seven people and lost consciousness herself. When the consciousness returned, she only drank some water and continued to work again. “Sister of charity,” pathetically wrote Nemirovich-Danchenko, “what moral height, what spiritual beauty you see in her heroism . . . Only for nurses the wounded are human beings, brothers and friends, while for all the rest they are mere combatant units.”16 The nurse Lyudmila Vladimirovna Yakovenko-Yakovleva became particularly famous during the war because she was wounded in both legs and one had to be amputated. She was only twenty-two years old at the time. Yakovenko was born in Kiev, graduated a gymnasium and worked for some time at the town council of Kharkov. During the war she volunteered for the local detachment of the Red Cross. The detachment left Kharkov in the beginning of May and she soon found herself at the front, just some thirty six kilometers from Liaoyang. Her ward consisted of four nurses, two doctors, and several litter-bearers. It belonged to the hospital which was designed for fifty patients, but in reality received eight hundred wounded. As the number of beds was insufficient, the wounded were put on flat roofs of Chinese houses and in the church. They were lying together with the dead, moaning and praying. When the hospital was ordered to move further from Liaoyang and the patients were already being transported on sanitary and goods trains, the medical personal began to collect their own belongings. Yakovenko was wounded at this

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particular moment. She was taken to Mukden, then to Tieling where her leg was amputated because gangrene set in. She was then sent to France to receive medical treatment. One article about this nurse ended with the following words attributed to her: “However, I feel great satisfaction with my job. It is a great pleasure to feel that your work has been done for someone’s benefit and that people feel gratitude to you.”17 At least one magazine, however, published a story of a woman for whom the career of a nurse became an escape from her unbearable family life. This woman was forced to marry a man she did not love. He was unfaithful, greedy, and a drunkard at that. When their only child died, she wanted to commit suicide, but someone advised her to begin earning her own money – to become a teacher, a midwife, or a nurse. It was exactly at that time that the war with Japan started and courses for sisters of charity were opened in the town where she lived. She graduated and, in spite of her husband’s protests, went to the front. The story ends with the following words: “When she saw a different life and become acquainted with many other people, she understood that one can become happy only through helping other people and sacrificing oneself for their benefit.” She dreamt about returning to Russia after the war and becoming a teacher. Though the name of the main character of the story is not mentioned, it is likely that it had some factual base.18 Vera Ignatievna Gedroits (1870–1931), a woman with an unusual fate, was the first female surgeon in Russia. Born into a family of gentry, she entered the medical courses in St Petersburg organized by a well-known anatomist Petr F. Lezgaft, but was arrested for her political activities and exiled to Bryansk, a small city in Western Russia where she was born. She managed to escape to Switzerland and entered the Medical Faculty of Lozano University. There she got interested in surgery and on her return to Russia became the head of a provincial hospital. As the war with Japan started, she volunteered to go to the front. She had to perform operations straight in a sanitary train or, as during the battle at Sakhe, in a Chinese fanza reorganized for medical use. At this time, she invented the technique of operations on the abdomen and later described it in her scientific works. She was awarded the Anna Ribbon, a silver medal “For Courage”, and received orders of distinction from the Red Cross. After the war she continued her work as a surgeon and even became the home doctor of the tsar’s family. Interestingly enough, she successfully pursued her career in the Soviet times as well and died from cancer before the “great purges” began.19 COMBATANTS AND JOURNALISTS

At least two examples of women combatants are known to us. Elena Smolka was a daughter of a Jewish soldier from Vladivostok. She spent her childhood in Nikolsk-Ussuriisk among the Chinese and Koreans and had perfect command of these languages. She was only seventeen years old when the Boxer Rebellion occurred, but she decided to become a

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member of a border guard unit. She thought that her knowledge of languages would be useful during the military campaign. Elena changed into men’s clothes, named herself Mikhail Nikolaevich and successfully passed the exam at the school of military interpreters in Vladivostok. She could ride a horse, use the rifle and the sabre. In 1901, she was sent as an interpreter on a reconnaissance expedition. They stopped for the night in a Chinese house. She managed to overhear talk among the Chinese and thus could inform the Russians about an impending attack by the hunkhuz (the word used by Russians meaning “Chinese bandits”). Smolka was wounded in a skirmish and later was awarded a medal and a sabre with a silver hilt. With the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, Elena immediately volunteered for the battlefield again, and without waiting for official permission went to Harbin. However, there she was not allowed to join the army. So, she cross-dressed into male clothing, attached her rewards and tried to make her way to the south. As tickets were not sold any more, she got into the wagon for transportation of cattle and soon managed to reach the front. There her friends helped her to be enlisted in a Cossack reconnaissance ward. Her knowledge of languages helped Russians again to obtain important information and thus to save lives of many people. Then she was officially enrolled as a volunteer interpreter in the Second Nerchinsk regiment under the male name of Mikhail Smolka, however, her real name Elena Mikhailovna was written in brackets. She is said to have participated in numerous dangerous military operations and was wounded again. Reportedly, most of the Cossacks treated her in friendly fashion and she even became a member of some local officer’s union. Queer things also happened to her. Being sent to Harbin to do shopping, she appeared in the local theatre in men’s clothes but became the object of mockery of the female community.20 Another female soldier was Haritina Korotkevich, a peasant’s daughter from Tobolsk province, Nesterevaya village. She became a defender of Port Arthur together with her husband who was called up to the army from the reserves. In the beginning of the war she continued their trade business, but at Easter she decided to visit her husband at the front. As a woman she was not allowed to go further than Harbin. So, she cut her hair, dressed in men’s clothes and managed to get to Talienvan where her husband’s regiment was. Then she decided not to return home and to remain beside her husband. At first she wore women’s clothes, but when the regiment was dispatched to Chinchou, which was quite close to Port Arthur, she received the same rifle and ammunition as a soldier and was officially enlisted as a rifleman under the male name of Khariton Korotkevich. It is reported that in the beginning no one took her seriously, but she managed to prove that she could fight as well as the male soldiers. When her husband was wounded, she accompanied him to the hospital and learned how to dress wounds. Soon she was appointed as a messenger of Captain Gusakovsky and stayed by him until her death. She was killed on October 3, 1904 when an eleven-inch bomb landed in the

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shelter where she was dressing a wound. The article about Haritina ends in the following way: Her military combatants will remember her well. She was always the first to bring the water or wood during the short periods of rest, she did the washing, went to buy tobacco or candies to Port Arthur. She was a good soldier and a faithful wife, and demonstrated to the world the greatness of the Russian women’s soul.21

In this article she is mainly praised for the qualities of a good wife and for doing some small tasks to make the men’s life easier. A journalist, M.R. Zvyagintseva, worked for the Newsletter of the Manchurian Army as the head of the section on foreign politics. She had been a war correspondent during the Chinese campaign of 1900–01. In the Russo-Japanese War she was a witness to the Liaoyang battle and stayed in the city till August 18, i.e. only three days before the retreat of the Russian troops. Her articles described the courageous deeds of Russian soldiers and, reportedly, she often managed to get better information than male correspondents did. She also published articles about nurses, including those who worked in the hospital belonging to the St. George Community of Nurses which accepted 1500 people per day. She glorified the nurses as real heroines and victims of the war who were the last to leave the battlefield. The headquarters of journalists, both Russian and foreign, were located in a Chinese temple. As the only woman there, she also took care of the meals of the whole company.22 In other words, she combined her professional work with traditional women’s chores. THE FEMALE POPULATION OF PORT ARTHUR

Before the war, the population of Port Arthur comprised 4000 people. As in most military fortresses women were less than half. With the beginning of war the number of women decreased to 300. Most of them were wives or daughters of officers and merchants. Several women lived on their own and worked as clerks, school teachers, and prostitutes. Reportedly, during the first five months of the war, i.e. till the bombardment of Port Arthur as such began, the city continued to live its usual life. Women gave birth to children, school and shops functioned as usual and even the public gathered regularly for a stroll on the embankment. However, with the beginning of the siege in July, life changed dramatically. Women were no more mere family members – everyone had to be engaged in work, such as sewing and washing underwear, cleaning rooms for the sick and wounded. Some women, including prostitutes, volunteered to become sisters of charity and one of them, Wilhelmina Krik, who worked as a canzonet singer in a local restaurant was later awarded a St. George Ribbon.

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The most remarkable and well-known figure among Port Arthur’s women was Vera Alekseevna Stoessel, the wife of the General and Commander of the Fortress. Her image is very contradictory. Many people of Port Arthur did not like her. It was known that her husband was under her heel and she often imposed her views on orders he gave. For example, the editor of the local newspaper Our Land, P. Larenko wrote: “Stoessel in spite of his outward firmness, craftiness, and stubbornness easily gets under the influence of his close near-bys. Ostensibly he acts of his own will, but in reality he becomes an instrument in their hands.”23 These “close near-bys” were no one else but his wife, as is evident from the context. (Here Larenko referred to the incident when the local newspaper was closed under the order of Lieutenant General Anatolii Stoessel because the editor refused to publish immediately information about the donation campaign organized by Vera Stoessel). Also, because after the war Stoessel was accused of surrendering the fortress to the Japanese, the negative attitude of him in society could not but affect the image of his wife who allegedly was the “main commander.” According to other descriptions, Vera Stoessel was a very energetic and active woman, someone who could be relied on. “This woman is accustomed to be the buttress, to serve as a moral support for others and she knows how to do it,” wrote a journalist.24 Varvara Astafieva-Pukhir, the youngest among the nurses of Port Arthur also recalled with gratitude the General’s wife who sent her in December 1904, just three weeks before surrender, a suckling-pig as a name-day present knowing that nurses were suffering from the lack of food.25 One of her achievements was the arrangement of a laundry in the public bath where wives of soldiers and officers washed the underwear, approximately 1000 items a day. Vera Alekseevna also visited hospitals with the purpose of providing moral support and physical help to the wounded. She herself brought up four orphan girls and after the siege of Port Arthur returned to Russia with several children whose fathers were killed or taken into captivity by Japan. She also organized the donation campaign for the support of families who lost their breadwinners. Gossiping about her may partly be regarded as the negative attitude to a woman who was more active than men. WAR IN POETRY BY WOMEN

It is well-known that Russia’s defeat in the war with Japan became a psychological shock for the Russian society, a sign symbolizing the collapse of the whole world. Such a response to the war is well demonstrated in the literature of the time, including the poetry of symbolists.26 However, symbolists used to express their thoughts through lofty, exalted and abstract categories. The fate of Russia after the war they compared to the fall of the Roman Empire and the defeat at Tsushima to the eschatological end of the world. This tells us little about the way the war was perceived by ordinary people. Interestingly, this reaction may be found in

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some poems written by little-known women-poetesses. Eventually names of authors were forgotten but their poems lived on in popular memory as folksongs or ballads. One of them was a song about a crippled soldier who returned home from Manchuria only to find out that none of his family members was alive – his wife, mother, son, and brother all perished at the hand of the government. This poem entitled From the Surrendered Stronghold of Port Arthur was created by Tatiana L’vovna Shchepkina-Kupernik. She was born into a family of intellectuals and became known as a translator of drama in verse, such as Shakespeare, Goldoni, or Rostan. The poetess recalled later how the poem and song came into being: From the Surrendered Stronghold of Port Arthur appeared soon after the events of January 9 which were a shock for all the people. Without any knowledge of mine, the poem was published in a magazine Osvobozhdenie considered to be a revolutionary one. But even before that the text was passed from hand to hand; workers and young men took it to be patriotic. No one created the melody. In the direct sense of the word it was the creation of people themselves. The reason for its popularity lies in the fact that the poem contained not a single particle of falsehood. Everything it was about happened in real life; I just put it all together.27

The creation of a song In Memory of Variag, also considered to be a folksong, is connected to the name of another female poet Evgeniya Mikhailovana Studenskaya. Apart from the fact that she translated some poems from German and published them in Russian literary magazines, little is known about her life. She died quite young in 1905. In Memory of Variag seems to be first published in a German magazine Jugend and written by a German poet Rudolf Greinz. The publication was designed to celebrate one month’s anniversary since the destruction of the cruiser on February 8, 1904. Studenskaya made some changes in content and published her translation in The New Magazine of Foreign Literature, Arts and Science. For a long time both the poem and the song were considered to be popular ones, probably because it seemed strange that a foreigner could write such patriotic and heart-breaking words, while the melody was the joint contribution of several authors.28 It was in tune with the patriotic mood which existed in Russia during the first months of the war. Thus it may be concluded that women made no small contribution to the way Russian people remembered the Russo-Japanese War. CONCLUSION

There is an obvious tendency in male accounts of the Russo-Japanese War to glorify “the greatness of the Russian women’s soul,” their spiritual beauty and moral height, to portray them as heroines who saw their duty in sacrificing themselves for the sake of the motherland and for the

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sake of men or as faithful companions of their husbands. Because the war has always been considered to be a male phenomenon, these representations may be qualified as typical. In Russia they were first produced through images of wives of the Decembrists – officers who raised the uprising against the tsar on December 26, 1825 (December 14 in the Julian calendar). Five leaders of the uprising were executed, while about one thousand participants were exiled to Siberia. Many of them were accompanied to this cold and remote land by their wives. This deed was variously glorified in poetry and prose,29 to the extent that it became customary to say that, though the Decembrists lost the uprising, their wives won it. This image of the feminine was very popular among democratic intelligentsia which appeared in the 1860s and 1870s and later in Soviet times as well. Some works of art created soon after the Russo-Japanese War also give evidence to the fact that the society tended to appreciate the heroism of nurses. Thus, a sculpture by M.L. Dilon (Figure 13.2), representing a young nurse reading a letter to a wounded soldier, was awarded in 1905 the first prize named after Her Highness, Princess Oldenburg, who sponsored one of the communities of nurses. We can only guess, though, whether the prize was really awarded in honor of nurses or of their sponsor. Whereas in the sculpture of Dilon the nurse was represented performing her duty to men, the picture by I.I. Geller Toward the Sacred Deed (Figure 13.3) conveyed the romantic image of a nurse standing on a porch alone. She seems to be contemplating her life and feeling apprehensive for the future. The picture was exhibited at the Thirteenth Exhibition of the St. Petersburg Association of Artists in 1905. However, it seems necessary to pay closer attention to what in particular these women were glorified for. Such virtues as self-sacrifice, performing the duty of being together with the husband, thrift and industriousness for the sake of others were usually appreciated, but these are exactly the virtues which are related to caring for men and downgrade women as independent human beings. There is no doubt that during the Russo-Japanese War, at least at its initial stage, some women volunteered to go to the war after being moved by romantic and heroic dreams or by patriotic feelings which existed in society. Many of them were compassionate and solicitous carers and good wives. However, memoirs of nurses or articles based on interviews with women themselves suggest that this was not the only reason for their participation in war. In fact, women saw the war as an opportunity to realize themselves, especially through work, to establish their own independence and, thus, to create their new identity. This was an important impulse that pushed them toward heroic deeds. At the same time, glofication of women in press, literature and art of the time definitely filled in the empty niche – there were hardly many male heroes in the war which did not reflect the national interests of Russia. The trivial and sluggish routine of Russian life did not leave much space for women longing for activity. This was noticed by such Russian

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Figure 13.2: M.L. Dillon, “Nurse Reading a Letter.”

Source: Khronika voiny s Yaponiei, 1905, No 49, Coversheet.

Forgotten Heroes Figure 13.3: I.I. Geller, “Toward the Sacred Deed.”

Source: Khronika voiny s Yaponiei, 1905, No 52, Cover-sheet.

215

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feminists as Ariadna Tyrkova, Anna Shabanova, Ekaterina Kuskova and well revealed by the famous writer Anton Chekhov in his works. Many of his heroines appeared to be distressed with their current life; they dream of meaningful work, which would take all their spiritual and physical energy and allow them to be useful for society. In this social climate the ideas that the road toward women’s emancipation and equality goes through work were gaining more and more force while the RussoJapanese War may have speeded up their development. With the advent of the revolutionary and democratic movement in 1905, women began to claim that the state and society should officially acknowledge their right to work and provide them with equal civil and political rights. However, neither the law of August 6, 1905, nor the Manifesto of October 30, 1905 (October 17 in the Julian calendar) granted any political rights to women. Since that time on, many Russian women connected their hopes for emancipation with the proletariat and socialist movement which regarded emancipation as an essential part of general liberation of workers from capitalist exploitation. Soon the heroic images of women who participated in the RussoJapanese War began to fade away from popular memory because they were replaced by other events of major importance. The Russo-Japanese War was followed by three revolutions and the Civil War which became the main repository of images of heroes in Soviet times. However, the ideas prioritizing emancipation through work remained to live in time. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

Mikhailova, 2002. Smith, 1998: 205–210. Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989: 7. Ueno, 2004: 38–42. “Mascha, Nina, Katjuscha,” 2002. Demidova, 2004: 140. Cooke, 1993: 177. See, e.g., Utin, 1879; Krestovskii, 1879; Tikhonov, 1892. “Krasnyi Krestna voine” [The Red Cross at War] 1905: 1625. Baumgarten, 1902. Baumgarten, 1906; Baumgarten, 1907. Pashchenko, 1910: 195. Pashchenko, 1910: 198. Pashchenko, 1910: 214. “Siostry miloserdiia na teatre voi” [Sisters of Mercy at the War Theatre] 1904: 20. Nemirovich-Danchenko, 1904: 10. “Beseda s L.V. Yakovenko-Yakovlevoi.” 1904: 27. Slukhovskii, 1904: 10–14. Khohlov, 1995: 170–177. “Mikhail Smolka.” 1904: 805–806.

Forgotten Heroes 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Silin, 1906: 54–55. “L.K.,” 1905: 563. Larenko, 1906: 276. Bazankur, 1905: 140. Astafieva-Pukhir, 1944: 122. Wells, 1999. Shchepkina-Kupernik, 1954: 816. Studenskaya, 1988: 480. Especially famous was the poem by N.A. Nekrasov Russian women.

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The Dress Rehearsal? Russian Realism and Modernism through War and Revolution AARON J. COHEN

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lexandre Benois (Aleksandr Benua), late Imperial Russia’s foremost modern art critic, remembered the unusual reaction among Russian artists when war with Japan came in 1904. They faced “the first real war” since 1878, he wrote, yet “at the beginning no one considered it completely real; instead “almost everyone treated it with surprising casualness, as toward some kind of trivial adventure from which Russia could only emerge victorious.”1 Contemporaries and historians have considered the war in Manchuria too distant to command public interest for long; nor did it evoke extensive public mobilization or patriotic enthusiasm.2 The significance of the Russo-Japanese War in Russian history has thus almost always been located in its relationship to other events, the Revolution of 1905, World War I, or the Revolution of 1917, and not in the war experience itself.3 In 1904 and 1914 an initial burst of public enthusiasm accompanied the outbreak of war, but in each case a failed war effort led directly to revolution. But was the Russo-Japanese War only a “dress rehearsal,” as many believed, for later events? In the world of Russian art the experience of war and revolution was much different in 1904 and 1905 than it was a decade later. The RussoJapanese War caused little disruption in the institutions or practices of the art world, and artists did little to mobilize themselves to support the war effort through the production of patriotic imagery or participation in charity work. This lack of professional and social mobilization stemmed in part from the incomplete nature of artistic engagement with the broader public and commercial culture in 1904, not just from the unimportance of East Asia in the public eye or the more limited need to mobilize for a colonial war. Aesthetic modernists in this “Silver Age” of

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Russian culture, moreover, had rejected the aesthetic social engagement of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, and the Russo-Japanese War showed the failure of nineteenth-century realist aesthetics, embodied in the work of the Wanderers (peredvizhniki), to capture warfare in the public imagination of the early twentieth century. Artistic engagement with broader public issues did occur in the Revolution of 1905, as many artists, even modernists, depicted revolutionary events and participated in contemporary political discourse. Yet revolution did not bring radical social or political change to the country, and it did not bring dramatic change to the art world. Instead it stimulated a renewed focus away from public engagement toward professional development, which expanded the size of the art world and magnified its connections to surrounding culture and society. Artists seemed irrelevant in 1904 but believed they could make a difference in 1914, when artistic mobilization was far more pervasive in professional and personal terms. An aesthetic and professional war was already underway in Russia for several years before military conflict came in 1904. In the words of one critic, the art world was divided into two groups based on aesthetic orientation: the realists of the Wanderer tradition and a new, growing movement that put “artistic tasks, color, plein air technique, [and] light and shade over ideological [ideinym] tasks.”4 The latter were the fin-de-siècle aesthetes, art nouveau stylists, impressionists, and symbolists who congregated around the Petersburg art journal Mir iskusstva (“World of Art”) and its affiliated institutions around the turn of the century.5 The main aesthetic issue that separated modern artists from artists in the realist or the academic tradition was the modernist emphasis on the primacy of the individual artistic vision over all else.6 For aesthetic modernists, art should not be bound to restrictive institutions or practices, as it was in the Imperial Academy of the Arts, nor should it reflect the external world to impart a didactic lesson about contemporary life, as socio-critical realist critics argued in the nineteenth century. Art should instead reflect inspired visions of beauty, truth, and freedom, and these eternal values were to be discovered and expressed through the imagination and free creativity of the individual artist. Aesthetic modernists thus searched for subject matter that emphasized eternal values over the everyday life, depicting mythical or imaginary pasts, personal visions, and decorative designs. Their “art for art’s sake” ideal rejected the notion that art should contain representations of political or social themes (“tendentiousness” in contemporary language) or contemporary life. Modern artists in the World of Art, however, did have political opinions and an agenda for social and political change. Art, a medium of truth, beauty, and the eternal in life, could save humanity from a modern civilization where the ugliness of current events, the banality of daily life, and the sameness and artlessness of mass production reigned. They considered the Wanderers a failure precisely because the realists sought to develop a distinctive national style through imitation of European art with Russian content. Russia could be integrated into

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modern trends in art and contribute to European civilization only through the development of a new art culture based on Russian style, not through the exposition of a specific, isolated Russian content as realist critics advocated.7 Editors, publicists, and artists in the World of Art sought, in essence, to create a new art culture and artistic language that would use aspects of the Russian past and contemporary European style to integrate the arts and the public into a common culture of universal form and free artistic expression.8 They wanted to educate the public about the proper role of art in society and to communicate their understandings of the true nature of art, a mission not far removed in spirit from the traditional moral obligation of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia to educate and uplift the Russian people. Yet this modernist project was self-consciously elitist, quite unlike the strategy of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia. Art should not be made to appeal to the public; instead, the ill-informed public needed to be educated to recognize modern art and aesthetic values. The welfare of Russia and the education of the public, defined in a different way than realist critics, therefore, remained at the center of the professional work of the World of Art. The common perception that the Russian public reacted to the RussoJapanese War with disinterest or disdain is a historical myth, although public reaction to war in 1904 was more restrained than during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78.9 To Colonel Moulin, the French military attaché in St. Petersburg, the surprise Japanese attack on Port Arthur turned what would otherwise have been viewed as a colonial expedition into a “national war” with a “great outburst of national vigor” and a “grim determination” that animated “particularly the lowest classes.”10 The city of Moscow, for example, voted a million rubles for the war effort, while patriotic student unions staged demonstrations in support of the war.11 Russians reached out in an initial wave of war enthusiasm to learn about the conflict as audiences flocked to the cinema; newspapers and magazines burst with war news and public patriotism, and popular posters, postcards, and magazine illustrations filled public space. The number of war-related images in the popular illustrated weekly Ogonek (“The Flame”) soared to 83 percent of all images at the beginning of the war and stayed near 100 percent for six months.12 Still, the public had never shown enough interest in the tsarist government’s Asian adventures to sustain such intensive public patriotism for long. In 1904, the radical press and leftist intelligentsia scarcely discussed the war at all,13 while interest in the popular press waned steadily as the war continued. In Ogonek the percentage of war-related images dropped to about 75 per cent in December 1904 and 38 percent in August 1905. In March 1904, the young artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin observed that daily life had already normalized: “the mood is becoming a bit more normal among ordinary folk [obyvatelei]. But at the beginning everything gave itself over to thoughts about the war, about victories and defeats. That was especially true in Petersburg.”14

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Many artists were not indifferent to the war on a personal level. Manchuria was not as important to the public as Russian adventures in the Balkans, but the Russo-Japanese War demanded significant amounts of military and financial resources and over one hundred thousand Russian casualties. In July 1904, the noted painter Viktor Vasnetsov felt a great sense of personal dismay at the war’s cost: “the war is upsetting me, let God help us in these days of suffering and trial!”15 The sinking of the Russian battleship Petropavlovsk brought the tragedy of war home to the artist Mikhail Nesterov: it killed not only the popular Admiral Makarov and famous war artist Vasilii Vereshchagin but also a childhood friend.16 Nikolai Punin, later a prominent Soviet art critic, remembered how it felt as a young man to hear of Russian defeats in the Sea of Japan: “The new academic year began. Even earlier the Tsushima battle had been fought, and I always remember that dark, sad day when we learned of this horrible event. I was choked with tears; sorrow filled my soul. Russia was sad and the whole country silently mourned the impossible defeat.”17 Petrov-Vodkin sensed popular foreboding in April 1904: “The gripping interest here is in the war – especially after our latest failures in Northeast Asia. The rumors are most depressing.”18 Benois may have sensed indifference, but others had more vivid emotions of humiliation and irritation as Russian defeats mounted.19 The rhythms of the art world, however, remained undisturbed. War broke out just as the Petersburg exhibition season opened, but newspaper reviews do not betray any problems associated with the war or even mention the war at all. The regular exhibitions of important groups such as the Wanderers, the Spring Salon, and the Union of Russian Artists ran as normal. The Wanderer exhibition, one of four important exhibitions in Russia, opened with a crowd of public visitors in early 1904.20 Individual artists could, it is true, experience some additional inconvenience. Petrov-Vodkin, for example, had to cancel a professional trip to St. Louis, but his assessment of this personal problem shows how far he was from thinking about the suffering of Russian soldiers and sailors: “no one, it seems, is as annoyed at the war as I: it shot my trip to America.”21 In February 1904, Nesterov cancelled an individual exhibition because he thought the public would not be there to buy: “attention paid to art will be very weak, and my exhibition will not have a mere platonic character. Everything exhibited in it will be for sale and to acquire it . . . people will have to have free cash on hand.”22 Some critics expressed surprise that the war did not affect the public more or have greater impact on the art world. “The peaceful arts are forgotten in time of war and for them a cold spring has come,” wrote a critic in the Petersburg newspaper Novoe vremia (“New Time”).23 “Nonetheless the Spring Salon is opening in its usual way.” Art journals do not show evidence of extensive mobilization in charity work, war painting, or other professional or personal activity on the part of artists, and the war had limited effect on the art market. “According to the number of visitors of the periodic exhibitions and the number of paintings that were

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sold,” noted a writer in February 1905, “one can conclude that the war has not affected the art market in Moscow as ruinously as one could have expected.”24 The exhibition he reviewed was visited by an “acceptable” 3500 visitors, and sales, although weaker than usual, were “not bad”: fifty-two paintings sold for a total of 5000 rubles. In early 1904, one critic concluded that “in the end our artistic affairs take their normal course.”25 The pattern of artistic mobilization shows how distant most artists were from significant engagement with society in their professional and public lives during the war. Official or semi-official organizations mobilized more than private artists, who tended to participate in charity as individuals rather than as part of their professional groups. The dean of Russian realist painting, the Wanderer Ilya Repin, donated portraits to the Red Cross,26 and Nesterov gave proceeds from the sale of his painting Golgotha to charity.27 When one newspaper reporter suggested that “our artists have responded to the good deed with help for the sick and wounded of war,” he was referring to the Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts, apparently the only major art group to organize war charities in 1904.28 In February, the Society donated funds for the sick and injured,29 and, in April, the Society’s drawing school raised some 2500 rubles from a “lottery-bazaar” for the families of soldiers.30 In 1905, the Society organized an exhibition of Russian portraits to raise money for widows and orphans of those who fell in battle.31 Other organizations found the time to give money to charity, including the Moscow Architectural Society, which donated exhibition income from tickets to the Red Cross shortly after the war broke out in 1904,32 and an exhibition of embroidery that gave its proceeds to help the sick and injured in the East.33 Russia’s main private art groups, though, remained disengaged from the war effort. The Wanderers do not appear to have concerned themselves with charity work either in February 1905 or a year later in 1906, while the Spring Salon, a large exhibition society made up of artists with links to the Academy, mentioned nothing about donations in its exhibition announcements in February 1905 (at least not in Novoe vremia reports). Organizations linked to the state, not private groups, appear to have carried out most of the charity work during the Russo-Japanese War. Individual artists sometimes participated, but the large groups apparently did not consider individual or professional mobilization necessary. No significant paintings depicting the war were painted or exhibited. In this, Russian art culture differed from literary culture, where the war appeared in the work of many authors, including symbolists and other modernists. As one writer wrote in February 1905, “the war and its everyday side are weakly reflected in the works of those, who at one time and even very recently, roused up everyone and filled the exhibition halls with thick crowds of people.”34 No modernist painter seems to have depicted the war in any form. In 1906, several battle artists presented paintings with war themes in the Spring Salon, but these works were few in number, panned by critics, or ignored by the public. The war artist and

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critic Nikolai Kravchenko, for example, considered the 1906 Salon and its war paintings to be “strongly disappointing and unsatisfactory.”35 Ilya Repin did exhibit a canvas called Na razvedke (“On Patrol”) in 1906, but he, too, faced rebukes from critics. Kravchenko, especially, touched on Repin’s failure to uphold the values of aesthetic realism. “There is no thought, no technique, [the things] which [previously] separated Repin from his colleagues,” he wrote. The entire painting is somehow strange, false, without a drop of sincere feeling, without an ounce of truth . . . Repin, such a sensitive artist, always so engrossed in realism, has falsified [the war]. Our unhappy war demands from all of us the same sincere approach, the same true representation.36

Even Repin, celebrated by many as Russia’s greatest living painter, could not capture the truth of the war as demanded by critics, try as he might. This lack of attention to war in the art world shows how much public culture had changed from the days of Vasilii Vereshchagin in the 1870s. War was an acceptable and even necessary subject for Vereshchagin and realist critics such as Vladimir Stasov, who believed that the depiction of the realities of war was an absolute necessity for the moral education of the Russian people. Public interest in Vereshchagin’s battle paintings, moreover, had made him one of Russia’s most successful nineteenthcentury artists. In the early twentieth century most artists and critics, regardless of their aesthetic philosophy, despised art that smacked of illustrative journalism or current events, pandered to common tastes, or represented formal political positions. The modernist ethos suggested that the depiction of war should be avoided to protect the public from ugliness, barbarity, and the valorization of the immediate that destroyed contemplation of the eternal. Alexandre Benois argued that the modern artist had no business trying to document or reflect external reality. He claimed in his 1904 obituary for Vereshchagin that popularity in the public did not make one an artist: Naturally, for the Russian public Vereshchagin’s tales are infinitely more interesting than the portraits of Dmitrii Levitskii or the “still lifes” of Snyders, but there can be no doubt before the court of beauty that one sleeve painted by our noted master of the eighteenth century or a basket of fruit painted by the great Flemish mage is greater than many, many of the most noteworthy works of our artist-preacher [Vereshchagin].37

Vereshchagin’s paintings of military conflict, Benois suggested elsewhere, were “tragic in what they tell, not in how they tell it”,38 which made Vereshchagin an illustrator. The interruption of revolution, lack of general public mobilization, and distance from far-away battles prevented serious consideration of the war in art for aesthetic realists, while the artists who challenged them for public dominance in the early twentieth

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century, the aesthetic modernists of the World of Art milieu, considered war an ugly, contemporary, and fleeting event that deserved no attention from the creative artist. The Revolution of 1905 marked a new level of political involvement for many artists through direct participation or the representation of revolution in art. Valentin Serov, for example, resigned from the Academy in a spectacular public act of protest against Bloody Sunday. Others, mostly younger artists and art students, took part in street fights and went to the barricades. The Imperial Academy remained closed until September 1906 after students went on strike to force the Grand Duke to vacate his post as director, and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture was shut down as revolution overwhelmed the streets and military forces occupied its building. Many artists became disturbed and afraid as the revolution and the government’s response turned violent and chaotic. Benois did not greet the revolution with enthusiasm but with reserve and skepticism.39 In March 1905, Punin was just a confused student: “I do not have any strong convictions yet. I am not aligned with one political side or the other; nor do I have anything of my own to suggest.”40 1905 witnessed significant politicization in the art world, but this political engagement was not dependent on aesthetic orientation, nor was it universal. The politics of representation in early twentieth-century Russia led to a situation where realist artists would try to depict the revolution on canvas while modernists refused. There were no major paintings on the revolution by aesthetic modernists, with the possible exception of Serov (who did not belong to any single art milieu). His famous canvas Soldiers! Where is Your Glory? was painted in reaction to Bloody Sunday as an immediate impression about quickly moving events, a quality shown in the lines that appear to be hastily drawn and the muddled anonymity of the actors. Few paintings about the revolution appeared in the regular exhibitions of the Wanderers and Salon artists in 1905, although more turned up in 1906 and 1907.41 These works reflected the moments of drama that had engulfed the country (especially in January and October 1905): troops shooting demonstrators, pogroms, Cossacks, arrests, funerals, and demonstrations. Repin made several attempts to depict revolutionary events, including the painting October 17, which, created in the aftermath of the revolution when disappointment reigned, emphasized the “naïve joy” of trusting people and the excitement of youth in 1905.42 Such paintings expressed doubt, fear, or ambiguity about the revolution and its costs, but they were not direct calls for revolution or the overthrow of autocracy.43 Contemporary authorities, however, did not see revolutionary paintings in this way. In 1906 visitors found that paintings with themes related to the revolution were missing at the Wanderer and Salon exhibitions, and these groups were faced with the prospect of closure if they planned to depict uncomfortable subjects. Police officials confiscated Filipp Andreevich Maliavin’s Whirlwind, which Repin termed “the symbol of Russian life in the years 1905 and 1906,”44 merely for its depiction of a wild, untamed woman and undisciplined colors.

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Revolution, unlike war, made it to canvas even if its paintings did not make it into the public sphere. The revolution did mark the first time that aesthetic modernists mobilized themselves for a political cause and began to engage publicly in social issues, but they did so in the institutions of the broader public, not the galleries or exhibitions of the art world. Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, Evgenii Lansere, Konstantin Somov, and Benois all linked their professional future to the future social and political fate of all Russia when they argued in public declarations that art could only be free in a society that was free.45 The impressionist Igor Grabar, later director of the Tretiakov Gallery, recalled that several of his friends and associates in the literary and art worlds planned a “social democratic” satirical journal in 1905.46 Lansere, one of the leaders of the politically-oriented World of Art artists, remembered the atmosphere as a time of great hope for change: “Our circle was in complete sympathy with the general mood which seized liberal society after the defeat in Manchuria, after January 9, and after Russia’s internal disturbances . . . We sympathized with any opposition to the government.”47 The medium that these artists used to engage the revolution was not the easel painting used by their realist counterparts but the graphic arts of the street press and satirical journals: the caricatures, cartoons, and other forms of visual political expression that surfaced in journals, posters, and postcards on a scale never before seen in Russian history.48 Their work in this period reflected the figurative style, narrative story-telling, and popular iconography that filled the mass culture, print media, and political culture. In other ways, Russian artists remained isolated from broader social engagement and political activity despite the great upheaval around them. The revolution sometimes caused disruptions in their personal lives, especially those who lived in urban areas. Its direct impact on the art world, though, was not severe. Some exhibitions were delayed by revolution in early 1905, but they all opened eventually, and there appears to have been no major changes in exhibition attendance or sales on the art market. Artists made almost no effort to mobilize themselves professionally. They did not engage the public through charities or other direct social work, nor did they form revolutionary organizations or professional unions (despite rumors to the contrary). Modern artists were quiescent except for their contributions to satirical journals, magazines, and newspapers, and there were few modernist exhibitions, art publications, or institutions in existence to serve as conduits to the broader public (the World of Art journal closed in 1904 due to financial reasons). In this sense, the revolution marked a decrease in the social activism of artists compared to the war, albeit a slight one, since war-related charity auctions and exhibitions had been minimal anyway. The experience of revolution in 1905 shows that artists still believed that the best way to participate in politics was to depict the revolution in art, not to engage in direct social or political mobilization. Attempts by realists to paint war and revolution and by modernists to participate in satirical journals represent a continuation of the nineteenth-century

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intellectual culture in which artists engaged the problems of the people directly through texts, not public action. Artists were too isolated and too small a group to make a difference in the political realm, and Benois criticized their attempts to participate in a revolution made by others: Despite the proclamations of freedom made by all parties there is no true spirit of freedom in the air, but, on the contrary, a sense of enforced “enlistment in the ranks.” We are no longer faced with mystic communion, but rather with orders from all sorts of “Committees of Public Salvation” to sign up for one militia or another.49

For Benois, artists could only make a difference in Russian life through the production of art and the creation of a new art culture, in other words, through a return to modernist values: It is precisely at such a point that it is so important to remember that the artist’s salvation lies in mystic communion alone, and that an artist must not join the militia and occupy himself with empty questions of how life should be organized. Other, higher tasks call to him, which he alone is capable of achieving.

Modern artists had abandoned modernist aesthetics and returned to figurative depiction of contemporary life when they used the institutions and conventions of the mass media to appeal to a general public that could not understand the visual language of modernism. They, therefore, implicitly recognized the utility and use of the very realist aesthetic they opposed. The reaction of the realist critic Vladimir Stasov to the political activity of Russian modernists shows how the new engagement of modern artists with politics was linked to the older intelligentsia culture, not the modernist aesthetic culture they claimed to represent. In his article “False Art and False Artists,” a cantankerous Stasov found it absurd that aesthetic modernists, the “decadent gentlemen,” had adopted the goals of his generation. He ridiculed their attempts to take up the cause of the people after others had done so for decades. “But what sort of participation is this? What sort of ‘share’ is this? What sort of people are these? What do they want?” he asked with sarcasm. Our artistic cripples and stutterers have now decided to demonstrate their true, genuine and deep feeling toward the great efforts in regeneration and in the increase in the people’s cause that is now taking place amongst us, namely by declaring that . . . the free life which is now unfolding before us will bring forth new, as yet unknown talents and strengths who will no longer be isolated, as contemporary artists are, but whose art will become a great, truly populist art of the future.50

Stasov saw the political mobilization of modern artists as a self-serving way to advance their professional status, to invade the turf of realist

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artists and make room for more modernist art. He attacked modernists for ignoring his ideas and the work of others who had engaged in the problems of their day, a strategy meant to de-legitimize them as selfish and ignorant artists and to separate them from the intelligentsia: “But it is shameful and bad to be ignorant of and blind to what has long existed and shone forth in all its glory, and to imagine that our art will become a great, truly populist art of the future . . . only at some subsequent point.” The revolution did not remove professional tensions between modernists and realists despite aesthetic convergences in the production of revolutionary art, but it did show the lack of power on both sides to change Russian life through art alone. A significant consequence of the period of war and revolution was a turning away from direct political or social engagement among artists and intellectuals after 1907. The highly-politicized, visually outrageous, and violent satirical journals disappeared once the revolution was defeated, and when political control over public space was reasserted, the opportunity to communicate directly with the reading public shrank. Artists turned to the cares and worries of their profession with the failure to establish a clear-cut constitutional regime, achieve land reform, and create a fully democratic political system in the post-revolutionary years. The failure of the revolution in 1905 to bring significant change to the art world marked a failure of the aesthetic agenda of the nineteenth century intelligentsia and a weakening of its place in Russian intellectual life. Ironically, the modernist vision gained in influence in the years after the revolution. A fin-de-siècle “art for art’s sake” political disengagement emerged triumphant in the broader culture when educated Russians themselves became “decadent,” that is, when they sought to escape from political turmoil and economic stress into the mass culture, apolitical art, and cultural pessimism that had been characteristic of European cultural life since the 1890s.51 Defeat in war and revolution helped orient modern artists and other intellectuals away from social and political engagement toward aesthetic problems and personal deeds as the only way to effect change in Imperial Russia. The experience of the art world in 1914 was much different than in 1904. In the fall of 1914 the art world seemed on the verge of dissolution as a personal and intellectual crisis atmosphere gripped almost everyone: the art market slumped, journals closed, and visitors avoided museums and exhibitions. Patriotism and public mobilization emerged on an unprecedented scale among intellectuals, a marked difference from the previous conflict. “Patriotic feelings began to bubble,” remembered the artist Vera Khodasevich; “everybody mobilized themselves. My parents organized . . . the sewing of underwear for the wounded.”52 The graphic artist Anna Petrovna Ostroumova-Lebedeva felt the urge to participate in surrounding events, to be useful to someone, anyone. “But how? How?” she asked herself.53 Artists blended patriotic social activism and professional self-interest in response to the sudden need for social mobilization in special war

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charity exhibitions and auctions as well as in the regular annual exhibitions. Almost fifty exhibitions appeared in the first season of the war, more than twice the usual number, and most were special events designed to serve the war effort. The auction in the Society for the Preservation of Art, for example, sold 4142 rubles worth of art on November 30, 1914. They made a profit of 2500 rubles and gave all their entrance fees plus ten percent of sales to charity.54 The “Exhibition For The Artists’ Hospital” raised 7856 rubles and 56 kopecks.55 Other special auctions and exhibitions included the “Exhibition Of Allied Peoples (For Poland),” “War And The Press,” “Artist Aid,” “Artists For Their Comrades at War,” and the “Exhibition For The Belgians.” Such charities enmeshed artists in the general atmosphere of mobilization, connected the art world to wider culture, and earned the artists themselves some badlyneeded income. In effect it became a patriotic duty to buy and sell art. By December 1914, one critic could observe that the mobilization of Russian art was “almost complete.”56 Revolution in 1917 also brought a much greater social and professional mobilization than in 1905. Artists from all aesthetic styles proclaimed their revolutionary sympathies and credentials at meetings and gatherings, much as they had proclaimed their patriotism in 1914. Public engagement for the war continued when organizers exhibited Finnish modern art and donated proceeds to the war effort, but artistic mobilization was also transferred from the war to the revolution. In April 1917 the large inter-party charity exhibition “Artists of Moscow for the Victims of Political Repression,” for example, echoed 1914’s “Artists of Moscow for the Victims of War.” Political restrictions and social conventions broke apart as government and public institutions were in disarray, which in turn opened public space for previously-excluded individuals and groups to mobilize more publicly and more completely. Freedom gave artists the ability to build institutions outside the traditional art world and to organize their politics and profession without state intervention. Artists founded professional unions in Moscow and Petrograd, and the Union of Artists, an umbrella organization with some ninety affiliated local institutions, was created to represent the economic interests of artists and art in the new Russia.57 Artists and other cultural figures hoped to use these new organizations to protect their professional interests in a time of political instability, economic collapse, and decay of public institutions. The mass mobilization that accompanied World War I was quantitatively and qualitatively different from the Russo-Japanese War; and a different enemy, in a different war, with a different public culture evoked a different response from Russian artists. Although civil society and the art world were expanding and becoming increasingly more sophisticated in the years before 1904, the number of art institutions and their links to the general public remained undeveloped, especially relative to later years. Many artists in 1904 still depended on rich patrons, public institutions, and their own organizations, not a broad art market, for their livelihood. After 1907, the art world experienced a great florescence and became, in

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the words of one World of Art artist, “unbelievably” complex and widespread in geographical space and aesthetic diversity.58 The market and audience for art continued to expand, as did the institutions of the art world, to meet the needs of an expanding public for art. In the 1890s, for example, Russia had less than twenty art groups, and, although that figure had risen to thirty-seven by 1900 and forty-eight in 1905, it took off after 1907 to reach ninety-one groups in 1914.59 Aesthetic modernists wielded considerable power in the art world on the eve of World War I; modernist artists, critics, and sympathizers published authoritative art histories, worked as noted critics, were close to important art journals, and administered major galleries and museums. The Russo-Japanese War was not a “dress rehearsal” and not part of a cycle of war and revolution in Russian artistic life; it represented just one moment in the continual development of artistic and intellectual culture in the last decades of Imperial Russia. In 1904, Russian artists were still mostly focused on themselves and their art world, which helps explain why many seemed disconnected from the war in Manchuria and the war effort at home. Alexandre Benois noted the disjunction between the “popularity” of war as a public event and the indifference of Russian artists.60 He personally blamed the cult of the individual in modern society for the artist’s estrangement from broader concerns: The trouble with contemporary art lies precisely in the fact that it is isolated, that it has wandered off. . . In the past the artist lived in communion with all society, and was the clearest exponent of the ideals of his time. Today’s artist inevitably remains a dilettante, struggling to isolate himself from others, dispensing only the petty crumbs of what he considers to be “his personal self.”61

In 1904 and 1905, war and revolution were simply not a part of the Russian art culture; they belonged instead to the wider public. War and art seemed to be two separate, mutually-exclusive activities. As Mikhail Nesterov wrote to a friend in 1904: “War is a serious matter, and now is not the time for artists to take up the attention of society.”62 In 1914 and 1917, the lines between the art world and the broader public had weakened to the point where artists participated in war and revolution on a scale that would have been unthinkable in the previous decade. “This war is unprecedented, unique in world history,” wrote the poet Dmitrii Merezhkovskii about warfare’s new importance in public life during World War I. “All previous wars seem private, conditional, and relative in comparison, as if they were not wars. This is the first war.”63 NOTES 1 2 3

Benois, 1993: 396 Wildman, 1980: 75. Wells, 1999: 108.

230 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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“Russkoe iskusstvo,” 1903: 50. The World of Art was only briefly a formal society and is better understood as an art milieu with a shared artistic ethos, institutions, and membership. Bowlt, 1982: 73–74. Gray, 1971: 39. Shestakov, 1998: 4. “Iz obshchestvennoi khroniki,” 1904: 420–421. Paléologue, 1957: 26. Ascher, 1988: 47. I gathered this data starting in February 1904 and sampled a random issue every two months. Ascher, 1988: 48. Petrov-Vodkin, 1991: 71. Vasnetsov, 1987: 203. Nesterov, 1989: 293. Monas and Krupala, 1999: 11. Petrov-Vodkin, 1991: 72. Paléologue, 1957: 125. “Khudozhestvennye novosti,” 1904a: 4. Petrov-Vodkin, 1991: 72. Nesterov, 1988: 212. “Malen’kie zametki,” 1904: 13. “S-n”, 1905: 3. Rostislavov, 1904: 249. “S-n”, 1904: 3. Nesterov, 1989: 293. “Na nuzhdy armii i flota,” 1904: 3. “Khudozhestvennye novosti,” 1904b: 4. “Na nuzhdy armii i flota,” 1904: 4. Anonymous, 1905: 1. Anonymous, 1904: 1. Anonymous, 1905: 2. “N. N.”, 1905: 13. Kravchenko, 1905: 4. Kravchenko, 1906: 3. Benois, 1904: 214. Benois, 1995: 287. Sternin, 1980: 107. Monas and Krupala, 1999: 7–8. Gomberg-Verzhbinskaia, 1960: 140. Gomberg-Verzhbinskaia, 1960: 144–145. Shleev, 1987: 19–20. Sternin, 1980: 88. Sternin, 1980: 85. Grabar’, 2001: 210. Bowlt, 1982: 111. Gomberg-Verzhbinskaia, 1960: 27.

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50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

231

Benois, 1906: 83. English translation by Carol Adlam, available [Online]: [November 29, 2005]. Stasov, 1905: n. p. Translation by Carol Adlam, available [Online]: [November 29, 2005]. Richardson, 1986: 32–33. Khodasevich, 1987: 96–97. Ostroumova-Lebedeva, 1974: 522. Anonymous, 1914: 299–300. “Ekspert”, 1914: 67. Nikolskii, 1914: 6. Lapshin, 1983: 85–100. Dobuzhinskii, 1987: 197. These figures I have calculated from data in Severiukhin and Leikind, 1992. Benois, 1993: 397. Benois, 1906: 82. Nesterov, 1988: 211. Merezhkovskii, 1917: 141–142.

15

The Scepter of the Far East and the Crown of the Third Rome: The War in the Mirror of Russian Poetry ANNA FRAJLICH1

T

he Russo-Japanese War and the ensuing political events affected all strata of Russian society, and – not surprisingly – found their reflection in the literature of the period. Erik Gollerbakh, the art historian and critic (1895–1942?), not yet ten years old when the war broke out, writes in his memoirs: On a bookshelf stood a modest book in a calico binding the color of coffee with cream, with a bas-relief portrait of Zhukovskii. I first opened it when the Japanese were sinking the Russian fleet, and the newspapers were full of melodious and strange Japanese names. Russian power had fallen into the black pit of infamy, and it turned out that some Fujiyama or Liaoyang was to blame for it all. Candy boxes with Japanese scenes and cheap fans with pictures of geishas became popular. During evening tea they spoke of bad quartermasters, about Tsushima and Port Arthur. Portraits of Kuropatkin, Stoessel, and Linievich were being printed in Niva. I loved to cut out photos of battleships from the newspapers, encircle them with pictures of sailors and paste them onto cardboard. I read the casualty lists with curiosity and fear, gazed intensely at the circles of portraits (there were rows of these circles in each issue of Niva) and could not understand why this young and handsome “captain of the second rank” was killed, while this infantry general, an old fogey, was alive and had been awarded a “St. Vladimir with Crossed Swords?” I sometimes heard quite distinctly the rumbling of weapons during the sea battle, saw men falling into the black water, and shuddered at the thoughts of a watery abyss.

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Once on a rainy and overcast day, in place of the rumbling of cannons and the splashing waves of the Pacific, Zhukovskii’s muse appeared before me in her light brown clothing.2

Certainly the war that had such an impact on the imagination of a tenyear-old was bound to influence the poetry of the period, above all, the verse of the leader of the Symbolist movement, Valerii Briusov, and his fellow poets, namely, Vladimir Solovev, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Maksimilian Voloshin. In order to avoid direct political reference that would not clear the censorship, the poets quite often would resort to what Briusov called a historical disguise (costume). The images of Ancient Rome perfectly served this purpose, particularly since they constituted a frame of reference accessible to the educated reader of that time. These images, used by the poets to address such patriotic concerns as the Tsushima defeat and the inadequacy of political and military leadership in Russia, will be the main focus of this analysis. Few people had greater influence on the Russian literary scene at the turn of the twentieth century than Valerii Iakovlevich Briusov (1873–1924). Poet, critic, editor, and translator, he has been called “one of the most solemn [. . .] figures in the whole of Russian literature”3 and the “reigning impresario of Modernism, [. . .] a cultural phenomenon of the first magnitude.”4 His early collections of poems Tertia vigilia (1900) and Urbi et orbi (1903) as well as his literary magazine Vesy (“The Scales”) placed him at the head of the entire movement known as Russian Symbolism, during what was ultimately perceived to be the Silver Age of Russian poetry. Mikhail L. Gasparov, the leading authority on Briusov, considers the Russo-Japanese War to be the single most influential factor on Briusov perception’s of Roman antiquity.5 Briusov’s pronouncements concerning the events of 1904–05 are to be found in several poems, including “To the New Year – 1905,” “To My Fellow Citizens,” “Tsushima,” and his famous “Julius Caesar.” These poems, as well as some letters of the period, reflect Briusov’s assessment of Russia’s political situation: he considered the capture and sinking of the Russian fleet in the Pacific to signal the end of an era. By the time of the Russo-Japanese conflict, Briusov’s position as a leader among his fellow poets was sufficiently well established that he could speak on the subject with an air of authority. His poems set the tone for the political discussion among the literary elite, reflecting simultaneously the elite’s attitude toward this major political event. In his review of the book Bor’ba za Velikij Okean (“Battle for the Great Ocean”), written by Renepinon in 1904, Briusov wrote: The history of coming centuries will be determined on the shores of the Pacific. The coming war starts a new era. The deserts along the Amur will become the bread basket of the world, poverty-stricken China will become a Creosos of the twenty-first century. Farsighted countries have already comprehended the inevitable significance of the Pacific Ocean.

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But the main demarcation will come after the end of the Russo-Japanese War. [. . .] The Roman Senate was able to calculate in advance, for whole centuries. Russia – the new Rome – thinks only about yesterday. Russia should understand that she will live in the millennia to come.6

These words demonstrate for us Briusov’s frame of mind during the composition of these civic poems. The poem K Tixomy Okeanu (“To the Pacific Ocean”), which takes the form of an invocation to the ocean, was written in mid-February, after the negotiations between Russia and Japan had been broken off on February 5. In this poem, Briusov tries to justify his and Russia’s longing for access to the Pacific. His poetic arguments are emotional. Imbued with imperial emotions, the poem does not speak of economic prospects, but rather establishes mythic reasons for gaining access to the Pacific. He maintains that it is the “call of a dream” (golos mechty) and “an old passion” (staraia strast’) that lead Russia to undertake this ambitious quest. Moreover, he writes that “the children of the steppes” (deti stepei) need another space that is kindred to it. The union of Russia and the Pacific Ocean would be a brotherly union, and who – asks the poet – would have the audacity to disrupt the union of these two giants? Kto, derznovennyi, zakhochet raz”jat’/Dvukh velikanov?

In his letter to Petr P. Pertsov, dated 1 April, Briusov voiced much stronger emotions concerning the conflict: Oh, the war! Our inactivity drives me out of my wits. It is high time to bomb Tokyo. Our strength is in the fact that we are in a foreign land and the Japanese are at home. It is more difficult when the theater of war is at home (rodina). We should throw to the mercy of faith Arthur and Vladivostok – let the Japanese take them. And we in return will take Tokyo, Khagodate, Iokokhama. Let the Japanese stroll (guliaiut) throughout Manchuria, and we will stroll through Nippon (Japan). Well, they will not reach Moscow, and we quite soon will reach Tokyo. I love Japanese art. Since childhood I have dreamt to see those most whimsical temples, those museums with the works of Kiyonaga, Utamaro, Eishi, Toyokuni, Hiroshima [sic!],7 Hokusai and all those who sound so strange to the Aryan ear. . . But let the Russian cannonballs (iadra) smash these temples, these museums, and the artists themselves, if they still exist there! Let all of Japan turn into a dead Hellas, into ruins of a better and great past – I am for the barbarians, I am for the Hunns, for the Russians. Russia must hold sway over the Far East, the Pacific Ocean is our lake, and because of that obligation all Japans mean nothing, even if there were a dozen of them. The future belongs to us, and when compared to that which is not merely the future of the world, but of the cosmos, what is the meaning of all these Hokusais and Utamaros?8

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The Tsushima defeat traumatized Briusov. In his letter to a friend (May 1905), he writes that with the destruction of the Russian Pacific fleet “all of old Russia went to the bottom of the ocean.”9 And in a letter to another friend, written in early October, he admits: “I still cannot free myself from delirium, from the nightmare of our war. I am still under the impression that this marked a new boundary, that a new era of history has begun.”10 The poem Tsushima,11 written in late August, was composed in the interval between these two letters. Written in a sonorous, rhapsodic voice, Tsushima expresses the undeniable identification of the lyrical “we” with the fate of the fleet: the repetition of the possessive pronoun “our,” and the personal pronoun “we” testifies to this identification. By using “our” and “we” he internalizes the pain and the mourning, but when he addresses “Russia” as such he employs the dialogical “you” and does not assume responsibility for the disaster. As Joan Delaney Grossman writes: “In majestic cadence the poet there mourned not only the loss of life and ships at Tsushima, but the end, for the foreseeable future, of Russia’s great hope for ‘Both the scepter of the Far East / And the crown of the third Rome’.”12 Needless to say, these final words were suppressed by the tsarist censor, and printed only in later Soviet editions. In the six months since the writing of “To the Pacific Ocean” the poet has abandoned all hopes of attaining a point of access to the Pacific. Briusov’s poems Voina (“The War”) and Na novyi 1905 god (“On the New Year of 1905”) are full of indignation, expressed in strong, dark images of blood, fire, wrath, and unknown fate. Equally strong civic concerns are expressed in the poem K sograzhdanam (“To My Fellow Citizens”), written in December 1904, where Briusov draws parallels between Russia and the Roman Republic. The poet appeals to his fellow citizens for unity in the face of external danger, the unity necessary to succeed in the Russo-Japanese War: Now is not the time for turbulent disputes Nor for the joyous sound of strings You, lictors, close the Forum! Keep silent, furious tribune, When the stern Veii fall And Rome will rise up like a ruler Let the plebeians again go To their sacred Aventine!13

Significantly, while addressing his fellow citizens, Briusov invokes an analogy from the period of the early Roman Republic. On the eve of the 1905 Revolution and in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War, he sought parallels with the famous conflict between the patricians and plebeians. In 494 and 449 BC the plebeians marked their protest by abandoning Rome and going to the Aventine Hill.14 But Briusov’s poem contains something which may be called a crypto- or reverse analogy. Having in

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mind the internal turmoil and the imminent Revolution of 1905, Briusov wants his compatriots to behave in exactly the opposite manner of the early Republic’s plebeians. He wants them to protest after the war is over, when it has ended victoriously, and when they no longer have their leverage. In Rome, the plebeians exerted pressure just when they were being summoned by the councils to join the annual campaign against the hill tribes. Thus, in alluding to the political model of the virtuous Roman Republic, the poet extols only one aspect of its principles – the readiness of the citizens to defend the republic. At the same time, he wants them to suspend, if only temporarily, their right to defend their public liberty. This is not the lesson that many others drew from this event. In the Discourses, Machiavelli comments on these events: “I maintain that those who blame the quarrels of the Senate and the people of Rome condemn that which was the very origin of liberty [. . .]; and all the laws that are favorable to liberty result from the opposition of these parties to each other, as may easily be seen from the events that occurred in Rome.”15 Unlike Osip Mandelshtam, who in his well-known poem Obizhenno ukhodiat na kholmy16 invoked the image of the Aventine to acknowledge the people’s “thirsting for freedom and a role in the governance of the state,”17 Briusov used the symbol of Aventine to urge the people to renounce these longings. No wonder, he himself had always worshipped absolutism and autocracy. “Any democratic government seemed to him” – according to Vladislav Khodasevich – “either a Utopia or an ochlocracy, mob rule.”18 Even if one questions Briusov’s use of the symbolism of the Aventine, one cannot deny the force of the message. In the poem “To My Fellow Citizens” Briusov makes use of imagery derived from Roman history; in Tsushima he refers to Russia as the third Rome, in “Julius Caesar,” written in 1905 and published in Venok, Briusov employs the myth of Caesar to express the longing for the ideal leader so sorely needed at the time. Political ferment stimulated Briusov to grasp the essence of Caesar’s personality, and his myth. And, to a great extent, the censorship compelled him to resort to what he called “antique images animated by the contemporary spirit.”19 Critics agree that Caesar’s life and legend were intended to carry a strong political and ethical message, to portray the present through the mist of history. The correspondence between “now” and “then” is stressed in the poem, the past being the irretrievable model of greatness and glory. “Julius Caesar” refers to the emotional experience of a whole nation. The poet expresses his belief that the monarchy and a powerful dictatorship are needed and directs his indignation at the inertia of the conservative bureaucracy, which he held responsible for the Tsushima defeat. In his previously quoted letter to Pertsov, Briusov exclaims with indignation: “Dogs are sometimes beaten – and it’s not a happy sight. But to see the Emperor of all the Russias beaten!”20 The principle of heroism is the main, normative aesthetic principle unifying author, lyric voice, and objectified personae in “Julius Ceasar.”21

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Apostrophe enhanced by exclamatory repetitions and other modes of rhetorical emphasis dominates the poem. The introductory stanza outlines the political situation by listing the accusations against Caesar: They shout: the law is on our side They swear: you are a rebel, You raised the banner of bloody war You raised brother against brother!22

The apostrophe is strengthened by the repetition of the familiar pronoun ty. The reader can assume that Caesar is referring to these accusations in order to respond to them. He is not the addressee but the main speaker – appropriately enough, since he was a celebrated orator, second only to Cicero. He forsook a rhetorician’s career for a military one, but he owed many of his political victories to his verbal prowess. The next four and a half stanzas consist of Caesar’s speech; out of eighteen lines, seven begin with the formal pronoun vy, addressing the Roman consuls and the Senate. This juxtaposition of two voices evokes a sharp image of conflict and heightens the dramatic immediacy. The metaphor in the second stanza (“the stones of the streets speak”), attests to the popular discontent with the Roman Senate. There is an interesting parity between two lines from Briusov’s “Julius Caesar” and two lines of Solovev’s “Panmongolism.” Both poets create a vision of humiliation caused by defeat. In Solovev’s “Panmongolism” we read: And the yellow children are given scraps of your flags to play with.23

Compare these lines from Briusov’s “Julius Caesar”: And what ! The emblems of the Roman legions’ are placed in the Parthian’s temples.24

Solovev’s poem, written years before the war, represents a poetic prediction of a disaster, but in Briusov’s poem these expressions point to the defeat of the Roman army in Parthia in 53 BC and, at the same time, to the losses of the Russian army in Tsushima. Briusov accuses the Russian generals in Caesar’s words. The phrase “degenerates of the past” signals the closing of a historical era. The most powerful artistic effect is reserved for the last two lines; after delivering his arguments, the hero makes a monumental decision: Enough quarrels. The die is cast. Swim, my steed, across the Rubicon!25

Ending the poem with the command to his horse implies the immediate subsequent action, thus heightening the dramatic quality. To use

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Bakhtin’s terminology, Caesar is represented here as “a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable – and unpredeterminable – turning point for his soul.”26 This moment is described by Plutarch in his life of Caesar: “At last, in a sort of passion, casting aside calculation, and abandoning himself to what might come, and using the proverb frequently in their mouths who enter upon dangerous and bold attempts, ‘The die is cast,’ with these words he took the river.”27 The command Plyvi moj kon’ chrez Rubikon (with its internal masculine rhyme, with the legendary Rubicon in the final position with the rhythmic stress, and the rhyme of vremen and kon) brings together many threads of Caesar’s myth. One of them is the motif of crossing a body of water. Caesar was the “first man that should pass the Rhine with an army;” he was also “the first who brought a navy into the western ocean, or who sailed into the Atlantic with an army to make war.”28 The legendary Rubicon was in fact the smallest river Caesar’s army had to cross. The only positive phrase of the poem is addressed to the horse. There are several legends and anecdotes illustrating the special place that horses held in Caesar’s life. According to Plutarch and Suetonius the horse was almost as extraordinary as its rider. Briusov therefore has Caesar direct his command to his unique horse at a dramatic moment, thus adding another dimension to the portrayal of his hero – that of the loneliness of a great individual. In the context of the Russo-Japanese War, the images related to the myth of Ceasar appealed to Briusov more strongly than any other. Several times he resorts to the theme of “casting the die,” always in a most dramatic, almost traumatic, context – the “die” rolls in blood and dust. Briusov embraced these Rome-related motifs and images to express his longing for Russia’s political grandeur. He harbored hopes that the Russian generals would be as victorious as Julius Caesar. Nikolai Gumilev, a poet of the younger generation, adorned the opening page of his Pearls with the inscription: “To Valerii Iakovlevich Briusov – Caesar’s Caesar.” It is interesting to note that Briusov may have had recourse to ideas put forward much earlier by Vladimir Solovev. In 1890, Solovev, concerned with the imminent confrontation with the people of Asia, published two articles on this issue: “China and Europe” and “Japan.” A combination of these concerns found poetic expression in the poem “Panmongolism.”29 The connection between the fear of invasion by the Mongol tribes and the doctrine of the third Rome existed in the Russian consciousness long before Solovev. The main point here is that the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453) coincided approximately with the final overthrow of Tatar rule in Russia (1480); these two events were naturally linked in Russia, being regarded as a shift in the center of world holiness. At the same time as Islam was victorious over Orthodoxy in Byzantium, in Russia the reverse had taken place, i.e. Orthodoxy was triumphant over Islam.30 In “Panmongolism,” Solovev presents history as a cycle perpetuated by sin and punishment. Thus “panmongolism” is an instrument of destiny unleashed as a response to the decay of spiritual life:

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The divine altar has grown cold Both priest and prince, people and tsar renounce the Messiah.31

The phenomenon of “panmongolism” is anthropomorphized (“he raised”) in the poem and is given certain sacred qualities as divine destiny, the instrument of fate, the instrument of divine punishment. And probably because of this function, the Asiatic tribes, in addition to their insect-like qualities (“swarm of the awakened tribes, host of regiments, innumerable as locusts and insatiable like them”) are endowed with divine protection as well, “protected by mysterious power.” The poem is more discursive than lyrical. The prophecy of imminent disaster corresponds to the prophetic character of the doctrine of the Third Rome. As Georgii Chulkov writes in his article “Poeziia V. Solove’va” (“The Poetry of V. Solovev”): “The very important and innermost in Solovev’s poetry is its prophetic character.”32 In the poem, the second and third stanzas illustrate the role that “panmongolism” played in the theory of the three Romes. The poet links the notion of “panmongolism” with the idea of the Third Rome and demonstrates its dynamics in the example of Byzantium – the second Rome. Then he brings the matter home: Russia did not learn from the errors of Byzantium and in considering herself the Third Rome, she commits the sin of pride. The final two stanzas are presumably written from the post-catastrophic point of view: Russia had been conquered, the past greatness had to be forgotten: “The two-headed eagle is crushed.” As in the Second Rome, whose fall followed the nation’s renunciation of Christ (“And they renounce the Messiah . . . “), in the Third Rome it will follow the forsaking of Christ’s legacy (“Who could forget the behest of love”). The theme of Russia’s sinful pride permeates two of Solovev’s poems. It is expressed explicitly in Ex oriente lux: Oh, Russia! in your lofty foresight You are absorbed in proud thought.33

and is alluded to twice in “Panmongolism”: And all of Russia’s flatterers repeat: You are the Third Rome, you are the Third Rome.34

Solovev’s poems directly refer to the widely-known prophecy of Filofej of Pskov. The last line of “Panmongolism” is an exact quotation of that prophecy: “And a Fourth shall never be . . .” Solovev questions the selfcongratulatory attitude that characterizes Russia’s perception of itself in the light of the idea of the Third Rome. Many of the questions raised by Solovev remain unresolved over a hundred years later. After the Tsushima defeat, Briusov in the poetic and political polemic that informs “Julius Caesar” utilized the positive and optimistic aspects of

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the Julius Caesar legend, whereas Maksimilian Voloshin found it necessary to allude to the darkest moments, that is, the assassination and the end of the Roman Republic. Voloshin’s poem Predvestiia (“Portent”) is dated January 22, 1905 (“Bloody Sunday,” January 9 in the Julian calendar), St. Petersburg. Apparently, the poem is purposely misdated.35 The poet actually finished it in early July 1905, and sent it to his friend A.M. Petrova a few weeks later. The genealogy of the poem is described by Evstingneeva, and by Kuprianov in his monograph.36 The poet, who had arrived in St. Petersburg on the morning of January 22, 1905, witnessed Bloody Sunday, and the following month, upon his return to Paris, published a report about it in the French magazine Courrier Européen. “Portent,” the poetic report, was first published in Rus’ in late August 1905. To express his sorrow and shock the poet drew on the legend of Julius Caesar. Even though the poem refers to Caesar only once, indirectly, it touches the very nerve of the most dramatic moment of Julius Caesar’s life and of Roman history, as narrated by both Plutarch and Suetonius. The poet has chosen Rome in 44 BC; the assassination of Julius Caesar is foretold, and therefore unavoidable. The poem starts with the words: There is somber knowledge in the gestures of Nemesis Know how to read the symbolic lines. Before the Ides of March had passed, The copper shields sounded in the temples.37

Thus Voloshin implies that the prediction of Bloody Sunday had been ignored, just as the warning to Caesar was ignored. At the same time, Bloody Sunday itself constitutes an omen of approaching catastrophe. This title indicates the linkage between premonition and revenge, an association that is reflected in the myth of Julius Caesar, assassinated midday on March 15. The topic of the portent is also pertinent to the image of “three suns” appearing in the sky over Petersburg. This sign is mentioned by I. T. Kuprianov and is discussed at length by Cynthia Marsh.38 In “Portent,” Voloshin alludes to Caesar’s death, without mentioning his name but referring instead to the Ides of March, and the warnings recorded by Plutarch and Suetonius, which Caesar hears on his way to the Curia. Challenging a man who has already warned him, Caesar says: “The Ides of March are come,” and the man answers calmly, “Yes, they are come, but they are not past.”39 Elements of the Julius Caesar myth reappear throughout the poem: the theme of the ignored forewarning, and that of a new omen – three bloody suns in the third stanza and the prophetic incantation of the fifth. The image of Nemesis incorporates the themes of fate and revenge. The theme of revenge is linked to the conflict between Caesar and Pompeii that ended with the defeat of the latter during the civil war. The fact that the political assassination took place in the Court of Pompeii implies the revenge for his death. Originally the poem had one more stanza that read:

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Po ulitsam tolpoi nestroinoi i neslitnoi Brodili my, i kazhdyi byl dalek S odnoi mechtoi – besstydno liubopytnoi – Uvidet’ krov’ – sviatoi, zapretny plod. (Along the streets in disorderly and disjointed throngs We wandered, and everyone was distant With one reverie – shamelessly curious – To see blood – the sacred, forbidden fruit.)

This stanza, excluded from the final version, contains two themes pertinent to the Julius Caesar myth: violation of the taboo related to looking at or the shedding of human blood and the theme of collective responsibility. Plutarch comments that “conspirators themselves were many of them wounded by each other, whilst they all leveled their blows at the same person.”40 This ensured collective responsibility. Out of two poems written in 1905, and linked to the legend of Julius Caesar, Briusov’s poem is more explicit in its references to the legend than Voloshin’s. And yet, Voloshin evokes more profound meaning from the Caesar legend with the taboo of bloodshed, collective guilt, Nemesis, revenge. On the other hand, Briusov’s poem incorporates broad knowledge of historical facts, and in a more direct way expresses his political disappointment and ambition. The political turmoil of 1905 affected Viacheslav Ivanov as it had so many of his fellow writers; like Briusov and Voloshin, he responded by drawing on Roman myths and symbols. The fifth part of his collection Cor Ardens, “Godina gneva” (“The Time of Wrath”), addresses matters which alarmed the entire Russian population – the Russo-Japanese War (particularly the Tsushima defeat), Revolution, and Bloody Sunday.41 Ivanov turns to the Roman tradition in two of the thirteen poems of the cycle: in the sonnet “Populus-rex,” written on October 31, 1905, the day after the convocation of the State Duma, and in “Lucina,” written on New Year’s Day 1906, shortly after the insurrection.42 In “Populus-rex” Ivanov expresses his fondness for Roman republican ideals, which were so important to Russian romantic thought. The poet makes a strong distinction here between the concept of the slave who has been freed (vol’noodpushchennik – “freedman”) and the free man who has been enslaved and has thrown off his yoke: . . . in bonds we were hostage-kings; But we threw off the bonds through nation-wide effort, The one who did not forget in prison that he was born to the purple take masterly the heritage of the power and create the Eternal Memory for your fighters and by noble oblivion revenge against the agressor.43

The composite zalozhniki-tsari (hostage-kings) and the compound bagrianorodnyi (born to the purple) reflect on the linguistic level the Latin title “Populus-rex.”

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But, within three months, Ivanov would also draw on the other main model in the Roman political legacy, namely, the empire. In the ninestanza poem “Lucina,” whose epigraph is taken from a famous quotation from Virgil’s “Fourth Eclogue,” the poet refers to the most hopeful period of the empire – its early years. The Eclogue, written in 40 BC, in the midst of civil war, created a myth of its own. Its visionary message is connected with the Sibylline Books, and the poem was considered to be the prophecy of a new golden age under Augustus. The epigraph from Virgil’s Eclogue was easily identifiable by the average reader at that time, and Ivanov’s invocation directed to Lucina, the goddess Juno, who aided women in childbirth, was read in its political context. The child destroyed at birth in the poem is the Revolution of 1905.44 In the spirit of Virgil’s prophetic Fourth Eclogue, Ivanov follows tragic pronouncement with an expression of hope: Everything will take its shape in us like clay: But the heart, the heart – like a diamond.45

This strong belief that the major values are being preserved beyond death and decay is expressed in other war-related poems, among them Ozim (“Winter Crop”), written in 1904, and Pod znakom Ryb (“Under the Sign of Pisces”) written in February of the same year. In the poem entitled Tsushima, written May 31, 1905, Ivanov also resorts to the myths of resurrection, namely the Phoenix; he creates a vision of Russia being submitted to baptism through fire. This short poem of only four stanzas, as compared to the seven stanzas of Briusov’s Tsushima, was inspired by the press account that one battle cruiser named Almaz (Diamond) broke through the enemy lines. The tragedy of the fleet is equated with being thrown into sacrificial fire; this image of fire is reinforced by the image of the burning bush, through which only the Phoenix can pass. Like Briusov, Ivanov identifies with the mourning nation: And some ghost-executioner pushes us forward Into the sepulchral night, or the burning bush . . .46

And, like Briusov in his “Julius Ceasar,” Ivanov recognizes the error, he yearns for Siloam, the sacred spring, to wash out the blindness, and to pour over the fire of revenge. The helms in the hands of Russia’s leaders are crushed, and Russia has to rely on the celestial helmsman. These linguistic strategies give Ivanov’s image its density. The poem is built on images of water and fire, whereby it conveys to the reader the tragedy of cosmic and providential proportions. The cruiser Diamond that escaped doom is like a real diamond extricated by fire from the black coal. And that is the fate that he foresees for Russia. Poetically it is the same “diamond” that we see in the poem Lucina. I am certain one could produce an entire anthology of poems inspired by the tragedy of Tsushima and events related to the Russo-Japanese War,

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if such does not already exist. These poetic testimonies are no less valid than any other historical, journalistic, novelistic, or military accounts. Let me end with one more quotation from another important poet of the time, Konstantin Balmont, whom Mandelshtam called the “father of Russian Symbolism.” Balmont also wrote poems about the war, but they are not that significant. He left another statement, however. In his article “Leviathan, Yggdrasil, Earth-Titan, Eagle: Balmont’s Reimagining of Walt Whitman.” Martin Bidney writes: Balmont translated Whitman to the sound of sea rhythms: he tells us that he did most of the renditions for his Whitman anthology during the autumns of 1903 and 1905 on the Baltic shore, and also (during the latter autumn) partly in Moscow, listening to the soldiers’ rifle salvos. In “Marine Phosphorescence” Balmont brings together more explicitly the themes of death and the sea in connection with Whitman [. . .]. Here Balmont describes walking by the sea at Soulac-sur-Mer, trying to sort out his reactions to the Russo-Japanese War in the context of Whitman’s meditations on Civil War fatalities. Whitman, he reasons, wrote of a war that served the higher end of emancipation, while Balmont’s friend Leonid has just died in a quite different sort of struggle – a baseless conflict, where the only “enemies” were those unseen leaders who uprooted peaceful men like Leonid from their homeland to make them die pointlessly on the barren plains of Manchuria. Balmont’s metaphor for this grotesque uprooting is the transformation of sea plants tossed ashore by a recent storm: the beautiful orchid-like forms are now hideously twisted out of shape, “cartilaginous-looking, large-nostriled, repellent stalks, broken tangled, dead” (khrashchevidnye, nozdrevatye, protivnye stebli, slomannye, sputannye, mertvye). Even so are the mounds of the dead in Manchuria mere remnants tossed up by the great “Ocean of Night.”47

NOTES 1

2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10

I would like to express my gratitude to the Harriman Institute for its generous travel grant and to Dr. Ronald Meyer of Columbia University for his most valuable editorial assistance. Gollerbakh, 1993: 330–331. Mirsky, 1949: 435. Bethea, 1983: 32. See his essay, “Briusov i antichnost’’ (Briusov and Antiquity), published as an Afterword to Briusov, 1973–1975. Ashukin, 1937: 239. Probably a slip of the pen on Briusov’s part. The poet no doubt has in mind the Japanese landscape painter, Ando Hiroshige. Briusov, 1927: 42. Chulkov, 1999: 324. Briusov, 1927: 43.

244 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

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Briusov, 1973–1975, I: 426–427. Grossman, 1985: 278. Briusov, 1973–1975, I: 631–632. In Russian: Teper’ ne vremia buinym sporam, / Kak i veselym zvonam strun. / Vy, liktory zakroite forum! / Molchi, neistovyi tribun! / Kogda padut krutye Vei / I vstanet Rim kak vlastelin / Puskai opiat’ idut plebei / Na svoi sviashchennyi Aventin! Livius, 1797: 214. Machiavelli, 1950: 119. Mandel’shtam, 1966: 310. Przybylski, 1987: 21. Grossman, 1985: 158. Chulkov, 1999: 329. Briusov, 1927: 44. Maksimov, 1969: 133. In Russian Oni krichat: za nami pravo! / Oni klianut: ty buntovshchik, / Ty podnial stiag voiny krovavoi, / Na brata brata ty vozdvig! In Russian: I zheltym detiam na zabavu / Dany klochki tvoikh znamen. In Russian: No chto zhe ! Rimskikh legionov / Znachki – vo khramax u parfian. Dovol’no sporov. Broshen zhrebii. Plyvi, moi kon’, chrez Rubikon ! Bakhtin, 1984: 61, 62–63. Plutarch, 1964: 318. Plutarch, 1964: 309–310. Solov’ev, 1977: 342–44. Lotman and Uspensky, 1984: 455–456. ostyl bozhestvennyi al’tar’, I otreklisia ot Messii, Ierei i kniaz’, narod i tsar’. Chulkov, 1905: 103. O Rus’! v predvidenii vysokom, Ty myslei gordoi zaniata. I vse tverdiat lstetsy Rossii: Ty – tretii Rim, ty – tretii Rim. Evstingneeva, 1977: 393–394. Kuprianov, 1978: 89. Voloshin, 1982–1984, I: 221. In Russian: Soznanie strogoe est’ v zhestax Nemezidy: / Umei chitat’ uslovnye cherty. / Pred tem kak sbylis’ Martovskie Idy, / Gudeli v khramax mednye shchity. Kuprianov, 1978: 89. Plutarch, 1964: 341. Plutarch, 1964: 344. Ivanov, 1971–1979, III: 249–257. Ivanov, 1971–1979, I: 90. Ivanov, 1971–1979, II: 253–254. Ivanov, 1971–1979,II: 255. Vse peremnetsia v nas, chto glina; No serdtse, serdtse – kak almaz. In Ivanov, 1971–1979,II: 256. In Russian: I nekii dukh-palach tolkaet nas vpered / il’ v noch mogilnuiu, il’ v kupinu zhivuiu . . . Vybroskami Nochnogo Okeana [168]. Bidney, 1990: 176–191.

PART III

REACTIONS AND POSTWAR REPERCUSSIONS

V. THE BELLIGERENTS: CONSEQUENCES IN JAPAN AND RUSSIA

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The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan NIKOLAI OVSYANNIKOV

W

hile historians have often argued that the Russo-Japanese War was a turning point in Japan’s imperialist drive in Asia, this event looms also as “a landmark in Japanese political history” at home.1 This development is exemplified by the attitude change within the Japanese government soon after the war. The first cabinet of Katsura Taro took an extremely hard stance toward the political parties that dominated in the House of Representatives, resulting in a dissolution of the parliament shortly before the war. The end of the war, however, brought about the formation of the cabinet headed by Saionji Kimmochi, a non-oligarchic figure and a president of the Seiyukai – the largest party in the Lower House. Although not truly partisan, the first Saionji cabinet was received warmly by the public and press, and even Okuma Shigenobu, Seiyukai’s arch-rival, welcomed it, saying: “It is a positive fact for constitutional government that a public party came to head the government. With all my heart I welcome the formation of marquis Saionji’s cabinet.”2 That these developments – the war and the shift towards a more liberal government – took place nearly simultaneously seems by no means coincidental, even though historians of modern Japan have dealt with this connection only superficially. This chapter focuses on the impact the war had on the Japanese domestic political process and attempts to examine the ways the war affected the progress of kensei, namely the constitutional government in Japan.

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Several scholars have pointed out the association between the war and the emergence of the first Saionji cabinet. Matsuo Takayoshi, for example, linked this shift of the cabinet with fundamental changes that took place in Japanese society during the war. He focused on the largescale mobilization of the people’s spirit, undertaken by the government for the sake of “national unity,” and the constant accentuation of the importance of the common people’s role for achievement of ultimate victory. Indeed, examination of the press of the period, both progovernment and independent, reveals that it is literally stuffed with pathetic slogans, patriotic proclamations and fabulous promises of future prosperity. On the one hand, this patriotic propaganda reached its aim of making the Japanese exert themselves to the full and put up with the hardships and tolls of the war but, on the other hand, as Matsuo points out, it “awakened people’s realization of their rights toward the state” and consequently “substantially promoted political self-consciousness of the masses . . . and strengthened the voices demanding an overthrow of hanbatsu politics.”3 In this respect, to Matsuo’s mind, formation of the Saionji cabinet, which – unlike the war-time Katsura cabinet – was largely based upon a political party and which carried out more liberal politics, permitting even the formation of the Socialist party, was nothing more “than a reaction of the authorities to this democratic sentiment.”4 Banno Junji expresses similar ideas and stresses the progressive meaning of the Russo-Japanese War, saying that a major foreign war always brings about internal political democratization because “material and human sacrifices, made by the people for the sake of the war, inevitably bring about the growth of political influence of the people. And the end of the Russo-Japanese War was no exception.”5 Faced with the awakened political self-consciousness of the nation the government had no alternative but to adopt certain democratization in order to pacify the subjects, so “the transfer of government to the largest party in the House of Representatives meant exactly an act of such political democratization as a shift of authority from oligarchic to party cabinets.”6 It is hard to disagree with these authors in what concerns the influence of the Russo-Japanese War on the political consciousness of the people. The conclusion of the Portsmouth Treaty was immediately followed by an unprecedented anti-government movement against the peace treaty (hikowa undo) that within several days embraced the whole country and involved, according to some estimates, several million people. While the essence of the movement was controversial (its highly nationalistic coloring makes it difficult to call it purely democratic), antihanbatsu sentiments undoubtedly played a considerable role in it. The Russo-Japanese War aggravated all the existing social contradictions and antagonisms and, consequently, heightened the people’s displeasure toward the situation in which they, obliged to pay for everything, were

The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan 249 in fact unable to influence political decision-making. Hence, all over the nation, resolutions demanding the establishment of kensei were passed, together with calls to denounce the treaty. Unlike the period of Jiyu minken undo (the Movement for Liberty and People’s Rights of the 1870–80s), when political freedoms interested mostly a narrow strata of educated and disaffected ex-samurai, this time the common people joined the vigorous attack on the “unconstitutional” government and the hikowa undo marked the beginning of a whole new era of such popular movements for political freedoms and constitutional government. That’s why most historians date the period of the so-called “Taisho democracy” – a period of the rapid rise of democratic tendencies in Japanese society and politics – from the end of the Russo-Japanese War. When it comes to political democratization, however, this link with the democratic tide, unquestionably intensified by the war, becomes obscure and there are serious doubts whether the pressure from the masses was the direct reason for this shift of power to party-centered governments. Analyzing the prewar and wartime political process that led to the shift of government to Saionji, one wonders whether the Saionji cabinet really owes its formation that much to the liberal political consciousness of the people. THE PREWAR POLITICAL SITUATION

Katsura formed his first cabinet in June 1901. The appearance of this cabinet became possible due to a shrewd intrigue played by genro (elder statesman) Yamagata Aritomo, one of the ablest leaders of the state and head of the most influential political faction, and Katsura himself. Yamagata succeeded in forcing the fourth cabinet of genro Ito Hirobumi out of office and, having prevented the formation of a new cabinet by a relatively liberally-minded genro Inoue Kaoru, installed Katsura, his most promising henchman as a new prime minister. Yamagata’s hostility towards Ito can be explained by the fact that Yamagata was, perhaps, the staunchest supporter of the notion of “transcendental,” i.e. non-party governments. The idea of transcendentalism was publicly declared on the eve of the enactment of the Constitution in 1889 by Prime Minister Kuroda Kiyotaka: The Constitution is, for certain, not based on the opinion of the subjects. There are various political opinions and it is inevitable that like minds will unite and create so-called political parties . . . but the government should always stick to the same course and stand above and outside the parties, following the path of truth.7

Thus, it is only natural that the state system, which came to be known as the Meiji Constitution system, was arranged in a way that made the appearance of party governments virtually impossible. Let alone the fact

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that the Diet’s functions were seriously restricted within this system – for instance, the choice of the next prime minister was entirely in the competence of the genro – in the Diet itself the balance between the two houses was schemed in a fashion that enabled the House of Peers – unelected and, consequently, fully controlled by the Meiji oligarchs – to block all undesirable initiatives and decisions of the Lower House. At that time, Ito, the principle architect of the Meiji constitution, also believed that national government should be transcendental. He explained the anti-party biases of the constitution in the following way: “Formation of political parties in a society is an unavoidable process but it is inadmissible for a party to gain influence over the cabinet.”8 The genro were convinced that Japan must be governed by authoritative leaders of state bureaucracy, who represented the interests of the entire nation, and not by party leaders, who, as they saw it, represented narrow group interests, and it was Yamagata who was the most intolerant toward the parties, believing that formation of party cabinets “cannot be approved of in the light of the history of the Meiji government and the spirit of the constitution.”9 Gradually, however, the genro’s unanimous hostility towards the parties started to change and Ito was the first to realize, although reluctantly, that a close relationship with a party was vital for the new system, if it were to be stable and effective, and, in September 1900, Ito eventually created a party of his own, the Seiyukai (literarily, Association of Political Friends) that became the largest party in the Diet. Ito’s actions finally spoiled his relations with Yamagata, which had already been tense by that time. What Yamagata could not forgive most of all was that Ito formed and headed a party being a genro, one of the pillars of the state, thus giving his party a considerable share of power and violating the transcendental principle. In this respect, the formation of the first Katsura cabinet (which is often called “the small Yamagata cabinet”) in 1901 can be seen as a certain kind of revenge on the part of the transcendentalists and it is not surprising that before long the new government faced a strong opposition in the Lower House, where the Seiyukai began to combine strength with the second major party – Kenseihonto (True Constitutional Party). Highly displeased with the Seiyukai’s stance and, perhaps, even more, with Ito’s ambivalent position as both the genro and the party president, Yamagata and Katsura attempted to get rid of both the obstacles with one strike. In 1903, Yamagata persuaded the emperor to appoint Ito the president of the Privy Council – a position which required him to abandon his presidency in the Seiyukai. Nonetheless, Katsura failed to reach his ultimate goal – to ruin the Seiyukai as a party, for notwithstanding Ito’s withdrawal and several related defections of other members, the party’s core remained intact. It can be partly explained by the appointment of Saionji Kimmochi, a liberal court noble of outstanding pedigree who was only a little bit less authoritative than Ito, as the party’s new president and partly by the

The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan 251 political skills of the party’s leadership, Hara Takashi (Kei) in the first turn. Thus, cabinet prospects for the nineteenth session of the Diet, which was to open in December 1903, were grim. And these misgivings proved right: Katsura had to dissolve the Lower House on the very first day of the session after Kono Hironaka, the chairman of the House, read a clearly provocative opening speech, in which he severely criticized the cabinet’s policy. This speech and the following dissolution vividly demonstrated all the tension with which the relationship between the parties and the Katsura cabinet had been fraught ever since its formation. Given this background it is really astonishing to see that less than two years later Katsura would take pains to persuade the emperor to appoint Saionji as his successor prime minister. Of course, the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War reconciled the government and the parties, which maintained constructive cooperation throughout the whole war period, but it cannot explain the fundamental change in Katsura’s attitude, for “national unity” was a regular norm for Japan in times of major foreign threat and it was obvious that this conciliation was only a temporal one. THE KATSURA-SEIYUKAI AGREEMENT

The formation of the Saionji cabinet was made possible by an agreement reached by Katsura and the Seiyukai leadership the year before. The thing is, Katsura, a shrewd and skilful politician as acknowledged by both his contemporaries and later historians, gradually started to realize that blind faithfulness to orthodox transcendentalism in relationship with the parties, on what Yamagata insisted, no longer could provide for a stably working government and began to see the necessity of striking an alliance with the major party. In December 1904, Katsura held secret negotiations with Saionji Kimmochi, Hara, and Matsuda Masahisa – key figures in the Seiyukai, which again gained the majority of Diet seats at the elections earlier that year. While officially the party’s president was Saionji, on the part of the Seiyukai these negotiations were initiated by Hara, who virtually had become a de facto leader of the party by that time. These Katsura-Seiyukai negotiations resulted in a secret agreement about the transfer of government from Katsura to Saionji after the end of the Russo-Japanese War. In return, the Seiyukai pledged to support all the cabinet’s decisions and actions during the war and, what was most important, in its aftermath. Later, Katsura and Hara met two more times (on April 16 and August 22, 1905) to confirm and concretize the provisions of this agreement. It was decided, for instance, that after Saionji formed the cabinet the Seiyukai must not make cuts in military spending – the pillar of the postwar management policy for military leaders of hanbatsu like Yamagata and Katsura – while Katsura will use all his influence in the oligarchic circles to ensure the loyalty of the House of Peers, the Privy Council, and the army toward the new cabinet. Hence, this agreement gave birth to an alliance between the majority party in the Diet and one of the most influential hanbatsu representatives.

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The main reason for Katsura to enter into alliance with the Seiyukai was that he foresaw the postwar political storm and realized all too well that without the support of the Diet’s largest party he was unlikely to survive it as a politician. By 1905, the atmosphere in society, which was growing weary of the prolonged war, was becoming increasingly explosive and this situation was constantly inflamed by aggressive propaganda of various nationalistic societies, of which the Tairo Doshikai (AntiRussian League) was the most famous. It was obvious to Katsura that in such circumstances even the most favorable conditions of the treaty would seem unsatisfactory to the majority of the population. Hara’s diaries clearly reveal Katsura’s thoughts at that time: “Should we conclude a treaty the people will certainly be displeased with its conditions. At this juncture, I am ready to sacrifice myself. But I wish to retire upon drawing up the plan of postwar management and in this case I have firmly made up my mind to recommend Saionji to the emperor.”10 Katsura still had one more reason for striking an alliance with the Seiyukai. Katsura, who had started his political career as a protégé and a disciple of Yamagata but whose self-confidence and ambitions had been growing rapidly during his time in office, was getting more and more tired of the influence of his patron, so this union with the Seiyukai also gave him leverage to gain more political independence from Yamagata. It was not merely a matter of circumstance that in August, when discussing the future cabinet with Hara, he stressed the necessity “at all costs not to include in the Saionji cabinet representatives of the genro.”11 At the same time he kept the very fact of his agreement with the Seiyukai secret from Yamagata until the last possible moment so as to prevent him influencing the situation. Thus, it would not be a mistake to suppose that “by joining forces with Hara and the Seiyukai, Katsura intended to distance himself from Yamagata, and the faction which he headed.”12 As for the Seiyukai, this agreement with Katsura gave Hara and his colleagues a splendid opportunity to dramatically increase the influence of their political party. Hara was a convinced advocate of parliamentary politics. Reading Hara’s diaries suggests that he thought it was “necessary to strive for the progress of constitutional politics,”13 and linked the idea of constitutionalism with the advance of party politics, for, as he believed, “there can be no constitutional politics without the growth of the political parties.”14 In other words, establishing a party as the leading political force and formation of a party government was for Hara an indispensable condition for the achievement of rikken seiji, or constitutional politics. Hara also thought that for the progress of rikken seiji it was necessary to build a party that would possess an absolute majority of seats in the House of Representatives and from this point of view Hara understood the expansion of Seiyukai’s influence as an integral part of the general progress of constitutionalism. Long before, Hara had realized that cooperation with genro and hanbatsu was the only option for a political party to force its way to power, since the anti-party political system set up by the Meiji constitution

The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan 253 virtually excluded any legal methods for parties to come to power. Hara and his followers’ strategy was based on avoiding confrontation with oligarchic forces, winning their confidence, and, after gaining access to power through collaboration with them, striking a blow at them from these positions. In this sense Hara continued the politics of his close friend and patron Mutsu Munemitsu who once told him: Nowadays the base of Sat-Cho oligarchy is solid and indissoluble. No matter how many men try, it is impossible to destroy it from outside. One must enter the ranks of hanbatsu, penetrate their organization, pretend that he is being used by them and, in reality, to use them himself, to manipulate and control them and to realize our hopes, our principles and ideas.15

This agreement was determined not by mutual sympathy but merely by political necessity and the desire of one side to strengthen its positions at the cost of the other. Nevertheless, when public disturbances did take place in September 1905, the Seiyukai led by Hara, unlike the Kenseihonto that for the most part sided with the discontented demonstrators, approved of all Katsura’s harsh measures against the rioters, including the proclamation of martial law in Tokyo and abeyance of some anti-government mass media. And only after public order was restored, Katsura, following the provisions of the secret agreement, recommended Saionji as the next premier directly to the emperor without involving the genro council – an unprecedented case, for up till then only the genro council had decided candidacies of prime ministers. RAPPROCHEMENT BETWEEN HANBATSU AND THE PARTIES AND THE FIRST SAIONJI CABINET

The formation of the first Saionji cabinet cannot be attributed to a mere postwar rise of liberal sentiments of the people. As the events of September-October showed, silent approval of the political party was enough for the government to overcome the disturbances without serious embarrassment. If anything, the appearance of the Seiyukaibased cabinet was connected with the mass hikowa undo only obliquely for its formation was decided one year before the actual bursts of indignation. For Katsura, the transfer of power was a preventative measure taken in order to ward off the threat of public disorder and maintain both his political influence and the basic line of his policy even after his retirement. And for Hara the agreement with Katsura was an excellent chance to realize his political ideas and ambitions while the public sentiment in this case seemed nothing more to him than a powerful tool with which he could intimidate and put pressure on hanbatsu leaders. When bargaining with Katsura over the conditions of the alliance Hara fully demonstrated his attitude:

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No matter what the conditions of the peace treaty are most of the populace will remain dissatisfied and, in such circumstances, if the Seiyukai does not form a coalition or enter some other form of relationship with the government, our party will have nothing else to do but to listen to the voice of the people, though I personally consider such a situation dangerous for the state.16

The Russo-Japanese War increased dramatically the dependence of hanbatsu on the political parties. Aside from war expenditures, postwar management of newly-acquired territories and new armament programs, aimed at securing increasingly expanding spheres of interests, required tremendous funds and in this respect the Diet’s “power of the purse,” i.e. the right to approve the budget, became vital for hanbatsu and hanbatsuaffiliated bureaucracy. The same situation could be seen after the SinoJapanese War when genro-centered governments felt an urgent need for parties’ compliance in financial matters – it was after the Sino-Japanese War when first alliances, no matter how short-lived and defective, between the two forces took place. But the Russo-Japanese War elevated this tendency of cooperation between the Meiji oligarchy and the parties to a new level. In this respect, the Russo-Japanese War created the foundations for the appearance of the Seiyukai-based government under Saionji. The war also strengthened the positions of the political parties in another way. The financial and social instability brought about by the war and the general expansionist course of foreign policy, which the public started to associate with the oligarchic rule, made it necessary in the postwar period not simply to maintain but to increase already heavy taxation and, hence, aroused serious dissatisfaction within the broadening strata of national bourgeoisie for it became a big hindrance to their further development. It is illuminating to see that hikowa undo began with a rally organized in Osaka by a local branch of the Chamber on Trade and Commerce. Displeasure of the business circles made them seek more actively for cooperation with the parties, which presented a certain alternative to the rule of hanbatsu, and such backing made it impossible for hanbatsu leaders not to take the parties into serious consideration any longer. Although close connections between the parties and the business world were not an entirely new phenomenon it was immediately after the Russo-Japanese War that the Seiyukai, for instance, started to evolve rapidly from the party of landlords into the party of businessmen. 17 At the same time, political parties, in which a generation of new politicians like Hara or Oishi Masami from the Kenseihonto began to hold sway, felt the importance of even closer cooperation with hanbatsu in order to bring their political parties closer to power. No wonder the activity of the so-called “reform faction” (kaikakuha) within the Kenseihonto, which – just like Hara in the Seiyukai – aspired to change the party’s permanent opposition attitude toward the government and to transform it into an effective subject of power, became noticeable after the war with Russia.

The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan 255 SAIONJI CABINET AS A LANDMARK IN JAPAN’S CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Although the first Saionji cabinet was not based directly on changing public opinion and rather was a result of compromises and intrigues of oligarchs and party politicians, its formation did have a serious progressive meaning and marked the beginning of a principally new era of relations between hanbatsu and parties. It appears that the Katsura-Seiyukai agreement of 1904 became a starting point of the so-called Keien jidai (the period of Katsura and Saionji cabinets), which, as Yamamoto Shiro defined it, “gave the onset to the long period of transaction from hanbatsu politics to party governments.”18 The oligarchs and the parties made their first steps toward each other after the Sino-Japanese War, when hanbatsu leaders realized that in the circumstances of rapidly-increasing government expenditure the parties’ good will in financial matters became vital for the longevity of this or that cabinet. Comparison of the Keien period with previous hanbatsuparty coalitions reveals conspicuous differences. All the coalitions of the period preceding the Keien jidai were not much more than the oligarchs’ timely ingratiating with the parties in order to settle their urgent political matters. The alliance between the Kenseito (Constitutional Party), led by Hoshi Toru, and the second Yamagata cabinet in 1898–1900 is, perhaps, the most indicative. Availing himself of the Kenseito majority in the Diet and passing the land tax increase bill, necessary to continue the “positive financial policy” in the fields of industry stimulation and armament, Yamagata not only neglected Hoshi’s demands to include Kenseito members in the cabinet but amended the civil service acts in a way that made it much harder for outsiders to enter the highest ranks of bureaucracy. Former alliances between hanbatsu and the parties enabled party leaders to receive important cabinet positions from time to time, but they did not not give the parties as a whole either any stable access to executive authority or sound control over the government and nonparty forces. In different words, previous cabinets, based on coalitions with the parties, “had been anti-party or super-party in principle and had tried to carry out bureaucratic government and though some of them occasionally combined with the parties they did so only to avail themselves of the power the parties had.”19 Even the organization of the Seiyukai by Ito with the subsequent formation of the fourth Ito cabinet, most members of which were Seiyukai men, was not any breakthrough on the way to party governments. All the facts show that Ito understood the Seiyukai not as an independent political force but rather as a means of harmonizing different parts of the diverse political system created by the Constitution in changing socio-economic and political conditions. At least these were his arguments when he explained the formation of the Seiyukai to the emperor: “Under the changed circumstances of the present day the only way to carry out the

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righteous government is by leading political parties properly.”20 That explains numerous concessions made by Ito to the Katsura cabinet that was not even trying to hide its hostility towards the new party. Ito appears to be not a party politician but rather a senior statesman concerned with the smooth operation of the government system, as Oka Yoshitake suggested: “Ito had set up the Seiyukai chiefly as a means to realize his own political goals and publicly admitted that his commitment to the party was far from total. . . . He was not a fighter but skilled in creating harmony.”21 Hence, the principle difference of the Katsura-Seiyukai agreement of 1904–05 is that it was the first full-fledged alliance, in which the party came as an independent political force and not as a tool in the combinations of clique oligarchy. Having scrupulously taken into account the current political situation and Katsura’s vulnerable position, Hara and his colleagues dictated to Katsura such conditions that enabled their party to take a solid position in government structures and to establish great influence over the executive authority on a long-term basis. Although Seiyukai leaders made up less than a half of the first Saionji cabinet members it was incomparably much more partisan than Waiban naikaku (the cabinet formed jointly by Okuma Shigenobu and Itagaki Taisuke in 1898), which is sometimes mistakenly said to be the first true party government in Japan. The Okuma-Itagaki cabinet formally did consist predominantly of party members, but its lack of any foothold outside the Lower House predetermined its almost instant self-destruction. Thus, it was more than a pseudo party government since it requires not simply to occupy ministerial posts by party members but an ability to coordinate, using party’s influence, various segments of political world for a cabinet to be called truly partisan. The difference of the first Saionji cabinet with the previous Seiyukaibased cabinet of Ito is no less conspicuous: unlike Ito, who formed his cabinet chiefly due to his authority as a genro, Saionji owed his appointment to the increased influence of the party that was behind him. In this sense, Takekoshi Yosaburo, one of the active members of the Seiyukai of those days, did not exaggerate when he characterized the first Saionji cabinet as “a landmark in Japan’s constitutional development.”22 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE KATSURA-SAIONJI PERIOD

Katsura’s agreement with the Seiyukai gave a start to the Katsura-Saionji period. The core of this period was the so-called Keien taisei – a complicated system of mutual concessions and compromises between hanbatsu forces and party politicians, represented by Katsura and the Seiyukai respectively, over key questions, such as priorities of national financing, defense, and foreign policy, etc. It was a certain reaction to the political deadlock, vividly described by Katsura in the following way: “The House of Representatives may be Saionji’s but the House of Peers is mine.”23 Both sides had an opportunity to block each other’s initiatives and needed close cooperation if their political aims were to be achieved.

The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan 257 The Keien jidai had significant importance to the political history of Japan since it became a decisive step toward the establishment of party politics. During the Keien period, which lasted until the break-up of the Katsura-Seiyukai cooperation in 1912, Saionji twice became the prime minister (January 1906 – July 1908 and August 1911 – December 1912) and the very fact that there were no dissolutions of the Diet over all that time demonstrates the unprecedented strength of the Seiyukai position – especially when counting the occasions that former prime ministers resorted to such measures. This turn of events let Okuma Shigenobu state that: “the government in Japan became constitutional not only on paper but in fact.”24 The leaders of the Seiyukai used the time of their tenure to the full to expand the influence of the party even further. First of all, Hara and others tried to undermine the influence of hanbatsu in such strongholds of anti-party forces like the House of Peers and the state bureaucracy. Hara and others did not succeed perhaps in drawing the peers and bureaucrats completely to their side, but they managed to start the process of their politicization (seijika) and division into parties (seitoka) so that gradually they began to loose their strong anti-party coloring. Without that, the formation of the first pure party government under Hara in 1918 would have been impossible. Another of Hara’s tactics was to take advantage of the Seiyukai’s position as a government party in order to attract the local interests and the business circles by lavishing money on them. There is no doubt that Hara’s sekkyoku seisaku (positive policy) became one of the key factors of the party’s rapid growth at that time, demonstrated by its success at the elections of 1908 and 1912, at which the Seiyukai obtained an absolute majority of seats. Certainly, Katsura tried to retaliate, for this Seiyukai expansion was a serious threat to his own political position: striking this alliance with a desire to achieve greater political independence he, to the contrary, became more and more dependent on the Seiyukai. In 1908, he even used the economic depression to force Saionji out of office and sought for cooperation with the Kenseihonto and other minor parties that in fact caused a temporal interruption in the operation of the Keien system. And, in 1907–08, both sides clashed severely over Hara’s initiative to abolish the gun (county) system – a pillar of hanbatsu regional influence. Thus, Mitani Taichiro was absolutely right when he supposed that “stability in the relations of bureaucracy and the parties after the RussoJapanese War was nothing but an illusion, for they constantly struggled against the strengthening of the counterpart’s positions in the structures of state power.”25 In the middle of 1912, at the latest, the Keien system virtually ceased to function properly and the country headed toward the storm of the Taisho Seihen (Taisho political crisis). Not long after the breakdown of the Keien system, obviously hostile actions of the army leaders, who were displeased with Saionji’s negative attitude toward army expansion and “weak-kneed” policy toward the China revolution, forced the retirement

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of the second Saionji cabinet. Nevertheless, neither this challenge from the orthodox transcendentalists, who were still unable to accept the notion of party politics, nor the subsequent disturbances of the Taisho seihen seriously affected the positions of the Seiyukai. Admiral Yamamoto Gonnohyoe, an acknowledged leader of the Satsuma clique who formed the cabinet after the crisis, came into even closer alliance with the Seiyukai than Katsura before him. In the Yamamoto cabinet that “was in fact nothing else than the third Saionji cabinet.”26 The majority of the ministers were from the Seiyukai and the cabinet itself advocated policy which represented the Seiyukai’s interests even better than that of the second Saionji cabinet. For instance, it was under the Yamamoto cabinet that the Seiyukai managed to abolish oppressive provisions of the civil appointment acts, which were designed by the second Yamagata cabinet in 1899–1900 in order to hamper the expansion of parties’ power. In this way, the Russo-Japanese War, which created the conditions for both the Katsura-Seiyukai agreement and the formation of the first Saionji cabinet, set a quantitatively new trend of political development in Japan, a trend in which the parties started to grow into the major political force, slowly but steadily overshadowing the old Meiji political elite and penetrating such layers of political authority that had hereto been strongly anti-party. It was arguably the main result of post-war political developments that hanbatsu forces became irrevocably absorbed into party politics, because now even if they wished, for example, to weaken the Seiyukai, like they did in 1914 when they installed the second Okuma cabinet, they had to do so by turning to cooperation with other parties. DRAWBACKS OF THE POLITICAL DEMOCRATIZATION

The constitutional government in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War witnessed a contradictory progress. While the war significantly facilitated the democratic aspirations of the masses, those who did have real capacity to influence the process of political liberalization chose to pursue the goal of constitutional government slowly and cautiously, through close cooperation with hanbatsu forces rather than acting as direct representatives of people’s sentiment. Hara, probably the most prominent party politician of that time, may serve as the ultimate example of such an approach. In one incident, the renowned journalist Baba Tsunego suggested that Hara should override the opposition of the anti-party Privy Council by mobilization of the broad popular support, but the latter replied: “That is a frightful proposition. To talk of riding on the wave of the masses and attacking the Privy Council – that is revolution. I could never support such an action.”27 Hara’s distrust toward all kinds of mass movements is well known. Ironically, the first “commoner” prime minister in Japanese history, he preferred to keep away from all movements outside the Diet believing that “adopting measures under the pressure from the masses hides

The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan 259 serious dangers for the foundations of the state.”28 Perhaps, as Marius Jansen supposed, Hara was anxious that a popular following would make him a dangerous foe and unacceptable partner for the leaders of hanbatsu, whose support he considered to be the most crucial in his quest for power.29 The Seiyukai joined the public movement only once: at the time of the Taisho political crisis in January 1913, Hara thought it better for the party to side with the powerful Goken undo (Movement to Protect Constitutional Government). But this decision was made mostly because Hara saw that there were no longer any chances for another compromise with Katsura, who prepared to organize a party of his own. But as soon as another coalition, this time with Yamamoto, was formed the party leadership abandoned the movement without any qualms. All such movements – from the Movement Against the Peace Treaty of 1905 until the Rice Riots of 1918 – were not much more for Hara and his colleagues than a useful background for their compromises with the Yamagata faction and other anti-party forces. On the one hand, this strategy was a success – especially if compared to the collapse of intransigent party politicians like Inukai Tsuyoshi, whose once powerful party degraded to a minor club by the end of the 1910s. As historian Tetsuo Najita sharply pointed out, Hara’s politics of compromise created a unique world phenomenon – a non-revolutionary establishment of Diet-centered politics.30 Indeed, the establishment of party cabinets, the core of the political system of the age of “Taisho Democracy,” owes a great deal to Hara’s firm and wise leadership and his cold practicality. Notwithstanding the anti-party character of the Meiji Constitution, with the help of the compromise politics and various behind-the-scenes maneuvers, the Seiyukai eventually overcame obstructions of different hostile segments of the political structure and by the beginning of the 1920s emerged as a dominant political force. On the other hand, this strategy, clearly formulated by Hara during the Keien period, to a large extent predetermined the short life and inferior character of the period of “Taisho Democracy.” The party leaders of that time tried to liberalize the political system within the framework of the existing undemocratic regime, without serious attempts to reform its numerous oppressive institutions. Consequently, even in the mid-1920s, when party cabinets were at their peak, the structure of the political system of the Meiji Constitution was not practically affected as its main undemocratic elements remained intact: the Privy Council was not reformed but only temporally pacified with appointments of more or less neutral members; the supremacy of the House of Representatives toward the House of Peers was not confirmed legally; the right of the genro to select prime ministers was not de jure transferred to the Diet; the army and the navy retained their independence from civil governments; and the passage of the universal suffrage bill in 1925 was virtually neutralized by the subsequent Peace Preservation law notorious for its repressive nature. In this respect, Kato Shuichi’s conclusion seems appropriate: “It

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was not by changing but by fully utilizing the institutions, which Taisho Democracy had not modified, that the army gradually rose to power in the 1930s.”31 Moreover, as a result of total reluctance to establish bonds with the masses, most vividly demonstrated by Hara, the Japanese parties evolved into “highly elitist organizations, not mass-based or mass-orientated,”32 that had “no other tie than a thin thread of symbolic votes” with the majority of the population.33 And public movements, obviously disappointed with such a conservative stance of “public parties,” gradually began to decline so that in the beginning of the 1930s, when party cabinets were in crisis, the masses were no longer the force that could or wished to protect “constitutional government” as in 1912–13. CONCLUSION

The Russo-Japanese War stimulated the progress of constitutionalism in Japan for it stirred up public opinion to a new level that made large-scale liberalization possible, created necessary social and economic background for the advance of party politics and at the same time provided party politicians with a concrete means of putting pressure on hanbatsu forces. Given all these objective conditions for the rapid spread of party influence, steady democratization of the political environment seems to have been almost inevitable, and to a certain extent it was. The Keien period, the beginning of which was symbolized by the formation of the first Saionji cabinet, started a new political era in Japan when the Seiyukai, the majority Diet party created a sound base in government structures. Still, this progress of kensei from the very beginning carried the seeds of its defectiveness and eventual self-destruction, for the actual pattern of expansion of party strength chosen by those party men who were really capable of influencing the political process, notably Hara, implied the neglect of awakening mass movements and public sentiment and did not have as its aim the fundamental transformation of the existing political structure. It will certainly be unwise to characterize Hara and his colleagues as narrow-minded conservatives. Hara did exert himself to the full for the sake of the progress he considered suitable for the political realities of Japan at that time. But he appears to have championed political democratization only to the extent that did not contradict his and his parties’ interests. Otherwise what was his reason to perceive both the existence of another influential Diet party, first the Kenseihonto and the Kokuminto, and later – the Doshikai (The Association of Like Minds that was subsequently reorganized into the Kenseikai – the Association of Constitutional Politics) and various public movements as a major threat? This lamentable tendency, which also traces its roots back to the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, in my opinion, explains why final results of political democratization of that time and real political achievements of the period of party politics were minimal in comparison to the scale of

The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan 261 the democratic tide, generated by the war, and the opportunities for political transformation that the war opened. NOTES 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Sims, 2001: 69. Banno, 1982: 23. Matsuo, 1966: 79. Hanbatsu is a collective name for the political elite that seized power after the Meiji Restoration. Literally hanbatsu can be translated as “domain cliques.” This definition refers to the fact that ex-samurai from those han, or domains of the Tokugawa shogunate, that played the main role in overthrowing the bakufu, namely Satsuma and Choshu, after coming to power organized various tight factions, the members of which occupied key positions in different organs of the state. Though hanbatsu, sometimes also described as the Meiji oligarchy, were often a subject to public criticism for “usurpation” of power and arbitrary actions, these cliques dominated Japanese politics for an impressive period of time and their decline became conspicuous only in the beginning of 1920s. Matsuo, 1966: 80. Banno, 1982: 21. Banno, 1982: 22. Miyazawa, 1968: 65. Mitani, 1975–77: 138. Hacket, 1965: 267. Hara, 1965, II: 131. Hara, 1965, II: 145. Ito, 2000: 256. Hara, 1965, II: 342. Hara, 1965, III: 83. Mitani, 1967: 14. Hara, 1965, II: 131. One of the first party politicians, who noticed the necessity to develop close bonds with the bourgeoisie and urban classes, was Hoshi Toru, the leader of the largest Kanto faction, first within the Jiyuto and later within the Kenseito and the Seiyukai. His intention to develop such ties is clearly demonstrated by the fact that he even became the chairman of Tokyo municipal council. Yamamoto, 1987: 9. Takekoshi, 1933: 233. Takekoshi, 1933: 204–205. Oka, 1986: 92. Takekoshi, 1933: 233. Hara, 1965, II: 353. Okuma, 1909: 554. Mitani, 1967: 57. Banno, 1975: 295. Oka, 1986: 118. Hara, 1965, V: 217.

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Jansen, 2000: 451. See Najita, 1967. Kato, 1974: 235. Scalapino, 1968: 271. Kato, 1974: 229.

17

The Legacy of the War and the World of Islam in Japanese PanAsian Discourse: Wakabayashi Han’s Kaikyo Sekai to Nihon SELÇUK ESENBEL

A

fter the Russo-Japanese War, Muslims had celebrated the Japanese victory as that of the oppressed against the Western imperialists. The victory inspired many Muslims to see Japan as a new form of modernity suitable to Islamic civilization.1 The Japanese response to this worldwide enthusiasm from the Muslim world was as a political and economic actor: to incorporate the nationalist and revolutionary dynamics of Islamic peoples into a joint revolt against the West as part of Japan’s imperial destiny.2 During the Meiji era (1868–1912), Japanese PanAsianists pioneered contacts with Muslim political activists primarily in a joint effort to work for Asian emancipation against Russia and Britain. For the Meiji “patriotic activists,” Japan and the world of Islam were to be cultivated in the form of an overseas policy of alliance and cultivation, kaikyo seisaku, a term that was invented to mean Islam policy, that would serve the Japanese empire. However, in so far as the official Meiji governing elite was concerned, Islam policy was not a dominant issue. Hence Islam policy remained as the subject of desire among a set of informal and unofficial contacts between Asianist-oriented Japanese and some Muslim figures that they had met during the Meiji era. However, after the Manchurian invasion of 1931, Japanese-Muslim relations became important for the Asianist orientation of the Japanese Army in Manchuria, and later for Baron Hiranuma’s Asianist foreign policy during the Showa era. The objectives were multifaceted but in general the Islam-oriented Japanese political and military circles saw Islam policy, kaikyo seisaku, the popular term, to mean developing pro-Japanese net-

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works in the Western colonial empires, establishing anti-Communist fronts, or countering Chinese anti-Japanese nationalism; in other words to find friends among Japan’s enemies and help Japan’s global claim to see Asia as a world power. Militarily, the objective was to cultivate local collaborative contacts in such strategically significant areas as the Soviet border, North China, and South East Asia where there were predominant Muslim populations. Economically, Japanese business also developed a new commercial interest in the Islamic word in the Near East, with the decline in the political and economic domination of the British and French colonial empires in the region, that was flooded with the phenomenal increase of cheap Japanese exports to Muslim markets.3 Wakabayashi Han’s well-known work titled kaikyo sekai to nihon (The World of Islam and Japan), that was published first in 1937 and quickly went through numerous reprints, was representative of this intellectual and political rapproachement between the global claim of Japanese PanAsianism to emancipate Asian peoples from Western oppression and the Muslim political agenda of nationalism and Pan Islamic awakening. Okawa Shumei, who was a major figure in Wakabayashi’s political and intellectual circle, the main intellectual figure of Pan-Asianism in Showa Japan, the “mastermind of Japanese fascism” in the Tokyo trials, justified Japan’s mission to liberate Asia from Western colonialism by war if necessary, saw Islam as the means.4 Given his immersion in German philosophy and Indian thought, Okawa’s theoretical scholarly discussions of the topic of Islam presented a perceptive critique of the prevailing Orientalist discourse in Western views of Islam. As one of the major figures, who became the intellectual mentor of the militarist Asianist actors of the day, Okawa’s views set the terms of the political agenda for the construction of modern Japan.5 Like Okawa, Wakabayashi’s work was also representative of this 1930s interaction between the two militant political currents. However, compared to Okawa’s work, it was more of an informed and well-written public-relations book bent on creating a favorable image of the Muslim world for the Japanese public. However, like the publications of Okawa, Wakabayashi’s book also advocated a strong political agenda of this 1930s Japanese Pan-Asianist argument why Japan should ally with Muslim agendas for Asian emancipation. Unlike the Meiji Pan-Asianists whose motive appears to have been more to ally with the anti-imperialist forces of Muslim activists against Western empires, in this 1930s argument, Wakabayashi’s vision is much more imperialist with an immediate agenda as he clearly states on numerous occasions in the introduction of Japan’s need “to use Islam as the instrument to govern Asia.”6 The author, Wakabayashi Han, whose name is sometimes read as Nakaba or Nakabe also remains as an enigmatic figure of prewar Islamoriented activities of Japan. The little that we know about his career is that he was an Islam expert of the Showa era who worked during the 1930s in forming direct contacts between the Japanese and Muslims in the Near East and Asia. He appears to be one of the many experts and

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agents that the Japanese authorities used as an unofficial network for intelligence-and information-gathering activities. During the 1920s and 1930s, Wakabayashi was in charge of the organization of at least five out of the six Japanese Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of the Islamic faith in Saudi Arabia. Most of these Japanese Muslim pilgrimages of Japanese agents who claimed to have converted to Islam took place during the 1930s some of which are accounted for in detail by Wakabayashi. The pilgrimages reveal the acceleration of Islam policy activities within the military and foreign ministry prior to the outbreak of World War II to find allies among Muslims as well as form pro-Japanese contacts within the Muslim populations of Asian countries. KAIKYO SEKAI TO NIHON OR THE WORLD OF ISLAM AND JAPAN

The book, one of the first accounts of this little known history of modern Japan and the world of Islam until then, apparently had achieved an immediate wide reception. The author, Wakabayashi, gratefully thanks his readers in the numerous prefaces that he wrote for each new reprint as the book went through five reprints until this last one in 1938, indicating the popularity of the work.7 The book also appears at times to harbor the author’s personal desire to heighten his personal role in organizing the numerous pilgrimage journeys of Japanese Muslims who were to be the new young generation of Japanese Muslim agents working for the military and political policies of Japan toward the Islamic world in Asia. Wakabayashi’s 200-page book first provides a summary introduction to the Islamic faith with the standard explanation of the principles of the faith and the rules of worship. The book then gives a brief history of Muslim peoples from the days of the prophet Muhammad to current times to the Japanese readers. Special attention is given to the history of Islam in China that is the closest Muslim region to Japan with Chinese Muslims shown to be potential friends of Japan in a sea of anti-Japanese Chinese people. All through this section Wakabayashi presents the defensive argument that Islam was an important civilization in the past. The present decline of Muslim societies should not reflect on the glorious past of this civilization. He also exposes various arguments that aimed to counter the prevalent prejudiced view of Japanese people about Islam that it was a backward faith without cultural qualities or that it is a militant religion of the sword. Wakabayashi states that this negative view is a product of Western missionary propaganda and teaching which became influential in the Meiji period. In this context, Wakabayashi was projecting his counter argument to the current Japanese view of Islam that was quite critical and based upon prevailing Western-inspired notions. The pro/con arguments about Islam surfaced just about this time in the 1938 Diet debate as to whether the Japanese government should legally recognize Islam as a religion of Japan similar to Buddhism, Shinto, and Christianity.8

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Like Okawa Shumei who was the most intellectually engaged prewar Asianist Japanese figure concerned with Islamic studies, Wakabayashi placed special emphasis on the importance of the current conditions in the Islamic world as a new Asian revolution. If used well, Wakabayashi argues that Islamic revolutionary currents will help Japan’s quest to ally with Muslims against the Western imperialists of Asia.9 Emphasizing his personal contacts in the Near East, Wakabayashi also appears to have wanted to present his important role in the activation of this new Islam policy, kaikyo seisaku, orientation since the late Meiji period. After having narrated the pre-modern and modern history of the Islamic world, Wakabayashi discusses the importance of having a governmental Islam policy of forming close political, economic ties with Muslim leaders and the populations in Asia for the interests of Japan to govern Asia. Briefly summarizing the Islam policy strategies of Britain, Germany, and Italy as the means for empire building, he strongly argues for the development of a Japanese policy to that end. The book ends with the first-hand account of the experiences of the Japanese Muslim agents who undertook the fifth Japanese pilgrimage of 1936 to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. The detailed account of the pilgrimage voyage, the junreiki was written by the young Japanese Muslim pilgrims. It is included at the end of the book and is an interesting source for the Japanese narration of their experiences and motives in these pilgrimages. In the junreiki, the narrators explain in detail the great difficulties of their journey on camelback. The text is a combination of the chronology of the Japanese participation in the religious ceremonies that takes place with the multitudes of pilgrims almost as a proof of how successful the Japanese pilgrims were in completing this vastly difficult physical task. Sprinkled with friendly conversations with dignitaries and adventures of chance encounters with local Muslim Arabs who help the Japanese party which gets lost in the desert at some point, the pilgrimage narrative combines the politically-motivated religious journey with the excitement of travel in exotic lands. Finally, the pilgrimage results in important audiences with King Ibn Saud and other dignitaries of the Saudi kingdom that seals the special close friendship of Imperial Japan and Muslim leaders.10 THE KOKURYUKAI AND WAKABAYASHI’S BOOK

In this work, Wakabayashi constructed a new historical narrative appropriate for the 1930s that tells the story of the bonds between Meiji PanAsianist nationalism and Islam as the continuous legacy of the Meiji era contacts that were engendered by the famous Meiji Pan-Asianist organization, the Kokuryukai, Amur River society, popularly known as the Black Dragons. The little that we know from the prewar sources about Wakabayashi’s career itself points to a pattern of the 1930s when late Meiji Pan-Asianists, especially members of the Kokuryukai and Genyosha (Dark Ocean Society) like Wakabayashi, now engaged in new tasks with

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the resurgence of Asianist oriented policies for the governing authorities in Japan during the thirties.11 The few bits of information that can be gleaned in mostly prewar PanAsianist publications tell us that he was the older brother of Wakabayashi Kyuman who had been born in 1891 and had graduated from the Military Staff College in Tokyo. Both were the sons of a Hanzaemon of Chiba ken. Kyuman graduated from Chiba prefecture’s public middle school in 1916 and after graduating from the Military College, went to China. During the late Meiji and Taisho periods, the two brothers were actively involved in field networking and intelligence activities on behalf of the army among the Chinese Muslims of China. In 1919, both brothers were under instructions to conduct research on China when they are said to have realized that the great task of Asian Awakening (Koa) could only be realized with the assistance of Chinese Muslims. There, Kyuman worked for Yamamoto Yukichi, who owned a general store in Changsha. Like many Japanese agents, Kyuman peddled goods in Hunan, Hupeh, Szechuwan, Yunnan to study the Muslims and forge bonds of friendship. In 1921, Kyuman ended up finally gaining some trust among Chinese Muslims in Ch’ang-te, a town west of Tung-t’ing Lake in Honan while working for the Yamamoto firm branch. The real politik motive, however, was to counter the severe anti-Japanese movement in Hunan province, that resulted in the killing of some Japanese, by forming proJapanese circles among the Chinese Muslims.12 Kyuman and Wakabayashi Han were close associates of the Kokuryukai, the Black Dragons, the well-known Pan-Asianist organization of prewar Meiji Japan that was actively involved in various Asian revolutionary movements. Militant advocates of Japan’s “manifest destiny” as an Asian empire, Kokuryukai members worked in information gathering and local operations on behalf of military intelligence during the Russo-Japanese War.13 The sources from the prewar and wartime Japan tell us that Wakabayashi was particularly close to the two leaders of Meiji era Pan-Asianism, Toyama Mitsuru, the elder founder of the Genyosha and the spiritual leader of the Kokuryukai who was the éminence grise of Japanese right-wing politics and Uchida Ryohei the charismatic activist of the Chinese and Korean revolutions who was the founder and first chairman of the Kokuryukai. In his book, Wakabayashi always refers to Toyama and Uchida as his superiors.14 In Toa senkaku shishi kiden, the prewar Kokuryukai publication of 1936 on the biographies of “patriots” who worked for East Asian emancipation during the Meiji era, Wakabayashi is introduced as a tairiku ronin, the typical late Meiji era continental adventurers who were involved in revolutionary movements in China and Korea. However, while the same source provides the biography of Kyuman, there is very little information on Wakabayashi Han himself, which suggests that he was active in the field during the publication of that book in 1936.15 Toa senkaku shishi kiden briefly mentions Wakabayashi Han as the only survivor of Kyuman’s family and gives his present address in Tokyo City.16

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Throughout his 1938 book, on numerous occasions, Wakabayashi connects the Russo-Japanese War and its aftermath to his early realization of the primary importance of Islam policy as the soul of Asiatic governance and as an instrument for the ultimate victory of Japan as the leader of Asia.17 He recollects his own determination of the importance of Islam policy that began twenty-seven years ago in 1912 when he was journeying in the British colony of India with Mr. Ottman, the high priest of Burma, former head of the Congress of the Hindu religion who was an activist against British imperialism. He tells us that after coming back home: “I thought that Islam policy is of crucial importance for East Asia’s governance.” Wakabayashi explains that it was he who sent his younger brother Kyuman to China where he began to form friendship links and networks among Chinese Muslims. But Wakabayashi’s brother apparently died of dysentery in Changsha soon thereafter in 1923 having left the objective of Islam policy unfinished.18 Despite the late Meiji origins of Islam policy, Wakabayashi complains that the authorities did not pay serious attention for a long time and narrates the eventual adoption of Islam policy as a serious agenda by the Japanese authorities at this juncture of Japan’s new future as the leader of East Asia after the Manchurian invasion. He claims to have played a role of some importance in the final adoption of Islam policy by the Japanese authorities. Hence the account is that of an idealized chain of events representing a personal story of contacts, voluntary advice to important military figures, which may or may not necessarily have been even solicited over these years. Wakabayashi complains that even though he talked to the various authorities of the government and important thinkers about the importance of the Islam question, in the end many listened to his words but none showed enthusiasm, even though: “I ran from hither to thither galloping to the East and running to the West.”19 Wakabayashi also embellishes his account with constant references to the two senior figures of the Pan-Asianist right, Toyama and Uchida, that bolsters the argument of connecting the roots of Islam policy efforts back to the Meiji Asianist leaders and fits his terminology to that of the Meiji Pan-Asianist activists who liked to see themselves as selfless heroic samurai figures of loyalty. During the thirties, Wakabayashi explains to us that he was dispatched by Toyama and Uchida as a ronin daihyo or “masterless samurai” – an allusion to the late Tokugawa patriotic samurai who worked for the Meiji Restoration against the Tokugawa Shogunate – to attend the League of Nations Geneva General Meeting in 1932 as an informal observer. Next year in 1933, Japan’s delegate, Matsuoka Yosuke, known for his Asianist foreign policy views walked out of the League over the adoption of the Lytton Report that was critical of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Matsuoka was to become the controversial foreign minister who forged the Axis Alliance during World War II.20 Wakabayashi apparently stayed in Geneva throughout the controversy and after Japan walked out, he took a long trip on an inspection tour of Europe and the United States.

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Upon his return home, he claims to have been busy trying to convince military figures of the importance of Islam-oriented overseas policies. Wakabayashi informs the reader of his numerous contacts in political and military circles where he repeatedly advocated attention to cultivating the Muslim peoples of South East Asia to the Near East for Japan’s advantage. Among the names he cites are those of important military actors of the day such as: General Araki Sadao, briefly Minister of the Army, Lieutenant General Isogaya Rensuke (the Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army in 1938–39), Major General Itagaki Seishiro, who are responsible for the Manchurian invasion and the expansionist and the militarist politics of the day. As intellectual figures, the master-mind Asianist intellectual and political activist of the thirties Okawa Shumei, the scholar-agent of Central Asian studies Professor Okubo Koji of Komazawa University, and the judo expert advisor and Asianist activist in India Abdullah Takasagi Shinzo reveal for us the expansionist and Asianist orientation of the circle that made use of Wakabayashi at the time of the book’s publication.21 IBRAHIM’S ROLE

Wakabayashi’s book uses the individuals who were involved in the Meiji period at the beginning of Japanese Pan-Asianist contact with the Islamic world on the occasion of the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War as the protagonists in the construction of the Meiji era memory of Japan’s connections to the Islamic world. It is clear that this is done in order to legitimize Wakabayashi’s responsibility in such activities as organizing the Japanese Muslim pilgrimage in 1936 which is narrated at the end of the book. Here, the major protagonist in the narrative is Abdurresid Ibrahim (1853–1944), the Russian Tatar Pan Islamist in the book from the outset. Historically, Ibrahim had formed a close collaboration with Colonel Akashi Motojiro, the head of European intelligence during the Russo-Japanese War. His subsequent contacts with the Kokuryukai people in the immediate aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War were forged during his first visit to Japan, for five months during 1908–09, which had been a catalyst for the inception of a kaikyo seikaku, or Islam policy circle of Kokuryukai, and military, political, intellectual Japanese figures who were part of Meiji Asianist environment. Japanese such as Toyama Mitsuru, the Pan-Asianist rightwing leader or Inukai Tsuyoshi, the liberal politician, continued to be patrons of émigré Muslim political activists from India to Arabia and Tatar Turkish émigrés after the Bolshevik revolution.22 In fact, in 1933 before the publication of Wakabayashi’s book, Ibrahim was invited back to Japan in order to aid the activation of Islam policy strategies during the thirties. He was to stay in Japan until his death in 1944 in Tokyo. He cooperated with the Japanese government as the nonJapanese head of the Dai Nippon Kaikyo Kyokai which was founded in 1938 as Japan’s official Islamic organization for public relations and propaganda that was active until the end of World War II. Ibrahim’s own life

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is an example of how the political contacts of the Russo-Japanese War period were activated via intermediaries like Wakabayashi in order to aid the new Asianist policies that became important during the 1930s until the end of the war. Back in 1909, Ibrahim had converted the first Japanese convert Omar Yamaoka, a Kokuryukai member in Bombay, during his return trip from Japan which represents the political character of these Japanese conversions to Islam. Omar Yamaoka or many later Japanese Muslims justified conversion as a means to serve Muslim Japanese friendship and alliance to serve the imperial way as a patriotic duty to the Emperor.23 In 1909, the two comrades had visited Mecca and Medina where Omar Yamaoka had become the first Japanese pilgrim to visit the Holy Lands and form contacts with Arab leaders on behalf of the Japanese Empire. In 1909, Omar Yamaoka had given lectures in Istanbul on the principles of Japan’s newly-formed organization for Islamic peoples, the Asia Gikai or Asian Reawakening Society, which was publicized in the Pan Islamist press of Istanbul that had distribution in the Turkish reading world beyond Ottoman borders including British Egypt and Romanov Russia.24 The message had been about how Japan was the new hope for Muslim emancipation and modernity. This background now gave precedence to Wakabayashi’s justification for new pilgrimages to expand on Islam policy activities. Most important, Wakabayashi’s book in 1938 published the photograph of the Meiji documentation of this spiritual alliance between Japan and Islam to work for the reawakening of Asia. Ibrahim’s own memoir of his 1908–9 travels in Japan and Asia gives us a detailed description of the founding of this society in the office of Toa dobunkai with the liberal Asianist politician Inukai Tsuyoshi ever present on these bonding ceremonies with Asian activists, Toyama, Uchida, and others of the Kokuryukai, Ohara Bukeiji, and many other members of the military establishment with strong connections to the Kwantung Army and the Russian section of the General Staff. The symbolic representation of this ceremony was in the form of an oath deed, identified later during World War II as the Muslim Oath by the OSS reports that saw it as the proof of Japan’s long years of infiltration efforts among world Muslims. The agreement was in the form of a scroll with Arabic and Japanese texts which declared a joint oath to persevere for the accomplishment of their great goal “to be of one heart and mind.” It was signed by members of this newly-formed Asianist Islam circle that included among the Japanese who were present, well-known Kokuryukai members Toyama Mitsuru, Nakano Tsunetaro, Nakayama Yasuzo, Kono Hironaka, Yamada Kinosuke, military figures Lieutenant Colonel Ohara Bukeiji, Captain Aoyanagi Katsutoshi, the politician Inukai Tsuyoshi as well as Chinese Muslims and finally the protagonist of Islam policies in Japan, Ibrahim himself. All these figures were active in the Russo-Japanese War and were to continue military and political careers with Asianist agendas in the Taisho and early Showa period into the 1930s.25

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Wakabayashi explains the process of bringing Ibrahim back to Japan and his recruitment in his own words. He tells us that he had a discussion with some people, and had the venerable Abdurresid Ibrahim who was a world famous elder leader of the Islamic world (close to his nineties when he came back to Japan in 1933) invited from Turkey where he was living as a Turkish citizen after his return from Japan in 1909. Wakabayashi writes that now Ibrahim is collaborating with him in an effort for the realization of Islam policy.26 Wakabayashi is aware of Ibrahim’s political problems in Turkey after the founding of the Republic of Turkey under the leadership of the first President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, when Ibrahim’s Pan Islamist intellectual activities were found to be incompatible with the accelerating secularist and Westernist policies of the new revolutionary regime. The rest of Ibrahim’s activities during the interval between his return from Japan in 1909 and his return in 1933 had included his participation in the Great War (World War I) as an Ottoman special agent for the Young Turk Special Agency (Teskilat ı Mahsusa) where he published the propaganda paper Islam Dunyasi (The World of Islam) for Enver Pasha the leader of the Young Turk government that had entered the war on the side of Germany. In keeping with his Asianist views, he organized the Asya Taburu (Asian Battalion) from the Romanov Army Tartar ex-prisoners of war in the Gallicia battlefront which fought quite successfully on behalf of the Ottoman Army that was victorious against the British forces of General Towsend which surrendered in the battle of Kut Al Amara of the Iraq front.27 During this period, Ibrahim was seen in Afghanistan together with Indian revolutionaries in an attempt to plot rebellion against the British and bring in the Afgan King on the side of the Ottomans. Next he was in Russia during the revolutionary upheaval helping to expedite the emigration of destitute Muslims to Anatolia, and went even as far away as Sinkiang as part of various operations on behalf of the Young Turks. Like many other Pan Islamist figures of the late Ottoman era, Ibrahim had fallen out of favor and was ultimately placed under house arrest in the village of Resadiye, Konya, in central Anatolia where he was exiled from the center of new political developments. It is difficult to discern just how Wakabayashi’s recommendation that Ibrahim be brought to Japan was realized in 1933, but the possible evidence reveals how all of this Islam policy networking was taking place during the thirties. Later, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports inform us that Ibrahim had close connections especially to one of the two Japanese military attachés in Ankara. The famous coup plotter of the 1930s and founder of the Sakurakai group of the Imperial Way and an admirer of Ataturk, Hashimoto Kingoro was the military attaché in Turkey (1927–30) to be followed by Colonel Iimura Jo (later Lieutenant General), who was the military attaché (1930–32) and the military figure who was closest to Ibrahim during his activities in Japan after his 1933 arrival. Japanese military attachés in Ankara were responsible for information gathering against the Soviet Union and for forming direct contacts with

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political intellectuals and activists especially among the Tatar and Turkestani émigrés of Turkey. Hence, it is most likely that Wakabayashi’s recommendation to invite Ibrahim was delivered via the Japanese military attachés in Ankara.28 The report of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Muslim activists in Japan refers to close relations between Ibrahim and Iimura Jo). Wakabayashi’s book uses this Ibrahim centered legacy of the RussoJapanese War to show strong Meiji connections with the world of Islam in a way that reinforces a historic legacy for the instigated Islamic policy activities during the 1930s, particularly to justify the series of new pilgrimages of Japanese Muslim agents. Wakabayashi uses Ibrahim in person as a confirmation of this long-lasting relationship throughout the book. After introducing the important political career of Ibrahim in Russia as “a benefactor who worked very hard for Japan through religious activities and the first person to introduce Islam to Japan,” the venerable Ibrahim met with distinguished figures concluding with his declaration back then that “Japan in the future would rise to a position of leading the world.” As a survivor of the Meiji Oath, Wakabayashi states that many of his fellow companions of the day had passed away. Only Ibrahim and the elder Genyosha leader Toyama Mitsuru were survivors of the Oath.29 The book outlines the networking that forged bonds between individuals from Ibrahim’s days in Japan and lasted until now. In addition to Ibrahim, Wakabayashi introduces to the reader his friend and close collaborator in Islam policy, the late Haji Nur Tanaka Ippei (1882–1934), whose sudden death after a recent pilgrimage to Mecca in 1934 greatly saddened Wakabayashi. Known to have been the second Japanese Muslim to undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1924, Tanaka Ippei followed the footsteps of Omar Yamaoka, Ibrahim’s comrade on their trip to Mecca and Istanbul back in 1909, and again the personality who provided the historic link between late Meiji Japan and new Islam oriented policies of the Asianism of the thirties. Wakabayashi explains that even before Kyuman’s death in 1923, he had counsel with the “senior venerable Toyama and master Uchida.” Whereupon he proceeded to visit his good friend Tanaka Ippei, who was in south China and convinced him to work with Wakabayashi “hand in hand” to realize this important Islam policy for East Asian governance.30 Omar Yamaoka who also subsequently proceeded to work among Chinese Muslims in the Yangtze area is said to have helped train Haji Nur Tanaka Ippei who became the second Japanese Muslim convert again serving the Japanese empire.31 But Tanaka himself claimed he was converted into the Muslim faith by Chinese Muslims while he was working among Chinese Muslims as a China hand during and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War.32 An interesting figure in this narrative of Japanese Muslim, Tanaka Ippei wrote extensively on Chinese Islam. Even though he continued to be a devout Shinto believer and at times speculated with the idea of harmony between all the great religions of the

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world, Tanaka, himself, explained that conversion to Islam was the only way to understand Muslim culture truly from the inside so that with the help of such committed Muslim Japanese who are aware of Muslim ways, Japan can form permanent bonds with Muslim peoples.33 In 1924, the year after the founding of the Republic of Turkey, Ibrahim again had gone on a religious pilgrimage to Mecca to form political contacts which is when he is thought to have met Haji Nur Tanaka Ippei. The China Muslim expert Tanaka Ippei actually began his career as a Chinese language graduate of Taiwan Gakko which is the Takushoku University of today. After serving in the Russo-Japanese War as an army interpreter in Manchuria, he became an assistant to Professor Hattori Unokichi the famous prewar Sinologist. Later, Tanaka worked among Chinese Muslims and befriended the Chinese religious community leaders, the ahon. By this time, he had already became the close comrade of Wakabayashi Han.34 A student of Takushoku University, Tanaka also appears to have kept up a close correspondence with Takushoku students trained as Asia specialists like Kamoto Toshio, who was an activist stirring up rebellion in Malay’s Halimao during World War II. Like Omar Yamaoka and many others who followed suit, Tanaka is quite typical of this pattern that becomes quite visible in the Showa period of Japanese field experts and agents who adopt a Muslim identity as part of their training, but also justify it intellectually as part of their Asianist self-identity. We understand that Tanaka Ippei now became very close to Wakabayashi and worked very closely with him in this Islam policy agenda resulting in the organization of the series of new Japanese pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia during the thirties. He credits Wakabayashi as the important Japanese expert on Islam who acted now as the mentor of the Japanese Muslim pilgrimages of the 1930s. Wakabayashi even claims that it was he who convinced Tanaka to study Chinese Islam and convert into the faith for the cause. He tells us that after solitary hard work, he was the one who managed to get Tanaka Ippei to embark upon an Islamic pilgrimage back in 1924.35 The photographs in the book reinforce this message linking the PanAsianist Islam policy of the Kokuryukai, Ibrahim, Omar Yamaoka, and finally Tanaka Ippei that provides a Meiji root to the new Showa era pilgrimages which had just taken place, that Wakabayashi is proud to present as his own scheme. In the photographs of the book, the elders, Ibrahim and Toyama, the two Meiji figures of the Asianist and Islamist alliance, are placed in the center of the photo with Japanese and Muslim figures in the surrounding group. In one photographic composition, Ibrahim is the central figure with Toyama and Uchida on his two sides and most importantly the photograph of the famous 1909 Muslim Oath at the bottom of the picture. What is fascinating is that a photograph of the same oath scroll was already published in the 1911 memoir of Ibrahim which had been published in Istanbul in Turkish and had already had a wide reception outside of Japan, almost a generation earlier. But now the same oath is part of a later Japanese Asianist propaganda

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effort during the thirties in order to justify Japan’s new empire building in Islam Asia. However, the signatures in the two versions are slightly different which suggests more than one copy of the oath was signed back in 1909. There are more names in Wakabayashi’s version of the scroll but the writing in Ibrahim’s hand and that of the Japanese calligraphy by the Kokuryukai member Nakano Tsunetaro are the same.36 Even the design of Wakabayashi’s book made use of Ibrahim’s script. The front cover of the book has the title of the book, Kaikyo sekai to nihon, written by Ibrahim in the Arabic script, Alemi Islamiye’de Nippon, also signed below by the man himself as Abdurresid Ibrahim. The title of Wakabayashi’s book, “The World of Islam and Japan” is quite reminiscent of the title of Ibrahim’s original 1910–11 publication in Turkish of “The World of Islam and the Spreading of Islam in Japan.” One suspects that Wakabayashi may have written perhaps a major part of the sections on Islamic principles and history in consultation with Ibrahim. Wakabayashi’s work like so many similar Pan-Asianist publications of the thirties exhibits the strong motive to show that Pan-Asianist politics of the present are shown as an outcome of a rightful past of strong bonds formed in the late Meiji era. The work includes interesting photographs of the political figures in Japan and from the Muslim world which represent the image of a strong alliance between Muslims and Japanese ever since the Meiji period. The old Meiji traditional right-wing’s PanAsianism is represented in the person of the chairman of the Kokuryukai Uchida Ryohei and the éminence grise of Japanese nationalist politics Toyama Mitsuru, the spiritual head of the Kokuryukai and the founder of the Genyosha in the Meiji period. They had been pioneers in the development of the Islam oriented policies. Now they appear as romantic role models that justify the current strategic character of the Islam policy as a ground for training agents. The reader is left with the impression that Japan’s relations with the Islamic world dated back to the victory of the Russo-Japanese War and its present incorporation works as a narrative to historically link the new policies and strategies that accelerate in the aftermath of the Manchurian invasion of 1931. The book therefore reflects the transformation of Meiji Pan-Asianist nationalism into the Asianism of the 1930s, or, better yet how the elements of Meiji Pan-Asianism were incorporated into new Asianist agendas of the day. Wakabayashi justifies the urgency of sponsoring regular Japanese Muslim pilgrimage visits to Saudi Arabia that had first begun with Ibrahim and Omar Yamaoka Kotaro’s 1909 visit, and had been followed by the second pilgrimage of Tanaka Ippei in 1924 which Wakabayashi claims was because of his own supervision. In 1933, Wakabayashi claims that he sent Tanaka Ippei again, this time accompanied by Yamamoto Taro who was active in Kabul, Afganistan, and Nakao Hideo who worked in the Ankara embassy for more than twenty years as an expert authority on the Near East.37 The sudden death of Tanaka after his return in 1934 due to illness also became an occasion for using Ibrahim in his new role as the leader

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of Japan’s Muslims which reveals the strong interest of the Japanese authorities in this new Islam policy image. On the 10th month 20th day, 1934, the funeral of Tanaka Ippei took place in Aoyama ceremonial hall with the chanting of Koranic prayers by Ibrahim. The ceremony was given political significance with the attendance of a large number of government figures and the military. Public relations journals of the period use the photo of Tanaka’s Muslim funeral as part of the propaganda toward Muslim readers in Japanese publications. The personal collection of photographs in Ibrahim’s family in Turkey includes one in which the military high command and ministers of the cabinet were present at this formal funeral ceremony of Haji Nur Tanaka Ippei with wreaths of flowers from the Kokuryukai and other nationalist organizations placed on the podium where the Koran recitation took place.38 The book also reveals the financial source for these new Showa era pilgrimages which take place between 1934 and 1937 to have been a coalition of political and economic interests of the day that saw interest in supporting Islam policy oriented activities. Wakabayashi explains that Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, The Spinning Federation, The Kwantung Army, South Manchurian Railway Co. (Mantetsu) provided the financial support for the three pilgrimages of young Muslim Japanese who adopted Islamic names. Arrayed in Islamic attire, Muhammad Haji Saleh Suzuki Tsuyomi, Muhammad Abdul Muniam Hosokawa, Muhammad Abdul Valis Kori Shozo, and Muhammad Ahmad Yamamoto Taro of Kabul again, the four young Japanese Muslim agents, now were trained in Islamic affairs through their visits to the heartland of the Islamic faith. These figures were later active especially on the South East Asian front during the Japanese invasion of the Dutch Indies with the outbreak of the Pacific War. Tanaka had led the third pilgrimage in 1934 with Wakabayashi who had held discussions with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and received a royal flag which he included in the photographs of the book that was later presented to the emperor. The fourth expedition took place in 1935 with only Kori Shozo and two other persons. The fifth pilgrimage that was undertaken by Suzuki Tsuyomi, Hosokawa, Enomoto Momotaro took place in 1936 which is narrated in detail in their travel journal that is published as an appendix to Wakabayashi’s book.39 Subsequently, a sixth pilgrimage of 1937 was undertaken by, again, Suzuki Tsuyomi and a Manchurian Chang Te-ch’un with the Muslim name of Niputon Raiki who headed the Institute for Islamic Culture in Dalny, and was the imam of Mukden mosque that had been built by the Japanese.40 These pilgrimages also followed the pattern that had been set already with Ibrahim and Omar Yamaoka’s visit in 1909. In most of these pilgrimages, the Japanese Muslims made sure that they were accompanied by some non-Japanese Muslim collaborators and frequently as part of a larger Muslim pilgrimage group from China. Japanese Muslims also made sure that they formally underwent a ceremony of conversion into

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Islam by an important Muslim scholar or local leader such as Ibrahim or Chinese Muslim religious leaders. In 1909 and 1924, on both occasions, Ibrahim had accompanied the Japanese Yamaoka and Tanaka. In the 1930s, Tanaka’s trips were organized actually as part of Chinese Muslim pilgrimage parties leaving from China, or as in the case of Suzuki accompanied by a Manchurian Muslim. These pilgrimages served as an alternative form of international relations through an informal transnational network of Muslims across many different countries that began in the Russo-Japanese War period. Japanese Asianists now committed to a Muslim identity such as Omar Yamaoka had begun this form of networking in 1909 and 1910. Haji Nur Ippei and the others had followed suit. By 1936, on the occasion of the publication of Wakabayashi’s book, a new crop of Muslim Japanese agents was now initiated into the strategy of Japan’s Asianist face toward Islam. Wakabayashi comments on the importance of allying with the newly-awakened Muslims of Asia after the decline of the British empire following World War I, as the only potent means to accomplish Japan’s rightful domination of Asia as the leader of the future. The political argument is reinforced with the economic one; most of the population in South East Asia was important for Japanese exports and the Near East promised to be a new economic market with the departure of Britain from the scene, an argument that must have appealed enough to the big firm interests such as Mitsui or Mitsubishi that had ended up sponsoring these pilgrimages as explained by Wakabayashi. The OSS does record significant rise in Japanese exports to the Near East markets for these years.41 Wakabayashi’s book on the World of Islam and Japan appears to have been meant for public relations in the Japanese audience to find friends for the Islam policy among financial and political circles. Perhaps a second motive was to develop a wider interest among the general public in Japan which disregarded Islamic affairs and culture in its Western oriented modernist vision of the world from the Meiji period. By making liberal references to the Pan-Asianist figures of the Meiji era and the central symbolic role of their good friend Ibrahim, the book surely was meant to gain more supporters from the ascending political and military circles of the day with an Asianist internationalist agenda after the Manchurian invasion. Japanese Pan-Asianist publications of the 1930s, such as the wellknown biography of Kokuryukai members and affiliates who “served the construction of the East Asian order and the fight against Russia,” the Toa senkaku shishi kiden, that were published by the Meiji Pan-Asianist organization Kokuryukai heightened its own role as pioneers for the cause. Such works represented the victory of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War as an Asianist victory against the West that served as the historic background to justify current Japanese expansionism in North Asia, particularly in Manchuria as an extension of the ambivalent Asianist revolutionary character of Meiji Pan-Asianism which had exhibited a genuine sense of soli-

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darity to Asian emancipation agendas and anti-imperialism against the Western empires of Asia such as Romanov Russia.42 Much of this 1930s Pan-Asianist narrative in the publications of the day presented the Meiji experience with Pan-Asianism as a series of success stories that aided Asian emancipation. The Pan-Asianists proudly verbalized their contribution to the Chinese Nationalist Revolution of Sun Yat Sen, support for the Korean revolutionaries, the Philippino independence movement, or Mongolian and Manchurian separatism. Japanese Pan-Asianist friendship with important Asian cultural figures, such as Tagore of India or Ibrahim of the Islamic world, illustrated this Asianist international network. According to this narrative, the Japanese shishi or loyalist patriots who were responsible for the Meiji Restoration had also worked for Asian Revolution. These works reflected the enigmatic character of Meiji Pan-Asianism that expressed a militant opposition to Western imperialist hegemony in Asia with strong irredentist imperialism which envisioned Japan as the savior of Asia. Pan-Asianist publications of the Kokuryukai took credit for having directly contributed to the dramatic victory of Japan over tsarist Russia in the RussoJapanese War as the great accomplishement of such Pan-Asianist aims.43 Noteworthy is the fact that Wakabayashi’s book was published by Dainichi sha that was a relatively new 1930s right-wing association devoted to the ideals of Toyama Shigeki, reflecting this transition from the romantic nationalist Asianism of the Meiji era to the right-wing politics of the Showa period. The book thus represents the incorporation of Meiji Pan-Asianism and the memory of the Russo-Japanese War as its honorable victory as historical elements that were used by new major actors who pursued the expansionist agendas of the Showa era which caused Japan’s collision with the Western world. Once, in their role as activists of Meiji Pan-Asianism, Uchida and Toyama had helped Asian revolutionaries such as Sun Yat Sen and had supported anti-imperialist Muslim activists such as Ibrahim, but by the thirties the Kokuryukai elders like Toyama or fellow travelers like Ibrahim were more symbolic in importance than as decision makers, which was in the hands of the new military and civilian figures. Still, the Meiji Pan-Asianist figures had transmitted important networks, contacts, and patterns of overseas transnational networking and intelligence gathering as in the form of pilgrimages from the Meiji era to the service of the present operations of the thirties in the hands of new political and military actors who were intent on an Asianist vision of internationalism that aimed at a new Japanese Asian empire in conflict against the West.44 To be sure, Japanese Pan-Asianist arguments for Japan’s rightful place as the leader of Asian emancipation and the unification of all under the eight corners of the world were not new. But, during the thirties, these arguments became justifications for Japanese military operations in wars that broke out from the Manchurian Invasion through the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. The Russo-Japanese War had not broken out because of these Asianist ideals, but the political

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vestiges of its impact in the Islamic world were now seen as the instrument for Japan’s governance of Asia. Hatsuse Ryuhei argues that Uchida Ryohei represents the Meiji current of the traditional right and his life span of 1874–1937 covers the transformation and links to the emergence of Asianism and Japanese political currents in what the author defines as the 1930s Japanese form of fascism as a modernist innovative rightist thought and activity.45 In national politics, after Taisho democracy in the 1920s, Toyama, Uchida and their followers had became militants against democratic and leftist movements and strong advocates of anti-Communism. By 1931, Uchida formed Dai Nihon Seisanto (Greater Japan Production Party) as a populist organization which the author sees to be comparable to fascist organizations. However, he notes that these figures who saw themselves as Meiji type patriotic loyalist activists devoted to the Emperor, represented the peculiar type of rightist thought that carried the character of the Meiji romantic visionary views of Asia.46 It is in this Meiji legacy of Pan-Asianism that, together with his younger brother Kyuman, Wakabayashi claims to have played a considerable personal part in incorporating into the 1930s practice of Islam policy, or, kaikyo seisaku for the Japanese governing authorities.47 Ibrahim’s activities in Meiji Japan and in his return voyage to Istanbul accompanying Omar Yamaoka in this first Japanese Muslim pilgrimage to Arabia were efforts at forming bonds between Japanese Pan-Asianism and Muslim agendas of nationalism and Pan Islamic awakening on a transnational common platform of anti-imperialism against Western hegemonic empires, namely Romanov Russia, the British empire, and the Dutch. By the 1930s, new agendas of anti-Communism, Japanese expansion in North Asia, and take over of the former colonies of the Western empires became the strategic platform of this Japanese-Muslim collaboration. In hindsight, Ibrahim and Omar’s interaction in 1909 became the guidelines and the seed for the training of Japanese agents to be sent to Muslim countries under Muslim identity, a tactic that now had military, bureaucratic, and business support in the form of the numerous pilgrimages that were financed by these interests. Wakabayashi’s book demonstrates how the legacy of the Russo-Japanese War, in the form of contacts and networks, was put to use for the development of this 1930s policy of training Japanese Muslim agents who served in active duty in the operations of World War II. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5

Worringer, 2004: 207–230; Nakamura, 1986: 47–57. Esenbel, 2004: 1140–1170. OSS No. 890.3: 2–6; Shimizu, 1993. Esenbel, 2004: 1141. Okawa, 1943: in passim.

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

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Wakabayashi, 1937: 1–10. Wakabayashi, 1937: 1–5. Esenbel, 2004: 1156 note 48 See debate in Diet. Okawa, 1943: 1–13 and introduction; Aydin, 2002: 180–198. Wakabayashi, 1937: 1–10 for the recollection of the history of Islam policy or kaikyo seisaku in Japan; 2–38 for the introduction to the main principles of the Islamic faith and the history of Islam; 39–41 Islam in the Near East and China; 53–86 current trends in the Islamic world before and after World War I and the main nationalist leaders of Muslim countries; 89–120 special emphasis on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and King Ibn Saud; 121–197 anectodal discussions of Arab views, Japanese economic relations with the Muslim world and the daily account of the pilgrimage of Japanese Muslim pilgrims in 1936. Kokuryukai, 1936, II: 777; Office of Strategic Services Research and Analysis Branch R&A China No. 890.1, May 15, 1944: 91. Kokuryukai, 1936, II: 777; OSS 890.1: 91. Kokuryukai, 1936, II: 777. OSS 890.1: 91. OSS 890.1:appendix. Toa senkaku: 777. OSS 890.3:1. Wakabayashi, 1937 : 1–2; OSS 890.1: 91. Wakabayashi, 1937: 2–3. Wakabayashi, 1937: 3. Wakabayashi,1937: 4. Esenbel, 2004: 1148. Esenbel, 2004: 1149. Worringer, 2004: 225 note 25. Ibrahim, 1910–1911: 354–64, 359, 366–67, 392–94, 401, 413, 427; Esenbel, 2004: 1152. Wakabayashi, 1937: 9. Esenbel, 2004: 1160. Esenbel, 2002: 194–200; Gaiko shiryokan, 1937: 49. Wakabayashi, 1937: 9. Wakabayashi, 1937: 2. Esenbel, 2004: 1159. Takushoku Daigaku, 2002: 355, 439. Takushoku Daigaku, 2002: 414. Wakabayashi, 1937: 6–7; Takushoku Daigaku, 2002: 354–59. Wakabayashi, 1937: 2–3. Esenbel, 2004: 1152–54. Wakabayashi, 1937: 1–10. See Muge Isker Ozbalkan Photograph collection. Wakabayashi, 1937: 189–197. OSS 890.1:139. Wakabayashi, 1937: 114–119; Shimizu, 1993. Norman, 1944: 261–84; Sun Ge, 2000: 15–17. Sun Ge, 2000: 15–17, 20–21, 27.

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Fuess, 1998: in passim; Iriye, 1981: in passim; Najita and Harootunian, 1995: 771–775; Morley,1983: in passim; Shillony, 1981b: 1–16. Hatsuse, 1980: 2–3. Hatsuse, 1980: 2–3. Esenbel, 2004: 1145.

18

Soldiers’ Unrest Behind the Front after the End of the War JAN KUSBER

T

he Russo-Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution interacted closely with one another. The war placed a strain on economic resources, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were mobilized in the various parts of the multiethnic empire and conveyed to the theater of war via the Trans-Siberian Railway. In the great land battles of Liaoyang and Mukden, the Russian troops were unable to achieve any victory against their tactically and technically superior enemy; the unsuccessful defense of Port Arthur, the defeat of the Baltic Fleet in the Straits of Tsushima let the course of the war become a complete disaster.1 This course of events, in turn, heated up the domestic political climate in Russia towards the end of 1904. Already during the banquet campaign, the Liberals in the zemstvo attributed the constant defeats to the political system they perceived as being outdated – the tsar’s government.2 When this Liberal opposition with its political demands for a parliament and free elections with an equal and secret ballot united with the workers’ social protest, leading to Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg, Tsar Nicholas’s regime came under political pressure from home and abroad.3 A sequence of critical situations followed, reaching a climax from October to December, 1905, when the war had already been ended by the lenient Treaty of Portsmouth.4 This revolutionary situation at the end of 1905, which almost deprived the tsar of his throne, but nevertheless did not succeed in doing so, did not only take place in St. Petersburg, but also in the wide hinterland of the front, in Siberia and in Northeast Asia. In this chapter, this hinterland is to be examined more closely, so to speak as a detail. It is of particular interest, therefore, because the soldiers, who came from the theater of war, or who had been readied for a war that was already over, were the main actors. How was it possible for such

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extensive mutinies to come about in fall 1905? This question is also of a more general interest: looking at the Russo-Japanese War, we can say that the history of the mobilization for war is by far better analyzed, than the history of the demobilization of the Russian troops, although it seems to me that the way this demobilization happened is one of the key causes of the final outcome of the Russian revolution of 1905–06. In St. Petersburg, in view of the difficulties directly on the doorstep, the government was little inclined to take account of complaints about an incipient state of ferment in Siberia and in the remote Amur region. References by the Governor General Kholshchevnikov were answered by the Ministry of the Interior with circulars which offered no help, not even instructions on how to act. Yet, from the local governor’s perspective, there was justified reason for concern: apart from the fact that Siberia and Northeast Asia were the classic destinations for convicts and political exiles, the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway after 1890 had led to a growth in the number of workers. At each of the great railway stations of Tomsk, Omsk, and Chita, several thousand railway workers were stationed in auxiliary units. They offered fertile ground for agitation by the local organizations of the Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries around the turn of the century. In the first year of the war, Krasnoyarsk developed into a stronghold of the Social Democrats, while in Chita the Social Revolutionaries were predominant.5 After Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg, strikes took place along the line, especially in February, May, and August of 1905. The revolutionary parties’ local cells intensified their agitation among the reservists who were being transported to the theater of war. In the hinterland of the war, the supply conditions drove the local population, the railwaymen, who were prepared to strike, and also the reservists, into the arms of the revolutionaries. Already in April, 1905, basic foods were rationed in Blagoveshchensk. In view of the city overpopulated with civil refugees from Harbin, the Governor decided to requisition the stocks of grain held by the peasants in the surrounding countryside. In June, there was no more meat available in Chita, and, in mid-November, the commanderin-chief, General Nikolai Linievich, considered himself unable to supply the troops stationed in northern Manchuria with bread.6 In view of this development, both the civil and the military administrations east of the Urals showed themselves as not being up to the task. In response to the repeated requests by the Governor General, Kholshchevnikov, the Deputy Minister of the Interior, D.F. Trepov, who as Governor General of St. Petersburg enjoyed the tsar’s high regard, informed him on September 3, 1905, that, in the event of disturbances, he should call in the inactive and thus available units of the Manchurian Army to suppress any unrest.7 Even after the October Manifesto, that gave the tsarist realm the prospect of civic liberties and a parliament,8 nothing changed in these instructions: on October 23 and 27, 1905, Trepov once again urged Kholshchevnikov to suppress unrest by heavy force, but at the same time to have regard for state property. In view of

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the overall political situation, Trepov’s dismissal and the take over of the Ministry of the Interior by Pyotr N. Durnovo failed to bring any fundamental change in the St. Petersburg directives, above all no concrete help. In Northeast Asia, just as in European Russia, at the turn of the month from October to November, things were driven on by events. Through the telegraph and rail strikes, links with the Russian capital had been interrupted since October 14, 1905.9 Plans for a quick return of parts of the Manchurian Army had thus been thwarted. Commands and directives to the commander-in-chief, Nikoali Linievich, and the governors only made their way either via Shanghai, or even Tokyo, to Harbin and ultimately to Chita.10 In a telegram from the end of October, although it is unclear whether Kholshchevnikov ever actually received it, the Minister of the Interior, Durnovo, recommended the helpless Governor General to continue energetically with the suppression of disturbances “on the basis of the Manifesto of October 17, 1905, in the spirit of a sensibly understood liberty.”11 In December, the instructions were no longer dressed up with pseudo-reformatory phrases. Durnovo demanded tough, uncompromising and decisive action, knowing full well what the position was with the local administration’s strained authority. The Governor General of the Trans-Amurian territory was overtaxed in view of the multitude of circulars and administrative instructions and the little concrete help forthcoming. In this, he saw himself in the same situation as the commanders of the Manchurian armies, whose units had made themselves, so to speak, independent with the “days of liberty” in October, 1905, and from their holding positions in Manchuria pushed towards the Amur governments and Siberia, homewards. Already on October 21, 1905, the commander of the hinterland, General Nadarov, had sent a request to the Governor General, Kholshchevnikov, to come to the aid of the governor in Irkutsk, as the railway and telegraph links with the east Siberian capital were interrupted. Nadarov stated simply that the protection of the Trans-Siberian railway and its stations from Chita to Irkutsk was the responsibility of the 13th Army Corps under General Pleve.12 Kholshchevnikov not only saw his administrative district, with its capital Chita, for the most part stripped of troops in this way, he had, for his part, already sent a call for help to Nadarov on October 13, 1905, with a request for reinforcements, as the civilians as well as the troops were in a state of unrest. Already on the day on which Nadarov’s telegram arrived, the commander of the 3rd Reserve Battalion stationed in Chita, Colonel Doryan, reported that the other ranks and non-commissioned officers wanted to refuse duty, if they were not given a definite time when they would be able to return home to their families. He requested that his unit be brought up to strength with regular troops from the home base in Baranovichi. On the other hand, on December 14, 1905, Doryan warned resignedly against bringing the unit up to strength with troops from whatever source as his soldiers were in a revolutionary mood anyway, so it could only be a matter of keeping other soldiers away from their propaganda.13

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In fact, in November and December, 1905, the entire 13th Army Corps mutinied. This corps, under the Peace of Portsmouth, had actually been intended by the Minister of War, Rediger, for the suppression of unrest in the European part of the empire.14 The commanders of two battalions of the 144th Kashirskii Regiment reported to the commander, General Pleve, that the other ranks already had great concern about their families’ material position in November, were demanding an immediate return home, but above all distrusted their superiors. Thus, they believed in a transport capacity of ten pairs of trains per day on the Trans-Siberian railway, and not in the four trains stated by their superiors. The disintegration of the power of the civilian as well as the military holders of state authority was manifest. Countermeasures, such as General Nadarov’s decrees that discipline was to be continually maintained, even after the publication of the initially unofficially distributed October Manifesto, and that the ban on attending political gatherings remained in force unchanged,15 illustrate this powerlessness, just like the attempts by the harbor and fortress commandants of Vladivostok to prevent publication from the outset. The result was a mutiny among the approximately 75,000 soldiers and sailors in the port city on October 30–31, 1905. Like everywhere else, here too the reservists raised the demand to be allowed to return home immediately. Reserve other ranks and officers “linked” their demands with brutish pogroms against the Chinese traders in the bazaars of Vladivostok. The twelve battalions of the 8th Siberian Reserve Infantry Division brought up during the night from October 30 to 31, 1905, went over in part to the mutiny and participated in the outrages. Contrary to St. Petersburg’s plans to be able to bring back the units in tactical formation along the railway in order to preserve their operational capability, the local commanders had to give way, not only in Vladivostok.16 On November 3, 1905, the Commander-in-Chief Nikolai Linievich announced that the reservists would be allowed to travel home, staggered according to their conscription dates – under Linievich’s plans initially by the sea route via Vladivostok, as the rail route was no longer available. The disturbances in Vladivostok that had broken out after the publication of the October Manifesto – especially among the units that were involved with supervising the embarkation and debarkation of Russian prisoners-of-war from Japan17 – only diminished temporarily at the beginning of December when the commandant of the fortress, General Kazbek, endeavored to restore order with a militia in which representatives of the revolutionary parties also found their place.18 After January 2, 1906, a mutiny by the 2nd Fortress Artillery Regiments and the 32nd East Siberian Infantry Regiment was joined by warships of the decimated Pacific Fleet, the destroyers Besposhchadnyi and Bodryi, the cruisers Rossiia, Terek, Zhemchug and others. Finally, it threatened to engulf the whole 8th Siberian Reserve Infantry Division which lay in the immediate vicinity of the city. This mutiny was quite comparable with those on the Potemkin and in Kronstadt and, through the number of soldiers involved, of very much

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greater extent than the mutinies in other part units of the Manchurian Army, if one takes a united resistance action as the decisive criterion.19 Finally, the commander-in-chief Linievich sent cavalry commander, Lieutenant General Pavel Mishchenko, with a small detachment to Vladivostok.20 The latter succeeded, without greater difficulties, in suppressing the disturbances that were abating anyway. General Linievich’s command from the beginning of November about the transport back by railway towards the west had the effect that the reservists stormed the trains in order to be the first in each case on their way home. In these days in November, Harbin was the scene of Khuliganstvo by the reservists marauding through the city. What mattered for the general, who was called the “old, grey wolf of Manchuria” by his soldiers on account of his common touch, was that the trains reached European Russia, despite the railway strike.21 In order to achieve this objective, from Harbin, Linievich changed the original plans for the transport of the troops. The remainder of the 13th Army Corps remained on the spot; instead, on account of their greater geographical closeness, the reservists of the 4th Siberian Corps were demobilized, but those soldiers in regular service were sent along the railway towards the West in order to regain the, for the most part, lost control in Chita and Krasnoyarsk. At the same time, Linievich negotiated with revolutionaries and representatives of the striking railwaymen, in order to ensure a speedy transport by railway, as the transport capacities by the sea routes were insufficient and, in addition, Vladivostok was no less unsettled than the larger railway stations in the interior of the country. These negotiations brought Linievich much criticism among the generals of the Manchurian armies and from the St. Petersburg administration,22 but did lead to the result that the railwaymen did dispatch the trains with reservists and, in the opposite direction, with supplies, thus alleviating the impending starvation at the overpopulated railway stations along the line.23 The railway workers did this in December in their well-understood own interest.24 The mutinying reservists were, namely, by no means revolutionary in mood, and not prepared to fraternize with the workers, as Premier Witte in distant St. Petersburg thought.25 For this reason, he gave up the Manchurian troops for lost as a means of combating the revolution, overlooking the fact that the reservists were only interested in rapid transport home. Thus, on December 6, 1905, even units of the Amur Cossacks in the Yekaterino-Nikolskii okruh initially demanded better food supplies and subsequently immediate demobilization.26 Several times, the officers suggested to the reservists that it was the striking workers who were preventing their departure. The soldiers believed this and, in these cases, turned against the revolutionary strikers, without listening to their appeals for solidarity. Thus the railwaymen organized as smooth a departure as possible. In Harbin, the outrages in the military ended with the reservists’ departure.27 There were acts of violence again and again along the line when the reservists poured out of the unheated

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trucks in order to get themselves something warm to eat with temperatures down to –30°C. On the other side of the Urals, at the stations, the reservists were integrated into newly assembled transports by regular troops and sent on their way home. The units of the 13th Army Corps and a few of the 4th Siberian Army Corps initially remained behind, and were consequently susceptible for a mutiny that coincided in time with the armed uprisings in Krasnoyarsk and Chita. In Krasnoyarsk, the Social Democrats, who had controlled the city since the end of October, succeeded in gaining the support of the 2nd Railwaymen’s Battalion which, with respect to its intended tasks, did not have any fundamentally different duties than the striking workers. A workers’ and soldiers’ soviet was founded, that was dominated by different group interests, in which, however, there was already talk of a “Republic of Krasnoyarsk,” and which wanted to conduct regional, free elections.28 This episode came to an end when the loyal troops of the 4th Siberian Corps sent out by Linievich surrounded the huts of the insurgent railwaymen’s battalion on December 27, 1905, whereupon the soldiers barricaded themselves with the revolutionaries, but had to capitulate on January 1, 1906.29 In Chita, events turned out to be even more turbulent. Governor General Kholshchevnikov, who had been complaining about conditions at this railway junction throughout the whole of 1905, was not in a position to bring under control the various regiments that had gone into open mutiny after November 15, 1905.30 The insurrection among the troops began with the mutiny among the soldiers of the 3rd Railwaymen’s Reserve Battalion that spread to the 141st Mozhaiskii and the 144th Kashirski Regiments of the 13th Army Corps and finally engulfed the whole of the Chita garrison at the beginning of December. The governor general did not go on the offensive with the several hundred soldiers who had remained loyal as he feared the mutinying soldiers and the Social Democratic revolutionaries, who had formed a soviet, and he wanted to avoid any shedding of blood. He was also unable to prevent the revolutionaries and soldiers from together plundering the weapon transports which had been sent by train from Vladivostok to Kronstadt. Only in the initial phase of the events in Chita did soldiers hand over weapons to their revolutionary partners in arms.31 The city was so completely in the hand of the revolutionaries and soldiers that they succeeded in simply putting seven generals and forty officers onto a train and letting them be transported away. Governor General Kholshchevnikov, who had remained in Chita, endeavored to preserve the state’s authority, at least on the surface, co-operated with the soviet, ratified some of its resolutions and gave instructions to hand over the post and telegraph offices to the revolutionaries.32 Co-operation between the workers and soldiers did not by any means go off smoothly here either, and there were strained relations time and again between the tired veterans of the war, who simply wanted to travel home, and the “agitators” from the Social Democrats and the other representatives in the

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soviet. Chita remained the only place in which the loyal units of the 4th Siberian Corps, on Linievich’s order, had still not restored order when the great punitive expeditions were being conducted in Siberia and Northeast Asia at the behest of Witte and the tsar. The military administration in St. Petersburg and Premier Witte insinuated that the commander-in-chief had vacillated in his endeavors to enforce tsarist authority on the other side of the Urals again. Therefore, on December 25, 1905, Linievich received the order to let General Pavel Rennenkampf, one of the few high officers whose reputation had not suffered in the war against Japan, restore order again with loyal troops. It took until January 6, 1906, by which time Rennenkampf in Harbin had seized two trains with three well-armed, loyal companies, two cannons, and two machine guns, and set off with the 5th East Siberian Infantry Division marching ahead of him. Whereas Rennenkampf had been able to select his troops from the entire Manchurian Army, General Baron MellerZakomelskii, who had been commissioned with a parallel operation starting out from Moscow, had a more difficult assignment before him.33 He set out with an elite unit of just under 200 men, including 130 Foot Guards, on January 1, 1906, and crossed the Urals four days later. MellerZakomelskii made extremely quick headway, as the 5th and 6th Infantry Divisions of the 4th Army Corps had for the most part already restored order again in Krasnoyarsk, and previously done so in Irkutsk.34 Nevertheless, his men went out from the trains, and acted on his orders, with extreme brutality against any trouble spots still existing. The press and his colleagues among the generals were agreed on his inclination for brutality. Rennenkampf with his incomparably larger body of men behaved more cautiously on the way to Chita. Both corps arrived before Chita at almost the same time. In view of the approaching superior force, the revolutionaries gave up their cause for lost and disappeared. The governor general had to negotiate with Rennenkampf who consented to a surrender of the city after fulfillment of the ultimatum he had set. Meller-Zakomelskii, who had not initially taken up any contact with Rennenkampf, was indignant about the latter’s indulgent action, for he had wanted to set a warning example to the mutinying soldiers, but above all to the revolutionaries.35 After the suppression of the mutinies in Vladivostok, Krasnoyarsk, and Chita, transport of the reservists by the land and sea routes proceeded in an orderly manner. In some cases it was even ordered that the reservists be integrated into their units again in order to be able to return the latter to their mobilization points, or their home garrisons ready for action. The insurrection in the army was thus overcome in the hinterland of the former combat area, too. It had already been on the decline before Rennenkampf and Meller-Zakomelskii carried out their spectacular punitive expeditions. The punitive expeditions had caused more of a stir than befitted their actual importance. Meller-Zakomelskii’s telegrams to the tsar, Witte, the minister of war, Rediger, and others, which were at the same time also printed in the national newspapers, turned the punitive

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expedition into a cruel propaganda undertaking, first of all in its own right, but then also in the sense of a resolute reaction by the autocracy, and absolutely not in the sense of the promises in the October Manifesto. Meller-Zakomelskii’s and Rennenkampf’s course of action contributed less to the pacification of the reservists, rather it affected the striking railwaymen, of whom Meller-Zakomelskii sought to make a warning example with summary executions by firing squad, but also arrests and subsequent trials. The semi-professional revolutionaries of the radical parties, the Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries, were hardly to be apprehended in this manner.36 After the mutinies in European Russia had died down at the end of 1905, the abatement of the unrest in the military at the periphery of the realm – in Trans-Caucasia and to the east of the Urals – gave the Witte government and the tsar a breathing space in which the preparation of the elections to the Duma was waiting to be dealt with as a consequence of the October Manifesto.37 The mutinies in Siberia and Northeast Asia, that had been so significant in number, had thus also not been able to prove to be of decisive importance for the overthrow of tsarism because they took place on the periphery of the realm, and always with a delay in time compared with the events at the center of power. Thus, ultimately, the soldier’s attempt to instrumentalize the revolutionaries did not bring about anything decisive. In the armed forces, after their deployment against the enemy Japan, their deployment against the “internal enemy,” thus against the rebelling peasants and the striking workers, and finally the phase of the mutinies in fall and winter 1905–06, there came a phase of superficial pacification. The massive demobilization stood, so to speak, at the end of the continuous deployment of the Russian military machine from February, 1904, until February, 1906.38 Various factors had contributed to the fact that, despite their extent, the mutinies did not ultimately contribute to the downfall of the autocracy. The mutinying soldiers did not allow themselves to be instrumentalized by the revolutionary agitators for their purposes, as the events in Krasnoyarsk, for instance, showed. The concerns of the individual party committees were alien to them. Not only were they inconsistent with their environment and their understanding of the world, but also, at the end of 1905, with their concrete need – their demobilization and return home. This wish was shared equally by the reservists, who had fought in the theater of war, and the soldiers, who had to serve on the periphery of the realm. The old structures of authority in the army and navy were only covered over during the fall and winter months in 1905 and 1906, but were in principle still so alive that the actions of even small, loyal units, with their officers acting in an authoritarian manner, sufficed in the short term to reveal these structures and to activate their functional mechanism again. The soldiers took their place within the framework of the army again, were satisfied with demobilization or even participated excessively in the punitive expeditions, as their cruel actions in the Baltic

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illustrate in a drastic manner.39 But, as the development in the Duma period of the tsarist regime and the revolution of 1917 show, the soldiers kept their experience gained from war and revolutionary upheaval in mind.40 Demobilization in the hinterland 1905–06 of the front initiated a process for learning to the soldiers and for the peasants, who had to accommodate to civil life again.41 The results of this process can be seen in various aspects of everyday life and political acting on a local level after 1905. There can be no doubt that there was a difference in the number of people, who were on different levels involved in the RussoJapanese War on the one hand and World War I on the other.42 But the experience of war and revolution in 1904–06 was still alive.43 NOTES 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19

20

21

For an overview with further literature see Kusber, 1994. A recent study with a special emphasis on the naval action is Pleshakov, 2002. For the situation at the end of 1904 illustrated, see Galai, 1965; Shacillo, 1982. For the self-perception of the autocracy during the war, see Kusber, 2005; Esthus, 1981. With a special stress in matching the most revolutionary situations during 1905: Verner, 1990; Ganelin, 1991. Esthus, 1988. Borzunov, 1961: 147–162; Striuchenko, 1982: 106–117. Stankevich, 1930: 15–19. Pereverzev, 1907: 134–135. The October Manifesto is to be seen as the key document for the history of tsarism between 1905 and 1917. One may say that the made promises of October were contested not only in 1905 and 1906 but during the whole Duma-period. Verner, 1990: 228–232; Ganelin, 1991: 200–234; Doctorow, 1975: 123–125; Szeftel, 1968: 461–493. Nimander, 1908: 80; Charbinskii listok, No. 142; November 18, 1905: 3. Maksakov, 1932: 95. Quoted in Pereverzev, 1907: 136. Pereverzev, 1907: 137–138. Doryan’s Rapports are quoted in Pereverzev, 1907: 138–139. Bushnell, 1985a: 77. Charbinskii listok, No. 126, November 1, 1905: 3; Charbinskii listok, No. 126, November 2, 1905: 3. Pravo No. 43, November 8, 1905, 3557–3558. For their influence on the mutineers Silin, 1976: 128; in detail, See AVRP, f. 150, op. 493, d. 352.369. Nimander, 1908: 166–170; Ossendowski, 1925: 207–208. Nepomniashchii, 1956, 104–111; Vremennyi voenno-morskoi sud Vladivostokskogo porta, 1906: 13–19; Gazeta, 1955: 22. For the biography of this after the war still quite popular general: Apushkin, 1908: 3–6. Barnes Steveni, 1914: 80; Ossendowski 1925: 169–173, 203–205 In his memoirs the adventurer Ferdinand Ossendowski, later on president of a so called “Far

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25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35 36

37 38

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Eastern Republic,” took pride in his good relations to Linievich. For the railway strikes in general, see Reichmann, 1987, 1988. His letter directed to Nicholas II. December 15, 1905, in which Linievich claimed that he did his best to master the situation, is published in Pokrovskii, 1925: 175–179; see also his diary of this period in ibid. and in Vyshniakov, 1925: 112, 114, 118. See the reflections in the papers of Minister of War, A.F. Rediger, in RGVIA, op. 1, t. 4, l. 79; ibid., t. 5, l. 5. See a resolution of Workers in Chita from January 1906, who pointed out their willingness, to bring the reservists home, but complained about the lack of rolling stock, printed in Maksakov, 1932: 211. Vitte, 1960: 13f, 142f. Recent studies on his role in the revolution of 1905: Korelin and Stepanova, 1998; Ananich and Ganelin, 1999. Simonova, 1955b: 111f. Nimander, 1908: 190–193. Iakovlev, 1952: 44f. Martov et. al., 1910: 168–174; Urodkov, 1956: 13–42. Simonova, 1955a: 82 f. RGIA, f. 1276; op. 1, d. 83, l. 2–3. Maksakov, 1932: 134f, 222, 230. For handing over the communication centres Kholshevnikov was sentenced later in the year 1906. Sibirskaia ekspediciia, 1917: 135–137; Maksakov, 1932: 186f; a higher number of participants – without mentioning sources can be found in Girchenko, 1949: 755. Martov et. al., 1910: 171–178; Poleshchuk, 1955: 317–323. Maksakov, 1932: 140, 217 f. The lists of the mutineers and revolutionaries caught in Maksakov, 1932: 115–120, 250–252; about the trials is reported in Polianskii, 1958: 125–132. Ascher, 1988. For the whole period see Perrins, 1979; Fuller, 1985; Bushnell, 1985b; Kusber, 1997. In the Baltic, the punitive expeditions started slightly later and were in part carried out by the same officers and soldiers, who took part in Northeast Asia and Siberia. See Kusber, 1997: 80–89. See for the whole period the monumental work of Figes, 1998. An excellent recent study on the peasants is Burbank 2004. For the even stronger development in the local urban space see Hildermeier, 2003. For World War I, see Gatrell, 1999; Lohr, 2001. For the echoe of 1905 in 1917 among the soldiers see Kusber, 2002; 248–255.

19

Imperial Russian War Planning for the Eurasian Space and the Impact of the War ALEX MARSHALL

T

he Russo-Japanese War fundamentally altered both the scope and intent of Russian war planning in the Eurasian continent, creating both internal tensions as well as concrete reforms that were eventually to fundamentally affect the manner in which the Russian army also performed in 1914. Before 1904, the Russian General Staff had accurately foreseen conflict in Northeast Asia, but due to a complex mix of personal, administrative, and financial reasons, both the General Staff and the armed forces as a whole were still largely unprepared for war with Japan when fighting actually began. Part of the reason for this lack of readiness lay in the deep legacy of strategic thinking from the nineteenth century, a body of thought which since at least the early 1870s had strictly guided where the majority of strategic planning time and material resources were devoted by Russia within the Eurasian space. The Russian commanders who went to war in 1904 were to a large degree inevitably the intellectual, spiritual, and doctrinal descendants of the generation who had earlier lived through and helped direct Russia’s “Great Reforms” in the 1860s. This previous generation had helped in organizational terms to create tsarist Russia’s first truly conscript army, whilst in doctrinal terms they had also laid the basis for modern Russian military intelligence, through the inculcation of whole generations of tsarist General Staff officers in the then relatively new academic discipline of “military statistics.” Russian war planning from at least the 1840s onwards gradually came to be shaped by a strategic assessment of the military capabilities of neighboring states, incorporating careful analysis of their physical geography, culture, technological level, demographic potential, and political-societal structure. Over time, this form of

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analysis created a series of set criteria, or potential-threat indicators, against which states of any type could be measured and assessed. Knowledge of such factors assisted force structuring, war planning, and deployment proposals, as well as Russian internal reform; conscription within Russia itself was only conceivable within a context in which the natural physical and human resources of the empire were themselves becoming an increasingly better-known quantity to the decision-makers in St. Petersburg. It was no coincidence, therefore, that the staff officers engaged on such intelligence-gathering activities were also frequently members of the Russian Imperial Geographical Society, nor that their extensive mapping activities frequently also facilitated civilian infrastructural and governmental projects within the borders of the empire itself. The Corps of Military Topographers formed in 1822, in particular, became an invaluable arm of the Russian state, and the later construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway (a vital part of the Trans-Siberian line before 1904) across Northern Manchuria would have been simply inconceivable without their extensive preliminary mapping and surveying efforts.1 Over time, these diverse and vibrant activities in the various fields of espionage, map-making, ethnography, and anthropology facilitated the creation of a distinct “world-view” amongst key St. Petersburg decisionmakers which then permitted the formulation of long-term grand strategic thinking for the Russian Empire. The geopolitical views of Russia’s most brilliant reform-minded War Minister, Dmitrii Miliutin (1816–1912; War Minister between 1861–81), and his deputy and close assistant, General Nikolai Obruchev (1830–1904; Chief of the Main Staff 1881–97) meant in practice that during the latter part of the nineteenth century by far the greatest strategic attention was devoted to the Western frontier and the critical border region with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Threat-analysis studies conducted by both Miliutin and Obruchev in the 1860s and 1870s demonstrated that the greatest strategic danger to Russian state interests came from this direction, and these assessments in turn dictated the prolonged and expensive reform of Russia’s western military theaters. The enormous Polish salient in particular represented a region of critical strategic vulnerability, and during the 1880s a whole series of new measures was undertaken to militarily strengthen this theater, including the construction of a new rail network and the building up of a series of elaborate and expensive new artillery fortifications. By contrast, threats from the direction of Central Asia or Northeast Asia represented a strategic distraction compared to the political menace presented by Germany and Austria-Hungary, and war scares from across this period in Asia – the Eastern Crisis of 1878, or the Penjdeh Incident of 1885 – produced only slim contingency schedules, with the promise of reinforcement by one or at most two army corps from European Russia. Characteristic of official St. Petersburg’s more general disinterest in Asian affairs was the subsequently scathingly reported at second-hand warning

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from Foreign Minister Gorchakov to General Kaufman, the governorgeneral of Central Asia, that in pacifying the khanate of Khiva in 1873, he should take care not to pass through or disturb Chinese Kashgaria.2 Though outwardly shocking, (Khiva and Kashgaria were in reality separated by several hundred miles of Bukharan territory) geographical ignorance on this scale within the imperial metropole was not entirely uncommon amongst most colonial empires of the period. Such ignorance however was also noted and increasingly lamented by a small core of Russian diplomatic and military personnel who both served in and studied Asia during this period. During the late nineteenth century, tsarist Russia, as part of its general imperial endeavor to acquire strategic knowledge, developed and deployed a number of noted experts on Asian political, social, economic, and military affairs, amongst them the engineer-diplomat Pavel M. Lessar, the Kashgar consul-general Nikolai F. Petrovskii, and military men like the famous explorer Nikolai Przheval’skii, the student of Afghanistan L.N. Sobolev, the military agent to China D.V. Putiata, the traveler and General Staff officer Mikhail Veniukov, and the future War Minister Aleksei Kuropatkin. Both the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian General Staff deployed such personnel at the institutional level within specially formed “Asiatic Departments” – bureaucratic entities designed specifically to study and monitor the affairs of these regions. Nonetheless, not until the ascent of Kuropatkin to the post of Russian War Minister in 1898 did tsarist Russia employ an individual in the very highest corridors of power who enjoyed some claim to be a true expert on political and military affairs east of the Caspian. Though he served under Obruchev in the 1880s helping to form European war plans, Kuropatkin had first attracted attention and reward during his early staff career from a trip to French-occupied Algeria in 1874, made in order to write a comparative and instructional study for the Russian administration of Turkestan, and from his intelligence work in scouting and mapping Kashgaria in 1876. Ultimately however, Kuropatkin’s extensive experience in the Turkestan military district, where he rose up through the ranks from a humble soldier to the post of local governor-general in Trans-Caspia, prepared him poorly for grasping the full scope of Russia’s Asian interests, just as War Minister Miliutin’s earlier extensive experience in (and strong life-long affection for) the Caucasus did not necessarily prepare him for Russia’s later entanglements in Northeast Asia and Central Asia. During his own brief term as head of the Asiatic Department of the General Staff in 1879–80, Kuropatkin himself had noted that neither the Chief of the Main Staff nor War Minister Miliutin really “knew” Asia, leaving the luckless individual who headed the Asiatic Department to bear an almost crushing degree of solitary responsibility for monitoring and reporting on the region.3 In contrast to his predecessors, therefore, Kuropatkin on coming to office as War Minister in 1898 at least recognized the immense strategic challenges that faced him (and indeed

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Russia as a whole) along its huge Asian land frontiers by the end of the nineteenth century. However the main characteristic of his later term as War Minister was his own inability to then propose and maintain a consistent solution to the growing regional security dilemmas presented to Russia in the region. Upon first taking up the post of War Minister, Kuropatkin had initiated a gigantic geopolitical review of the whole Russian Empire wherein, as he later put it, was: . . . traced out and summarized the achievements of Russian arms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, [showing what] had been finished and which had been left open for completion to the twentieth century . . . I reviewed the condition of each of our frontiers, indicated the numbers and organization that would be necessary for the different probable theaters of war, and estimated the power of offence of our most likely adversaries.4

Though later presented by Kuropatkin as a significant doctrinal innovation on his part, a review on this scale fell firmly within the tradition of Miliutin-era military statistics, a tradition begun by Miliutin in the 1840s when, long before becoming War Minister, he had helped initiate a program that subsequently in the 1860s produced the first comprehensive military-statistical portrait of the whole of the Russian Empire. Moreover Kuropatkin’s strategic thinking, whilst bearing many of his own personal characteristics, also inevitably bore the imprint of his early mentor, Chief of the Main Staff Obruchev. Though personally concerned about the growing accessibility of modern military technology to the Asian races (something of which he had acute personal experience from the Geok Tepe expedition of 1881, when Turkmen warriors had employed captured Berdan breech-loading rifles against Russian troops in urban combat), Kuropatkin also shared Obruchev’s firm opinion that the Bosphorus remained one of the most vital of Russia’s long-term strategic goals, and he therefore also agreed that Germany and AustriaHungary correspondingly remained Russia’s primary potential foes. During his own last years as Chief of the Main Staff, when diplomatic affairs in Northeast Asia had begun to heat up as a result of the SinoJapanese conflict, Obruchev himself had deprecated Far Eastern entanglements for Russia and the accompanying possible political alienation of Japan as a strategic distraction from the threat on Russia’s western frontiers. In his view, a pact over the division of territory amongst the regional powers was infinitely preferable to a possible future military confrontation, and Obruchev’s advocacy at the time of a JapaneseRussian rapprochement brought him into conflict with Finance Minister Witte and with his own direct superior, War Minister Petr Vannovskii.5 However upon taking up the post of War Minister himself, Kuropatkin had ordered his subordinates to take note of and develop the ideas contained in Obruchev’s “excellent” note.6 It would be the belief, partly inherited from Obruchev, that Russia could still somehow continue to

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expand in Northeast Asia to more “natural” frontiers (“flattening” and hence shortening the line of the Sino-Russian frontier in particular), whilst also avoiding military conflict through careful diplomacy, which would in many ways form the fatal crux of much of Kuropatkin’s own future policy in the region. Kuropatkin not only shared many of Obruchev’s views on the world scene, he also inherited the strategic dispositions created by Obruchev and Miliutin in the 1880s, deployments that placed over 45 per cent of the Russian peacetime army in the European military districts, where they guarded the critical Polish salient. These expensive inter-connected garrison networks and their heavy guns formed a powerful impetus both mentally, financially, and logistically against any large-scale re-deployment by the Russian armed forces at the grand strategic level. Changing these dispositions would require money, time, and an exceptionally strong sense of personal strategic purpose from a Russian War Minister. In reality, Kuropatkin soon proved handicapped in all three areas, and such changes as he did make before 1904 were informed instead by cloudy strategic reasoning, indecisiveness, and a distinct lack of urgency. The grand geopolitical review Kuropatkin had undertaken upon taking up the post of War Minister at the turn of the century had itself concluded that Russia’s frontiers for the twentieth century were generally satisfactory, but it also left open room for significant developments in terms of gaining access to the Indian Ocean, seizing the Bosphorus, and establishing a firm footing on the Pacific. In 1900–01 these views brought Kuropatkin into open conflict with both Finance Minister Witte and the Russian Foreign Ministry, as he at that time opposed withdrawing Russian military forces from Manchuria, advocating instead the transformation of Northern Manchuria into a semi-vassal state of Russia similar to the Emirate of Bukhara.7 This however was in many ways not an innovative demand on Kuropatkin’s part, but merely an extension of Obruchev’s earlier thinking that the “true” Russian frontier in Northeast Asia lay in a significantly flattened and hence simplified Sino-Russian border positioned significantly further south than the existing borderline. Such internal clashes nonetheless complicated Russia’s overall strategic posture toward Northeast Asia, and created a degree of near-fatal ambiguity in the eyes of foreign observers, particularly the Japanese, regarding Russia’s true intentions. As War Minister, Kuropatkin himself had also retained a patrician personal interest in Asian affairs; in 1901, after all, he became the first Russian War Minister to visit the Turkestan military district personally, and he went on to visit both Persia and Northeast Asia by 1903, in what was, by comparison with his predecessors, a busy traveling schedule. The health of the Russian troops in these regions and the construction of local railway lines and new strategic fortifications all attracted his concerned attention.8 His term in office was also accompanied by a gradual general build-up in military forces in the Russian Far East. Between 1898 and 1903, Russian military strength east of Lake Baikal increased from

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twenty-three to eighty-nine battalions, from thirteen to thirty-five cavalry squadrons, and from eight to twenty-five gun batteries.9 In his later post-1905 writings, Kuropatkin naturally used these reinforcement measures to defend his own prewar policy and conduct in the region.10 Yet these preparations remained inadequate for the rapidly worsening diplomatic environment, and they were fatally accompanied by a lack of clear strategic planning and poorly developed mobilization schedules. Siberia itself lacked the population reserves needed to form and deploy an army several hundred thousand strong. The Siberian military district in peace-time planning was scheduled to provide twelve reserve battalions, but lacked the sheer population density to do so and shared out this burden instead with the Kazan military district. The number of reserve battalions in the Siberian and Priamur military districts was also reduced from the statutory forty-eight to just nineteen. This placed the Russian General Staff in a difficult position given that any war in Northeast Asia would have to be conducted with 50 per cent first-line troops and 50 percent reservists. From the very first day of conflict there existed a deficit of 464, 0000 reservists, and forty-two-year old reservists who had been trained on the single-shot Berdan rather than the more modern magazine rifle were being hurriedly pushed into front-line service from the outset to fill the ranks as casualties occurred. By the time of the battle of Mukden this disproportion in age, skill, and experience within the ranks had only increased, to the point where the Russian armies in the field comprised 28 percent first-line troops and 72 percent reservists.11 Only a fundamental prewar rethink of the deployment of troops in the Western European theatre would have ameliorated this problem, but Kuropatkin refused to entertain such a proposition, even when prompted to by the tsar, since he regarded the front with Germany as still critical to Russia’s interests. Only in December 1903 did Kuropatkin suddenly begin urging dramatic measures to reinforce Northeast Asia, resolving on January 24, 1904 to despatch twenty-eight battalions to Northeast Asia alongside eleven artillery batteries. On February 4 it was decided with typical wilfulness to then add to this contingent an additional twelve batteries. This sudden, feverish activity threw into disorder the whole mobilization process, as it demanded for its realization 136 train carriages at a time when the Trans-Siberian was already choked with sixty-four carriages bearing newly enlisted men en route to the Priamur military district and Kwantung province. Kuropatkin by his measures certainly reinforced Northeast Asia, notably by increasing the field artillery more than twice over, from 178 to 392 guns, but this came at a cost of delaying the general mobilization and concentration of forces in Northeast Asia itself by some twenty-seven days.12 Given the confusion and competition that this disorganized mobilization naturally created, with diverse units competing for a limited number of train carriages, units then assembled in the field in great disorder. Administrative inefficiency continued in the field of conflict itself and this, combined with the natural chaos of battle and retreat, ultimately

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created a military force, in the words of one contemporary eyewitness, comprised of “confused parts, in complete chaos, in which every kind of organization was destroyed, and in which commanders neither knew their forces nor the forces their commanders.”13 The muddle of Kuropatkin’s grand strategic thinking had found its ultimate physical reflection in the shape and nature of the fighting army he created on the ground. His grand strategic failings aside, Kuropatkin also remained wedded to a nineteenth-century operational model of warfare which had been transmitted to the Russian army via the most influential lecturers in the Nicholas General Staff Academy, Jomini and Leer. This model foresaw the main purpose of military strategy as the preservation and defense of one’s own operational line whilst preparing for a grand set-piece battle in which the whole course of the war would then be decided. This, according to both Jomini and Leer’s teachings, had been the real legacy of Napoleon, which the wise military commander of the future would build upon when planning their own campaigns. Kuropatkin, through both his training at the General Staff Academy and his personal experience of colonial expeditions in both Algeria and Central Asia, was fully wedded to such warfare models, and correspondingly disparaged the significance of the navy to military operations. The general plan for conflict in Northeast Asia subsequently prepared under Kuropatkin between March and July 1903 allowed nothing to the role of chance, and foresaw defensive activity covering a build-up of Russian forces in Manchuria, a decisive battle around the southern end of the Chinese Eastern Railroad followed by an aggressive pursuit, and a culminating point of victory in which Japan itself was invaded and peace signed in Tokyo. This was what the Russian military specialist Aleksandr Svechin later termed a purely “continental” strategy influenced by Moltke the Elder, and it practically ignored the fact that Japan was fighting the war for much more limited goals. In such a scheme the significance of Port Arthur itself was practically ignored, and the Russian fleet was condemned to an almost entirely passive role. Light cavalry forces were foreseen to be fully adequate to delay the Japanese in preparation for the decisive land battle that Kuropatkin envisaged, and a Japanese foe would be crippled by his own operational over-extension and natural attrition in much the same way as Napoleon had been when marching on Moscow in 1812. In Kuropatkin’s view, the battle of Borodino typified the particular characteristics of combat in which the Russians as a people excelled, and the main challenge of a Far Eastern campaign would lie in reproducing similar conditions in Northern Manchuria, by fighting a delaying action whilst the immense spiritual and physical resources of the Russian Empire gathered strength. The main operational challenge in such a campaign plan was accordingly one of logistics, an area in which Kuropatkin, with all his previous experience, could confidently claim to be an expert, though in reality much subsequently proved to be lacking.

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The actual campaign itself however threw up considerably more difficulties for Russia than merely the purely logistical nightmare of deploying troops to Northeast Asia. The Japanese armed forces during the course of the subsequent conflict, advancing on multiple operational lines with effective army-navy cooperation, mounted continuous preemptive flanking strikes that drove Russian forces ever backwards, and prevented a truly decisive concentration of military forces from ever taking place. When the two sides finally did come close to mounting a set-piece decisive battle, around the town of Mukden in February 1905, primitive contemporary communication systems then proved inadequate to control the maneuver of thousands of troops along a front of over a hundred kilometres, and neither side achieved a crushing success. Kuropatkin’s whole strategic conception of warfare was now proven to be outdated in the most decisive manner imaginable, and Russian military thinkers for the next thirty-five years would accordingly become obsessed instead with the importance of “meeting engagements” in the opening stages of a conflict and with the complexities of “operational art.” Russian operational and tactical thinking, which until 1904 had been in thrall to Napoleon and the cult of the bayonet, would before World War I accordingly become a much more complex and ambiguous amalgam of French, German, and indigenous Russian doctrinal thought, with the General Staff at times even divided against itself over what model to follow.14 The failure to achieve decisive victory in the Russo-Japanese War also marked Kuropatkin’s personal eclipse, since in March 1905 he was relieved of his post as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in Manchuria and was replaced by General Nikolai Linievich, a capable though uninspired field commander who failed to achieve any further progress before a peace treaty was signed at Portsmouth. Though he would continue to write extensively on affairs of state and would again become a corps commander during World War I before going on to become the final GovernorGeneral of Turkestan, Kuropatkin would never again be in a position to influence Russian grand strategic policy in Eurasia. The shock of defeat and revolution in 1905, in particular the loss of a military presence in Southern Manchuria and the effective destruction of Russia’s Far Eastern fleet, confronted the Russian General Staff as a whole meanwhile with a dramatically altered strategic scenario, one which in turn appeared to require radical new measures and a sharp reallocation of resources. These challenges extended across the scale, from simple military measures to the question of where to seek future allies and strategic alliances. Such challenges formed part of a major debate in which even the aged former War Minister Miliutin, long since retired but with his sharp analytical and intellectual abilities still intact, participated.15 However the man within the Russian General Staff who actually did most to chart a course through this storm was no longer the figure of the Russian War Minister but instead the newly-appointed Chief of the General Staff,

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Fedor F. Palitsyn. During his short and tempestuous reign as Chief of the General Staff between 1905 and 1908, Palitsyn did much to reshape the Russian Empire’s whole agenda of strategic priorities. Although many of his organizational innovations – most notably his separation of the General Staff itself from the Russian War Ministry – did not survive beyond his own term in office, other changes that he made also continued to guide operational and strategic thinking in the Russian War Ministry as a whole right through to 1914. Palitsyn became most well known during his own term in office for the creation of the Main Administration of the General Staff (Glavnoe Upravleniia General’nogo Shtaba, or to give its common acronym, GUGSh) which was intended to be the new operational “brain” of the Russian army and which was answerable only to the tsar, effectively bypassing the War Minister. Since the War Ministry retained control of the army’s financial purse strings, however, this proved in practice an unworkable relationship which was terminated when Palitsyn himself left office, his successor Sukhomlinov rapidly subordinating GUGSh once more under the wing of the Russian War Ministry. GUGSh nonetheless retained its operational planning role right through to 1914 although, as we shall see, within a generally much more unfavorable working environment. During his own term in office Palitsyn also succeeded in establishing within GUGSh a number of “Quartermaster” sections, the heads and personnel of which were tasked with specifically studying material on the various operational fronts upon which the tsarist army might be expected to fight in future. The Second OverQuartermaster section tackled the fronts relating to Germany, AustriaHungary, Romania, and Sweden, whilst the Third Over-Quartermaster section handled the Turkestan, Caucasus, and Far Eastern fronts. Within each of these sections, Palitsyn enjoyed remarkable success in recruiting and retaining genuine area experts. Working within the Third Over-Quartermaster section during Palitsyn’s own reign as Chief of the General Staff were individuals like P. I. Aver’ianov, an expert in the Transcaucasus and the so-called “Kurdish question” who headed the section studying the Caucasus front. Andrei E. Snesarev, the Russian army’s leading expert on Central Asia and British India, and Lavr G. Kornilov, a former Russian military agent in China who would go on to wider national fame during the revolutionary events of 1917, also worked in the Third Over-Quartermaster directorate at this time. The desk in charge of Turkestan was headed by V.F. Novitskii, another officer with extensive experience in Central Asia, Mongolia, and Northeast Asia who, like his co-worker Snesarev, would also go on after 1917 to serve within the Soviet General Staff Academy. The desk devoted to Northeast Asia was likewise headed by Colonel Bolokhovitinov, the Russian army’s leading expert on Far Eastern military statistics. The work of these directorates as a whole was guided by Palitsyn, who worked with his section heads in his own office every day from 10.00 a.m. till 1.00 p.m., after which he then invited them as guests to his family breakfast.

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Palitsyn from the outset firmly gripped the running of operational planning within the General Staff, and regularly surprised and challenged his subordinates by his own detailed knowledge of the characteristics of the various military theaters under consideration, upon which he personally kept notes upon various points that interested him. He also repeatedly expressed his own desire to have the greatest number of General Staff officers possible undergo this joint experience of working closely together on operational questions in order to instill in the Russian army a spirit of edinomysle (a Russian term implying united thought) and a “unified military doctrine” such as existed in the German army in the time of Moltke the Elder.16 Though not achieved in Palitsyn’s day, this would again become a hot topic of debate during the early Soviet period when M.V. Frunze attempted to instill a similar spirit and attitude to doctrine within the new Red Army, coming into conflict with Trotskii in the process. Though unquestionably a more efficient and capable chief than Kuropatkin, Palitsyn shared at least one common characteristic with the latter in that he had from the very outset to form operational plans from the basis of some grand strategic perspective of the place of the Russian Empire in the world as a whole. As Aver’ianov later recognized, not until February 1907 was there even a basic idea for the defense of Northeast Asia, the Russo-Japanese War having thrown into complete disarray the technical and operational planning of the Russian army. From February 1907 onwards, the recently-established State Defense Council twice assessed a new operational plan for the defense of Northeast Asia that had been developed by Palitsyn, which was orientated around the radical concept of concentrating Russia’s forces in future not within Russian territory but instead further forward in Northern Manchuria, technically “foreign” territory. This plan met resistance from Foreign Minister Izvolskii, War Minister Rediger, Finance Minister Kokovtsev and the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, but it was supported by Navy Minister Dubasov, the Head of the Naval General Staff Admiral Brusilov, and by Palitsyn’s own close co-worker within the General Staff, General Mikhail Alekseev.17 Rediger as War Minister managed to delay the implementation of Palitsyn’s proposals through his grip on budget allocations, but Palitsyn’s general operational design to concentrate in Northern Manchuria actually survived his own departure from office and continued to guide operational war planning for the Russian Far East right through to 1914. The measures which the Russian General Staff helped initiate in Northeast Asia between 1908 and 1916 – the absorption of Outer Mongolia, the expensive construction of the Amur railway, the reinforcement of Vladivostok after 1910, and the reinforcement of the existing Chinese Eastern Railway – make sense only when seen in the context of Palitsyn’s original operational proposals. The general strategic world-view from which Palitsyn and Alekseev were making these proposals itself became more apparent the following year, in their joint 1908 paper on “A General Plan for the Defense of the State and measures to accomplish this

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over the next ten years.” Although it began in a traditional manner, this paper marked a complete break from the strategic prognostications of the nineteenth century. It noted at the outset that, simply on the basis of the number of trained military soldiers they could field, “[t]he main factor in international life having the most serious influence on the fate of Russia remains, as before, the Triple Alliance, and in particular our relations with its main members – Germany and Austria-Hungary.”43 However, beyond this traditional and now rather prosaic first principle, the report then noted the emergence in Northeast Asia of “young, warlike, energetic powers, thirsting for action and conquests” and came quickly to the radical conclusion that the basis of all future planning must now rest on “the capability for [Russia] to conduct a simultaneous struggle with the powers of the Triple Alliance and in the Far East.” The report cited and took issue with the view of the Russian Foreign Ministry that if Russia lost the Primor’e oblast’ to Japan then the position of Russia as a great power would still remain unchanged, whilst the Balkan Peninsula by contrast in Foreign Ministry eyes demanded much greater attention and care. Palitsyn and Alekseev’s report argued by contrast that “the high likelihood of a clash on the western front cannot free us from the need for energetic and systematic work to secure the inviolability of our Asiatic possessions.” The report concluded that in terms of priorities for fortification work, Vladivostok and Kronstadt must now take priority over Western Europe.19 Palitsyn and Alekseev’s report itself came in the wake of a series of alarming intelligence reports that appeared to indicate that the Russian Empire was increasingly surrounded and threatened from all sides, particularly in the south. Of these reports, perhaps amongst the most curious (in retrospect) were those related to the movements of alleged Japanese spies in the Caucasus in 1907, including the sojourn of one Major Takenouchi around Baku and that of a certain Japanese convert to Islam, Abdul Hamid Saishi Nakashima, who appeared in Batum in July 1907.20 Military circles within the Russian army at this time were also increasingly aware of moves by the Russian Foreign Ministry under Izvolskii to reshape Russia’s global strategic alliances. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 and the associated treaties with Japan that followed were perceived by Izvolskii as a means to free Russia’s hands from Far Eastern entanglements and to concentrate state attention more effectively on Near Eastern affairs (the Balkans and the Straits), which he perceived as the site of Russia’s true national interests. Ironically this obsession with Balkan affairs on Izvolskii’s part would ultimately culminate in the 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary, an event perceived in Russian society at the time as a diplomatic “second Tsushima,” for which Izvolskii lost his own post as a direct consequence. He was replaced at the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry by the rather colorless figure of Sazonov who served through to 1914 and beyond. Many within the Russian military took direct issue with the political re-alignment that occurred during Izvolskii’s reign.

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Britain was still regarded by many within the military as a traditional foe, and Aver’ianov freely admitted that all the General Staff officers working within the Third Over-Quartermaster section remained very interested in the question of whether a campaign to invade British India was really possible, although operational planning from 1900 onwards had in reality switched to the notion of conducting a purely limited offensive in Northern Afghanistan instead in the event of either an Anglo-Russian or a combined Anglo-Afghan-Russian military conflict. The main expert within the General Staff on Afghanistan and British India, and one of the very few to have actually visited the latter country, Colonel Andrei Snesarev, was a passionate Anglophobe who prophesied that an agreement with Britain would undoubtedly lead to a ruinous war against Germany and thereby constituted a betrayal of Russia’s own true national interests. Aver’ianov later concluded through the prism of hindsight created by subsequent war and revolution that Snesarev at the time had undoubtedly been right.21 An even more public repudiation of Izvolskii’s legacy than Snesarev’s arguments however came in the political writings of another military man, Lieutenant Colonel A.E. Vandam. An unusual figure, one of the few Russian officers to have traveled as a military observer to the Transvaal during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, Vandam’s own public utterances in 1912–13 warning against any alliance with the perfidious English reflected the private geopolitical concerns of many within the Russian General Staff. Vandam’s two major books of the period, Nashe polozhenie (“Our Position,” 1912) and Velichaishee iz iskusstv (“The Greatest of Arts,” 1913) invoked an extraordinarily extensive geopolitical review of over 300 years of Russian imperial expansion in order to demonstrate that the Anglo-Saxon powers (Britain and America), due both to their capitalist thirst for markets, their cunning and hypocritical governments, and ultimately their essentially maritime nature, were and would always remain the eternal enemies of Russian state interests. Russia’s natural interests for their part were interpreted to be both essentially continental in nature and a natural strategic continuation of the domination by the Mongol Horde of South Asia (India and China). Within this historical design presented by Vandam, other regional actors, even Japan, were merely the marionettes of these arch-manipulators and foes of Russia, and even the American Commodore Matthew Perry’s enforced opening up of Japan in 1853 was merely a carefully crafted strategic ploy designed over the long term to create an antiRussian bastion in Northeast Asia. This design to constrict Russian southern expansion was now visible, in Vandam’s eyes, not only in the British possession of India, but in the role of American universities in creating malleable Asian puppets from the gullible student youth of China and Persia. Powerful Anglo-Saxon financiers like Pierpoint Morgan and Morgan Shuster were now major players in the Persian and Chinese states, who also now worked against Russian interests under cover of the division of influence that the 1907 agreement had so dangerously sanctioned.

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At the very heart of this Anglo-Saxon historical conspiracy, Vandam sensed a covert Masonic-Jewish alliance that sought both to contain Russia externally and to destroy the Russian state from within.22 Together with Snesarev, Vandam was amongst a small clique within the Russian establishment before 1914 who correspondingly began to call for the recognition of a new and distinct discipline of “higher strategy” (Vyshaia Strategiia) to help guide Russian statesmen. This broadranging type of geopolitical analysis was the natural culmination of strategic trends first initiated during the reign of Miliutin and Obruchev, but before 1914 this school was marked by a distinct lack of internal consensus, had a very minor following, and was deprived of any real actual influence on events. That the “Germanophile” lobby still had a following even within the highest corridors of power in St. Petersburg was further underlined however by the famous (and famously ignored) Durnovo memorandum of 1914, which argued passionately mere months before World War I unexpectedly began for an alliance with Germany rather than Britain. Vandam’s own reading of history moreover would also live on to some degree in the Russian émigré school of Eurasianist historiography, and has become popular again in Russia today. Vandam’s name was practically forgotten until recent times, when a growing post-Soviet interest in geopolitics amongst modern Russian scholars led him to be posthumously crowned, alongside Snesarev, Danilevskii and Miliutin, as one of the founding fathers of the modern Russian school of geopolitics. Though strategic debate at the higher level of the Russian state remained in practice shaped by the legacy of Izvolskii, operational war planning before 1914 essentially still conformed to the two-front war scenario outlined by Palitsyn and Alekseev in 1908. Steps to actually implement the number of measures needed to make this operational plan realizable remained lethargic however. The failure either to significantly revise the prognostications of 1908 or on the other hand to energetically implement all the measures they demanded came about largely through changed working conditions within the General Staff itself. Sukhomlinov’s rise to power within the War Ministry after 1908–09 was accompanied by a jealous determination not to tolerate the emergence of any potential rivals; consequently, between 1908 and 1914 the post of Chief of the General Staff changed hands no less than four times. Many of the men appointed to this post after Palitsyn’s time were nonentities, and the one individual who arguably was not (Myshlaevskii) was dismissed after only a year in office. The main characteristic of the majority of these men was their complete incapacity in terms of background, service experience, and education to perform effectively in the role assigned them. The last Chief of the General Staff appointed before August 1914, General Ianushkevich, was considered by Aver’ianov to have gained his post only through the Emperor’s favor, his previous military service having provided him with no experience at all in either military or operational command or staff work. Ianushkevitch himself

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allegedly confided to Aver’ianov that he had only reluctantly convinced himself to accept the appointment on the basis that he would have a full uninterrupted summer in 1914 to become more fully acquainted with his new responsibilities.23 Within this new working environment, the Chief of the General Staff ceased altogether to be a guiding force in operational planning, and the general tone within the General-Quartermaster section became set instead by General Vladimir N. Danilov, a Russian General staff officer of near-legendary dourness and strategic pessimism. Aver’ianov later summed up Danilov as extremely dry, harsh, and demanding of his subordinates, and Danilov’s general influence upon operational planning was to create an unpleasant atmosphere of haste and ceaseless pressure. Symbolic of this changed working environment was the fact that when one of Aver’ianov’s colleagues committed suicide at his work desk, the underlying cause was generally assigned by many within the General Staff to the pressures put upon his subordinates by Danilov (Aver’ianov himself however believed the real cause of the suicide to have been the man’s growing awareness of the onset of syphilis).24 Danilov’s work methods were certainly also alienating in terms of the specialized personnel that Palitsyn had previously managed to gather and retain around him, with Aver’ianov lamenting that by 1913 he was one of the few Asian area experts to remain working within the QuartermasterGeneral section of the General Staff; Bolokhovitinov had by then taken command of a regiment, and Snesarev had become a divisional staff commander. The general lack of appropriate personnel at the central level in this later period was certainly reflected in the fact that Aver’ianov himself, an expert on Caucasus affairs, was by that time taking assignments to oversee and review operational measures in Mongolia and Northeast Asia.25 This ceaseless pressure on dealing with everyday detail, accompanied by the flight from the operational planning departments of regional specialists, meant in practice that little time remained to re-assess the broader strategic picture, and that Russian war-planning up until 1914 remained guided by the nightmare of a potential two-front war that had been outlined by Palitsyn in 1908. NOTES 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

Glushkov and Sharavin, 2000. Nalivkin, 1913: 60–1. Kuropatkin memoirs in RGVIA, f. 165, op. 1, d. 1759 l.148; Kuropatkin memoirs in RGVIA, f. 165, op. 1, d. 1759 l.148. Kuropatkin, 1909: xxiii–xxiv. Kashirin, 2004: 38–44. Kashirin, 2004: 44. Subbotin, 2003: 140. Kuropatkin, 1902. Hauner, 1990: 82.

Imperial Russian War Planning for the Eurasian Space 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Kuropatkin, 2002: 107–34. Svechin, 1937: 173–175. Svechin, 1937: 181. Martynov, 1907: 61. Menning, 2005: 129–156. Osipova, 2005: 288–293. Aver’ianov memoirs: GARF, f. 7332, op.1, t.1 l.154–8. Aver’ianov memoirs: GARF, f. 7332, op.1, t.1 l.161, ob. RGVIA, f. 2000, op. 1, d. 186 l.7. RGVIA, f. 2000, op. 1, d. 186 l.9–36. RGVIA, f. 1300, op.1, d.1217 l.3–17, 43–43 ob. Aver’ianov memoirs: GARF, f. 7332, op.1, t.1 l. 162, ob-164. Vandam, 2002: 44–46, 57–59. Aver’ianov memoirs: GARF, f. 7332, op.1, t.2 l.7. Aver’ianov memoirs: GARF, f. 7332, op.1, t.1 l.238, ob.-39, 270–72. Aver’ianov memoirs: GARF, f. 7332, op.1, t. 1 .256.

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VI. DIVIDED ONLOOKERS: EUROPE AND THE WAR

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The War and British Strategic Foreign Policy KEITH NEILSON

T

he Russo-Japanese War was arguably the most important international event in the twenty years before World War I. While the significance of the Russo-Japanese War for its two participants has been widely acknowledged, the effect of the conflict on international relations generally has not been recognized. This is unfortunate, for the failure to see the ramifications of the Russo-Japanese War has resulted in an incomplete understanding of the nature of international affairs before the outbreak of World War I. In particular, British strategic foreign policy in the years from 1900 to 1907 was strongly influenced by the Russo-Japanese War. An examination of Britain’s policies during this period in the light of the conflict does a number of things. From a purely British perspective, it demonstrates the close linkage between Britain’s global, imperial concerns and her involvement in the European Great Power system. From a more general perspective, it also shows how the Russo-Japanese War was the catalyst for profound changes in the international arena. Finally, it makes clear that divorcing European from extra-European (particularly East Asian) matters leads to a misunderstanding of international affairs in the two decades before World War I. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a rough balance of power between the two opposing European blocs – the Franco-Russian Alliance and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. There was, however, a growing concern that Germany’s burgeoning power would soon destroy this uneasy equipoise. Britain’s position was difficult. In Europe, she faced an economic and naval challenge from Germany, while the Empire was threatened by the French in Africa, Russia

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in India, and Russia and Germany in China.1 Two events – the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion – underlined Britain’s strategic difficulties. The fact that both of these conflicts occurred outside Europe was particularly significant. The European Great Power system as it had existed since at least 1815 generated its own equilibrium. Any threat to the status quo by a single Power or a combination of Powers resulted in the formation of groupings in opposition. This fact had allowed Britain – isolated geographically from Europe and possessed of the world’s foremost navy – generally to play an aloof role, choosing to join in European affairs only when her own interests were threatened. This was the basis of Britain’s so-called “splendid isolation,” although this should not be overstated.2 But, extra-European conflicts did not necessarily provide Britain with this luxury. Instead, Britain had to utilize her own resources to maintain its position. In fact, the Boer War created the possibility that the European Powers might take advantage of Britain’s pre-occupation in South Africa for their own aggrandizement.3 Britain’s involvement in it, in fact, reduced Britain to the level of “only a third-rate power; and we are a third-rate power with interests which are conflicting with and crossing those of the great powers of Europe.”4 And, while the Boxer Rebellion eventually resulted in a coordinated European effort against the rebels, in the aftermath of the intervention Russian troops remained in Manchuria, further threatening the British position in China. There was yet another concern for those charged with maintaining Britain’s global position: the Russian threat to India. This was not new. Throughout the nineteenth century the defense of India had been a staple of imperial defense. However, the building of the Russian Trans-Siberian Railway (begun 1891), with a spur line from Orenburg to Tashkent in Russian Central Asia (due for completion in early 1905), made the Russian threat that more imminent. This brought an end to the logistical advantage that sea power had given Britain with respect to Indian defense and had swung the balance in Russia’s favor. As Lord George Hamilton, the British Secretary of State for India, noted of the difficulties that the new Russian railway construction created for Britain: “I have felt for a very long time past that we must, so far as Russia is concerned, acknowledge the changed conditions that the extension of railways has made in the relative fighting power of Great Britain and Russia.”5 Britain’s first response to these difficulties – often perceived as evidence of her “decline” by historians – was to seek to diminish them by negotiation and agreement.6 This was accompanied by a number of political changes, as the “Victorians” – older men who believed that Britain could continue to play a lone hand – were replaced by “Edwardians” – younger men who preferred to pursue a more active policy.7 Their attempts to come to terms with Germany and Russia in the period from 1898 to 1903 failed because the former asked for a price too high and the latter was determined to exploit Britain’s weakness for its own ends.8 Britain had better luck elsewhere. In 1902, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance provided some relief against Russia, and, in 1904, the Anglo-French Entente brought an end to the

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colonial quarrels between the two countries.9 Just as importantly, Britain decided to embark on a thorough re-examination of her defense policies. The venue for this was the newly-created Committee of Imperial Defence (CID).10 Commencing in 1903, the CID began a ten-month long examination of the defense of India.11 It quickly became apparent that “we cannot effectively injure or make war upon Russia elsewhere than in Central Asia.”12 The costs of doing so, particularly in view of the sharp increase in the national debt caused by the Boer War and the price of maintaining Britain’s naval superiority, were enormous.13 The problem was that Britain retained “all the difficulties and responsibilities of a military Power in Asia,” but without such things as the “compulsory military service” that made it “easy . . . to be a great military power for home defense or European warfare.”14 Continued meetings of the CID only underlined the complexities of the problem. As the Chief of the General Staff wrote in May 1905: “The Prime Minister is . . . fairly puzzled with the enormous difficulties which the problem presents, dealing as it does with such uncertain quantities as the Afghans and the Frontier tribes.”15 Nor was a diplomatic solution seen as easy to achieve. While Lord Lansdowne, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, did not “despair of finding a reasonable solution of the Russo-Afghan difficulty, and perhaps of other tiresome questions which concern Russia and us,” the path to a solution was not clear.16 Russia’s continuing refusal to withdraw her troops from Manchuria made things even more difficult. The connection to the newly-created Anglo-Japanese Alliance was manifest: “The Russians are impossible,” Lord Salisbury’s eldest son wrote, “and our little friends the Japs are evidently very uneasy. Any day we might have a diplomatic demand by Japan for the specific performance of the Manchurian Convention. Perhaps not any day but sooner or later. What then! What then!”17 In fact, by the end of June 1903, it was clear that, in the words of the British Minister to Tokyo, “the Japanese are getting impatient and small blame to them, for the Russians are not playing straight and the present situation is far from satisfactory.” Sir Claude MacDonald did, however, warn that this might lead to an unsatisfactory result: a Russo-Japanese agreement in which Japan “should have a free hand in Corea, while the Russians had it all their own way in Manchuria.”18 This was unacceptable to the British, as the original purpose of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance had been to constrain, not to legitimize, Russia’s advances in East Asia.19 However, the unpleasant possibility of a Russo-Japanese rapprochement based on spheres of interest steadily retreated after the summer of 1903. This was clear from events. The British Ambassador to Russia, Sir Charles Scott, noted that the formation of Vice Royalty in the Russian Far East boded ill for any pacific settlement.20 By the end of August 1903, the British had begun to discuss what the result of a Russo-Japanese War might portend. The basic fear was, as the British Minister to China, Sir Ernest Satow, put it, “that the result of a war in which Japan fights Russia singlehanded would be her defeat and the loss of Corea. Then Russia becomes

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the dominant Power in this part of the world, and will swallow up at least all northern China.”21 This meant, Satow contended, “if Russia is victorious over Japan then though we shall not have lost a ship or a man, we shall be powerless in the Far East.” Such concerns were given greater weight by the fact that Aleksandr Izvolskii, touted as soon likely to become Russia’s foreign minister, was convinced that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was a result of Britain’s unwarranted suspicion of Russia and also likely to permit the Japanese to make aggressive moves in East Asia.22 While Lansdowne continued his negotiations for a settlement with Russia, he was becoming less convinced that St. Petersburg was pursuing them with any sincerity. By October, the Foreign Secretary put forward the idea that Britain should guarantee a loan to Japan in order to help Tokyo buy further warships. “Of course,” he told the Prime Minister, Sir Arthur Balfour, “the step would be regarded by Russia as openly hostile, but she is behaving so badly to us, that I should not much mind that.”23 Lansdowne’s advocacy of such a course was in order to enhance his diplomacy. “The result” of such a loan, he continued, “might be to convince her [Russia] that she could not safely continue to flout us, and to bring about, what I have always hoped to see, a frank understanding between us as to Manchuria, Thibet [sic], Afghanistan, Persia, &c.” This kind of naval maneuvering also appealed to Balfour, who suggested to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selborne, that “if we and the Japanese together were obviously too strong for her [Russia], she might hesitate to run. It is possible, therefore,” the Prime Minister concluded, “that an augmentation of our Eastern Fleet might make for peace; as well as be useful in case of war.”24 By December 1903, the Anglo-Russian negotiations were not going well.25 In addition, “the position in the Far East,” Balfour reported to Edward VII, “is necessarily a cause of anxiety.”26 With Russia’s buying up coal and Japan’s purchasing rice on the London market, things looked ominous. In the words of Sir Thomas Sanderson, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, unless “something may be settled during the next three months . . . we may have a crisis in April the like of which has not been seen for many years.”27 In these circumstances, the British began to consider both what would be the likely course of a Russo-Japanese War and what should be British policy. Balfour immediately asked Selborne and the Secretary of State for War, H.O. Arnold-Forster, to ascertain what the intelligence departments at the Admiralty and War Office believed would be the Japanese strategy in such a conflict.28 Selborne’s concerns reflected what a possible RussoJapanese War could mean for British interests generally: If war ensues what are we to do? I have always held that we could not afford to see Japan smashed by Russia; but, if that is accepted does it not follow that we cannot wait to make up our minds till after Japan has been smashed? But our intervention might also entail that of France, and we and France might be driven into war, an appalling calamity!!29

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Selborne suggested that London might approach Paris in the hope that joint representations to St. Petersburg might serve to deter war, something that Lansdowne, in the midst of the negotiations leading to the Anglo-French Entente, supported.30 But, this mention of France showed just how entangled Far Eastern affairs were with Europe. The British were not sure of the terms of the Franco-Russian agreement of 1894, and had no wish to transform a possible war between Japan and Russia into one that involved Britain and France.31 The fear that such a complication might ensue affected not only Britain’s diplomatic stance, but also her naval preparations. When Selborne asked the First Sea Lord, Sir Walter Kerr, what preparations Britain should make for a Russo-Japanese War, the latter replied that he did not “think that there is anything special to be done, except to be ready for anything.”32 However, the First Sea Lord also noted that “unless we were sure of the non-intervention of France, we would not send any B.[attle] ships” to the Far East. However, such concerns were not decisive in shaping Britain’s policy. Balfour had spent much of 1903 enmeshed in the CID’s discussions of the defense of India against Russia. As shown above, these had not been very optimistic about the possibility of striking any effective blow against Russia. Balfour also was not convinced that Lansdowne’s continuing negotiations with Russia would lead to a “thoroughly satisfactory permanent arrangement” with the tsarist state, because the latter tended to break agreements both when it suited her and when she had designs on British territories.33 Thus, the Prime Minister wished to know how any RussoJapanese conflict could help Britain deal with her own strategic problems. On December 22, he drew up a memorandum outlining the position.34 After a consideration of the general circumstances, Balfour turned to specifics. The worst thing that could happen to Japan (since he felt that an invasion of Japan by Russia “on any important scale is . . . impossible”), he believed, was that she would be unable to achieve command of the sea and would thus have difficulty in maintaining her position in Korea. The latter was not a British interest, “except as it affects Japan.” That being said: From every other point of view (except trade) there could be nothing better for us than that Russia should involve herself in the expense and trouble of Corean adventure – with the result that at the best she would become possessed of a useless province, which would cost more than it brought in, which could only be retained so long as she kept a great fleet in the Far East, and a large army thousands of miles from her Home base, and which would be a perpetual guarantee that whenever Russia went to war with another Power, no matter where or about what, Japan would be upon her back.

Given this, the Prime Minister felt that Britain should “not put pressure on upon her [Japan] of any kind to abate her demands” and instead to let her “work out her own salvation in her own way.”

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In a letter to Selborne, Balfour expanded on his views.35 While contending, somewhat disingenuously, that “I detest all war, and on general principles would always try to stop it,” the Prime Minister made clear the advantages that could accrue to Britain. He could see no reason to “thrust myself into a quarrel not my own, in which I am expect to aid an unfriendly Power [Russia] and to put pressure on an ally; especially as I believe that if any war could be conceived as being advantageous to us, this is the one.” As he concluded: “Both ‘before, during and after’ its outbreak it is likely to do wonders in making Russia amenable to sweet reason.” Lansdowne did not accept all of Balfour’s contentions.36 The Foreign Secretary was not convinced that Japan could maintain her naval supremacy in Northeast Asia, as the Russians showed signs of transferring naval units to that region. If that should happen, the entire rationale behind the Anglo-Japanese Alliance – checking Russia in the Far East – would be jeopardized. Japan, Lansdowne argued, might be “render[ed] . . . an almost negligible factor in Far Eastern politics instead of as at present a potential ally of great importance to us.” For him there was a “three-fold risk” in any Russo-Japanese War: (i) the possibility that our ally may be crushed: (ii) the possibility that we ourselves become implicated, not on account of our Treaty engagement to Japan, but because the British public will not sit still while the crushing is being done: (iii) the aggravation of our present financial difficulties, already grave enough.

And Lansdowne’s hesitations were not the end of the discussion.37 Others advocated taking advantage of the situation. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Austen Chamberlain, asked Lansdowne whether, “if war breaks out, is not that the proper time for us to secure, and to secure promptly, whatever we want in places where Russia is our rival?”38 Chamberlain was particularly concerned that Russia, “once free of her anxieties about Japan,” would no longer be likely to “negotiate a settlement of outstanding questions with us.” His conclusion was blunt: “In fact, let us take a leaf out of the notebook of German diplomacy, and for once play a selfish but national game.” Chamberlain agreed with Balfour’s contention that Britain should not urge caution on Japan.39 Instead, he felt that the Japanese should “brusquer the negotiations and obtain acceptance of their terms or fight before the balance of naval power alters.” At the end of December, Balfour attempted to lay out British policy.40 In light of his colleagues’ arguments about public opinion’s forcing Britain to intervene if Japan seemed likely to be defeated by Russia, the Prime Minister was quick to make it clear that “our moral obligations under the Anglo-Japanese Treaty do not exceed our legal obligations.” Echoing arguments that he had raised two years earlier when the AngloJapanese Alliance was being negotiated, Balfour made it clear that Britain

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could not consider the Alliance as forcing Britain to go to war with Russia in all circumstances.41 Given this, the Prime Minister argued that “in determining our course in the present crisis we should be moved by no considerations outside British interests, present and future.” He reiterated his belief that Russia would be unable to “crush” Japan, and that the possession of Korea by the former (or a Korean port such as Masampo) would be both a financial burden and an area that needed to be defended at all times against likely Japanese revenge. In the context of British policy, Russia had to be “fear[ed] . . . chiefly as (a) the ally of France; (b) the invader of India; (c) the dominating influence in Persia; and (d) the possible disturber of European peace.” Possession of Korea would not in any way make Russia more dangerous in any of these venues. However, Balfour warned, “the risk and loss inevitably attending a world-wide war in which Britain, Russia, and France (for France could scarcely abstain) would all take a part, are before all incalculable. The only Power that would certainly gain by so unexampled a calamity is Germany.”42 The connection between the situation in Northeast Asia and Britain’s global strategic foreign policy was clear. For this reason, Balfour concluded that Britain’s policy must be “dictated solely by a cool calculation of national interests.” Here, Balfour, presciently, thought it liable that “even if Japan got the worst of the naval battles” that a war was likely to produce, “Russia could not come out of it unscathed.”43 This, he felt, might “render Russia innocuous for some little time to come.” While not all agreed with Balfour’s analysis, the Prime Minister’s political position ensured that it became the basis of British policy.44 Thus, when actual hostilities between Japan and Russia began on February 8, British policy was set. London would act in all circumstances in her own best interests. That did not mean, however, that Britain would act in an even-handed manner as between Japan and Russia. In January, for example, Lansdowne avoided a French endeavor to promote mediation between Tokyo and St. Petersburg, something that the British foreign secretary believed had been generated by the Russians themselves.45 And, concerned that Russia might violate international agreements concerning freedom of the seas and belligerent rights once war broke out, the British undertook a serious study of and preparation for this eventuality.46 In addition, there was further examination of the defense of India, for the British believed that Russia would utilize the threat to India as a diplomatic lever to extract concessions from Britain during the Russo-Japanese War.47 While this was going on, on April 8 the Anglo-French Entente was signed. This had several effects. The first was positive. Many believed that this agreement could be used as a “stepping stone to some sort of improvement in our relations with Russia.”48 The second was negative. Many Russians believed that the Anglo-French Entente meant that maintaining it would take precedence in French eyes over providing support for Russia. The British response was to do nothing and await events.

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Problems soon arose between Britain and Russia. In July 1904, Russian ships from its Volunteer Fleet seized British ships in the Red Sea.49 Britain responded with diplomatic protests, but the Russians were not inclined to listen. In late August, the situation worsened when more British ships were stopped. While this crisis was overcome, there was a residue of anger in London over Russia’s high-handed action. This anger exploded on October 21, when the Russian Baltic Fleet, on its way to attempt to relieve the Russian naval squadron immured in Port Arthur, sank a number of British fishing trawlers in the North Sea, believing them to be Japanese torpedo boats. This, the so-called Dogger Bank incident, brought the two countries to the brink of war, with the Royal Navy’s shadowing the Russian fleet as it steamed towards Spain. By the end of the month, a compromise had been worked out, wherein four Russian officers had been put ashore in the Spanish port of Vigo to await the findings of an international tribunal into the event. The resolution of this quarrel led to a period of froideur in AngloRussian relations. Not even the events of the Russo-Japanese War itself – the fall of Port Arthur on January 2, 1905 and the riots that swept St. Petersburg on January 20 (Bloody Sunday) – seemed to promise any change in either Anglo-Russian or international affairs. Things began to move at the end of March. On March 31, the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, landed at Tangier, initiating the Moroccan crisis.50 This crisis, often seen as one of the stepping stones towards the outbreak of World War I and generally considered only its European context, was a direct result of the Russo-Japanese War. To understand this involves a consideration of German policy during the war.51 At the outbreak of the war, the German position had seemed strong, with Germany committed neither to Russia nor to France and thus enjoying the position of the “free hand” in international affairs. However, German attempts to wean Russia away from France failed, as St. Petersburg refused to give up certain French support in exchange for being tied to Germany’s chariot wheels in Europe. The Germans also became concerned that, should an Anglo-Russian naval war break out, the British would take advantage of the situation to make a pre-emptive strike against the German fleet.52 This latter belief was strengthened by the signing of the Anglo-French Entente, which was seen in Berlin as part of the French attempt to “encircle” Germany. Thus, there was a growing restlessness among the German elite and a belief that somehow something must be done to prevent Germany’s international position – seemingly so promising at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War – from deteriorating further. The British, rightly, saw the Moroccan crisis as an attempt to split the newly-created Entente. The situation was complicated. At the same time as this was occurring, the British were engaged in the negotiations for the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.53 London thus needed to support Paris firmly for two reasons: to demonstrate to France the value of the Entente and to reassure Japan that Britain was an ally worth

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having in difficult, not just pacific, times. Further muddying the waters was the fact that the American President, Theodore Roosevelt, was now acting as a mediator in peace talks between the Japanese and Russians at Portsmouth, and the American leader wished Britain to put pressure on the Japanese to accept a moderate peace.54 Making things even more difficult was the fact that Wilhelm II and the Russian tsar, Nicholas II, had met at Björkö in early August, and there were rumors that Nicholas’ reluctance to sign a peace treaty was due to German promises of support55. Despite these complications, British diplomacy was generally successful. On August 12, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was renewed, and, at the end of August, the Russo-Japanese War was brought to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth. But the end of the Russo-Japanese War did not mark the end of the impact of the war either on Anglo-Russian relations or on the international situation generally. Russia’s defeat in Northeast Asia had wideranging repercussions. At the most fundamental level, Japan was now a regional Great Power. This had important implications for Britain. While Russia had ceased to be a threat to Britain’s imperial interests in China, there was now the possibility that Japan might menace them, especially as both the Russians and the Japanese were moving rapidly to improve relations between their two countries.56 This irony was apparent to the British as early as 1911.57 Of more immediate importance, both for Britain and for the international situation generally, was the fact that Russia was greatly diminished as a Great Power.58 After the Russo-Japanese War, Russia’s finances were in tatters, her fleet was greatly diminished and her army was beset with mutinies and unrest.59 This, combined with the social and political unrest of the First Russian Revolution, made Russia pursue a more cautious foreign policy, one designed to shore up its defenses while repairs were being made to its ability to make war successfully.60 Most importantly for the British, the result of the war made Russia see “sweet reason,” just as Balfour, on the eve of the war, had hoped would be the case. Beginning in 1906, serious negotiations began that led to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.61 When it was signed on August 31, the Anglo-Russian enmity that had been a constant factor in international diplomacy since the end of the Napoleonic Wars had ended. In fact, the Russo-Japanese War was a blessing for Britain generally, at least in the short term. Lansdowne’s diplomacy had been vindicated. While the Dogger Bank episode had strained Anglo-Russian relations, adroit handling of the incident had avoided an outright break, enabling the Convention to be concluded. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance had been able to withstand the strain of the conflict, and in fact had been renewed. The Entente Cordiale had been signed despite the beginning of hostilities in Northeast Asia, and it had survived the rigors imposed by the war. In fact, the German attempt to weaken the Entente had done the opposite; Anglo-French cooperation at the Algeciras Conference held to bring an end to the quarrel had solidified the new relationship. And, there were

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other benefits. The sinking of the Russian navy ensured that, whatever happened to Anglo-Russian relations, the Royal Navy’s position vis-à-vis the Franco-Russian alliance had been improved. Equally, Britain had been able to maintain her position with respect to belligerent rights and freedom of the seas, both issues crucial to British ideas of maritime power. Further, the new plans advocated by Sir John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, to concentrate the Royal Navy in Home waters, were made more acceptable by the fact that Japan could be counted on to hold the ring for London in Northeast Asia. Nor were all the improvements naval. The mutinies in the Russian army and the general bankruptcy of the tsarist state meant that the threat to British India was diminished, again regardless of the state of Anglo-Russian relations. But, for international relations generally, the effect of the RussoJapanese War was not beneficial. With Russia temporarily hors de combat, the European balance of power was destroyed, and Germany began to pursue a dangerous and reckless foreign policy. Fearing that they were being “encircled” by the loosely-bonded Triple Entente, the Germans accelerated their building of a “risk fleet”, in the hope that it could be used as a diplomatic lever to prise Britain away from its existing alliances and, at the very least, make her pursue a policy of neutrality in any European conflict. This had the opposite effect, as the British rightly determined that Germany could wish for such an eventuality only because it wished to dominate the Continent. The result was the Anglo-German naval race of 1907–11 that did so much to poison Anglo-German relations. Russia’s weakness also prompted Austria-Hungary to try its strength with St. Petersburg. While the Bosnian crisis of 1908–09 was largely of Russian making, it was Russian weakness – itself a result of the RussoJapanese War – that was central to its resolution.62 Austria-Hungary was willing to deceive Russia and Germany was willing to support this deception because both were secure in the knowledge that Russia would either be unwilling to resort to war or be incapable of waging war effectively. The result was a deterioration in Austro-Russian and RussoGerman relations, and the growth of a determination in Russia not to have to back down in the face of force majeure in the future. During the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913, Russia’s rearmament was not complete, and, while complete humiliation in the fashion of the Bosnian crisis was avoided, it was clear that Russia was still a diminished force. Not so in 1914. By the latter date, Russia believed that she had repaired the deficiencies that had prevented her from taken a firm stand in both 1908–09 and 1912–13. Thus, she was unwilling to back down in the face of German pressure.63 The result was war. The shadow of the RussoJapanese War was long. In conclusion, the Russo-Japanese War should be viewed not just in its East Asian context, as an event marking both the first time that an Asian power had defeated a European one and the emergence of Japan as a regional Power. Instead, it should be seen in its wider context, and as the most significant episode leading to World War I. Some have termed the

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Balkans the “powder-keg of Europe” and argued that it was instability in that region that led to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. It could be more accurately argued that the long fuse that lit the Balkan powder keg originated in Manchuria. NOTES 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27 28

29

30

Grenville, 1964: 218–234; Neilson, 1995a: 110–143; Otte, 1995. Howard, 1967. Wilson, 2001. Hamilton (British Secretary of State for India) to Curzon, July 4, 1901, Curzon Papers, MSS Eur F 111/149. Hamilton to Curzon, November 2, 1899, Curzon Papers, MSS Eur F 111/144. Friedberg, 1989. Neilson, 1995a: 48–50; Otte, 2000; Otte, 2002. Neilson, 1995a: 203–237. Nish, 1966; Andrew, 1969. d’Ombrain, 1973. Gooch, 1974: 198–237; Friedberg, 1989: 234–273. Godley (Permanent Undersecretary, India Office) to Curzon (Viceroy, India), February 7, 1903, Curzon Papers, MSS Eur F 111/161. See, for example, Selborne to Curzon, January 4, 1903, Curzon Papers, MSS Eur F 111/229. Selborne to Curzon, January 4, 1903, Curzon Papers, MSS Eur F 111/229. Lord Roberts to Kitchener (commander-in-chief, British Army in India), May 21, 1905, Kitchener Papers, PRO 30/57/28. Lansdowne to Balfour (British Prime Minister), April 12, 1903, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49728. Cranborne to Bertie, June 26, 1903, Bertie Papers, Add MSS 63015. MacDonald to Lansdowne, June 30, 1903, Lansdowne Papers, FO 800/134. Nish, 1966: 262–282. Scott to Lansdowne, confidential disp 244, August 20, 1904, FO 65/1661. Satow to Lansdowne, August 27, 1903, Lansdowne Papers, FO 800/120. Goschen to Lansdowne, confidential, September 17, 1903 and reply, September 26, 1903, both Lansdowne Papers, FO 800/122. Lansdowne to Balfour, October 23, 1903, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49728. Balfour to Selborne, October 30, 1903, Selborne Papers, 34. Hardinge to Bertie, private, December 18, 1903, Bertie Papers, FO 800/163. Hardinge to Bertie, very private, December 4, 1903, Bertie Papers, Add MSS 63015; Balfour to Edward VII, December 11, 1903, Sandars Papers MS Eng. hist c. 715. Sanderson to Scott, private, December 16, 1903, Scott Papers, Add MSS 52299. Balfour to Selborne, December 21, 1903, Selborne Papers, 34; Balfour to Lansdowne, December 22, 1903, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49728. Selborne to Lansdowne, copy, December 21, 1903, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49728. Lansdowne to Balfour, December 22, 1903, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49728.

318 31

32

33

34

35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63

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For this lack of knowledge, see the untitled memorandum by Sanderson, January 26, 1904, FO 46/618. Selborne to Kerr, December 21, 1903 and reply, December 21, 1903, both Selborne Papers, 35. . Untitled memorandum, Balfour, December 21, 1903, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49728. “Memorandum by Mr Balfour. Japan and Russia’, December 22, 1903, Cab 17/54. Balfour to Selborne, December 23, 1903, Selborne Papers, 34. Lansdowne to Balfour, December 25, 1903, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49728. For further in the Balfour-Lansdowne discussion, see Balfour to Lansdowne, December 26, 1903 and reply, December 29, 1903, both Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49728. Chamberlain to Lansdowne, December 21, 1903, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49728. Chamberlain to Balfour, December 25, 1903, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49735. Untitled memorandum, Balfour, December 29, 1903, Cab 37/67/97. Tomes, 1997: 117–119. Balfour to Lansdowne, December 12, 1901, Balfour Paper, Add MSS 49727, for a reiteration of this sentiment, see Balfour to Spencer Wilkinson, January 3, 1904, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49747. Balfour to Selborne, December 29, 1903, Selborne Papers, 34. Boyce, 1990: 166–167. Lansdowne to Balfour, January 18, 1904, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49728. Neilson, 1989: 63–87. Brodrick to Curzon, March 25, 1904, Curzon Papers, MSS Eur F 111/163; Selborne to Kerr, secret, April 1, 1904, Selborne Papers, 39. Spring Rice to Mallet, April 13, 1904, Lansdowne Papers, FO 800/115. Neilson, 1989. Anderson, 1930; Kennedy, 1980: 275–285. Geiss, 1976: 99–101; Kennedy, 1980: 272–275. Steinberg, 1966: 23–46. Nish, 1966: 298–332. Esthus, 1988. Geiss, 1976: 103–104. Marinov, 1974: 23–51; Dickenson, 2004: 103–106. Neilson, 2004: 57–60. Hermann, 1996: 57–59; Stevenson, 1996: 64–111; Neilson, 1985: 199–217. Bushnell, 1985b; Gatrell, 1994: 65–114. McDonald, 1992: 76–102; Long, 1974: 213–233; Steinberg, 1970: 1665–1687; Oppel, 1977: 318–29; Luntinen, 1975. Neilson, 1995a: 267–288. Stevenson, 1996: 112–131. Neilson, 1995b: 97–120.

21

British War Correspondents and the War PHILIP TOWLE

T

he Russo-Japanese War broke out in February 1904; well informed commentators expected it to have a major impact on the deeply polarized European debate about the likely economic, political, and social effects of future warfare. On one side, were those who believed that a war between the Great Powers might destroy the delicate international financial and trading system, throwing thousands out of work and causing European-wide revolutions. Their arguments were epitomized by the claims of the first major civilian strategic analyst, the Polish banker, Ivan Stanislavovich Bloch, that mobile battles would be replaced by an interminable state of siege and eventual economic collapse because the great increases in the fire-power of rifles and machine guns would favor the defensive. On the other side, were the Social Darwinists who believed that warfare was both inevitable and necessary in order to prevent decadence and materialism. They urged their own countries to prepare for the coming war or face destruction in the natural and beneficial struggle for survival.1 These debates had a profound impact on national leaders, soldiers, and intellectuals. Bloch claimed to have influenced the tsar and the Russian Minister of War.2 Comments by Sir Edward Grey, who was British Foreign Secretary in 1914, show that he had absorbed the Bloch school’s emphasis on the delicacy of the world economic system.3 Many of the Liberal MPs, who spoke in the House of Commons opposing British involvement in the war, reiterated the warnings that war would lead to social unrest and even revolution.4 The Tory grandee and former Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour and the influential government official, Lord Esher helped Norman Angell spread his ideas about the inability of modern nations to make war pay for itself.5 On the other hand, while senior officers knew about Bloch’s arguments, those in the artillery

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argued that the sieges Bloch feared could be ended by the fire-power of heavy artillery, while many infantry officers hoped to overcome any deadlock by training and the offensive spirit.6 More imaginatively, within months of the English publication of Bloch’s book, the novelist, H.G. Wells had combined Bloch’s views and Social Darwinism in a short story to show how the development of “land ironclads” could enable a decadent, but more advanced society, to overcome its enemies.7 Historians have pointed out that most of Europe’s poets and novelists welcomed war in 1914 because they accepted Social Darwinist ideas and believed that the conflict would disperse the boredom and materialism of life in an industrial society.8 The dozens of British correspondents who covered the Russo-Japanese War were well aware of these debates, as the books that they wrote after the war often showed clearly. Despite the difficulties presented by the size and complexity of the battlefields, the correspondents discerned most of the changes which were occurring in military technology. They generally saw how many casualties would be inflicted by the new forms of warfare both amongst the troops and the civilians living in the battle zone. They might, therefore, have supported Bloch’s warnings of the disaster which would befall Europe should war break out there between the Great Powers. On the other hand, they were ill-equipped to grapple with the economic impact of the war and thus with the core of Bloch’s arguments. They knew, of course, that defeat had led to revolution in Russia but how this had occurred and what it boded for Europe, should a great war break out there, was beyond their ability to discern. Moreover, the correspondents, not surprisingly, chose to see the crushing defeat of Russia and the domination of Korea and southern Manchuria by Japan in terms of the Darwinian struggle for survival. Their strongest warnings were not about the damage which a war would do to European civilization, but of the threat to Britain should it allow its defenses and general military spirit to decline. Some indeed believed this “decay” was already taking place; as one of the senior British military attachés with the Japanese put it, “with our education anti-military, and our army organized on the basis of wages, we are marching straight in the footsteps of China.”9 The journalists felt that the main problem they faced in reporting adequately on the war was the Japanese censorship, but later historians have argued that the journalists’ own prejudices and the state of the British newspapers in 1904 represented deeper problems. Commentators and historians have criticized the popularization of the press at this period and accused it of fostering war scares which contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914. In her analysis of The Pre-War Mind in Britain, Caroline Playne claimed that: . . . alarms were started by crazy jingoes, fostered by interested armament firms, propagated by the Press and confirmed in the public mind by the demands of Ministers who were themselves under the influence of the current infection.10

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In his more scholarly examination of The Scaremongers, Anthony Morris has shown how press attacks on one country produced reciprocal invective in the country under attack, leading to a spiral of suspicion and hatred.11 Glenn Wilkinson has argued that the newspapers prepared the ground for war in 1914 by romanticizing conflict and minimizing the destruction it caused.12 It is certainly true that the war correspondents shared and shaped many of the prejudices aired in the newspapers. Some of them also propagated the romantic contempt for the peace-loving, money-making, nineteenth-century bourgeoisie which the American historian, Roland Stromberg has shown played a major part in persuading European intellectuals to welcome the outbreak of World War I. Clearly, the Japanese censorship hindered reporting on individual battles or even prevented it altogether in the early months of the war. Previously, although there was censorship of colonial wars, correspondents were often given a great deal of freedom to report on such conflicts, not least because the Zulus or the Indian Mutineers were hardly likely to gain military secrets from their accounts.13 In greater wars their reports were potentially far more damaging and thus they were sometimes hampered by the military authorities, as the doyen of correspondents William Howard Russell himself found in the American civil conflict and the Franco-Prussian War. Consequently, the hundred or so correspondents who arrived in Tokyo early in 1904, must have expected that the Japanese would try to control their activities. But the Japanese authorities made the cardinal error of failing to tell the correspondents when they might be allowed to go to the front. Accordingly, their frustration grew as they sat around waiting in Tokyo. When the Japanese finally allowed them to travel to Manchuria, they compounded the initial error by hampering the correspondents’ activities. This behavior was so resented that, as Lionel James The Times’ correspondent recorded, “there were few of [the journalists] who could be trusted to speak or write of their hosts without bias.”14 The asymmetry in the correspondents” preferences was all the greater because the Russians were much more accommodating once they had given permission for a journalist to go to the front. Thus, some of the correspondents, like Douglas Story, left Tokyo for the Russian side. Story himself claimed that a “free press was as much a marvel in Japan as a mastodon in Hyde Park.”15 His account of The Campaign with Kuropatkin is dedicated to the censors because he appreciated the difficulty of their task and also because the Russian censors were generally so sympathetic. Lord Brooke, who reported for Reuters from the Russian side, maintained that “once a correspondent did obtain permission from the Russians to go to the front he had practically carte blanche, he could go to the firing line and get himself killed if he chose.” However, he also recorded that his own account of the battle of Sha-ho was torn up by the censor because it described too accurately what had happened to the Russian forces.16 The Japanese were certainly obstructive but there were deeper reasons why some of the reporting from Manchuria appears slight and why, for

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example, the novelist and poet, Maurice Baring, who reported from the Russian side, could warn at the start of his book, “the following notes will have no value for the military expert or the serious student of war.”17 The Daily Telegraph’s Bennet Burleigh commented on the battle of Anshanshan, “the foreign military attachés including those of our own country were watching the panorama from a low green hill on our left. Neither they nor the correspondents could see much from so remote a distance.”18 Burleigh blamed the Japanese for keeping the foreigners some four miles from the battle and, no doubt, he was correct. But the size of the Manchurian battlefields presented problems for the journalists and senior officers alike, even if they had been allowed to wander at will. In contrast, the siege of Port Arthur was more compact and more visible, and the journalists who covered it were less critical of the censors who, on their side, were more accommodating to the correspondents.19 The correspondents with the field armies noted that the numbers engaged made them very difficult to control, though they often put this down to the failure of specific commanders or of the armies deployed. Brooke believed that “the war had failed to produce a single Russian general equal to handling successfully such large bodies of men as were now in the field.”20 World War I was to show that the problem was not specific to the Russians but was a consequence of the number of men under arms and the inadequacy of battlefield communications. Additionally, geographical conditions in Manchuria restricted both observation and movement. The millet or kowliang grew to ten feet high in the summer and this crop and the sandstorms obscured the battlefields, while in winter the mud hampered all movement.21 Fever was rampant and several of the journalists and military attachés died. All this meant that the reports from Manchuria were very different from those sent from the Crimea half a century before when accounts by William Howard Russell and his colleagues on The Times set the tone. First of all, Russell reported as an overt supporter of the British forces. He was often able to see the whole of the battlefield from the hills where he took station and the language Russell and other journalists used suggested they were there to commend individual officers on their courage and efficiency. Reporting the actions which led up to the “charge of the Light Brigade” at Balaclava on October 25, 1854, The Times’ account began with the words, . . . if the exhibition of the most brilliant valour, of the excess of courage, and of a daring which would have reflected lustre on the best days of chivalry can afford any consolation for the disaster of today, we can have no reason to regret the melancholy loss which we sustained in a contest with a savage and barbarian enemy.22

Like a modern sports commentator, the correspondent went on to describe Russian cavalry driving Turkish gunners before them until they came up against a long line of Highlanders who repulsed them: “ ‘Bravo

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Highlanders! Well done’ shout the excited spectators.” Russell is best remembered for his criticism of the shortage of supplies provided for the army during the winter of 1854–55, but most of the reporting was of a different sort as the previous quotations show clearly. It was domestic, patriotic, and romantic; warfare was a theatre where young men could show their bravery and skill. Individual officers who were killed or wounded were complimented for their courage. While the correspondents were not afraid to comment on military issues, these were relatively simple. Although they mentioned the suffering of civilians and wounded in Sevastopol, this was peripheral; they believed they were in the Crimea to make sense of the battles to the British public and to support British forces. By the Russo-Japanese War, conflict had become industrialized and the observers’ reports reflected this change. The censors and the scope of the battlefields prevented them from seeing the details of individual battles but not the tactics and weapons employed. The military attachés sent to Manchuria commented at length on the advantages of direct or indirect artillery fire, on cavalry or mounted infantry, on entrenching, and the spacing of infantry in the attack. Indeed the British attachés’ reports were printed in multiple volumes and circulated to show how warfare was changing.23 The journalists reached many of the same conclusions or absorbed the attachés’ views. Indeed, they were freer of the pro-cavalry prejudices which often distorted the attachés’ reports. But they had to make their stories interesting to the ordinary reader by mixing them with political and moral reflections. Brooke, for example, noted the unsuitability of the Russians’ uniforms compared with the Japanese, the excessive weight of their equipment, the shallowness of their trenches, the superiority of Japanese artillery fire because of the mobility of their lighter pieces and the inability of the Russian cavalry to penetrate the kowliang. On the other hand, he was impressed by their soup kitchens which operated while on the move during the retreat from Liaoyang, the way in which the Russians quickly covered the countryside with telegraph lines, and the quality of the nursing care.24 Frederick Arthur McKenzie remarked on the advantages enjoyed by the Japanese supply trains because of their soldiers’ simple and monotonous diet of rice and fish25 and, more surprisingly, William Maxwell noted the superiority of high explosive over shrapnel shells – something which was to be demonstrated throughout World War I but was still disputed by some of the army officers present in 1904.26 W. Richmond Smith, who reported from the Japanese side on the siege of Port Arthur for Reuters and Associated Press, showed how poorly the Russians sited their guns, how insanitary many of the Japanese field hospitals were and how the dense groups of attacking Japanese soldiers were mown down by the Russians. He emphasized the effective use made of hand grenades and underground mines in siege warfare, the efficacy of barbed wire and machine guns in stemming attacks and the crucial role played by the 14inch Japanese siege guns in blasting a way through to the key Russian

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position on 203 Meter Hill. Many features highlighted by his reports on the siege clearly reappeared in Europe ten years later.27 Partly because the journalists represented countries not directly involved in the conflict and because, despite the popularity of Social Darwinism, many British people were becoming concerned about the impact of warfare on civilians, the correspondents focused far more on the effect of the war on the people living in the battle zone than Russell and his colleagues had done in the Crimea half a century before. The Red Cross was now an accepted feature of European battlefields28 and, influenced perhaps by Bloch’s prophecies, the tsar had summoned the first Hague Peace Conference five years before the Russo-Japanese War began. The Churches in Britain and elsewhere were becoming more concerned about the humanitarian impact of warfare, and Quaker pacifism was coming to seem not quite such an anomaly.29 Thus, McKenzie wrote of the Japanese bombardment of Liaoyang, “cries of pain and of mourning were heard in innumerable Chinese homes, mothers lamenting their shrapnel mangled babies, infants trying in vain to feed off breasts that would never suckle again.”30 Guy Brooke divided his account of the Sha-ho battle between an exposition of the tactics and of the battle’s impact on the local people. The Chinese tried to continue with their normal lives even gathering crops between the artillery barrages and celebrating the Emperor Dowager’s birthday, before being killed or driven out by the fighting. Living in Mukden, Brooke was able to see the long lines of women and children fleeing from their wrecked farms into the city. He interviewed a young girl whose family had been caught between the battle lines. First they had fled towards the Japanese, only to be mown down, then they had turned towards the Russians only to lose all their other members except the girl herself whose body was riddled by bullets. Brooke believed that many of their menfolk had been killed previously by Cossacks who could not distinguish between bandits and peaceful farmers. The Caucasian Cossacks, in particular, gave the whole army a reputation for robbery and even murder. He also felt that, with all their own troubles, the Russian troops had lost sympathy for the refugees who had to depend on the bounty of other Chinese and of the missionaries in the city for their very survival.31 Despite this, many of the British journalists still believed that the Russians were kinder to the local people than the Japanese were and that they were more popular with them as a consequence. Brooke was himself of this opinion. In a later book, McKenzie recorded how he had personally welcomed the arrival of the Japanese in Korea in 1904 because he believed that they would be more efficient and less corrupt than the Korean officials, but he had seen how they had quickly alienated the Koreans by seizing all unoccupied land and by their brutality.32 Foreign missionaries living there who had also looked with favor on the Japanese quickly turned against them because of their exploitation of Korean resources and the introduction of opium. Lancelot Lawton, who reported

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for the Daily Telegraph during the war, pointed out that numerous Chinese and Koreans were killed by both sides on the merest suspicion that they were acting as spies.33 The Japanese crucified those suspected of sabotaging trains before their execution, as the photographs in Bennet Burleigh’s book make clear.34 Those journalists who spent some time in Korea tended to be particularly critical of the Japanese and sympathetic to the ordinary Koreans. Angus Hamilton’s account of the country, published in 1904, is a case in point. Hamilton greatly admired the Korean farmers: . . . whose capacity for work is unlimited. To the wayfarer and stranger the individual farmer is supremely and surprisingly hospitable. A foreigner discussing the peculiarities of their scenery, their lands and the general details of their life with them, is struck by their profound reverence for everything beyond their own understanding, and their amazing sense of the beautiful in nature.

Although he liked the simple Koreans, Hamilton was not a pure romantic and believed that rapid economic progress was being made in Seoul before the arrival of the Japanese whose victory he and the Koreans regarded with horror.35 As Lord William Gascoyne-Cecil, one of the British missionaries, put it after some years of Japanese rule: Korea was at their mercy. Except for the wisdom and gentleness of Prince Ito, there was nothing but oppression and suffering for the Koreans. The Japanese army had learnt not only their military art but their statecraft in Germany, and the latter is traditionally harsh. Break, crush, and bully are the maxims which find general acceptance in the Prussian court. Prince Ito could not control the Japanese soldiers, and the moans of the oppressed Koreans echoed throughout her land.36

Nevertheless, not all the journalists believed that the Koreans and Manchurians supported the Russians. Frederick Palmer and the American correspondent, Frederick McCormick argued that the Chinese often favored the Japanese.37 Like Brooke, McCormick saw the Russians’ behavior deteriorate as the war progressed not least because they were illequipped to face the intense cold of the winter of 1904–05: When the soldiers were not at religious exercises they seemed to be foraging in the neighboring hamlets and carrying off everything they could lay their hands on without payment and without scruple. It was . . . sometimes a calamity for a Chinese to be visited by them for they laid hold of any food, drink, clothing or other necessities that might come their way.38

McCormick admitted that Russian officials continued until the end of the war to hear formal complaints from the Chinese about the troops’

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behavior but pointed out that there could be no adequate compensation for a home wrecked in the middle of winter. He provided an insight into another aspect of the war. Both Russians and Japanese were bothered by attacks from bandits or hunhuzes as they were called. McCormick claimed never to have met any, despite all his wanderings in Manchuria. Rather he argued that the notorious “hunhuzes” were “outraged natives who in many cases murdered Russian soldiers and officers” after Cossacks had attacked them. In other words, they were fighting a guerrilla war against the occupiers, just as the Spanish had resisted Napoleon’s forces almost a century earlier. Curiously, McCormick was able to sympathize with such infuriated Chinese for taking up arms against the Russians but completely unable to empathize with Korea which he dismissed as a “cesspool of political chicanery and disease.”39 Amongst the correspondents covering the war from the Russian side, McCormick was particularly disillusioned with his hosts because he was one of the few correspondents to witness the Russian retreat after the last great battle of the war around Mukden when: . . . soldiers desperate and ferocious, seeking to wreak vengeance upon their officers for this last great calamity, or wanting a pretext for running away, inaugurated sympathetic panics by letting off their rifles and then plundered the officers’ baggage, took the horses – even vehicles – and disappeared.40

Officers were often so pleased to escape with their lives that they made no protest against the mutinies and the murders they witnessed. McCormick’s books are sometimes pretentious and his judgments on Korea and other issues misguided, but his account of this retreat is one of the epics of war reporting and certainly one of the finest pieces to emerge from the English-speaking correspondents who covered the Russo-Japanese War. It was a prescient warning of the defection of the army and of the revolution to come when Russia again become involved in a major war. But it was not seen by the war correspondents as a whole as proof of Bloch’s claim that war and revolution would be inextricably linked in the event of a major, and inevitably prolonged, European conflict. Frederick McKenzie, who was one of the few to wrestle with the issue, argued, on the one hand that reports of revolution in Russia were often exaggerated but admitted, on the other, that revolution would occur there unless the tsar bowed to demands for liberalization.41 Thus, he made the key issue the progress of liberalization rather than the strains of war. The many British journalists’ book-length accounts of the RussoJapanese War reveal a good deal about the thinking of that time. They made a major contribution to the war literature of the period because there was enough in their reports to give a very clear idea what a great war would be like in Europe with its trenches, its artillery fire, its barbed wire, its machine guns, and its mass casualties. Because they were taking

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the offensive, Frederick Mckenzie noted “the task before the Japanese was one which the disciples of M. Bloch would have declared impossible.”42 Yet, they were able to force the Russians to retreat to Mukden and beyond. Some of the correspondents argued that this was due simply to the unique qualities of the Japanese troops and would not be repeated.43 But European armed forces were inherently unlikely to accept that sieges were inevitable or that Japanese courage alone could restore mobility. As Brian Bond, the editor of the latest English edition of Bloch’s work, pointed out: Professional soldiers did not need a civilian such as Bloch to warn them of the hazards of fire-power and the risk of tactical deadlock. But their job was to find solutions and to make war “winnable” – and quickly – before Bloch’s dire warning about the collapse of civil and military morale could occur.44

Most of the full-time correspondents were Social Darwinists who wanted to warn their compatriots against the threat from less-peaceful nations. They had seen so much colonial warfare that it was hardly surprising that they accepted conflict as a normal aspect of life and found it difficult to see that a European war would be on a vastly greater scale and more prolonged than anything they had yet encountered. They shared the complaints about the bourgeois and decadent nature of peace which were so prevalent at that time and which convinced so many of the artists and intellectuals to rejoice when war broke out in 1914. AshmeadBartlett claimed that “the improvements, or the so-called improvements, of civilization have a disastrous effect on the physique and stamina of a nation.”45 Echoing the same sentiments, Michael McCarthy quoted Lord Rosebery’s feeling of despair when he compared Britain to its disadvantage with the “modern civilization” of Japan.46 Similarly, Burleigh complained about the weakness of British foreign policy and military preparations.47 Francis McCullagh, who reported for the New York Herald, protested as he left Manchuria: After having tasted of the horror and sublimity of war I was to return to the contemplation of . . . that sordid, eternal squabble for pence which they call peace – a squabble in which there is no Red Cross, no quarter, no regard for sex or age, no dignity, not a single redeeming feature.48

Similarly, McKenzie wrote of the dead soldiers, “better the death they died than the self-centered existence which seems the sum of our modern civilization.”49 Rarely can the loathing of urban life and romantic death-wish have been more clearly expressed. That is not to deny that some of the journalists were unaware of the sufferings involved; Guy Brooke best reflected the contradictions in the Western mind as he could write both about dreaming of the joys of battle and of the horror of lying close to an officer “terribly injured by

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the bursting of shrapnel. His groans never ceased till death came in mercy to end his sufferings.” After the second day of the battle of Liaoyang, Brooke wrote of the “tragedy of men ‘made in the image of God’ bringing their utmost skill to the hateful task of mutual murder.”50 Maurice Baring, who dedicated his book to Brooke, called war an “abomination” only offset in a minor way by the courage and endurance displayed by the combatants.51 Such writers paid due attention to the sufferings of the wounded and of the civilians living in Manchuria and Korea, even if their role was also to sell newspapers and to interest their fellow countrymen. The political outcome of the war was a shock to almost all correspondents because they were brought face to face with a change in the balance of power between Europe and Asia. Editorials in British newspapers lauded the achievements of the country’s Japanese allies, but they were also concerned about the long-term impact of Japan’s rise on Britain and the rest of Europe. British opinion was never again to be as pro-Japanese as it was in 1904–05, and the war correspondents led the way in this change of attitude. They admired Japan, but they were afraid of what its power portended and shared some of the concerns which the American writer, Homer Lea was later to popularize.52 Seeing a Russian prisoner, John Fox reflected. “I could not help feeling pity and shame – pity for him and shame for myself.”53 Bennet Burleigh concluded his account with a long soliloquy on the relationship between the “yellow” and “white” races, arguing that the Asians would only become equal through the failures of the Western powers. Presciently, he warned his compatriots of the threat from Japanese industry. He suggested that an alliance with the United States or France would have been preferable to the Anglo-Japanese alliance and that, if another war broke out between Japan and a European state, few powers would have the capability to send a fleet round the world to challenge Japan in its own waters.54 Ashmead-Bartlett argued that the Japanese “staggered the pride of every Western nation by the defeat and humiliation of one of their number.” He believed that they were better educated and more intelligent than most peoples, and praised the generous way they fraternized with the Russian troops after the surrender. Most of the correspondents would have agreed with his conclusion that there “are no soldiers who, by their behavior in the field during recent years, can compare with the soldiers of Japan in sustained courage, devotion to duty, and hardihood.” Like Burleigh, he compared Britain to its disadvantage with the Japanese because of their courage and preparation for war.55 The numerous books on the Russo-Japanese War by British war correspondents thus reflected the prejudices, troubles and anxieties of the age. The authors made a serious effort to inform their fellow countrymen about the clash between the rising Japanese state and the tsar’s rambling, inefficient regime. They did sometimes show their humanitarianism in their descriptions of the down-trodden Koreans and Chinese, and their

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reports foreshadowed the horrors which Japanese conquests were to inflict over the next forty years on the Korean and other Asian peoples. The Japanese prevented them seeing the fighting at close quarters but they were still able to describe something very like the trench warfare which was to take place on the Western Front during World War I. They were well aware of the physical destruction and suffering which this inflicted. If the popularization of the press at this time can be justly criticized for exacerbating international tensions, even the popular organs, like The Daily Mail, made a major effort to send reporters to the war, and the books written by their correspondents make more balanced reading than the accounts written about the Crimea half a century previously. If they failed sufficiently to warn of the catastrophe which war would bring to the European nations, this was because they could not find a way of reconciling the need to warn against war in general with the urge to alert their own country to defend itself from attack. Nor were they able to deal with Bloch’s contention, later taken up by Norman Angell, that a major war would be ruinous for Europe. On the face of it, the Japanese had managed to finance the war with loans raised in London and elsewhere. The correspondents could not have known that this would burden their economy with debts for years to come.56 Furthermore, if the Russian Empire had nearly collapsed, this could be taken as a symptom of its own incompetence and corruption rather as a reflection of the general vulnerability of European states to the impact of war. Even if the war correspondents had been able to deal with economic issues, they would have to have been extremely prescient to have concluded from the Russo-Japanese War that a European conflict would lead to the collapse of the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and leave Britain and France burdened with debts to the United States which they promised to repay over the following six decades. Nor did the Manchurian conflict entirely confirm Bloch’s claims that the defense was becoming much stronger than the attack and that a great European war would end in stalemate. What it did seem to show was that nations which became weak, such as Korea and China, would indeed be conquered and repressed by Japan and other stronger countries, as the Social Darwinists claimed. It is not, therefore, very surprising that the RussoJapanese War became the curtain raiser to a far greater and more disastrous conflict exactly a decade later and that the war correspondents, who covered the Manchurian conflict, should fail to warn their fellow citizens of the dangers ahead. NOTES 1 2 3 4

Gooch, 1975; Crook, 1994. Bloch, 1991: xiii. Grey, 1925, II: 21. Hansard, August 3, 1914.

330 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

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Angell, 1951: 164. Towle, 1971. Wells, 1974: 115. Stromberg, 1982. Hamilton, 1906: 14. Playne, 1928: 104. Morris, 1984: Ch. 2. Wilkinson, 2003. Towle, 1975. James, 1929: 4; Richmond Smith, 1905: 129; Prior, 1912: diary entries, May 30, June 14, and August 20, 1904. Story, 1904: 43. Brooke, 1905: 18, 204. Baring, 1905: ix. Burleigh, 1905: 286. Ashmead-Bartlett, 1906: 88, 118; Villiers, 1905: 13–14, 176. Brooke, 1905: 229. McKenzie, 1905: 116, 176. The Times, November 14, 1854. Great Britain, General Staff, 1908. Brooke, 1905: 158, 225. McKenzie, 1905: 178. Maxwell, 1906: 370. Richmond Smith, 1905: 277, 405; James, D.H., 1905: 50–51. Morris, 1992. Grane, 1912; Brittain, 1964; Brock, 1992. McKenzie, 1905: 247. Brooke, 1905: 231–234. McKenzie, 1908: 118 ff. Lawton, 1912, I: 236. Burleigh, 1905: 172, 178. Hamilton, 1904: 120, 136. Gascoyne-Cecil, 1910: 235. Palmer, 1904. McCormick, 1909, 1: 346. McCormick, 1909, 2: 366. McCormick, 1909, 2: 28. Mckenzie, 1905: 326 McKenzie, 1905: 132. Richmond Smith, 1905: 47. Bloch, 1991: preface. Ashmead-Bartlett, 1906: 484. McCarthy, 1905: Introduction. Burleigh, 1905: 439–441. McCullagh, 1906: 377. McKenzie, 1905: 268. Brooke, 1905: 94, 120.

British War Correspondents and the War 51 52 53 54 55 56

Baring, 1905: 205; Story, 1904: 297. Lea, 1909. Fox, 1905: 118. Burleigh, 1905: 436–458. Ashmead-Bartlett, 1906: 468–499. Ono, 1922.

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22

Participant Observation: Germany, the War, and the Road to a European Clash BERND MARTIN

W

orld War I is generally considered the original catastrophe of the twentieth century. Russian Communism, Italian Fascism, and, later on, German National Socialism all have their ideological and political roots in that first global war. The period up to the outbreak of World War II in 1939 or, regarding East Asia, the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, was merely a prolonged and unstable cease-fire for twenty-one and nineteen years respectively. Seen from today, both world wars belong together as an historical epoch. Hence, the background of the original catastrophe of 1914 appears perhaps to be more important to the historian than the policies of the Japanese and the Germans aiming at another war during the 1930s. The Russo-Japanese War had its impact on the constellation of powers in East Asia as well as Europe bringing about coalitions that eventually, nine years later, confronted each other in world-wide war. Although limited to East Asia, the war between a European great power and rising Japan offered to European-American diplomacy the last chance to undermine existing agreements and alliances and replace them by new political constellations. Geographically located at the centre of Europe, the German Kaiserreich in particular, tried to make use of the war in order to prevent itself from being encircled by France, Great Britain, and Russia. These German attempts failed, however, mostly because the German government under Emperor Wilhelm II and Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow overestimated its power and influence, so that at the beginning of 1906 the German Reich found itself internationally isolated. Based on original reports, this chapter overviews German perceptions of the conflict in Manchuria and the effects of its convoluted relations with Russia during the war on its subsequent geopolitical position.

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GERMAN DIPLOMACY BEFORE AND DURING THE WAR

With Wilhelm II’s accession to the throne (1888) and his dismissal of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the Reich, German policy changed tack and from European centered “policy of saturation” turned to world-wide expansion. The alliance with Russia, hitherto the basis of any German foreign policy, in 1890 was exchanged for a “policy of the free hand.” In view of this kind of unstable and expansive policy in the center of Europe, France and Russia, both of them sharing long borders with the Reich, soon allied together forming a military convention in 1892, which two years later became a formally concluded alliance. For the time being, Great Britain kept its distance, as the French-English antagonism over colonial questions and the strained relations between Russia and Great Britain were considered basic assumptions of international politics. The German Reich for its part, unhampered by alliances and bound only to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire (and later on, loosely, to Italy) tried to make use of the existing controversies to increase its own power. However, Bülow’s world policy aiming at “a place in the sun” for Germany joined by Germany’s Navy armament program from 1897 met with increasing British apprehension – the Reich had become a rival and the British government re-approached France.1 The Entente Cordiale concluded in April 1904 put an end to the colonial controversies in North Africa and at the same time attached Great Britain to the FrancoRussian Alliance. With Japan occupying Manchuria in 1900, war between Japan and Russia seemed inevitable and Berlin sensed the singular opportunity to direct the tsarist empire’s interest away from Europe towards Asia and to foment the still existing international controversies. In accordance with Germany’s policy of independence, repeated Russian proposals of an alliance were rejected as were similar offers on the part of Great Britain. From 1900 on, the Reich’s policy aimed at a war between Japan and Russia skillfully steering both sides along the path to confrontation. In his personal correspondence, Wilhelm II managed to convince his imperial nephew of the Japanese weakness and stressed their common racist prejudice against the yellow Japanese upstarts. Before, and especially during, the war, the axiom proclaimed by Berlin was that Russia was defending white Christian civilization in East Asia thereby protecting the European nations’ most cherished values from imminent danger. A few days after the outbreak of war, the Emperor to his Chancellor depicted the yellow peril – to his mind’s eye the Japanese were already threatening St. Petersburg and Posen. When the Chancellor dared to disagree he was ordered to write down and depose in the archives His Majesty’s opinions.2 Since the Boxer War, in which Germany had played a leading military part in the intervention powers’ camp, Wilhelm II looked upon himself as the guardian of the Occident. According to the Reich’s Chancellor, German policy was to keep strictly neutral and at the same time prevent any unsatisfactory peace agreement.3 The more the war was prolonged, the weaker Russia would

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become, the more isolated France would be, and the more deeply involved Great Britain – all the better for the Reich’s future position as a world power. It was quite unthinkable in Berlin that Japan might win the war and turn out a useful Far Eastern partner. The once excellent relations between Japan and its highly esteemed German tutor – after all, the whole Japanese army had been trained according to Prussian regulations – had markedly cooled off since the Triple Intervention in 1895 when Germany, France, and Russia together had prevented Japan from entering the Asian continent in Port Arthur.4 Restoring that troika with Germany in the lead was Germany’s aim before and during the RussoJapanese War. Hence, Japan as well as Great Britain were considered the real potential adversary, all the more so as these two since 1902 were united in a military alliance. In the long run uniting the continental European powers against the two maritime powers Great Britain and Japan was the declared aim of German policy. While officially neutral Great Britain in fact supported its Far Eastern ally by trying to slow down the war. France obviously opted for Russia. Despite all the Russian disasters, public opinion in France stayed friendly towards its ally, whom it would lose in the case of total Russian defeat.5 However, because of British maritime supremacy France could hardly afford openly to support its ally in distress. Hence, during the war, only half-hearted measures were taken such as delivering arms and opening French ports to Russian battleships. The United States, imperialist great power in East Asia since the victory over Spain in 1898, above all pursued commercial interests with its open-door policy in China. However, due to tsarist autocracy and frequent pogroms against the Jewish population in Russia, Washington kept its distance from Russian expansion in Northeast Asia. As a counterpart to Russia, Japan in the eyes of the United States was welcome only so long as it did not itself claim hegemony.6 Basically, the Western powers including Germany agreed on limited expansion of the Japanese territory in the case of Japan winning the war, which was soon to be expected. The German emperor, who at the outbreak of war had still enticed Russia with the Korean booty, four months later when talking to his English cousin Edward VII assessed the situation in a more realistic way.7 Both monarchs shared the opinion that Russian victory was highly unlikely and that as a consequence Korea would belong to Japan.8 The American President already at the beginning of May 1904 had voiced the same opinion. The fall of Korea under Japanese rule, which is to say the end of any, however limited, Korean autonomy, was sealed during the first months of war, even before Japan could strengthen its claim by overwhelming military victories. In all their reports from East Asia, German diplomats and military confirmed Russian inferiority. After the Russian Pacific fleet in vain tried to escape from encirclement, the Japanese navy controlled the sea unopposed so that for the siege of Port Arthur troops could land and heavy war material be shipped unhampered. Before long, the Germans were

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convinced that the fortress was not going to hold.9 Maybe they were even proud of the German-trained Japanese forces, especially as the siege of Port Arthur was carried out according to the German manual on siege warfare. After all, Japanese army officers regarded the German general staff officer Jacob Meckel as their tutor, who in just three years had reorganized the Japanese Army and especially the general staff.10 Even The Times of London held Meckel responsible for the Japanese victories but also for the horrendous losses on both sides.11 Massive frontal attacks in closed lines – as Meckel had recommended – with their huge numbers of casualties in many ways anticipated World War I. Although well informed of the Japanese superiority, the Kaiser in his private correspondence with the tsar tried to depict Japan as inferior in the long run. According to him, Japan was exhausted, tired of fighting, and generally at the end of its strength. Whether the Russian side saw through the German intention to keep Russia at war as long as possible and obstruct mediation cannot be said for sure. The tsar, however, convinced of the Kaiser’s arguments, in the course of the war more and more stubbornly opposed any kind of making peace. Even after the Russian army had been forced to retreat northwards in February 1905, the tsar still believed in final victory and in doing so was backed up by Berlin. When even the German Ambassador to Petersburg recommended peace, for fear of revolution and the end of the monarchy, he was immediately replaced. To encourage the tsar, Wilhelm II sent his brother, Prince Heinrich, who minimized the revolution as a Jewish plot and announced the expulsion of Russian revolutionaries from Berlin.12 With Russia weakened by war and revolution the Kaiser made use of the situation by going to Tangier (March 31, 1905) and in this way stated the German claim to have a say in the future development of Morocco. France indeed took a step back. Foreign Minister Déclassé, the architect of the Entente Cordiale and figurehead of anti-German encirclement policy, was forced to retire (June 6, 1905). With respect to the military as well as political situation Russia had to fend for itself and was further weakened by the revolution spreading fast. Russia had to pay dear for the friendship with Germany. After stagnating for years, the negotiations about a new commercial treaty upon direct order from the tsar were now decided in favor of German wishes. Import duties for Russian agrarian products were raised, which protected the inland market and served the interests of big landowners in the Northeast of Germany. In this way the government retrieved the support of the conservative elites, while the Social Democratic Party spoke of profiteering. The industrial bourgeoisie was won over to the government’s policy by huge orders of war material, as the Reich was by far the most important supplier to Russia. Moreover, selling ships and optical and electronic equipment was extremely lucrative business and stabilized the monopoly of German “new industries“ world wide. From the point of view of Berlin the war in East Asia could not go on long enough. Only the catastrophe of the Baltic Fleet near Tsushima made this way of thinking no longer seem appropriate.

336

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 GERMANY AND THE VOYAGE OF THE BALTIC FLEET

At dawn, on the spring day of May 27, 1905, in rough seas and foggy weather, a Russian fleet unit of fifty ships was passing the Isle of Tsushima and entering the Strait of Korea in order to gain the secure port of Vladivostok. Having started on October 15, 1904 from Libau, the Baltic Fleet, the second squadron under the command of Vice Admiral Zinovii Rozhestvenskii, after an eight-month voyage, now seemed to be nearing its destination. Twelve hours later, at sunset, thirty-four ships had been sunk, burned or abandoned. Thousands of Russian sailors had fallen or drowned or were floating in the water hoping for rescue. The jewel of Russian ships and the symbol of tsarist maritime prestige was lying at the bottom of the Japanese Sea.13 The German Navy displayed genuine interest in the naval campaigns of the Russo-Japanese War for several reasons. First, the modern (Prussian) German Navy had seen action only twice – in East Asian Waters. The Prussian Expedition to the Far East (1860–62) laid the foundation of a modern fleet that was later deployed for the first time in a giant logistic transfer of troops from Germany to China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The highest-ranking officers had been cadets when exploring East Asia, the middle ranks were involved in the campaigns in China. Furthermore, since 1865, a permanent Far Eastern Squadron had been established where many officers had served – among others, the German navy secretary of state since 1897 and during 1904–05, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz himself as commander.14 Therefore, German naval officers in general knew about East Asia and seem to have been more familiar with Japanese or Chinese peculiarities than their Russian counterparts. Second, with the seizure of Tsingtao, which was meant to be governed by the German Navy, the Reich disposed of a military stronghold and a model town. According to Admiral Tirpitz the leasehold in the long run should outmaneuver Hong Kong and become a base for a German Navy equal to the British sea power. During the building up of this giant navy, Tirpitz avoided any serious conflict with the Royal Navy and tried to minimize the naval strength of possible competitors like Japan and Russia. Tirpitz and his staff, therefore, were frightened by the idea of having the Russian Navy as a close ally. In that case, the new few German battleships would be easy prey for the British in a conflict in the North Sea. German reports on the Russian fleet, written by naval personnel, therefore, were extremely critical. Admiral Tirpitz openly opposed the Kaiser’s wishes for any political steps toward a closer alliance with tsarist Russia.15 Both, however, agreed upon protracting the war as long as possible, Tirpitz with the intention of ridiculing the Russian Navy and the Emperor aiming at a weak Russia asking Germany for help. Neither the Admiral nor the Emperor wished for a Japanese victory which could establish the Japanese Empire as a further rival to German aspirations in East Asia. War without a victory would be the best for improving the Reich’s position world wide.

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Third, with the construction program in progress since 1897 the German Navy took a keen interest in the naval battles going on in East Asia.16 The secret report printed for internal use, under the headline “Experiences and consequences of the Russo-Japanese War for the construction and armament of warships” was meant to confirm Tirpitz’s concept of a battleship fleet even before Tsushima: The capital ships in line have always been the decisive factor in naval warfare. For gaining superiority at sea and keeping up sea power these ships have proved indispensable. Next to the efficiency of the crews the number and strength of battle ships is decisive. Apart from the supporters of the jeune Ecole in France still vehemently opposing, this concept has been generally accepted in expertise.17

Tirpitz, the admiralty, and the Navy ministry were all looking for lessons from the war to prove them right. The fate of the fleet seemed doomed from the very day it left the home port of Libau on October 15, 1905. According to diplomatic reports and newspaper articles, written before the departure and during the voyage, the badly-trained Russian fleet would be no match for the highly proficient Japanese Fleet commanded by the English-trained Admiral Togo Heihachiro.18 The whole world closely watched the squadron’s route, and commented on the political implications which always evolved when the ships tried to enter neutral ports or were forced to shovel coal by hand from the colliers off the three miles’ zone. Minor incidents, which in those days happened quite frequently to the boiler-run battleships of other fleets as well, were sarcastically criticized and the Russian officers ridiculed. The tabloid Western Press was most interested in the behavior of the Russian sailors when ashore. The Russians, conscripted peasants in sailors’ uniforms, would always provide a good story when misbehaving. In English and American papers, the Russian crews were depicted as stupid and brutal drunkards unable to handle most modern warships. The fact that after all this fleet was moving slowly but steadily round half the world seemed like a miracle. German papers, however, were asked to report on the Russian warfare in a friendly manner. Critical reports about the voyage of the Baltic Fleet were censored. After the Chinese predominance on the East Asian mainland had been broken, tsarist Russia’s continental expansionism strove to add Manchuria and Korea to its newly won Far Eastern bastion, the Amur province and Vladivostok founded in 1860 as a navy base. Although the Russian naval fleet looked back upon a tradition of more than 200 years, it had never seen more than local action, mainly against the Turks in the Black Sea. As Russian navy units had shown up for the first time in the Chinese Sea during the fighting against the Boxer rebels they lacked fighting experience. And the higher officers’ corps was over-aged. The leading elite, most of them members of the nobility, relied on the extraordinary endurance of the ranks consisting of drafted farmers’ sons and

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cherished a religious belief in “Holy Russia” that, if only due to its masses of people and vastness of territory, simply could not perish.19 From this idealized, nationalist point of view, the upstart Japan was looked down upon, the Japanese were despised as “yellow monkeys” and their military endeavors ridiculed. At the beginning of 1904 the storm broke. On February 9, 1904, the Imperial Japanese Navy opened the war with a surprise attack on Port Arthur. The Russian ships anchoring there were either sunk or, in order to block the entry to the bay, sunk themselves, or were badly damaged. From then on the Japanese Navy under Admiral Togo was able to transport troops unhindered across the Yellow Sea and the Korean Strait. Confident of further victories, the Japanese presented the formal declaration of war two days later, on February 11, 1904. The first reports, sent by German diplomats and military officers, about the opening of the war at sea and the ensuing battles, were very unfavorable to the Russian Pacific Fleet. “Obviously the Russians lack fighting spirit” the embassy in Tokyo finished its first report.20 Five months later, the German captain attached to the naval base in Port Arthur sent a disastrous report on the Russian naval officer corps to Berlin: They lack solidarity as well as social, ethical and intellectual training. They have no sense of duty and officers’ honor, and completely lack any kind of esprit de corps, they are not trained to think and act independently. Neither ambitious nor efficient they just wait passively for things to come, relief by the Russian land forces or the Baltic Fleet.21

As both sides had formally asked war correspondents and military observers to join the forces as “embedded” reporters, similar comments can be found in English newspapers.22 The French, on the other hand, did not want to provoke their ally and suppressed any kind of criticism of the Russians.23 In Berlin, the critical reports were presented to the Kaiser and the admiralty. But the official government policy was to keep up benevolent neutrality towards Russia, which would exclude any harsh criticism of the much sought-after ally. Therefore, all reports on the military situation in Northeast Asia were censored in Germany.24 The Kaiser himself would decide which military information he would himself personally convey to the tsar in order to win his cousin and the reluctant Russian statesmen over to his plan of a continental alliance.25 Meanwhile, the Japanese had entered Manchuria and drew a siege line around Port Arthur, where, as both sides calculated, the outcome of the fighting would be decided. Fresh troops and heavy siege armor were shipped to Port Arthur under the protection of the navy. Consequently, the government in far away St. Petersburg concentrated all its efforts on the relief of the fortress, thinking that this could best be achieved from the sea. The greatest part of the Russian Pacific Squadron was still anchored on alert at Vladivostok. In order to prevent the Russian units

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from leaving the port, the Japanese first of all mined the waters around Vladivostok. Promptly, the flagship of the squadron, the Petropavlovsk under Vice Admiral Stepan Makarov, one of the few capable higher naval officers, hit a mine, exploded and sank together with the whole crew and the Admiral himself.26 Eventually, on August 10, 1904, the Russian Pacific Fleet quite unable to meet the challenge of the Japanese Navy, was to pay for its attempt at relieving Port Arthur with the loss of five heavy units and the death of its newly appointed commander, Rear Admiral Vilgelm Vitgeft.27 The Russian Pacific Fleet was destroyed, Japan was in control of the far eastern waters, and the fall of Port Arthur seemed but a question of time. When Vitgeft’s flagship Tsesarevich had taken shelter in the German naval base of Tsingtao, the local authorities had ample opportunity to inspect the damage and observe the Russian sailors. In their report to Berlin they came to the conclusion that the battle-cruiser was given up on purpose: Upon entering Tsingtao port the ship’s helm was more or less intact (contrary to Russian statements). After the battle of August 19 the ship remained seaworthy and fit for action . . . By outstaying its legally allowed time in a neutral port without any good reason a perfectly serviceable battleship was ignominiously interned – a severe loss to any fleet.28

At this stage, several departments of the German Navy reported on the Russian defeat in order to improve their own vessels. All these statements were carefully studied by Admiral Tirpitz, who commented only on the improvement of the German battleships: “The armor-plating should be strengthened and the turrets lowered. The newly built German capital ships should not be an easy target and thus prey to the enemy, as had been the case with the Russian Far Eastern Fleet.”29 Tirpitz did not care so much about suggestions for improving mines, torpedo-boats or light-cruisers. But he marked all proposals listing flaws of Russian artillery and the armament of the tsar’s ships with a handwritten “yes.”30 In an interdepartmental round-table discussion called by Tirpitz, the Secretary of the Navy admonished the participants not to draw the premature conclusion that cruisers were better suited for naval combat than battleships.31 By now, influential court circles in St. Petersburg began to urge the tsar to deploy, as the last resort, the Baltic Fleet with its modern and efficient battleships. However, in the capital, opinions were divided as to the sense and the likely success of such a big project. For one thing, the ships would have to be adapted to such long-term deployment and their voyage round the world posed logistic problems. Furthermore, there was the question whether Port Arthur would hold out until the arrival of the ships. The tsar hesitated and the newly (on April 11, 1904) appointed Commander-in-Chief of the squadron, Vice Admiral Rozhestvenskii, too, had his doubts. Yet, he made up for his uncertainty by boasting and, for

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his soon obvious incapability as a leader, by brutally harassing his subordinates, frequently battering members of the rank and file. A favorite of the tsar, Rozhestvenskii was not an exception but rather a product of the social order in which ordinary people did not count and competence was ignored in favour of connections.32 Navy officers served for reasons of social status; they were badly trained and badly motivated. In order to operate the new machinery specialists from the merchant navy had to be dispatched. The crew for its part mostly consisted of hastily-recruited land soldiers. While equipment and supplies were amply provided, the ranks and the officers’ corps were at best second-rate. The Kaiser had been supporting the die-hard faction in Petersburg and the newly appointed Commander. Ever since Wilhelm’s notorious flag signal to Nicolaus II after their meeting in Reval in 1902 “The Admiral of the Atlantic salutes the Admiral of the Pacific,”33 the Kaiser missed no opportunity to flatter his imperial cousin. The Kaiser even claimed to have discovered Rozhestvenskii’s ability as an artillery officer when the Admiral, in those days still a captain, practiced firing the German fabricated Krupp canons to the pleasure of the two Emperors. The gifted navy officer immediately was promoted on the Kaiser’s recommendation.34 Therefore, the Kaiser showed great interest in the voyage of the fleet on which he commented in the most favorable terms. On the other hand, he warned the “Admiral of the Pacific” against deploying his fleet unprepared and too hastily. Before leaving the admiral should first learn how to form a battle line and have shooting exercises in the Baltic.35 The Kaiser soon was proved right with his recommendation. German diplomats and high-ranking military frequently issued warnings of Japanese spies and agents plotting assaults on the battleships.36 The Japanese, indeed, had built up a network of agents from their legation in Stockholm encouraging the national minorities like the Fins and the Poles to side with the Japanese in order to shake off of the Russian yoke.37 The tsar eventually decided to let the ships sail; on October 15, the unit of forty-two ships finally left the last Russian port, Libau. According to a report by the German naval attaché, morale on board was bad with deficiencies soon showing everywhere and the crew not working smoothly together.38 As there had been no time for maneuvers, the fleet had not even practiced formation sailing, not to mention operating and firing the very modern guns. In addition, already in the Baltic Sea there was the fear of Japanese torpedo attacks. Consequently, due to the prevailing insecurity and nervousness even during the first days at sea several incidents happened that forced the fleet to turn about. It was just a question of time before the first serious accident happened. When it did happen, during the night of October 21–22, at the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, it might almost have triggered a world war, though, probably with different allies.39 One of the ships at the rear of the fleet reported torpedo-boats from all sides, and the nervousness increased. Then the ships sailing in front noticed unusual flare signals in the morning fog, and the Commander ordered gunners to open fire. When,

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ten minutes later the error was noticed – the presumed enemy was found to be English fishing boats – it was too late. One trawler was sunk, several fishermen killed, others were swimming in the sea injured, and the cruiser Aurora was hit several times, yet without the grenades exploding. Rozhestvenskii ordered the fleet to sail on without caring about those left behind. Even after the event he kept insisting that Japanese torpedoboats had been hiding among the trawlers.40 The Kaiser at once supported Rhozestvenskii’s unshakeable belief that the fleet had been attacked by Japanese torpedo-boats. In commenting on a realistic report from the German Embassy in London the Kaiser wrote: “This is impossible! With such a calm and careful admiral! I know him. Obviously he noticed torpedo-boats under foreign flags. Presumably former British ones sold to the Japanese.”41 In the conduct of the “Russian mad-dog-fleet” the British public saw yet further evidence of the Russian upper classes’ barbarism and incompetence and the press demanded harsh punishment of “these so-called sailors.”42 The British Navy was immediately alerted. Wounded in its national self-esteem, Great Britain seemed about to favor the Japanese side so that the tsar hastily promised generous financial compensation. Moreover, the Russian Navy was confronted with the humiliating demand for an international investigation committee. The reputation of the Russian Navy was ruined, and the squadron’s further voyage was followed with curiosity as well as ridicule. At first, the Russian government strongly objected to any kind of international investigation which would humiliate the Baltic fleet. Russia’s prestige seemed at stake but the tsar and his government, realizing the imminent danger of war with the British and the superiority of the Royal Navy, had no choice but to submit. The Russian squadron was escorted by British battleships and cruisers put on alert, to the Spanish port of Vigo.43 There, the Russian ships were trapped by the Royal Navy forming a battle line in the coastal waters. Meanwhile the French government tried to smooth the storm of indignation within the British government by hinting at German preventive military plans. Indeed, in case of a British-Russian conflict, France would have been an easy prey to a German attack. The famous “Schlieffen plan” realized in 1914, had been worked out in 1904 and the general himself had advocated such a surprise offensive against France as early as in April 1904. Obviously, the French intelligence had got hold of the German war plans, which were now presented by the French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé to the British who immediately calmed down.44 Eventually, six high-ranking Russian naval officers left the ships and stayed behind for interrogation while the ships were allowed to continue their voyage. As the international investigation committee had not yet been formed, the officers were confronted with a crowd of curious journalists. “True stories” of the Dogger Bank Incident told under the influence of heavy Spanish wines became favorite news in the Western press thus discrediting the so-called naval officers again.45 The official report was

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published about four months later. Obviously a diplomatic compromise, it blamed the Russians for attacking trawlers, the loss of which should be compensated for, and stated that the Admiral had not acted on purpose.46 Providing supplies for the Russian fleet turned out to be another much disputed topic, especially between France and Britain, while Germany could take advantage of the situation. As Russia did not have any bases outside its own territory, coal supply was a logistic as well a political problem. Running at average speed, the squadron needed 3,000 tons of first quality coal, at top speed three times as much. Now that France too, under pressure from England, refused to supply coal, Germany stepped in to help, thereby strengthening the tsar’s obligations to Germany. Upon an agreement with the government of the Reich the Hamburg-America Line signed a contract for delivering altogether 340,000 tons of coal from Cardiff. Sixty coal ships, half of them sailing under the German flag, eventually delivered their freight wherever desired.47 Rozhestvenskii’s squadron on its way round Africa because of British pressure on the French government could not rely on any efficient help by the harbor authorities in French colonial ports. But the ships always received a friendly welcome when anchoring in Portuguese or German ports, or, after twenty-five hours, on the roadstead. In Lüderitz Bay, a delegation of Russian naval officers in civilian clothes even paid a semi-official visit to the commander who, presumably, acted under orders from Berlin.48 The need for repeatedly bunkering coal delayed the voyage and further demoralized the crew. According to international maritime law such actions were not allowed in ports but only at sea. This meant that due to the lack of cranes the coal had to be shoveled by the crew. Especially in tropical heat and without sufficient ventilation working below deck was such a strain that the squadron suffered its first losses: people were simply dying from exhaustion. Between Vigo and Tangier, the squadron was accompanied and closely watched by the British Royal Navy, whose exact maneuvers offered a humiliating contrast to the chaotic Russian formation. When leaving Tangier the squadron once again provided the world press with several amusing incidents, e.g. when the Russians by mistake cut the telephone cable between Morocco and Europe.49 Rozhestvenskii, together with the bulk of the fleet, the modern ships that formed the first division, set course around Africa, while the older units, the second division, under the command of Rear Admiral Dmitrii von Felkerzam (Fölkersam), were to pass through the Suez Canal.50 At the northern end of Madagascar the two of them were to be reunited. When the ships of the second division stopped in Suda Bay on Crete, again reports about drunken Russian sailors demolishing the whole town of Chania circulated around the world.51 When the ships met in front of Hellville (named after the French Admiral Hell) on Madagascar, the capitulation of Port Arthur was a fact. During a two-months’ wait in the tropical waters of Madagascar ordered by St. Petersburg, the fighting morale of crew and officers alike dropped to zero. The looting in Hellville soon got out of control.52 The officers,

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usually in plain clothes, did their best to overlook everything while indulging in their own orgies in the brothels of the town or in the officer’s mess on board. A popular pass-time was feeding champagne to dogs and monkeys and then setting them on each other. For all to see, the Admiral himself openly courted a nurse on the hospital ship.53 Hence his Draconian attempts at restoring discipline were of little effect. Eventually at his wit’s end, Rozhestvenskii sent all the offenders, the disoriented crew and the many degraded officers back home on two cargo ships and together with the whole unit – the second division having arrived – left the hell of Hellville without waiting for the third division. The international press provided detailed reports of what was happening and even the French governor had to admit that the Russian officers were acting like seventeen-year-olds.54 When the Kaiser had heard about the breaking down of the ice machine on Rozhestvenskii’s flagship he thought of his favorite admiral and immediately ordered a thousand bottles of German beer to be shipped by a collier to the Kniaz Suvorov. The beer was apparently delivered on the roadstead of Hellville. This friendly gesture, of course, did not improve the fighting spirit of the rank and file but was regarded as a token of German friendship in St. Petersburg.55 Despite protests and the Admiral’s petition to resign, St. Petersburg had sent a motley division (the third one) of different ships under Rear Admiral Nebogatov on its way.56 These battleships, which were so old and in such bad shape that their crews called them “self-sinkers,” were supposed to help the squadron carry out its new order to break through to Vladivostok. Obviously they could only reduce the squadron’s mobility and speed even further. While waiting for this third division that had left Kronstadt on February 18, 1905, the Commander-in-Chief of the first and second divisions, for the first time, ordered military exercises, during which fighting off enemy torpedo boats went more or less according to plan, whereas three gunnery exercises proved a complete failure. The squadron failed at gunnery as well as maneuvering, not to mention doing both things at the same time. Even the flagship fired by mistake at one of the squadron’s own cruisers.57 By then news of the Russian revolution and the Bloody Sunday (January, 22 1905) in St. Petersburg had spread, as had Russian press comments on the superiority of the Japanese fleet. Proceeding was felt to be a suicide mission, especially after the Russian defeat in the battle of Mukden (March 10, 1905) became known. For three weeks the international press lost track of the two fleets, the first and second divisions crossing the Indian Ocean unobserved. When they were eventually passing the Strait of Malacca (April 8, 1905) in battle line close to the coast of Singapore the journalists were impressed, now waiting for the final show-down with the Japanese.58 At the beginning of May the ships anchored in Cam Ranh Bay, off the coast of Annam in northern French Indo-China (today Vietnam) for another ten days and, after being joined by the third division and one day of practicing formation sailing, on May 25 all three divisions consisting of fifty-two ships left for the Japanese Sea.59 On May 27, at 5:30

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they were discovered by a Japanese patrol boat. The Russian Admiral did not have a plan of action nor had he ever called a briefing session with his staff officers and commanders. To the last moment even the course to take – through the Korean Strait or around Japan – had remained unclear. Admiral Togo’s Japanese fleet was lying in wait in the Chinhae Bay on the southeastern coast of Korea, yet he, too, was unsure whether the enemy would try to break through the Korean Strait or rather take the detour around Japan. In the latter case, Togo would have to catch up with the Russians near Vladivostok at the latest. When the enemy’s approach was reported, Togo’s fast units were positioned about ninety miles away from the Russians and could meet them on their own course. Thus, even before the two fleets met, the initiative lay with the Japanese. The Russian admiral, on the other hand, had no idea from where to expect the Japanese advance. The two fleets approaching each other were generally considered of equal strength. The Russian ships were more heavily armed and their firing capacity was somewhat greater, whereas the lighter Japanese battleships were easier to maneuver. While the average speed of the battleships was more or less equal, the Japanese armed cruisers were much faster than most of the Russian cruisers. Yet, Rozhestvenskii had to take into account the slower vessels of the third division in order not to break the fleet apart and leave the third division an easy prey to the Japanese. Togo, unhampered by any such consideration, divided his fast ships and his armed cruisers, which anyway were capable of twenty knots, into two attacking units. The outcome of the battle was clear before the first shot had been fired. The Russians under the vile-tempered tsar’s favorite Rozhestvenskii had no chance against the perfectly-trained and highlymotivated Japanese under Togo’s excellent leadership. Unshakeably confident of victory, on the morning of 27 May he had his flagship signal the words: “The future of the fall of our country depends on this battle. May everyone do his duty as best he can.”60 The Russian squadron did not carry out any long-range reconnaissance, so that the heavy Japanese units fast approaching were not noticed. Roshestvenskii had just ordered the second and third divisions to join the first division in single keel line when the Japanese ships came into view. As the Russians had to coordinate their speed and the space for filtering in was too short, the ships in the rear had to slow down, which again caused confusion. Thus from a safe distance, Togo easily succeeded in crossing the Russians’ course in a classical “Crossing the T” maneuver. In addition to this surprise coup the tactically experienced Admiral made use of the enemy’s confusion for a dangerous maneuver. Beginning with his flagship he made the whole unit turn by 180° in order, from a parallel position, to force the Russian ships off their course for Vladivostok. Instead of using the enemy’s momentary weakness during this maneuver to open fire at once, the Russian Commander-inChief seemed to be fascinated by Togo’s recklessness. When eventually at 13:55 he ordered fire, the first salvoes were so well-placed that the

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Mikasa was hit and Admiral Togo slightly wounded. However, scarcely had the Japanese unit gained formation again, when all hell broke loose. The splinters hailing down caused fires everywhere on the decks of the ships. From a distance of about 6 km the Japanese concentrated their salvoes on the two flagships, the Kniaz Suvorov and the Osliabia; the rudder of the Admiral’s ship was damaged and the ship forced off course whereupon its tower too was hit. The jewel of the Baltic Fleet the Kniaz Suvorov was adrift, ablaze, and aimless. Less than one hour later, at 14:55, the equally badly damaged Osliabia capsized and sank taking two thirds of the crew with it. The first heavy battleship in the history of modern naval warfare had sunk.61 The Russian crews and officers alike were paralyzed with horror and unable to take the simplest measures such as extinguishing the fires. Now the Russian fleet was left without command, panic and chaos prevailed. Two liners, the Alexander II and the Borodino temporarily tried to take command, yet were hit so often that they, too, sank fast. On the Borodino the ammunition store exploded so that all but two members of the crew were killed. Of the four modern Russian battleships, only the Orel managed, badly damaged, to stay afloat and together with the older units continue on course for Vladivostok. Eventually a destroyer moved parallel to the burning and slowly sinking Kniaz Suvorov to take up the Admiral and the surviving staff officers. Rozhestvenskii lost consciousness and even when he came to was unable to assess the situation. His officers made use of the opportunity to save the Admiral’s and their own lives. On the evening of May 27 the fighting force of the Russian Fleet had been broken and about 5,000 Russian sailors had lost their lives. The scattered remainder tried to escape in the direction of Vladivostok or, like the cruiser squadron tried to gain the secure American waters in Manila. Eventually, the remainder gathered around the new Commander-in-Chief on board the old liner Admiral Nakhimov. As they were encircled from all sides, Nebogatov capitulated in order to avoid the senseless death of yet another 5,000 men. For lack of a white flag he had a white tablecloth hoisted. Only when the Russian ships stopped their engines, did Togo order the bombardment to stop and in a torpedo-boat had the Russian Admiral taken aboard his flagship. Nebogatov offered the surrender of two liners, two armed cruisers, and one destroyer. About twenty-four hours after the beginning of the fighting the battle had ended. The commanders, 122 officers, and 5,710 sailors were taken prisoner. The final report of the Navy Ministry for the Secretary on the battle of Tsushima presented on June 17, 1905 was to support Tirpitz’s naval program and strategy: “The main reason for his [Rozhestvenskii’s] defeat is throughout to be found in the deficiency of tactical and artillery training. What has been neglected in years cannot be made up for in a few months.”62 The Russians lacked experience in reconnaissance and protection, deployment, and training of cruisers, and their torpedo-boats completely failed; whereas the Japanese stuck to the basics of fighting in line and were good at reconnaissance. Summing up the reasons for the

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defeat: lack of thorough combat training; lack of strategic understanding and training; heterogeneity of the task forces; insufficient number of cruisers and torpedo-boats; different flaws in the materials (unreliable gunpowder, instability of a whole type of ships); underestimation of the opponent. The chief of the Admiralty in his evaluation of the battle came to slightly different conclusions. Repeating the main deficiencies of Russian tactics and the flaws of the ships, the report stressed the importance of the torpedo-boats in battle. And contrary to common opinion for once the Russians were praised for their training and skill at moving in keelline,63 Admiral Hintze in his report from Petersburg to Berlin gave the Russian version of the shattering defeat, for which he listed seven reasons.64 The worst mistake in Russian eyes had been Rozhestvenskii’s attempt to break through the straits of Korea instead of circumnavigating the Japanese Isles. Next came deficiencies in the command structure. In third and fourth places, Admirals Nebogatov and Enkvist were blamed for incompetence. In fifth place, the chaos of the Russian task forces at the opening of hostilities is mentioned. And only in sixth and seventh places are listed the construction flaws of the battleships and the grenades (which would often explode belatedly or not at all). Apparently the Commanding Admiral was spared from serious criticism probably because of his good connections with the Court. Tsar Nicholas had sent a personal message of thanks to the wounded admiral: I heartily thank you and all the sailors of the fleet, who have done their duty with honors in combat, for your unselfish service to Russia and to me. On the Almighty’s will your heroic deed could not be crowned with a success. But the fatherland will always proudly remember your noble courage. I wish for your speedy recovery. May God console you.65

Apparently the tsar had exonerated Rozhestvenskii from all accusations. Only about a week later on the occasion of the farewell dinner given for the German ambassador did the tsar pick up the explanations of Russian newspapers: the battleships had been totally overloaded with coal which, as everybody understood, was obviously the fault of the Germanrun collier system and the refusal of the Hamburg-America Line to deliver coal north of French Indo-China.66 Now a scapegoat for the defeat had been found: the Germans. The prospects for an alliance looked rather gloomy. Indeed, numerous factors can be identified that contributed to the disaster. The main reasons must be seen in the deficient training of the crews and the lack of fighting spirit in most officers. Rozhestvenskii’s incompetence and the breaking-down of leadership during the battle added to the catastrophe. The motley Russian fleet consisting of old and slow liners as well as newly-built battleships hampered co-ordination. What the world, thanks to the press reports about the voyage of the fleet,

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had long expected, the total and humiliating defeat of the Russians, had come true. Public opinion in the West now took sides with the brave Japanese praising them for their military performance on land and at sea. Even the German Kaiser congratulated the Japanese despite all his apprehensions regarding the yellow peril. Since Russia had completely lost the war the German Emperor finally advised his cousin to make peace. Weakened Russia asking for peace had to rely on the good offices of befriended nations like Germany. This might offer a chance to the Berlin government of reconfirming the traditional Prussian-Russian friendship. THE FAILURE OF GERMAN ALLIANCE OFFERS TO RUSSIA

During the time of Russia’s deepest humiliation and worst military weakness, a German-Russian defense alliance indeed seemed within easy reach. Such an alliance would have changed international constellations to such an extent that the “Great War” would hardly have been possible, at least not between the fronts of 1914. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Reich Chancellor Bülow constantly kept in view such a turning point in European history and twice – although eventually in vain – tried to bring it about. When Russia and Great Britain after the Dogger Bank Incident stood on the verge of war, close connections with Germany seemed the only hope for Russia to prevent it. In answer to the tsar’s wish to renew the Triple Alliance the Kaiser in a personal letter prepared by Bülow included the draft of an alliance between Germany and Russia only. Although Russian Foreign Minister Vladimir Lamsdorf saw the proposal as an attempt to undermine relations between Russia and France, he too had to acknowledge the facts and accept negotiations with Berlin. In the tsar’s answer, a passage intending to include France in the defensive alliance was added to the German draft. Mostly it was the question of France that caused the project to fail. The German navy too had its reservations against this kind of continental alliance: the new German fleet, it was said, was much too weak to confront an attack from the British and in case of war would be sacrificed in vain. Thereupon negotiations were soon given up, all the more so, since the incident at sea was settled by Nicholas’s relenting and the danger of war had been warded off for the time being.67 The second German attempt was prepared more carefully. The plan was to surprise the tsar with a treaty ready to sign and presented to him by the Kaiser personally who would talk the tsar into signing. Any opponents to such an agreement, like the German navy or Russian diplomats were to be left out; they would later have to acknowledge the fait accompli created by the two monarchs. The opportunity for such a surprise coup presented itself after Russia’s utter defeat in the battle of Tsushima when it was ready to relent and accept the American President Theodore Roosevelt’s peace mediation offer. Russia was crushed, its defeat complete and the revolution was threatening to sweep away the monarchy. The amount of the Japanese, as yet unofficial, demands for territorial and other reparations was unacceptable to Nicholas and his government.

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From the Russian point of view, a strong new ally could only be an advantage in the attempt to return to normality and parry the Japanese demands. In this situation, the Kaiser saw another realistic chance to break up the Franco-Russian military alliance and bind Russia to the Reich. An unspectacular opportunity offered itself with the Kaiser’s northbound voyage on the Baltic Sea where he had to pass by Finland’s skerry. He offered a wholly private meeting to the tsar who at once accepted and proposed Björkö near Viborg as a meeting place.68 There, the original German draft of a defensive alliance was again discussed and slightly modified.69 As before, the alliance was meant to be bilateral; later, however, France might be included. It was to come into effect only after peace had been made and it was to be limited to Europe. The anti-British prejudice both monarchs shared soon created an atmosphere of mutual trust. As chance would have it, the Kaiser had the original draft with him and presented it to the tsar after the latter had deplored his “disagreeable situation“ and asked the Kaiser’s advice.70 To the Kaiser’s delight, Nicolas signed on the spot and on July 24, 1905 the Treaty of Björkö was concluded. According to international law the signature of the Russian autocrat was valid in itself whereas the German Kaiser’s needed to be counter-signed. At once two trustworthy officials present – a German attaché and a Russian Admiral – were asked for their signature.71 However, contrary to the Kaiser’s expectations, the Björkö Treaty did not bring about a turning point in European history. The Russian diplomatic corps violently opposed, but the tsar could not at once retract his signature. Moreover, the mere rumor of such a treaty bolstered up the Russian peace delegation’s position as Russia obviously was no longer isolated. Consequently, the Reich strongly supported the American President’s attempts at mediating peace, guided not least by the ulterior motive that instead of a continental bilateral alliance with Russia a transatlantic one with the United States might be formed. By then the Kaiser repeatedly urged his Russian cousin to accept the indeed favorable peace conditions. Japan was considered the loser of the peace conference as it was given Korea, Northern Sakhalin and Port Arthur but had to renounce further reparations.72 With the peace of Portsmouth on September 5, 1905 there was no point in any further negotiations concerning a continental alliance of three. Somewhat later, the tsar asked the Kaiser to put the Björkö Treaty on ice until the position of France was clarified, although Petersburg diplomacy so far had done nothing to include France. The French side activated its attempts at a balance of interests with Great Britain and Russia in order to isolate Germany again. At the Algeciras conference to settle the Morocco crisis in spring 1906 the Reich for the first time faced a united front. It was the front that Germany had tried in vain to break up during the Russo-Japanese War and that was now stronger than ever. In 1906 the alliances in the war to come – Entente against Central Powers – had been fixed irrevocably for the original catastrophe of the twentieth century to take its course.

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NOTES 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8

9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17

Foreign Secretary Bülow in the German Reichstag December 6, 1897 justifying the seizure of Tsingtao. With this forceful annexation of Chinese territory German foreign policy changed for imperialist world-wide politics. Cf. Fesser, 1996. Grosse Politik 19, 1927: Memo of Reich Chancellor Count von Bülow on conversation with the Emperor on February 14, 1904. Grosse Politik 19, 1927: Draft of Bülow, February 7, 1904. Wippich, 1987: 129–170. BA/ MA/ RM 3/4300: Report German Embassy Paris, February 28, 1904. Esthus, 1967. Grosse Politik 19, 1927: 62: Letter from the German Emperor to Tsar Nicholas II, January 3, 1904. Grosse Politik 19, 1927. Conversation between the German Emperor and King Edward, July 29, 1904. BA/MA/RM 3/4304: Report German Naval Attaché, St. Petersburg on assessments by the Russian Navy. BA/MA/RM 3/6845: Report Lieutnant Commander Hopmann [attached to Pt. Arthur March 31-August 17, 1904] to German Emperor, September 26, 1904. Hopmann on his transfer back to Japan stayed several days on Japanese warships and had many conversations with Japanese naval officers in German “. . . vivid sympathies for Germany. They stressed the point, that Germany has been their teacher in military matters and mentioned the name of General Meckel with highest esteem. They referred to Germany as the country from which they have been learning most in every respect in science and technics.” BA/ MA/ RM 3/4312: Note (January 18, 1905) on a visit of the former Japanese legate in Berlin Count Aoki in the German legation in Tokyo. Aoki had chosen Meckel in 1885 for remodeling the Japanese army and in due respect for the sensai, the great master, minimized the Japanese victories attributing them to German strategy: “We have learned a lot from you, but we are not good strategists yet. This we have still to learn from you.” Westwood, 1986: 26, 62. Vogel, 1973: 99. The following part is based on the following archival sources: BA/MA Folders RM 3/4300–4314 RM 3/6843–6845 RM 3/10447–10448 RM 3/9690–9691 RM 3/10225 RM 3/10264 RM 5/1433, 1438, 1450, 1476, 1478. Uhle-Wettler, 1998. Vogel, 1973: 200. See Hobson, 2002. BA/MA/RM 3/4314, March 22, 1905.

350 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

BA/MA/RM 3/9690–9691, newspaper clippings, July 1904 – June 1906. Rogger, 1983. BA/MA/RM 3/4300, February 12, 1904. BA/MA/RM 3/4312, July 20, 1904. BA/MA/RM 3/4302, Japanese War Ministry February 12, 1904. BA/MA/RM 3/4300, Report, German Embassy Paris, February 28, 1904. German newspapers could not be officially censored but information could be held back by the military authorities. According to their political orientation the papers were critical of the government – like the Socialist Vorwärts – or reported in favorable terms. The Vorwärts for once sided with the German Navy harshly criticizing the Russians and their incompetent military leaders. BA/MA/RM 3/4311 October 15, 1904: Under the headline “Unlimited service to the Russians.” The “Vorwärts” disclosed that leftist Russian students in the Reich, the opponents of the reactionary Tsar, were being observed by German authorities. BA/MA/RM 3/10447: The September-issue 1904 of the Marinerundschau (Naval Review), the official organ of the German Navy was heavily censored. All critical remarks about the Russians had to be omitted. BA/MA/RM 3/4305: The dailies Tägliche Rundschau and Berliner Lokal Anzeiger printed favorable articles after the journalists had been officially received by the commander (“Admiral Rozhestvenskii’s appearance reflects calm and confident self-assurance, he is full of extraordinary energy and persistent patience”). BA/MA/RM 3/4200, Memo, German Admirality, February 23, 1904. Westwood, 1986: 49–50. BA/MA/RM 3/4305, Reports from Tokyo, August 7 and 13, 1904; 4312: September 20, 1904. BA/MA/RM 3/4311, September 2, 1904. BA/MA/RM 3/4314, September 3, 14, 1904. BA/MA/RM 3/4314, November 14, 1904. BA/MA/RM 3/4314, November 15, 1904. Nowikow-Priboi, 1955: 60. Nowikow-Priboi, 1955: 61. Nowikow-Priboi, 1955: 60–70. Grosse Politik 19, 1927: October 8, 1904. BA/MA/RM 3/4311: Foreign Ministry-Navy, August 21, 1904. Akashi, 1988; White, 1964. BA/MA/RM 3/10264, October 8, 1904. Connaughton, 1988; Westwood, 1986. BA/MA/RM 3/4313, German Embassy Petersburg, Report, November 8, 1904. Grosse Politik 19, 1927: 282. Westwood, 1986: 141. Semenow, 1908; Connaughton, 1988. Vogel, 1973: 167 Westwood, 1986: 141. BA/MA/RM 3/4307, Official Report on the North Sea Incident, February 24, 1905. Grosse Politik 19, 1927: September 23, 1904, conversation between Bülow and Ballin.

Participant Observation 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71

72

351

BA/MA/RM 3/4306, December 14, 1904. Connaughton, 1988: 251. BA/MA/RM 3/4305, Report German Consulate Tanger, November 6, 1904. BA/MA/RM 3/4306, Report German Consulate Chania (Crete), November 21, 1904. Connaughton, 1988: 256. Nowikow-Priboi, 1955: 215–220. BA/MA/RM 3/4307, Report German Naval Attaché, Petersburg, March 5, 1905. BA/MA/RM 3/4308, Report German Naval Attaché Petersburg, April 22, 1905. BA/MA/RM 3/4306, Report German Naval Attaché, Petersburg, February 2, 1905. Connaughton, 1988: 257. BA/MA/RM 3/4307, Report German Consulate Batavia, April 9, 1905. Connaughton, 1988: 259. Amtliche Darstellung des japanischen Admiralstabes, 1908. Bruce, 1976: 7–21 BA/MA/RM 3/4309. BA/MA/RM 3/4309, June 1905. BA/MA/RM 3/4312, August 28, 1905. BA/MA/RM 3/4309, June 9, 1905. BA/MA/RM 3/4309, June 17, 1905: Report German Naval Attaché Petersburg. Grosse Politik 19, 1927, documents in chapter cxxxv “Anläufe zu einem deutsch-russischen Defensivabkommen.” Grosse Politik 19, 1927: 435. Grosse Politik 19, 1927: 436–438. McLean, 2003. Grosse Politik 19, 1927, July 25, 1905: Report Wilhelm II to Reichchancellor Bülow. Grosse Politik 19, 1927, documents of chapter CXXXIX.

23

Perceptions of Russia in German Military Leadership during the War OLIVER GRIFFIN

D

uring the Russo-Japanese War, all major military powers dispatched observers to Manchuria to follow the conduct of the combatants. Some, like Germany, attached observers to the armies of both sides. Firsthand accounts, military journal articles and works drafted after the war abounded with descriptions of the respective Russian and Japanese national attributes, tactical-technical virtuosity, and attitudes towards combat and war. Observers from the major powers attributed reasons for Russian failure and Japanese success mainly to alleged ethnic traits and deficiencies in leadership and training. Material factors such as troop strengths and quantity and quality of armament did not occupy a prominent place in the thinking of European observers as guarantors of victory. This chapter focuses on the nature of Russian military leaders in German perception, which would influence planning against Russia during the decade preceding World War I. General Aleksei Kuropatkin, commander first of the field force and ultimately commander in chief in Northeast Asia, received little praise in reports by German observers. Lieutenant Colonel Otto von Lauenstein, author of a lengthy report describing his observations while accompanying the Russian army, wrote: A man of insight and intelligence . . . he had personally directed the measures of the military administration in case of . . . conflict and had a few months prior to the outbreak of the war informed himself on-site about the local circumstances . . . I had believed that a man of his judgment had a more or less clear understanding of the insufficient training of the army for the war and that only under pressure from overpowering influences had he refrained from a thorough improvement [of the army]. But Kuropatkin, I am sure, entered the war with the firm conviction of the

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[innate] superiority of the Russian soldier. The incomparable bravery of the Russian warrior and the insurmountable strength of the Russian bayonet were for him also inviolate truths . . . 1

Lauenstein went on to ascribe a defensive posture, flaccid disposition, and lethargy under fire to Kuropatkin. The diligent general lost himself in minutiae and failed to delegate authority, depriving subordinates of any initiative that they may have possessed. The lieutenant colonel wrote: Kuropatkin mainly conducted the campaign in a defensive manner. In the beginning he deliberately chose the defensive because of his numeric inferiority. . . Subsequently Japanese battlefield success foisted a defensive posture on him. Consequently the offensive strength of his army waned only to disappear completely.2

The general’s lack of firmness, Lauenstein argued, had a deleterious effect on the conduct of operations: Drastic measures did not accord with his character. He left people whose incompetence was known . . . in their jobs and did not act with firmness even when it was urgently needed. The spectacle presented by the train station of Liaoyang in the summer of 1904 with numerous officers who actually should have been with their regiments reveals the lack of fear of the “gentleman.” His tolerating inferior people, whom he may have known from earlier campaigns, in his presence is attributable to this good-natured weakness.3

Even the general’s putative phlegm under fire warranted qualified praise at best, for, Lauenstein argued, the former lacked the requisite drive for victory. This dearth of initiative and resolve appeared as a stock phrase in German reports and articles from the period. Authors also posited a causal link between this flaw and the reason for Russia’s defeat. Observers perceived morale as the most salient factor ensuring Japanese success and, conversely, Russian failure. Lauenstein noted: . . . In combat he possessed, even when the situation was bad, impeccably calm bearing and did not let even apparent danger influence him visibly. But in the end he possessed only the exterior, not the spirit of the great warlord. The enormity of his responsibility frightened him. . . he eschewed whole-hearted commitment and lost the game.4

The absent-mindedness, even quasi-somnambulism, of Kuropatkin exacerbated the situation of Russia in Manchuria. Lauenstein noted of the general when describing the latter’s conduct during a religious service on October 5, 1904: “. . . he conveyed the impression of absent-mindedness; he wanted to kiss the cross before the ceremony was finished and

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reviewed the troops with the look of a sleep-walker. I . . . had the feeling: this field commander does not believe in his fate.”5 Kuropatkin’s diligence and attention to detail had drawbacks as well: I know that he wrote forty-page orders . . . himself. However, he made the mistake common to people so predisposed of trying to do everything himself. Thereby he deprived his subordinates of independence, of the joy of one’s own responsibility . . . The consequence was general insecurity among the brigade and regiment commanders, the complete destruction of what little initiative subordinates evinced. Seldom has the word order-counterorder-disorder played a greater role than in this campaign.6

Lauenstein extended his severe indictment to Russian officers in general. Kuropatkin’s subordinates shared his lack of initiative, he argued, and distinguished themselves through some flaws of their own. Lack of flexibility, a punctiliousness that stymied decisive action, appeared in this and numerous other descriptions: A Russian general staff officer can experience a childlike joy over an order that considers all points required by regulation. When an order was not “forgotten,” when “contact with neighboring troops” as well as “mutual support” find mention, when a contingency plan has been drafted in case of the wounding of the commander, then it was a model order. Whether the command as such was correct was secondary. Even less attention was paid to whether the order contained aspects that, given the situation, must have appeared . . . superfluous, even illogical.7

The alleged lack of initiative extended down the chain of command and resulted in lost opportunities as commanders waited for permission to execute specific orders instead of acting of their own accord: With commanders of all ranks, decisiveness and independence were insufficiently developed. Where these traits did appear, they were artificially suppressed by the endeavor to centralize the issuing of orders . . . Ultimately, subordinate commanders no longer took a single step of their own accord without first obtaining an order or at least authorization to do so. All too often, this requesting permission resulted in lost opportunities.8

Lack of foresight received mention as another factor impeding military operations. Only when a need actually arose did it warrant consideration.9 In short, contingency planning did not appear as a forte of the Russian military. War games failed to reflect the dynamic nature of combat, with deleterious effects on the performance of officers in the field in 1904–05. The concept of continuous interaction with the enemy did not receive sufficient attention. General staff officers viewed war and

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combat situations as problems requiring the application of formulaic solutions.10 Lack of flexibility, Lauenstein argued, manifested itself not only in punctilious observance of rules and command but in a schematic approach to a dynamic process, with dire consequences on the battlefield. Rigid though they may have been, Lauenstein did ascribe diligence and a sense of responsibility to the general staff officers, as he did to Kuropatkin. If most field commanders lacked zeal, that did not apply to the planners at the highest levels. Instead, Lauenstein adduced faulty training and education as major deficiencies of these officers: . . . the general staff academy cultivates among its cadets more knowledge than exercising judgment and decision-making. From there, the general staff officer retains a propensity for theory, an inclination to desk work, to longwinded orders, to discursive instructions . . . 11

German naval officers drafted equally critical reports on the Russian military. Corvette Captain Albert Hopman traveled to China and noted his observations of Russian activity in a lengthy report. Lieutenant General Anatolii Stoessel, commander of Port Arthur, elicited critical commentary from Hopman: He is described as a boastful sergeant, who possesses neither the personal attributes nor the professional expertise to fulfill his duty. He is undoubtedly poorly educated, speaks no language other than Russian, knows nothing outside of Russia and Russian circumstances and looks down with the . . . contempt of circumscribed orthodox Russianness on everything strange and new.12

A bigoted, parochial, incompetent braggart, then, faced the daunting task of defending the important naval base against a determined and skillful Japanese adversary. Hopman went on to characterize Russian generals as lacking the training which provided the basis of leadership by endowing them with sober calm and clarity when assessing and exploiting a given military situation: They are too much front-line fighters, following ponderous, obsolete forms and traditions, exhausting themselves in minutiae and thereby losing sight of the large picture. The lessons of the newest campaigns, the influence of modern weapons technology and all manifestations that have effected massive transformations in the art of war in the last decade have passed them by.13

The leadership, Hopman argued, remained too bound in archaic “Russo-centric” thought paradigms to appreciate military developments outside of the empire. It continued to view the world through a Russian prism, attesting extremely circumscribed intellectual horizons.

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The officers beneath the rank of general, it was argued, comported themselves similarly or even far worse. The officer corps was, with exceptions, largely populated by those: . . . whose military training and competence stood at a level almost beneath that of the Prussian noncommissioned officer, long-serving, experienced soldiers who knew nothing about the art of war except the drill manual and who express opinions that are more than puzzling. In terms of social graces and general education they generally stand on subaltern level, but they do not fail to demonstrate a considerable degree of conceit.14

The Germans viewed these officers as uncouth, rigid, old-fashioned pretenders who attempted to compensate for their deficiencies with unwarranted haughtiness. Sloth, drunkenness, and licentiousness also appeared in descriptions of officers drafted by Colonel Richard Gaedke, correspondent of the daily Berliner Tagesblatt in Manchuria. He wrote that strict superiors with high standards generally did not enjoy great popularity, thereby echoing Lauenstein.15 The great scourge of the officer corps, he argued, was drink, the national vice. He noted: In Liaoyang I saw during the day in the train station restaurant an officer lying under a table, and everyone carefully made room so as not to disturb his drunken slumber. In Mukden a colonel threw three heavily inebriated officers out of the Restaurant Europa. After a brief time they returned, armed with a bottle of vodka, and asked the colonel to drink with them. He did!16

Lauenstein had believed that the apathy, foolishness, and negligence characteristic of officers during his tour as military attaché in St. Petersburg before 1904 would yield to positive attributes in wartime: that the exigencies of war would nurture the best traits in officers. Officers’ behavior, however, did not change in Northeast Asia as the Russians brought their prewar flaws with them. He wrote: Their willpower was not firm; they did not understand how to be hard with themselves. Everywhere the inclination to indolence made itself felt, in the excessive baggage, the need for service, especially in the late rising [waking up]. Early risers were indeed a great rarity and . . . unpopular with their subordinates. After every act requiring any effort the officer deemed himself entitled to a rest . . . 17

Officers shirked responsibility and performed functions tardily. They also actively took steps to avoid work, it was argued. The work day distinguished itself through lack of punctuality and delays. Tasks requiring a few hours for completion provided excuses to absent oneself from active duty for lengthy periods of time. Sick officers found a pretext to

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remain in hospital while healthy ones tried to obtain medical leave. During the retreat from Mukden a general had to monitor hospital trains and field hospitals for unwounded officers.18 To compensate for this alleged lack of work ethic, officers displayed an inordinate desire for medals and decorations. Throughout the campaign these provided an incentive to fight. Lauenstein wrote: “To acquire these [medals and decorations] the officer would subject himself to difficulty and danger but would also not hesitate to underscore his own accomplishments.”19 The army high command fostered this perceived predilection by rewarding every service rendered, no matter how modest. Consequently, according to Lauenstein, the officers’ expectations rose. Lauenstein noted: There came a point at which officers believed that they had a legitimate claim to a decoration for every battle in which they had participated. I observed how a captain who had deposited the baggage of military attachés in Harbin requested from his superiors a medal “for Liaoyang.”20

He attributed this quest for recognition to egotism on the part of the officers. The officer viewed everything from his personal standpoint, and a particular assignment as such played a secondary role. His performance in combat superseded in importance the outcome of an engagement. The execution of an order or the completion of a task could only prove satisfactory if some benefit accrued to him.21 The Lieutenant Colonel noted: “This pronounced emphasis on personal interest, in turn, fuelled envy of and resentment against anyone more successful than oneself. Whoever distinguished himself made enemies . . . ”22 Gaedke, in his collection of letters from Manchuria, adduced the relatively low esteem in which the educated classes held the military as a reason for the lack of collegiality. Since large numbers of men from these strata did not pursue military careers, the army could not apply very rigorous criteria when selecting officers. It had to make do with a motley assortment of individuals lacking a common bond of honor or purpose. Consequently, the officer corps did not distinguish itself through its outward cohesion. Gaedke wrote: “. . . any sentiment that one is responsible for all and all for one is alien to the Russian officer.”23 The colonel continued with his discussion of the low prestige enjoyed by the military by citing the example of a drunken lieutenant’s swaying into a bar in Harbin, only to elicit laughter from the numerous other officers present. This failure to act to bolster the image of the army after a disgraceful public appearance explained the military’s low social standing in Russia, according to Gaedke. The officer could comport himself as uncouthly as he wanted, and no one would intervene. The respected aristocratic German families of the Baltic provinces excluded the officer corps from their salons as long as they had no special ties to it. The mercantile class of the large cities acted in like manner. These circumstances

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could not nurture the self-respect and efficiency of officers, acutely aware of their low social standing.24 Moving down the chain of command, German observers paid considerable attention to the Russian enlisted man. Reports, letters, and articles abounded with descriptions of putative attributes of the common man. Hardiness, sloth, and intellectual torpor found frequent mention in the literature of this period. A stock phrase in first-hand accounts, military journals, and works published after the war is “the rugged Russian passively waited for the Japanese to attack and subsequently defended his position valiantly.” “The Japanese act while the Russians react” found repeated explicit and implicit mention as well. Again and again German officers contended that passivity extended from Kuropatkin all the way down to the lowliest private and accounted for Russian defeat. Zeal, élan, spirit, Geist distinguished the Japanese on the field of honor. The tsar’s peasant soldiers, on the other hand, demonstrated considerable bravery and stubbornly resisted Japanese attacks, as the high casualties inflicted during the siege of Port Arthur attested. However, they forfeited the initiative and consequently victory, observers argued. Hardiness alone did not suffice when confronting a resolute, fanatically brave foe willing to pay a high price to achieve his objectives. Gaedke went back to the agrarian roots of the soldier to describe him. The peasant had not advanced far beyond his station as a serf, for the village community relegated him to a strictly subordinate position, thereby preventing the unfolding of his natural talents and robbing him of independence and enterprise.25 The peasant’s passive disposition did not really accord with military service or fighting. A peaceful tiller of the soil, dependent, lacking will power, he preferred limited responsibility. Pliant and dependent, he felt most comfortable in a mass of people. Whereas the German distinguished himself as an individual combatant, the Russian operated most effectively in a large unit. His nature affected his relationship with his superior, who exhibited a goodwill toward him that tolerated his flaws and did not tax his physical and moral strength to the utmost.26 In short, his superior indulged the Russian soldier instead of challenging him. Interestingly enough, Gaedke contended that this very indulgence had fostered a certain degree of independence and creativity in the enlisted man since he was left to his own devices. Unlike his German counterpart, subjected to a rigorous, closely-monitored regimen, the Russian soldier could function in certain capacities quite well alone. For example, he could water horses, draw fodder and provisions, and march with numerous vehicles in column without the supervision of an officer.27 Here a German observer presented the only mention of initiative, however narrowly circumscribed, as a trait of Russian enlisted men. Military periodicals contained numerous identical descriptions of the alleged attributes of the Russian soldier, both in articles written by contributors to the journals and in book reviews. “The traditional, soldierly, outstanding characteristics of the Russian, tenacity, devotion to the

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leader, and the ability to endure privation, all manifest themselves,” wrote retired Major General Constantin von Zepelin in 1904.28 However, poor leadership vitiated the potential of these attributes, according to observers. A reviewer of Colonel Gaedke’s letters from Manchuria summarized the colonel’s contention that despite all of the Russian setbacks, the Russian soldier was an excellent instrument of war. Peacetime training, however, had not prepared him for combat, and in wartime leadership had proven faulty.29 Lieutenant Colonel Freiherr von Tettau, official German observer who spent eighteen months with the army in Manchuria, also praised the common soldier while criticizing the officers. “I have often emphasized that the bravery of the Russian soldier remains beyond doubt. But even the best material fails if it is not properly trained or used.”30 Germans believed that failure to change tactics compounded the deficiencies of Russian leadership. The war in Manchuria witnessed the use of magazine-fed rifles firing smokeless powder and machine guns on an even greater scale than in South Africa between 1899 and 1902. Consequently, attacks by infantry in close formations across open terrain proved very costly. The Russian, however, it was argued, lent himself more to the era of Napoleon than to the twentieth century. He had yet to adjust to the above advances in weapons technology by altering his tactics. A reviewer of a wartime diary quoted the author and warmly recommended his work: The Russian soldier . . . is not suited for modern infantry combat. His character is too weak and not robust enough. He lacks the strength to resist the nerve-wracking and enervating influences of modern combat . . . the soldier lacks all independence and initiative . . . Purely passive obedience and the passive ability to resist . . . no longer suffice . . .31

The recurrent discussions of the lessons learned from the conflict proved quite striking. According to observers on the ground and strategic thinkers in offices across Europe, the most salient fact of the war lent itself to very succinct expression: morale. The importance of morale as the cause for Japanese victory and Russian defeat ran like a red thread through the documents generated by Germans addressing the war. The Japanese, Asian inhabitants of small islands poor in natural resources, had trounced the (Western) nation boasting the largest army in the world not because of deficiencies in Russian logistics, the remoteness of the battlefield from home bases or technological superiority. The Japanese had distinguished themselves via their superior morale. Their drive, initiative, and fanatical bravery had incurred heavy casualties but had ultimately secured victory. The Japanese presented the mirror image of all of the negative attributes ascribed to the entire Russian command hierarchy starting with Kuropatkin. While the tsarist commander of the field force faltered, vacillated, and waited for the “ideal moment,” the Japanese attacked. The latter acted while the former reacted, often too late. Russian bravery and

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tenacity, it was argued, ultimately succumbed to a determined and skilled adversary. The fact that the Japanese Army drew heavily and sometimes literally from training manuals provided by German instructors certainly did not diminish the stature of the Japanese in German eyes. According to this logic, “our” manual had proven superior to that of the neighbor and potential foe. Tactical flexibility, an area in which the Germans deemed themselves very competent, had marked Japanese battlefield conduct and had demonstrated its worth. The young nation had vanquished the old adherent of the static defense. Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the Great General Staff, himself commented on the nature of the Russian: It has been shown that the famous Russian obedience is based less on loyalty and a conception of honor than on apathy and fatalistic resignation and that these congenital traits of the Slavic race only exist to a certain degree before turning into brutality.32

Lauenstein adduced the realm of morale as the most profound reason for military victory and defeat. He wrote of the Russian: The Russian national character distinguishes itself through a pronounced indolence, an avoidance of compulsion and exertion . . . an aversion against everything difficult and unpleasant for their own person, a lack of consistency in thought and action.33

Gaedke contended that Russian generals had not yet learned how to demand the utmost from their soldiers. In this respect, he argued, the Japanese army was far superior, with the wild energy of its attacks, intent on victory at every price. Contrary to Russian opinion, iron discipline and belief in the justice of their cause, and not bloodlust, motivated the Japanese. Only if the Russians could muster comparable energy would they achieve success.34 How did the Manchurian war affect German mobilization plans? Schlieffen, in the midst of drafting the basis of the plan by which Germany would deploy her forces against Russia, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg in August 1914, wrote two reports to Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, addressing the effect of Russian deployment in East Asia on German national security. The first, dated April 20, 1904, before the large land battles in Manchuria, expressed the view that the number of Russian forces stationed on Germany’s eastern frontier had remained virtually unchanged. However, the eastward deployment of the best officers and men had diminished the quality of the manpower pool for units in western Russia. The government would have to draw on older reservists to replenish units, and a lot of rolling stock served the needs of the army in Siberia and Manchuria. Consequently, any mobilization against Germany would not proceed smoothly. These factors, combined with the current rearming of the Russian artillery, made the prospect of a

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European war unappealing to St. Petersburg, Schlieffen argued. However, binding obligations, presumably an alliance, or the prospect of securing great advantages could motivate the tsar to act otherwise. The Chief of Staff did not go on to describe these possible gains.35 The second report, dated June 10, 1905, critiqued the Russian Army in light of its performance in Northeast Asia. While the low quality of the officers and inadequate training of recruits had been known for a long time, the Russian soldier had been considered one of the best in the world. Schlieffen wrote: “His unconditional obedience, perserverance and calm contempt of death were recognized as invaluable characteristics. Now faith in these characteristics has been strongly shaken.”36 In many instances, he argued, officers had begged, persuaded or parleyed with their troops instead of commanding them. Insubordination and acts of violence against officers occurred. Whereas in the past, a force of ill-trained but pliant troops could still achieve something, advances in weapons technology now required very careful preparation of recruits. The Russian soldier’s lack of training and inability to shoot or to move in combat presently constituted a distinct disadvantage. He could not confront another army and proved wholly unsuited for the attack.37 Schlieffen felt that the war had exposed the tsarist army as even worse than had been thought. Manchuria had effected a deterioration by destroying any joy, trust, and obedience in the army. The inability of the Russians to recognize their own flaws militated against an improvement. Instead they attributed their defeats to the numerical superiority of the enemy and to the incompetence of individual officers. Despite the anticipated continual decline in quality of the tsarist army, however, Schlieffen did not write off the eastern neighbor completely. A desire to reassert itself on the world stage after the defeats in East Asia or the need to channel domestic pressures outward could induce St. Petersburg to act again on the military front. Even with its poor quality the great mass of the tsar’s army lent it weight.38 Despite this cognizance of Russia’s potential, Schlieffen downgraded the eastern front in the drafts of his strategic testament to minimal significance. He felt that the war and revolution had removed Russia as a major threat for the time being. The mobilization plan for the year 1905–06, effective April 1, called for the deployment of most of the German field army against France. The testament presented his successor, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, with an exposition and guide as opposed to an exhaustive war plan. Entitled “War with France,” the thought piece focused on operational aspects of mobilization and ignored Russia.39 To what extent did German observers draw conclusions about Russian domestic morale and stability from the war? Gaedke noted the difficulty of gauging the sentiment of the soldiers he encountered: It is very difficult to determine the mood of the soldier. The troops mostly move in the same calm, casual manner, in the slow tempo that

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almost conveys a tired impression; seldom have I seen them sing while marching, only seldom have I seen in their ranks expressions of happiness and joy or even high spirits.40

However, he cautioned against drawing premature conclusions. Contingent factors such as possible discomfort caused by the heavy packs that the soldiers carried might have explained their appearance.41 Gaedke attributed the Russian lack of discipline comparable to that of the German Army to the contradictory sentiments experienced by those in power. The demands of state, he argued, conflicted with their own sentimentality and innermost convictions. Consequently, cruel and even brutal behavior could mark the organs of the regime when the preservation of the system required action. However, those at the levers of power often proved flaccid in galvanizing the state and people and especially the army to great exertions. Officers’ desire to spare their troops conflicted with the harsh reality of war.42 Gaedke described the popular support for the war as slight and thereby affecting the soldiers’ attitudes. The purpose of the conflict remained unclear, the Japanese an unknown enemy. The remoteness of Manchuria and the perceived need to address problems at home did little to enhance the popularity of the war among the enlisted men, who lacked a willingness to fight.43 This general aversion to the war even affected the mood of officers, according to Gaedke. Brave though they were, the general unpopularity of the war, combined with the constant retreats and weak attacks, diminished their resolve. “How does this war pertain to us? We have enough land and enough privation at home; we want to return home to wife and child!” reflected views shared by officers and men alike.44 Captain Albrecht von Thaer, attached to the Great General Staff, compiled a report of his stay in Russia during the spring and summer of 1904 that also illuminated public sentiment there. He addressed the attitude of the educated class and expressed surprise at the widespread pessimism caused, not so much by the course of the war, as by the deplorable domestic situation. His attempts to praise Russia in the presence of locals merely elicited a litany of complaints arising from corruption, bribery, fraud and theft in all layers of the bureaucracy, and from the dismal state of jurisprudence. The belief that harmless and unjustifiably suspected individuals were eliminated in their prison cells enjoyed currency.45 The majority of the educated public hoped, argued Thaer, that defeat in Manchuria would effect a regeneration at home. Only a negative outcome of the clash of arms would induce the right men to assume control.46 In a report on sentiment in the navy and army, Captain Paul von Hintze, naval attaché, examined officers’ attitudes towards the tsar and his family. The ruling family did not usually constitute a subject of conversation, especially in the presence of foreigners. However, when officers did discuss the tsar, pity usually marked their basic tenor. Some

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complained about the sovereign’s lack of insight and contended that he believed suave talkers rather than sober assessment. He subsequently acted on the advice of the former, with detrimental consequences for millions.47 A second flaw of the tsar, according to Hintze, lay in goodwill and his excessive consideration of others. Given the currency of this opinion both inside and outside of military circles, the German captain concluded that the Russians would actually have preferred an Ivan the Terrible on the throne to the present good-natured but ineffective ruler.48 Better malevolent efficiency than benevolent misrule! Only officers of the tsar’s immediate entourage displayed any particular devotion to the ruler, according to Hintze. The officer corps in general appeared to view the tsar with the instinctual respect accorded the hereditary ruler but without great warmth or particular regard. This attitude reflected the largely impersonal relationship between the subject and ruler and consequently had less to do with the person of Nicholas II.49 Hintze concluded that most officers would come to terms with a change in ruler, that he lacked evidence to dispute the contention that some would help effect a change in monarch, and that the idea of republic in place of the monarchy lacked sufficient support in the officer corps for any prospect of aid from that quarter.50 German observers of Russian military developments devoted conspicuously little attention to the revolution of 1905. For example, this author remains unaware of any army-generated primary source that addresses Bloody Sunday, when the shooting of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators in front of the Winter Palace destroyed any remaining reservoirs of esteem that the tsar may still have enjoyed among the populace. Reports appearing between 1906 and 1914 did address the social and political situation of the tsarist empire. Documents from the year in question examined the sailors’ mutinies in Kronstadt and Sevastopol. For example, in a report drafted in July 1905, Hintze discussed the reliability of sailors at those two bases. He contended that units there had helped quell unrest without incident. Dockworkers and stokers had caused some disturbances in Kronstadt without, however, participation by sailors. On the contrary, units there and in Libau and Odessa had proven reliable to date, a fact deemed all the more noteworthy by Hintze because of the large proportion of reservists serving in some of those detachments. The naval attaché considered these troops susceptible to revolutionary propaganda.51 This dearth of coverage, even of army mutinies, in a momentous year warrants speculation. Clearly the German military wished to focus on the war in Manchuria, which did, after all, present the world with the first large-scale conflict between two modern powers in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the domestic unrest affected reservists deployed to Northeast Asia and thereby impaired military effectiveness. This did not escape the notice of the Germans. However, the fact that the military’s police functions in quelling civil unrest and mutinies received fairly little coverage does prove puzzling. Did the Germans subsume all

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other considerations to the outright war in East Asia? It was troops, after all, who shot the demonstrators outside of the Winter Palace and troops who shot other, mutinous, soldiers. The army saved the tsarist regime. That was what distinguished 1905 from March 1917. Did German officers find police duty by the army particularly distasteful or onerous? If so, that would echo the sentiments of Russian commanders themselves, who preferred to leave the maintenance of law and order to the civil authority whenever possible. As Lieutenant Colonel Gustav Graf von Lambsdorff noted on July 27, 1905, when describing the potentially grave implications of the government’s initial failure to respond vigorously to civil unrest: It is . . . undoubtedly true that the mood of the military has worsened since last fall. From good sources I hear that the infantry in Libau actually refused to fire on mutinous soldiers. This line infantry certainly no longer constitutes an absolutely reliable weapon in the hands of the government. The rapid progress of this deterioration must serve as a serious warning for every nation [observing Russia]. The government lacked the vigor to deploy the military very forcefully to curb the nascent unrest from the beginning. . . This failure has emboldened the agitators and demoralized the military and now it almost appears too late for decisive action.52

The periodical Von Loebell’s Jahresberichte ueber das Heer-und Kriegswesen mentioned the difficulty confronting the army in dealing with civil unrest when a significant percentage of reservists recalled to active duty proved politically unreliable. While the army largely fulfilled its function when deployed ruthlessly by an energetic leader, numerous units committed acts of gross insubordination and even mutiny. The internal situation of the army continued to raise concern. Only vigorous action by the government and self-sacrificing devotion to duty by the officer corps could ensure the suppression of revolution.53 During the Russo-Japanese War, Germans monitoring military affairs of the tsarist empire focused heavily on the military campaign in Northeast Asia. The concurrent revolution and civil unrest in Russia received scant mention in primary sources. Observers attached to the combatant armies drafted detailed accounts of the fighting, tactics, weapons, logistics, medical services, leaders, and enlisted men. Contemporaneous reports abound with descriptions of alleged national attributes of the warring nations and their effect on the outcome of the war. Germans and others argued that the most important lesson of the conflict, which suggested the possibility of Japanese great-power status, lay in the significance of national zeal. In an era of conscription, it was argued, national survival depended on the cultivation of the proper élan. Imbued with “martial spirit,” recruits could vanquish a foe on the battlefield. Material factors such as troop strength, equipment, provisioning, and even doctrine played secondary roles.

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Observers and strategists at home contended that the Japanese had defeated the Russians because the former had believed stoutly in their cause and had shown their willingness to sacrifice. Those attributes traditionally ascribed to the soldiers of the tsar, including hardiness, frugality, and bravery, had failed to ensure victory over a resolute and equally brave enemy. Lack of initiative was repeatedly pinpointed as the main feature of Russian military leadership and ultimately explained the empire’s defeat. In the hierarchy of martial values and virtues, vigorous, decisive action superseded the best training, armament, and the greatest heroism. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Lauenstein, 1905: 23–24. Lauenstein, 1905: 26–27. Lauenstein, 1905: 27. Lauenstein, 1905: 27–28. Lauenstein, 1905: 28–29. Lauenstein, 1905: 29–30. Lauenstein, 1905: 16. Lauenstein, 1905: 18. Lauenstein, 1905: 19. Lauenstein, 1905: 15–16. Lauenstein, 1905: 15. Hopman, 1904: 31. Hopman, 1904: 32–33. Hopman, 1904: 33. Gaedke, 1905: 346–347. Gaedke, 1905: 351. Lauenstein, 1905: 2–3. Lauenstein, 1905: 3–4. Lauenstein, 1905: 4. Lauenstein, 1905: 4–5. Lauenstein, 1905: 5. Lauenstein, 1905: 5. Gaedke, 1905: 346. Gaedke, 1905: 346. Gaedke, 1905: 334–336. Gaedke, 1905: 343. Gaedke, 1905: 343. Zepelin, 1904: 180. Keim, 1905: 196. Tettau, 1908: 21. Ullrich, 1910: 199–200. Schlieffen, 1905: 2. Lauenstein, 1905: 1. Gaedke, 1905: 339–340.

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Schlieffen, 1904: 3–4. Schlieffen, 1905: 1. Schlieffen, 1905: 2. Schlieffen, 1905:2–3. Rothenberg, 1986: 317–318. Gaedke, 1905: 271. Gaedke, 1905: 271. Gaedke, 1905: 339. Gaedke, 1905: 341–342. Gaedke, 1905: 349. Report sent by A. Thaer on October 16, 1904, PA: 13–14. Report sent by A. Thaer on October 16, 1904, PA: 14. Hintze, 1905b: 19–20. Hintze, 1905b: 20. Hintze, 1905b: 20–21. Hintze, 1905b: 24. Hintze, 1905a: 1–4. Lambsdorff, 1905: 2. “Das Heerwesen,” 1905: 215–216.

24

A Different View: The War in Austro-Hungarian Political Cartoons MONIKA LEHNER1

I

n the decades before World War I, Austria-Hungary was maybe the most “European” of the Great Powers. Relations with her immediate neighbors, with Russia, Germany, and Italy, dominated foreign politics. Diplomatic and consular representative worldwide were closely observing the situation in all parts of the world – concentrating on possible repercussions on European affairs. In this process, the Russo-Japanese War was of special importance, considering the fact that a concentration of Russian forces in East Asia seemed to reduce tensions in Central Europe. The emerging conflict in Northeast Asia was a major issue in Austro-Hungarian politics and as a consequence, was prominent in the Austro-Hungarian media. Newspapers were a key factor in shaping public opinion in early twentieth-century Vienna, however, comments on the situation in East Asia were rare. Daily papers covered the Russo-Japanese War by filling page after page with reports from Reuters and other news agencies. Satirical periodicals did not hesitate to comment on the political situation, both on foreign affairs and on interior affairs in satirical texts and a huge number of political cartoons. Cartoons and texts both offer unique glimpses of the image(s) of the “Other” of their time. They tell us what the intended audience knew about politics, economics and geography as well as about monarchs and ministers. Readers were required to know about the uniforms of foreign armed forces, they should be familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, with the writings of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Heinrich Heine – and with contemporary operas and operettas. Satirical texts and cartoons on the Russo-Japanese War show detailed knowledge about the theater of war,

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about Japanese and Russian commanding officers, and about warfare. After a brief look at the development and the importance of satirical periodicals, focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century and an introduction on ways to analyze these periodicals, this chapter will offer an outline of Austria-Hungary’s attitude towards the Russo-Japanese War, concentrating on a discussion of a number of satirical texts and political cartoons dealing with the Russo-Japanese War. SATIRICAL PERIODICALS AS A SOURCE FOR IMAGES OF THE “OTHER”

Political cartoons are a medium with a rich tradition, as are satirical periodicals. Kikeriki, Figaro, Neue Glühlichter, Humoristische Blätter and Der Floh dominated the heyday of Austro-Hungarian satirical periodicals. All of these periodicals had distinguished writers and cartoonists-caricaturists. In addition, despite the fact that many people worked for more than one paper, each and every one of these periodicals had a very special layout, a very individual approach, and a very distinctive style. The one thing they all have in common: caricatures and texts are of equal importance and cannot be separated from each other. This equal importance of texts and caricatures sets apart Austro-Hungarian satirical periodicals from similar publications in other countries. Most periodicals, e.g. the German Simplicissimus and the British Punch were text based, cartoons and caricatures were clearly in second place. Cartoons and satire gain importance in times of change, of revolutions, of crisis. They show changes in perception of foreign affairs, changes of images of the “Other,” and they quickly respond to changes in these images. Cartoons are a product and a mirror of their time – and they are only understandable and perceptible in their special context. Therefore, analysis of cartoons has to include four major points: communicator, medium, statement, and recipient. The analysis addresses questions such as: Who is the communicator? Who wants to have a certain cartoon, a certain satire published? Is it a political party, is the publisher the driving force? What are the motives behind publication? Is the main point about spreading political ideas (as in publications provided by political parties)? Alternatively, are there economic interests? Are there any special dependencies – technical matters, changes in aesthetic styles? And finally yet importantly: are there restrictions by law, such as censorship? The medium influences the attitude of expectation, the ability of the recipients to decode associations and asking for the medium means asking about modes of distribution: in which way are things distributed, who finances distribution? Who has access (regarding circulation and price)? The medium under discussion in this context is clear: journals or newspapers published regularly – weekly, twice per week or three times per week. In this context, cartoons and texts are of equal importance. The cartoons in AustroHungarian satirical periodicals do not illustrate the articles, and the articles do not explain the cartoons.

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Statement focuses on the cartoon, the drawing in itself: which techniques, which symbols are used? What is the origin of the statement? Is the cartoon based on reliable facts or is it based on ideological prejudices? Which level of basic knowledge and background information is required from the audience? The recipient, the audience is hard to reconstruct – but it is possible to name the intended recipient. In addition, it is important to find out what a recipient needed to know to be able to understand a cartoon or a satirical text.2 These questions provide a frame for the analysis of the representation of the Russo-Japanese War in AustroHungarian political cartoons. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY IN EAST ASIA

At the end of the nineteenth century, Austria-Hungary seemed to have lost her position as one of the great powers in Europe. The others regarded her as totally focused on European affairs. The Habsburg Empire had no colonies, no possessions overseas, neither in Africa nor in America, nor in Asia, nor in the Pacific – the tiny concession in Tianjin being a sole exception.3 Austria-Hungary had not attempted to position herself as a “global player” – political and strategic conceptions concentrated upon European affairs.4 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had to deal primarily with Germany and Russia, the two neighbors, while Italy, France, and Great Britain, let alone the United States, China, and Japan, seemed to be of minor importance. Yet Austria-Hungary observed ongoing affairs in other parts of the world, especially in East Asia, closely, although it has to be mentioned that the focus was on possible repercussions on European affairs. In the decade from 1894–95 to 1904–05, from the Sino-Japanese War to the Russo-Japanese War, when Agenor Graf Gol⁄ uchowski acted as Minister of Foreign Affairs, foreign policy reached a new level.5 This period under discussion was one of dramatic changes in the Great Power system, as Paul Kennedy describes: [. . .] [I]t was the case that many acute observers in the late nineteenth century sensed the direction in which the dynamics of world power were driving. Intellectuals and journalists in particular, but also day-today politicians talked and wrote in terms of a vulgar Darwinistic world of struggle, of success and failure, of growth and decline. What was more, the future world order was already seen to have a certain shape, at least by 1895 or 1900.6

In this scenario, Austria-Hungary was in a difficult position. The Habsburg Empire was considered “by far the weakest of the established Great Powers” because of her unique geographical, multinational, and strategic position.7 Under the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I, who ascended to the throne in 1848, foreign politics always stood way behind domestic affairs. The Ausgleich of 1867, which established the

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Austro-Hungarian Dualism had set a new framework for the government. This situation caused many problems, especially for the development of foreign relations, because the installation of new diplomatic and consular representations was quite expensive – and financial decisions needed approval of both sides. In Austro-Hungarian political perceptions, there were hardly any imperialistic approaches. Imperialistic tendencies never gained influence in the inner circles of Hapsburg foreign policy. Nevertheless, the last decade of the nineteenth century, when Agenor Graf Gol⁄ uchowski took over as Minister of Foreign Affairs, brought one major change: the SinoJapanese War, 1894–95, had shown that there was an Asian power able to cope with a European power. In those years, the network of AustroHungarian diplomatic representation was reshaped and legations and consular offices in East Asia were established.8 The late-nineteenth century saw a reshaping of European relations and therefore a new chance for Austria-Hungary. Despite the fact that, in Austria-Hungary, supporters of colonial projects and the ideas of imperialism could not gain influence in leading political circles, the Austro-Hungarian government watched closely the activities of the European powers, concentrating on possible repercussions of conflicts abroad on the power-political balance of the systems of alliances, which became more and more elaborated.9 The Allied intervention in China in 1900 was a chance for Austria-Hungary for a demonstration of their position as one of the Great Powers – although the interests in China were marginal.10 As mentioned above, after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, AustriaHungary had become interested in events in East Asia and particularly in the role of the European powers in that region. In those years, AustriaHungary separated the posts of Minister to China and Minister to Japan, and a residence for the Austro-Hungarian Minister to China was built in Beijing.11 In 1900, with the beginning of the siege of the legations, where a few Austro-Hungarian officials and a small group from the AustroHungarian Navy were trapped, the Habsburg Empire could no longer remain uninvolved. In the summer of 1900, it became a point of national pride to take part in the international intervention. The peace negotiations in Beijing focused primarily on sorting out the interests of the European powers – negotiated by the diplomatic representatives of the Powers in Beijing, but organized by the foreign affairs ministries in Europe. In addition, even before the negotiations in Beijing started, the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs instructed the Austro-Hungarian representatives in St. Petersburg, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo to report the respective positions taken by the governments. News of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance did not only surprise the Russians and cause them to speed up negotiations on Manchuria, the news also surprised most of the European Governments, especially the French. The Austro-Hungarian ambassador, Anton Graf Wolkenstein, wrote in one of his reports, that news about the alliance had been a major issue in the French media: French commentators regarded the Anglo-Japanese

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Alliance as a huge achievement for British diplomacy. While British forces were bound in South Africa, the British had secured full support for their efforts in China by the Japanese army. The alliance was seen as directed towards Russia in naming Manchuria an integral part of China, where Russia had tried to gain more and more influence. The Austro-Hungarian minister in Tokyo was convinced that the breach with Russia was inevitable and that the Korean peninsula was the most vulnerable point for Japan. In February 1902, the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador in London, Albert Graf Mensdorff, gave a striking analysis of the situation in East Asia, mentioning the growing number of Russian threats against Japanese interests in East Asia, especially regarding Korea. Although a Japanese attack against Russia seemed unavoidable, observers were in doubt about the results, referring to the costs of Japan’s taking of Formosa. Japan could not gain much in Korea; however, Japanese nationalism led the way into war with Russia. Tensions were growing, and in December 1903, the long-time Austro-Hungarian Ambassador in Berlin, Ladislaus Szo ˝gyény-Marich von Magyar-Szo˝gyen und Szolgaegyháza, reported a major change in the attitude of the Japanese minister to Berlin. His Japanese colleague, who for a long time was quite optimistic that the controversies could be settled peacefully, had become more and more pessimistic. The outbreak of the war in 1904 led to a thorough evaluation of Austria-Hungary’s relations with Russia. The Austrian Ambassador reported that some Russian leading politicians saw war with Japan as a minor conflict: “qu’il s’agit d’une chien enragé auquel il suffit de donner un coup de pied” and that Russian Pan-Slavists wanted to declare the Russo-Japanese War as a kind of colonial war to secure Russia’s prestige in the Near East. However, the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador in St. Petersburg, Graff Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, did not share this impression – he was with the French Ambassador who said clearly, “Il s’agit d’une grosse guerre.” Even the Russian press was then listening to the reason that Russian politics had only one task: to secure peaceful relations with the European neighbors during the war with Japan. Aehrenthal was convinced that during the war or during peace negotiations Russia would come into conflict with Britain or with the United States. He suggested laying new foundations for Austro-Hungarian relations with Russia – the tsar would need favorable relations to the two neighbors in the West to be able to fight Japan in a longer war. Aehrenthal tried everything to convince the Minister of Foreign Affairs, but Gol⁄ uchowski rejected all these attempts – and Aehrenthal could only return to this project after he came into office as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1906. THE WAR IN POLITICAL CARTOONS

The brief outline above sets out the Austro-Hungarian attitude towards the conflict in East Asia and its possible repercussions on the situation in

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Europe – but diplomatic correspondence had a rather limited audience. In addition, background information provided by diplomatic and consular representatives around the world did not reach a broader audience. The public had to rely on newspapers. During the early twentieth century, newspaper coverage of events was very different from today’s coverage. Papers presented short paragraphs provided by news agencies, such as Reuters and Wolffsches Telegraphenbüro without any comment. German-language Austro-Hungarian newspapers did not include lengthy leading articles as seen in The Times, not even short articles such as those in the Daily Mail. Comments and longer articles were rare and limited to the “official” version as provided by “well-informed sources from the Ballplatz.” Interpretation and comment on events were the main purpose of satirical periodicals, especially in times of crisis – such as during the Russo-Japanese War. The Kikeriki published a first short note on the situation in East Asia in a poem entitled Fasching 1904 [carnival 1904] published on January 14, 1904.12 The poem describes the beginning of a Viennese ball – the first stanza speaks about the usual opening with fanfares and pleasing violin music. This time everything is different, there are tubas and trumpets from the East (that is, Northeast Asia), but no violins, as Mars (the Roman god of war) had arranged the music. The second stanza describes the most interesting part of a ball: at the beginning of ball the gentlemen have to find a partner. During this process apprehension, hatred, and jealousies become obvious. Everybody tries to show his or her strong points (third stanza). Japanese, Russians, Chinese, Britons, and Frenchmen are present. The polonaise is very colorful as all of them show their “fleets” – a pun using the double meaning of Flotte in German. One meaning is “fleet, naval force;” the second is “attractive, unmarried female.” The final stanza mentions that when everybody has found a partner, the polonaise could begin. However, nobody wants to act as a leading dancer – and Albion (that is, Great Britain) tries to persuade Japan to take the initiative. Two weeks later, on January 28, 1904, the Kikeriki presented a caricature illustrating this: Ein Faschingsulk [A joke during carnival]. Prince Carnival, a male character dressed as a jester with a huge fool’s cap, leads the dancers – among them: the Russian bear and a Japanese “geisha”, John Bull (Great Britain) and South Africa, and Uncle Sam and Cuba. Following are France and the Roman Catholic Church, Germany and “Leutnant Bilse” (a depiction of German militarism) – and in the background, we see Austria-Hungary represented by the figure of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gol⁄ uchowski, who has a kind of whip in one hand and a toy behind him. In the distance, we see the figure of a cock – the Kikeriki – harassing two men. The visual code identifies both men as Jews (codes used are the over-sized nose and hair-coiffure). During the first days of the war, most of the Austro-Hungarian papers saw Russia being well prepared for war – and brought texts and cartoons showing the huge bear (Russia) coping very well with Japanese attacks;

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for example “Der russische Bär will sich mit Vergnügen dem Pulver der Japaner aussetzen – natürlich dem – Zacherlpulver.” (The Russian bear will be delighted to expose himself to Japanese powder – of course to Zacherl-powder (that is, a brand of pesticide).13 However, even at this early stage, Kikeriki presented David und Goliath, showing Japan as David and Russia as a giant Goliath – with the caption: “Da fiel der lange Riese hin, So groß und stark er war.” (Although he is that tall and strong, the giant toppled over.).14 Der Floh dedicated its number 6 (published February 1904) entirely to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. One of the cartoons is a map showing Korea as the tongue of the Chinese dragon.15 After the outbreak of the war, newspapers discussed the reasons and tried to identify the point that led to war. Figaro blames the diplomats of all sides in a cartoon entitled Betrachtung nach Ausbruch des Krieges (Reflections after the outbreak of war). The cartoon shows the devil chasing people and putting them into a cage mounted on a wheelbarrow. The caption reads: “Wenn der Teufel den p.t. Herren Diplomaten gegenüber früher seine segensreiche Tätigkeit entfaltet hätte, wäre vielleicht das Ärgste verhütet worden.” (If the devil would have done this to the diplomats, maybe the worst case wouldn’t have come true.) Papers frequently criticize the positions taken by Great Britain and by the United States – they stand at the fence or behind a wall and wait until they get their part of “fresh ham from a bear.” It is quite significant for the role of political cartoons and of the satirical periodicals that in the early days of the war coverage is very intensive: short articles and poems prepare the ground for cartoons. The authors describe scenes that are repeated in pictures later on – and if the caricaturists saw the slightest possibility that the public might not be able to understand, the caption explains the drawing: In Auf dem ostasiatischen Kriegerhimmel, the cartoonists plays with stars and constellations.16 The small cartoon is an interesting example of the level of knowledge required from the audience: Japan – the Empire of the Rising Sun – is shown as a “sun.” The face of this sun shows marks from slaps as sunspots. Russia is represented by the “bear” in a double sense: the bear (animal) with a kind of bandage around the head and the astronomical constellation, but although the caption mentions Ursa major, the drawing shows Ursa minor. The caption reads: “Im japanischen Sonnenreich hat die Sonne jetzt schon einige Flecken – und der Bär ein paar Dippeln.” (In the Japanese Empire of the Sun, the sun already has some spots – and the bear some bumps.) Even more difficult is Der Bär und der Honig (Bear and honey), a fullpage cartoon: The drawing shows a hollow tree with a beehive inscribed “Koreanischer Honig” (Korean honey).17 While the bear (that is, Russia) tries to grab hold of the beehive and is attacked by bees, John Bull is quite comfortable sitting in the tree and collects honey into a container. The bees are Japan (wearing flat caps) and China (wearing cone-shaped hats), but that isn’t explained anywhere – as the caption only says: “[Da]s

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Leben wird’s nicht kosten, aber unangenehm ist die G’schicht!” (It will not cost him his life, but the whole affair is quite unpleasant.) As explained in the introduction, cartoons can only be understood within context, of knowing who is who, what is on, know about metaphors, about artworks, poems, and so on. Therefore, reexploring the connotations makes cartoons a source, indeed a valuable source way beyond mere illustration. In July 1904, commentators concentrated on a more international perspective. Asiatische Geschichten (Asian stories) shows a map of East Asia as a rich buffet: Siberia as a huge ham, Manchuria as a lobster, China a plate of hot food, Korea as a pot of honey, and Japan as a croissant. In addition, while Russia (a figure with a fur-rimmed hat and a whip) and Japan (a man with a black cap and a small moustache) are quarrelling, John Bull, shown as a bulldog, grabs the tablecloth so that the bottle Tibet is toppling over. On the floor there is a huge cake India, a grilled chicken Ceylon and a number of tropical fruits, representing Burma (that is, Myanmar). The caption makes the interpretation clear: “Der lachende Dritte” (The laughing third, the real winner) – while Russia and Japan are at war, Great Britain takes advantage of the situation. Nevertheless, as a kind of guide for the public, the artist has written in the names of the nations.18 In late August, early September 1904, the position of China gained new importance – China is again seen as a victim of the actions taken by the European powers as shown in the lament Chinesisches Klagelied (Chinese lament).19 The author notes that this song is “zu singen nach bekannter Melodie” (to be sung following a well-known tune) and it is obvious that the tune is the traditional version of O alte Burschenherrlichkeit, a song from students’ associations.20 The lament is about the difficult position of a local daotai, a Chinese local official, in dealing with Russians and Japanese.21 The first verse sets the scene: The local official (“Ta-o-ta-i”
daotai) wishes that the Russians and Japanese should go to hell as they maltreat him – as if he was their Chineser. Chineser is a term of abuse frequently used in the late-nineteenth century when cartoonists and authors of satirical texts are referring to Austro-Hungarian government officials. The term Chinese refers to Chinese nationals, Chineser usually refers to (Austro-Hungarian) bureaucrats. What shall I, the daotai, do now? / The Russians should go to hell / Same to the Japanese / They make a fool of me / As if I were their “Chinese” / O jerum, jerum [. . .].

He continues his lament: One old junk is still here / her machines are missing / she has some large holes / rats are in there. / However, the cannons are great / unfortunately, they do not work. / O jerum, jerum [. . .].

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The Chinese official only has one vessel without machines, but with magnificent cannons, which unfortunately jam, so he worries about what to do: The best thing might be to remain silent / even when the consuls shout / [I] let things go on without interference / I will not take any actions. / Otherwise, one of the Whites / might cut my beautiful queue. / O jerum, jerum [. . .]

Therefore, the daotai decides to be silent and not to take action, even when the consuls demand that. The daotai does not want to take the risk of having his queue cut by one of the “Whites” – a metaphor for having a part of China taken by one of the Western powers. I will not write to Beijing / Nobody there can tell me what to do / They moan, but they are afraid of / the European diplomats / Who even dare to laugh at the dragon / the Dowager Empress, o horror / O jerum, jerum [. . .]

The last verse refers to the weakness of the Qing government – the daotai does not want to write to Beijing for instructions, because the authorities do not know what to do. The European diplomats take advantage of the weakness of the Qing government and even dare to laugh at the dragon. The German word Drachen has two meanings: it is the mythological dragon, the dragon symbolizing China – and it is a term of abuse usually referring to an elderly woman, especially a mother-in-law. To make it clear to the readers, the author names the dragon: it is Cixi, the Empress Dowager. Looking at the front page of the following number of the Kikeriki, Nr. 70 (September 1, 1904), it is obvious that Chinesisches Klagelied prepared the ground for the cartoon Chinesisches Ultimatum (Chinese ultimatum) and the poem Der Taotai. This poem seems to talk about China, however, the topos of a Chinese official who does not know what to do, is used to comment on internal affairs in Austria-Hungary. The cartoon shows a damaged ship with barely repaired leaks, but with shining cannons. Aboard the ship is a Russian, as usually defined by the fur-rimmed hat, who pours water onto a Chinese official. The Chinese official, the daotai, wears the traditional dragon robe, but his feet are in shoes with a turned-up toe. The caption is a short dialogue: “Der Taotai: Entweder abrüsten oder abfahren! - Der Russe: Also oder! Fahren S’ ab!” (The daotai: Disarm or depart! - The Russian: Up yours! Clear off!). The pun uses the two meanings of German abfahren, a verb meaning “to depart”, but if used as an imperative, is a colloquial and not very polite way to tell people to leave. In October 1904, rumors were spread about mediation and various mediators were under discussion. Ambassador Aehrenthal, mentioned this issue in a report to the Minister of Foreign affairs dated October 22, 1904 after a conversation with the Chinese minister to St. Petersburg, Hu

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Weide, who had asked about Aehrenthal’s reaction to a possible Chinese mediation. Austria-Hungary remained very passive, and this passiveness was illustrated in a number of cartoons, for example in a Vexierbild (picture puzzle): The cartoon shows Italian and German prime ministers, Giovanni Giolitti and Bernhard Fürst von Bülow, and the latter holds a document, inscribed Friedens-Vermittlung (mediation) in his hand. The caption reads, “Wo ist der Golu?” (Where is Gol⁄ u[chowski]?) The AustroHungarian minister is hidden in the landscape drawing, he is fast asleep, and Giolitti’s right foot is on Gol⁄ uchowski’s nose, while von Bülow is standing at Gol⁄ uchowski’s feet.22 Although diplomats in all the European capitals discussed ways to end the war, fighting went on – and in November 1904, cartoonists started to comment on fighting again. Figaro presented the cartoon Die Japanfurcht (Fearing Japan) showing ships dressed with long johns instead of flags and pennants. On the ship in the foreground, sailors acting like laundrywomen are washing their laundry.23 Sperl’s cartoon Weihnachten beim Zar (The tsar’s Christmas celebration) is a drastic illustration of the Russian situation. The Emperor, the Empress, and the infant Heir-Apparent are on the throne and an aide-decamp brings the message: “Das Regiment, das die Ehre hat, den Namen Eurer Majestät zu führen, erlaubt sich diese Spende aus der Mandschurei dem allerhöchsten Throne ehrfurchtsvoll zu Füßen zu legen.” (The regiment, that has the honor to carry the name of your majesty, permits itself to present this offering to the throne.) The “offering” is a Christmas tree on a table, and the tree is “decorated” with sculls, bones, and skeletons, showing the discrepancy between celebrations in St. Petersburg and the horrors of war in East Asia.24 Even after the Japanese took Port Arthur, Austro-Hungarian cartoonists saw the Kikeriki blamed Starke Einbildung (You need a strong imagination) for this: a bear with a fur-rimmed hat is sitting next to a butt, holding a glass of champagne in his hand.25 On the right side of the image, we see a wounded Japanese, standing on the walls of Port Arthur. With his huge sword, the Japanese has cut one of the claws/nails of the bear – and the caption reads “Bansai! Jetzt ist der Bär tötlich verwundet!” (Banzai! Now the bear is fatally wounded.) The cartoon is a striking iconographic manifestation of the difficulties faced by European observers attempting to evaluate events in East Asia. The commanding officer of the Austro-Hungarian Detachment in Beijing, Lieutenant Commander Nikolaus Ritter von Rodakowski, noted in one of his reports, that his review of the events during the last weeks is based on widely differing reports, mainly from British origin and therefore proJapanese. Without reliable maps of Manchuria it was extremely difficult to report on the situation. Figaro thinks about Russia in a poem entitled Betrachtung nach dem letzten russischen Feste der Wasserweihe (Considerations after the last Russian celebration of the Great Sanctification of Water). The orthodox Great Sanctification of Water is celebrated on Epiphany (in January), the

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poem refers to the role of Epiphany Water for Orthodox Christians – and about the fate of the Russian fleet.26 While Russia retreated to the north, there were lots of cartoons and poems and short articles, referring to the fact that Japan is too small to take Russia as a whole, such as Japanischer Appetit (Japanese Appetite),27 to rumors on peace negotiations, for example Friedensgerüchte (Rumors about peace) by cartoonist Friedrich Graetz,28 and even some direct comments on the Russian retreat like Eigentlich wahr! (Actually true!).29 After the battle of Tsushima, only a small number of cartoons on East Asian affairs were published. This changed in August, when the peace negotiations in Portsmouth began. Lots of poems and cartoons comment on the negotiations and on the negotiators. The poem Diner zu Portsmouth (Dinner in Portsmouth) reintroduces the topic to the audience: Roosevelt takes a seat between Kamura [sic.] and Witte. Witte himself mounts the high horse and shows Mr. Sato that Russia was not defeated. In fact, the tsar has won the war. And he [Witte] came to Portsmouth as an act of courtesy for Roosevelt. / While Witte speaks on, Japan has taken Sakhalin.30

The first stanza tells about President Roosevelt as a mediator between the Japanese and the Russian plenipotentiaries, Komura Jutaro and Sergei Witte; the poem continues: Komura replies with a proof that Japan has strong hold of Manchuria and is on her way to Russia. And if the tsar doesn’t accept peace at all cost, the Japanese army would close a ring around Moscow / The Japanese fleet would block Kronstadt. / But Witte has taken precautions and has arranged a loan.

The poem closes with a pessimistic outlook: And so they talked on and on. / In the meantime, peace is crushed inbetween them.

The chances for a peace agreement are diminishing, because each of the negotiators talks politely about accomplishments, while Japan has taken Sakhalin and Russia got more money by way of loans.31 The same scene is discussed in a poem in Der Floh on August 13, 1905 and the author of this poem draws the same conclusions.32 The cartoonist Friedrich Graetz shows a huge Russian man with two petite “Geishas” – the Japanese women wear kimono-style dress (although the obi is not tied at the back). What is unusual, is the integration of a poem into the cartoon: Leo Wullf’s Die Patriotin (The female patriot) is inserted into the cartoon.33 In Der Floh it is a common feature to insert a short notice to clarify the context of a cartoon and/or a poem – and in this

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case there had been a short notice in the papers that Japanese Geishas refuse to accept Russian prisoners. The author uses this as a starting point – and misinterprets geishas as prostitutes: A geisha loves everybody / So she loves us Russians. / Says a captured Russian / and starts to kiss her. // But he jumps back / what was this? / Kisses? No, slaps into his face / are very loud. // What happened to the geisha? / Nothing – Slaps can not disturb a Russian. // The geisha talks to him: / Love is our life / but we love our country / men are second place. // A Japanese girl / does not kiss everybody / But – if you sign the peace treaty / you can talk to me . . . // Give us Port Arthur and Dal’nij / And you could be optimistic / Add your (Far) Eastern Railway / and I will serve you well. // Accept the Peace Agreement / I’m open for new talks / Capitulate – and we will take / a stroll under palm trees. // If you leave Korea to us / I’ll let you do / If you leave Manchuria / you can have even more. // Give us Sakhalin / and you can do with me / (in exchange for indemnities) / a thousand wonderful things.34

The poem has all the Japanese demands and makes clear that Japan trades peace against territory – and China will have to pay the price. A picture tells a thousand word – and the cartoon Im Hotel zu Portsmouth (At the hotel in Portsmouth) shows that clearly: The owner of the hotel asks his guests (Komura and Witte), “And who will pay for that?” – and Witte answers: “Well, you have to try to find a Chinese who pays for that.”35 Austro-Hungarian commentators noted on various occasions, that Japan had defeated Russia on the battleground. However, the peace agreement and the following triple intervention by the European powers had left nothing and that Komura was returning home empty-handed.36 CONCLUSION

Satirical texts and political cartoons and caricatures offer a new point of view, as they both present manifestations of common constructions of the “Other” at the time of their creation. Caricaturists and authors instantly respond to information provided by officials, to reports in newspapers, and periodicals from other countries – and to various rumors. This makes them a reliable source. They show clearly what authorities wanted a general audience to think about ongoing events, and they tell us about common knowledge of Asia, of popular music tunes, about fashion. The intended audience had to meet high expectations: texts refer to poems and songs; there are lots of citations referring to texts and poems by Goethe, Schiller, and Heine (to name but a few). National costumes and uniforms of various armed forces are used to mark nations – usually without any annotations: the reader had to know that the soldier with a bottle of Vodka represents Russia, that a round-faced, bearded sailor

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represents Great Britain, Marianne represents France, and Uncle Sam the United States. Animal allegories are frequently used, for example: the bear for Russia, a dragon for China, an eagle for Germany (a doubleeagle for Austria), a cock for France. At the time of the Russo-Japanese War, cartoonists show Chinese men wearing dragon robes, small caps with or without peacock feathers, and shoes made from fabric. Japanese men are usually shown as soldiers in “Western” uniforms or as samurai, carrying huge swords and wearing wooden shoes. Asian female figures are not that different; they usually wear kimono-style clothes and elaborate hairstyles. A caricaturist would never use an item his intended audience would not know – because then the audience would not understand his message. This aspect is even more important for cartoons dealing with foreign affairs. Focusing on the Russo-Japanese War, this chapter shows that for the shaping of Austria-Hungary’s foreign policy, which had a clear focus on Europe, a close observation of ongoing affairs in other parts of the world was of high importance. The never-ending national-political problems in Austria-Hungary were a major obstacle for a more active role, and yet Austria-Hungary watched developments in East Asia. She watched not because the Habsburg Empire wanted to gain more influence, but to gain information and hints on the activities of both allies and opponents – information that was used with much skill to adjust relations with the “Other.” NOTES 1

Thanks are due to Georg Lehner (University of Vienna), who read earlier versions of this chapter, and to Naoko Shimazu for a vivid discussion on images of “the Other”. Their questions and comments helped to shape the focus of the paper. Special thanks to Wieslaw Rza˛dek (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan´ ), for discussing his paper “Subduing the triumph of rangaku: Japanese popular prints of the Russo-Japanese War” (Association for Asian Studies, Annual Meeting 2003) with me on a panel organized by Danke Li (Fairfield University) and myself. Obtaining material for this paper would not have been possible without the support and service provided by Alfred Martinek from the Austrian National Library’s Microfilm Department. A theoretical discussion of the use of cartoons as a source is part of my forthcoming habilitation thesis on Iconographic manifestions for the construction of the “Other”, analyzing Austro-Hungarian perception of political change and revolutionary movements in China 1894–1895–1917. This chapter is based on the following materials: A. Periodicals: Figaro (1904–1905), Der Floh (1904–1905), Humoristische Blätter (1904–1905), Kikeriki (1904–1905), Neue Glühlichter (1904–1905). B. Austrian State Archives: 1) Family Court and State Archive: HHStA, P.A. Fach I Allgemeines Karton 475 Liasse XXXIIg-l: Verhandlungen mit Rußland

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Fach III Preußen Karton 160 Weisungen, Varia 1903–1904 Karton 161 Berichte 1904, Weisungen, Varia 1903–1904 Karton 162 Berichte 1905 Fach VIII England Karton 125 Berichte 1900 X-XII, 1901 I-VI, Weisungen, Varia 1900 Karton 131 Berichte 1904 I-II Karton 132 Berichte 1904 III-X Karton 133 Berichte 1904 XI–XII Karton 134 Berichte 1905 I–VI Karton 135 Berichte 1905 VII–XII, Weisungen, Varia 1905 Fach IX Frankreich Karton 152 Berichte 1902 I–V Karton 157 Berichte, Weisungen, Varia 1904 Karton 158 Berichte 1905 I–IX Karton 159 Berichte 1905 X–XII, Weisungen, Varia 1905 Fach X Rußland Karton 117 Berichte 1902 I-V Karton 118 Berichte 1902 VI–XII Karton 119 Berichte 1903 I Karton 120 Berichte 1903 II–XII Karton 121 Weisungen, Varia 1903 Karton 122 Berichte 1904 I–V Karton 123 Berichte 1904 VI–XII Karton 124 Weisungen, Varia 1904, Berichte 1905 I–III Karton 125 Berichte 1904 IV–VII 2) War Archives: Marinesektion / Operationskanzlei [KA, OK/MS] MS/OK 1905-X-14 Russisch-japanischer Krieg Grünewald, 1979: 66–85; Plum, 1998: 49–76. Sauer, 2002. Gollwitzer, 1982. New Cambridge Modern History, 1964–1969. Kennedy, 1989: 195. Kennedy, 1989: 214. Lehner, 1995. Klein, 1984; Kolm, 1997. Lehner and Lehner, 2002. Lehner, 1998. Fasching 1904 (Kikeriki, January 14, 1904: 2): Im Ost Trompetenstöße/ Und lauter Tubaschall/ Verkünden mit Getöse/ Es kommt der Karneval/ Es fehlen heit’re Geigen/ Dem Fasching dieses Jahres,/ Sie müssen stille schweigen,/ Denn Arrangeur ist – Mars.// Schaut, wie sich schon gruppieren/ Die Paare allzumal!/ Rasch gilt’s zu engagieren,/ Solang man hat die Wahl./ Da offenbart sich Neigung,/ Haß, Neid und Eifersucht/ Verbeugung um Verbeugung:/ Ein Vis-à-vis gesucht!//

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Da läßt sich keiner spotten/ Und alle stell’n zur Schau/ Den stolzen Wuchs der Flotten/ Und ihren üpp’gen Bau./ Japaner, Russ’, Chinese,/ Brit’ und Franzos’ sind da,/ Solch’ bunte Polonaise/ Schon lang man nimmer sah./ Nun ka[nn] der Tanz beginnen!// Doch niemand aus den Reih’n/ Will ‘s über sich gewinnen,/ Der Vortänzer zu sein./ „Fang’ an, mein Japaneschen!“/ Lockt Albion falschsüß:/ „Du hast die schönsten Höschen/ Und hast die jüngsten Füß’!“/ 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Figaro, Nr. 5, January 30, 1904: 1. Kikeriki, Nr. 14, February 18, 1904: 4. Der Floh, Nr. 6, 1904, 4. Kikeriki, Nr. 25, March 27, 1904: 9. Kikeriki, Nr. 39, May 15, 1904: 10. Kikeriki, Nr. 59, July 24, 1904, 1. Chinesisches Klagelied (Kikeriki, Nr. 69, August 28, 1904: 1): Was fang’ ich Ta-o-ta-i an?/ Die Russen hol’ der Teufel,/ Den Japanesen wünsch’ ich dann/ Das Gleiche ohne Zweifel./ Die foppen mich um kreuz und quer,/ Als ob ich ihr Chineser wär’./ O jerum, jerum, je-erum,/ O quae mutatio rerum!// Ein’ alte Dschunken hab’ ich noch,/ Der fehlen bloß Maschinen,/ Sie hat so manches große Loch/ Und Ratten hausen drinnen./ Doch die Kanonen sind famos,/ Nur leider gehen sie nicht los./ O jerum, jerum, je-erum,/ O quae mutatio rerum!// Am besten ist’s, ich schweige still,/ Wenn die Konsule schreien,/ Lasse alles gehen, wie es will/ Und hüte mich zu dräuen./ Sonst schneidet mir so’n weißer Tropf/ Am Ende ab mein’ schönen Zopf./ O jerum, jerum, je-erum,/ O quae mutatio rerum!// Nach Peking schreib’ ich auch nicht mehr,/ Dort weiß man nicht zu raten,/ Man schimpft, doch fürchtet man gar sehr/ Europas Diplomaten./ Die lachen selbst den Drachen aus,/ Die Witwe-Kaiserin, o Graus./ O jerum, jerum, je-erum,/ O quae mutatio rerum! //

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Nail, 2000. Hucker 1985: nrs. 6306 and 6322. Kikeriki, Nr. 82, October 13, 1904: 4. Figaro, Nr. 46, November 12, 1904: 1. Neue Glühlichter, Nr. 228, 27; December 23, 1904. Kikeriki, Nr. 4, January 12, 1905; 10. Figaro, Nr. 4, January 28, 1905: 14. Kikeriki, Nr. 22, March 16, 1905, 1. Neue Glühlichter, Nr. 235, 7; March 29, 1905. Figaro, Nr. 14, April 8, 1905: 1. Kikeriki, August 10, 1905: 1. Diner zu Portsmouth: Zwischen Kamura [sic!] und Witte jetzt/ Sich Roosevelt in die Mitte setzt./ Herr Witte, der ist gar nicht faul,/ Setzt sich gleich auf den hohen Gaul/ Und zeigt Herrn Sato eins, zwei, drei,/ Daß Rußland nicht geschlagen sei,/ Ja, daß in Wirklichkeit der Zar/ In diesem Krieg der Sieger war./

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 Und wenn er (Witte) käm’ so weit,/ So sei dies nur “ne Artigkeit,/ Die Roosevelt erweis” der Zar/ Der einem schönen Augenpaar,/ Wie es besäß der Präsident,/ Am Schlusse nichts abschlagen könnt’./ So sprach Herr Witte, unterdessen/ Hat Japan Sachalin gefressen./ Komura wieder seinerseits/ Beweist, daß Japan nun bereits/ Im Vollbesitz der Mandschurei/ Und auf dem Weg nach Rußland sei./ Und wenn der Zar nicht über Nacht/ Um jeden Preis den Frieden macht,/ Dann könnt’ es ihm passieren noch,/ Daß innerhalb der nächsten Woch’/ Moskau zerniert von Japans Heer/ Und Kronstadt von der Flotte wär’./ Indes hat Witte vorgesorgt/ Sich eine Anleih’ ausgeborgt./ Und so bei Tische weiter ging ‘s,/ Sie Worte zierlich schmieden,/ Erdrückt von rechts, erdrückt von links/ Ward in der Mitt’ – der Frieden.//

31 32 33 34

Kikeriki, Nr. 64, August 10, 1905: 1. Der Floh, Nr. 33, August 13, 1905: 2. Der Floh, Nr. 33, August 13, 1905: 4. Der Floh, Nr. 33, August 13, 1905: 4. Die Patriotin by Leo Wulff: „Wenn die Geisha alle liebt,/ Liebt sie auch uns Russen!”/ Der gefang’ne Russe spricht’s/ Und beginnt zu bussen.// Doch da läuft er übel an:/ Welch verdächtig Knallen?/ Küsse? – Backenstreiche sind’s,/ Die da klatschend fallen!// Was der Geisha drauf geschah?/ Nichts! Was macht aus Schlägen/ Sich ein Russ’? Ein Russ’ kann sich/ D’rob nicht sehr erregen// Und die kleine Geisha spricht:/ „Lieben ist uns Leben,/ Doch zuerst das Vaterland,/ Männer dann daneben!“// „Geh’, du Russ’! Japanisch Kind/ Küßt nicht all’ und jeden,/ Höchstens wenn ihr Frieden schließt,/ Lass’ ich mit mir reden.// „Gebt Port Arthur, Dalny und,/ Und ihr könnt voll Mut sein;/ Eure Ostbahn legt dazu/ Und ich werde gut sein.// „Gegen Friedens-Kuß und Schluß/ Lass’ ich mit mir handeln,/ Sollt ihr, gebt ihr euch besiegt,/ Unter Palmen wandeln.// „Laßt ihr uns Korea ab,/ Halt’ ich still in Ehren;/ Räumt ihr dann die Mandschurei,/ Wird ich mehr gewähren.// „Laßt ihr uns noch Sachalin,/ Laß ich mit mir machen/ (Gegen KriegsEntschädigung!)/ Tausend schöne Sachen!“//

35 36

Kikeriki, Nr. 73, September 10, 1905: 1. Kikeriki, Nr.75, September 17, 1905: 8

25

A Reinterpretation of the Ottoman Neutrality During the War HALIT DÜNDAR AKARCA

A

s in much of the rest of the world, the Russo-Japanese War was also followed with great interest by the public, and with close attention by the government in Turkey. Since one of the belligerents was the archenemy of the Ottoman Empire, and the victorious party was an Asian Power, it was assumed that the Ottoman government and Sultan Abdulhamid II himself were thought to be emotionally inclined towards the Japanese.1 However, due to Abdulhamid’s well-known policy of preserving the equilibrium among, and equal distance from, the Great Powers, he acted to please or not to antagonize both parties throughout the war.2 Hence, a careful reading of the Ottoman and Russian archival sources reveals that, willingly or not, the Ottoman government pursued a neutrality which would intentionally please and at least not irritate the Russian party per se, in contrast to the public support for the Japanese side. There were substantial reasons for the Turkish public and the intellectuals to follow the ongoing war enthusiastically and wish for a Japanese victory. First of all, one of the two belligerents was the Russian Empire which had expanded to the detriment of the Ottoman Empire over the last two centuries. The disastrous consequences of the last war of 1877–78, which had debilitated the Ottoman Empire and rendered it more vulnerable to Russia and other Great Powers, were not forgotten. The Russophobia of the Turkish public probably exceeded similar feelings elsewhere in the world. Secondly, the other belligerent was from the East and had been in regression and under the domination of the West. The Japanese Empire had been hailed by the intellectuals of Eastern countries as an example of the possible revival of an Eastern nation embracing Western standards and challenging the West without losing its intrinsic character.3

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The extensive coverage of the war news by the Istanbul and the Young Turk press abroad, eyewitness reports, as well as the memoirs of the contemporaries, reinforces this point. The Istanbul press covered the war from the very inception to the end and and remained its principal focus throughout. However, they could only include reports taken from international news agencies, without commenting very much on them.4 On the other hand, the Young Turk newspapers and journals such as Mes¸veret, S¸ ura-yi Ümmet, Terakki and Türk5 which were issued in Egypt and France published articles analyzing and praising the Japanese victories, and the Japanese example of reformation and renovation.6 The news on the war had been the main issue of people of all levels. As stated in a report to Abdulhamid written by the distinguished commander Ahmed Muhtar Pasha: “From the youngest to the oldest, all people talk about the war with their families at their homes; and with their acquaintances on the street. The literates, the merchants, even the coachmen ask each other news from the current war.” An interesting Japanese figure, Yamada Torajiro, wrote about the great sympathy and the admiration of the Turkish people for the Japanese during the war.7 The public admiration and support for the Japanese encouraged two Japanese residents of Istanbul to to find a practical application for these sentiments during the first months of the war in Northeast Asia. Yamada Torajiro who had resided in Istanbul from 1892 to 1914 and who had been the Japanese unofficial envoy to bring Japanese donations to the families of the Ertugˇrul staff in 1892,8 together with his friend, Nakamuro Ejiro the owner of the two Japanese shops in Istanbul, sold tickets to collect money for the Japanese Red Cross. Moreover, it was stated by a Japanese historian that some Turks had sent money and commodities to Japanese newspapers.9 The Sublime Porte had also been prudently following the events in Northeast Asia. Numerous translations from foreign newspapers and the reports of Ottoman ambassadors and consulates to the European states, concerning the international atmosphere around the Far Eastern crisis are to be found in the holdings of the Ottoman Archives today. However, at the same time, from the very first months of the war, the Ottoman government was on tenterhooks. It was the characteristic policy of the Sultan to avoid any conflicts that would undermine the shaky balance he was trying to preserve. To this effect, he was trying “to give no party any justified pretext for quarrel, to refrain from actions which incite the mutual enmities of the Powers, and to preserve order and govern well at home.”10 When news appeared concerning the Japanese advance against the Russians, the Ottoman government felt this was a threat that could incite Russian enmity. As early as March 4, 1904, the Special Council of Ministers (Encümen-i Mahsusa) directed an instruction to the Ministry of Interior to prevent war news being printed that would antagonize the Russian government. Some of the papers were even closed due to the extensive coverage of the pro-Japanese news.11 Adding to its concern not to annoy the Russian

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government, the Hamidian administration had noticed adverse overtones in the war news, since the Young Turk press abroad had been interpreting the Japanese victories as a challenge to the absolutist and reactionary rule of tsarist Russia in its resemblance to the Ottoman Empire.12 The antagonistic Young Turk press enthusiastically continued to comment on the Japanese example of modernization, and called for political transformation in the Ottoman realm to follow that example. They also claimed that the Sultan was aware of the dangers to his reign due to the extensive coverage of the news about the war, and accused him of preventing the Istanbul press from discussing the developments of the war.13 The censorship against pro-Japanese news affected the collection of aid by the Japanese residents mentioned above. Nakamuro Ejiro had asked the Turkish press to announce the names of the donors, but he was refused by all but the Levant Herald. Moreover, collection of donations for the Japanese Red Cross aggravated the anxiety of the Ottoman government. The Ministry of Police intercepted the collectors of the donations, and warned them to cease these acts, which were organized at the two Japanese shops in Beyogˇlu and Mahmutpas¸a. This prudent neutrality was an expected reflection of the Hamidian foreign policy. The activities of the Porte throughout the war, proved to be classical applications of this policy. During his reign, Abdulhamid tried to ensure that the Ottoman Empire was recognized as a legitimate European power, and he was keen on emulating the activities of other European states in the international arena.14 Appointing military observers to the warring army staffs, and plans to send field hospitals to both sides were all in line with this concern. Notwithstanding the carefully balanced nature of these steps, the main consideration behind them was related to Russian apprehension of them. By the time of the Russo-Japanese War, it had been an accepted military tradition to attach neutral military observers to the armies at war, in order to get insights into modern warfare. In the course of the RussoJapanese War, many new technologies and tactics were tested for the first time. Therefore, several governments assigned military attachés in the Far Eastern theater of war. Colmar Freiher von der Goltz, who had been in the service of the Ottoman government for the modernization of the Ottoman army between 1883 and 1896, advised the Sultan to appoint military observers in the Russo-Japanese War.15 Upon his advice, and following the European examples, the Ottoman government got in touch with both Russian and Japanese general staffs through the St. Petersburg and London embassies in June 1904.16 Colonel Pertev Bey (Demirhan), and Hasan Enver Pasha17 were selected as the military attachés to the Japanese and Russian army staffs, respectively. It can be deduced that the Sultan attributed more importance for the mission at the Russian army, from his appointment of an officer of higher rank to the Russian side. Whereas the Japanese side accepted the appointment of an Ottoman military officer, the Russian government ignored and then declined the

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Ottoman application. This delayed Pertev Bey’s departure, and even the cancellation of the appointment was contemplated.18 In late July, 1904, the Sultan authorized the appointment of Pertev Bey and the latter departed on July 29. Another act of conformity with the Great Power activities was the planned dispatch of a field hospital to the Russian army. The Russian government had sent a field hospital to the Ottoman Army during the TurkoGreek War of 1897. As a reciprocal act of goodwill the Ottoman Sultan ordered the preparations of a field hospital to serve in Northeast Asia immediately after the outbreak of the war. While the report of the Special Council of Ministers on the issue pointed out the financial difficulties in executing this order, another report, explaining the necessary personnel and equipment, stated that this exceeded the capacity of the Society of the Red Crescent; moreover, since the foundational aim of the Society required indiscrimination, the same aid should also be sent to the Japanese side, which in turn would double the costs. Thus, the plan was postponed approximately for a year until the Sultan demanded the renewal of the consideration of the plan. On January 11, 1905, the Special Council of Ministers reconsidered the plan to send a medical team of the Society of the Red Crescent in a more meticulous way. This time, besides the pecuniary incompetence of the society and the necessity to dispatch comparable aid to the Japanese side, which would eventually double the expenditure, the causes hindering the implementation of the plan included the inconvenience for the Russian government of the existence of Ottoman medics among the Russian troops which comprised Muslim soldiers. A translation of an article from a Romanian newspaper on Turkish public opinion concerning the war and the dispatch of a Red Crescent team to the Russian army demonstrates that, by that time the preparations for the execution of the plan proceeded at least to the nomination of the personnel, it was known by, or made known, to the press. Additional importance of the article was that it also stated that the medical team was organized exclusively for the Russian army, in response to the previous act of goodwill of the tsar during the Turko-Greek War of 1897. Finally, the Porte decided to content itself with sending pecuniary aid via the headquarters of the International Red Cross at Geneva to both sides of the war. While the Ottoman Sultan was contemplating measures to show his benevolence to the Russian tsar, and avoid causing conflicts, the war in Northeast Asia was evolving contrary to the expectations of many. The Japanese were advancing, the main Russian naval base of Port Arthur was under siege, and the Russian Pacific Fleet had been hampered severely. In this context, international attention was directed to the Straits, envisaging the possibility of the deployment of Russian Black Sea Fleet to Northeast Asia, violating the existing Straits regime. The Turkish Straits regime had been shaped under numerous nineteenth-century agreements, the Kala-i Sultaniyye (Çanakkale) (1809), Edirne (1829), Hünkar Iskelesi (1833), London (1841), Paris (1856) Straits conventions and the

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London (1871) and Berlin (1878) covenants. Although they had varied in essence to some degree, according to these agreements the Straits remained open to commercial vessels of all states and closed, in principle, to the ships of war of the foreign powers, in time of peace throughout the nineteenth century.19 In the Russian administration, during the Russo-Japanese War, two contradictory views emerged regarding the Straits regime. The Naval Ministry with public and, from time to time, imperial support, insisted on abolishing the current regime to Russia’s advantage, by sending warships through the Straits. In February 1904, Minister of Foreign Affairs Vladimir Lamsdorf in a confidential telegram instructed the Russian ambassador in Constantinople Ivan Alekseevich Zinoviev, according to the initiative of the Naval Ministry, and with Nicholas II’s approval, to assess the possibility of the passage of two Russian battleships through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. However, the telegram also included a conditional clause: “If local and international situations, and also the present state of affairs in the Turkish East would not seem to be dangerous for such an initiative.”20 In his response, Zinoviev stated that the Sultan was not free to make such decisions. Had it been possible he would, undoubtedly, have decided in favour of the Russian naval ships. Further, the ambassador indicated that, “had it been possible to achieve the consent of the Porte, most probably the British fleet would enter the Dardanelles.” Therefore, the ambassador, on February 3, 1904, cabled to St. Petersburg that he did consider it inappropriate to initiate negotiations with the Porte on the said question. Lamsdorf completely shared the apprehension of Zinoviev on the consequences for Russia which would be entailed by the infringement on the current regime of the Straits. The opinion of the Minister of Foreign Affairs had also influenced the tsar, and in his note to Lamsdorf he stated that, “it is better to refrain from this idea absolutely.”21 The decision of the Foreign Ministry and the tsar demonstrated that Britain had made its position clear enough to dissuade Russia from such an initiative.22 At the end of February, the Russian Naval Ministry held a special meeting concerning the use of auxiliary ships from the Volunteer Fleet as commerce raiders. The Volunteer Fleet had been formed after the RussoTurkish War of 1877–78, by a group of Russian merchants, mostly from Moscow, led by Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, and under the aegis of the future tsar, the Grand Duke Aleksandr Aleksandrovich. Until 1883, when it was transferred to the Naval Ministry, the Volunteer Fleet served as a secondary navy, providing subsidized transportation to Northeast Asia, and being able to be converted into commerce raiders in the event of war.23 From then on, the Volunteer Fleet existed as a commercial entity under the authority of the Naval Ministry, and during the time of the Russo-Japanese War, the Naval Ministry decided to exploit this ambiguous situation, and to employ the auxiliary ships in interrupting the Japanese supply route. Subsequently, two commercial-cum-naval vessels

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Peterburg and Smolensk passed through the Straits in the first days of July, 1904, under the usual special permission given by the Sultan.24 This time, however, the deployment of these vessels raised political and legal issues in the international arena. The cruisers intercepted and seized some British and German ships on the basis of confiscating contraband.25 Although the Russian government had to terminate this operation following the rapid and belligerent response from the British government,26 the Sublime Porte seemed to be greatly concerned by the possibility of a similar recurrence. The British ambassador in Istanbul severely warned the Porte to guarantee the closure of the Straits to the warships, and hastily the Ottoman government got in touch with the Russian embassy and the Russian Foreign Ministry for written guarantees of the commercial nature of the vessels belonging to the Volunteer Fleet. At the end of numerous written exchanges, and several visits of the Ottoman Minister of Foreign Affairs to the Russian Embassy, and the Ottoman ambassador in St. Petersburg, the Porte had no choice but to be satisfied with the verbal guarantee. Another issue, which raised the hackles of the Hamidian government, was the possibility of the passage of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in order to join the Baltic squadron on its way to Northeast Asia. As the war was continuing to the detriment of the Russian army and Pacific fleet in the fall of 1904, Nicholas made an important decision concerning the future of the war. By this time, the Pacific fleet was in a dire situation and Port Arthur was under siege. The only way to turn the tide for the Russians remained to alter the naval balance in the Pacific. Nicholas, therefore, decided to send the Baltic Fleet to the Pacific.27 This being the case, the Russian government did not instigate a new crisis by sending the Black Sea Fleet. In particular, the Russian Foreign Ministry clearly understood that the question of passage for the naval ships through the Straits could lead to the straining of relations with Britain, and under the conditions of war with Japan this could exacerbate the external and internal instability of Russia considerably. In line with these considerations, only some auxiliary vessels of the Volunteer Fleet passed through the Straits in November, 1904. This time, the Ottoman government was required to assure the security of the vessels against the anticipated attacks of Japanese torpedo boats.28 The Ottoman Naval Minister instructed the commanders of the Ottoman ports to take all necessary precautions to secure the safe passage of Russian ships in Ottoman waters. While the Baltic Fleet under the command of Zinovii Rozhestvenskii was approaching the Pacific Ocean, the Russian stronghold, Port Arthur, surrendered in January, 1905. The land battles continued with heavy casualties on both sides. The decisive showdown would be the confrontation of the Japanese Fleet and “the Last Armada.”29 This turned out to be a swift and dramatic defeat for the Russians; the Baltic Fleet was ruined, along with the Russian hopes of regaining the upper hand in the war. The Tsushima disaster made the Russian government more vulnerable to internal political unrest throughout Russia, and forced the tsar to

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accept the peace proposals.30 After a protracted conference, the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on September 5, 1905 in the United States, ending the Russo-Japanese War. As was the case throughout the Eastern world, the Turkish public greeted the Japanese victory with high praise. It was even stated that the Sultan appreciated the victory and said that “[t]he success of Japan pleases us. Their victory against Russia should be valued as our victory.”31 Moreover, there had been rumors for the accession of Turkey to the prospective second Anglo-Japanese Alliance.32 These rumors were to a great extent related to the intelligence reports delivered to St. Petersburg by the Russian ambassador in Constantinople. Between October and December, 1905, Zinoviev sent numerous accounts on the alleged Turkish, Japanese, and British secret negotiations, depending on “his reliable sources.” Upon the misgivings of Lamsdorf on the validity of his reports, Zinoviev further assured him that “on the validity of the information I have reported, there can be no suspicions. The negotiations have been continuing since June, 1905.” Consequently, Lamsdorf instructed the ambassador to present the matter to the Sultan, and to ask about the nature of the negotiations. As expected, this caused the Sultan considerable anxiety. He immediately attempted to demonstrate his government’s cordial approach towards the tsar and the Russian Empire. The Turkish ambassador in St. Petersburg, for example, was instructed many times to refute the allegations before the Russian Foreign Minister, and the Sultan himself and the Ottoman Foreign Minister refuted all Zinoviev’s claims. In fact, Zinoviev’s reports on the secret negotiations that had started in June 1905 did have grounds, albeit shaky ones. At that time, an Ottoman agent in Vienna had sent a number of reports concerning the possibility of concluding an alliance between the Ottoman and Japanese empires, via the Japanese ambassadors in Vienna and London from the Japanese side, and himself, the owner of the Japanese shop in Istanbul, and Colonel Pertev Bey in Japan on the Ottoman side. Despite the fact that such a proposal was indeed received by the Porte, there is no substantial evidence for the existence of negotiations between Japan, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, the consistent policy of Abdulhamid to avoid such adventurous acts, and the British foreign policy aims of abating the strained nature of its relations with Russia undermines the validity of the claims raised by Zinoviev. On the possibility of an alliance between the Ottoman and Japanese empires Abdulhamid stated in 1899 that: . . . as we share a common enemy in Russia it should not be a chimera to seek an alliance between Turkey and Japan. Yet, however, we have not even exchanged diplomatic missions. . . . It would nevertheless be mutually useful, if, with certain provisos we could establish trade relations between us. In brief, I would greatly welcome it, if Japan, though geographically far away from us, would fully realize what advantages

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she would derive from establishing relations with Turkey, though I have serious doubts about such comprehension. On the other hand, we should be very careful in satisfying both our friends and foes in establishing any type of close relationships with any country of the world to prudently avoid any strong reaction from any quarter which would disturb our tranquility. We must, in principle, carefully avoid alliances with some countries if we desire to maintain friendly relations with all the countries of the world.33

Furthermore, the Sultan also explained why the Ottoman Empire must stay away from alliances which could not provide security against Russia: Russia is a Great Power that is possessed of huge land and sea forces, and furthermore she is the neighbor of the Ottoman Empire; it therefore seems important and necessary not to offend her without compelling reasons. . . . as the Empire’s fundamental concern is how to defend itself if Russia invades across the Anatolian border, it is essential that those Powers proposing an alliance should state in advance with how many troops they will assist the Ottoman Empire in the event of such an occurrence.34

Since the strategic situations of Russia and Japan did not change over time, it was unreasonable to expect a radical alteration in the Sultan’s assessments. Adding to that, even at the very beginning of the RussoJapanese War, Abdulhamid was worried that Russia would redirect its attention to the Balkans and the Straits as soon as the war in Northeast Asia came to an end. Whereas these were the Ottoman considerations, the other parties of the alleged alliance were also careful not to alienate Russia. Britain had been trying to come to terms with Russia at least for a decade as a part of its policy to break the diplomatic isolation it was in.35 Even though it was bonded to Japan with an alliance, it preserved strict neutrality throughout the war, and eschewed any attempt to force it to adopt a negative stance vis-à-vis Russia during those years. Accordingly, Britain managed to come to a diplomatic understanding with Russia in 1907 with the Anglo-Russian convention that reconciled the differences between the two countries.36 The Japanese on the other hand had just settled their cause with the Russians and would actively avoid a new source of conflict. During the course of the war, and following the Japanese victory, The Sublime Porte of Sultan Abdulhamid had cautiously tried not to strain its relations primarily with the Russian Empire and was not influenced by the public euphoria for the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War. The actions of the Ottoman government then, can be well situated in the general path of the Hamidian foreign policy which was followed after the 1877–78 war with Russia. According to that policy, the Sublime Porte

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tried not to instigate any kind of enmity with any of the Great Powers, and most importantly with Russia. Such concern induced the Porte to take certain actions, which can be interpreted as benevolent for Russia, rather than maintaining balanced relations with both sides, let alone showing any official affinity towards the Japanese. One might expect that during the Young Turk era, that followed the Abdulhamid regime after the 1908 revolution, that the relations with Japan would develop favorably. Young Turks had found in the Japanese case everything they needed to transform their backward country, and to civilize it. In the official publications and in the press, many books and articles were published on the different aspects of Japanese modernization in order to provide patterns for Turkish development in the field of education, military and naval strategies, medicine and social life. However, the official relations could not evolve beyond attempts at concluding commercial and political alliances. Both sides lost their interest in concluding official alliances or friendship treaties after 1910, when Japan became involved in colonial expansion in Asia, and the Ottoman administration with the Balkan and Italian wars. Japan continued to be referred to as a successful example of modernization for non-European nations to emulate; however, no agreement was reached between the two governments, and even diplomatic relations between the two governments were postponed until 1924, after the demise of the Ottoman Empire.37 NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

Arik, 1991: 50–51; S¸ akir, 1994: 20. S¸ ahin, 1998: 105; Deringil, 2003: 48. Kreiser, 1981. Kocabas¸ogˇlu and Berge, 1994: 20. Hanioglu, 1985. Mardin, 1983: 205–206. Esenbel, 1996: 242–243. Abdulhamid II sent the frigate Ertugˇrul on an official visit to the Japanese emperor in 1889 as a response to the visit of Prince and Princess Komatsu. On the way back, the visit ended in a tragedy when the ship sank losing most of its crew and officers in the Pacific Ocean. (Komatsu, 1992). Arik, 1991 :51. Said Pas¸a, 1328: 428. The newspaper Asir claimed to be closed due to its pro-Japanese stance. See As¸çidede, 1960: 112. Matsutani, 1994: 25. Worringer, 2001: 216. Deringil, 2002: 149–153. Demirhan, 1943: 8–9. Ottoman and Japanese empires could not establish diplomatic ties despite several attempts throughout the nineteenth century. Therefore, the relations

392

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37

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between the two states were maintained through the Ottoman and Japanese ambassadors in London. Hasan Enver Pasha had been the Ottoman commander of the occupation forces in Greece during the 1897 Turko-Greek war. In 1901 he was appointed as the head of the Heyet-i Nasiha [Delegation of Counsel] sent to the Chinese Muslims who had participated in the Boxer Revolt. He was son of Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha (former Konstantin Borzecki) and the grandfather of Nazim Hikmet, famous Turkish poet. See Sirma, 1980. Demirhan, 1943: 12. Inan, 2001. Boldyrev, 2003: 19. Boldyrev, 2003: 20. Neilson, 1989: 65. Sorenson, 1975: 131. Although the Straits were open for commercial vessels, the Ottoman Port consistently issued special permissions for the operations of the Volunteer Fleet, asking assurance from the Russian ambassador of their commercial nature each time. See Tukin, 1947: 331) Rollins, 1994. Neilson, 1995a: 251. Esthus, 1981: 397–398. Upon the intelligence reports, the Russians became obsessed about the presence of Japanese torpedo boats which would obstruct the deployment of Russian Fleet to the theater of war. The Baltic Squadron on its way to the Pacific Ocean sank a number of British trawlers off the Dogger Bank on October 22, 1904, mistaking them for Japanese ships. See Neilson, 1989: 80. Pleshakov, 2002. Esthus, 1981: 404. Sultan Abdülhamid, 1987: 165. Ignatiev, 1993: 264. Arik, 1991: 49. Yasemee, 1996: 247, Quoted from an Imperial Order dealing with the Bulgarian issues in 1887. McKercher, 1989: 309. Neilson, 1995a: 267. Worringer, 2004: 212.

26

The Jewish Response to the War BEN-AMI SHILLONY

T

he Russo-Japanese War broke out at an important stage in modern Jewish history. At the beginning of the twentieth century, half of the world’s Jewish population, or about five million Jews, resided in the Russian empire, constituting about four per cent of the empire’s population. Most of them were restricted to the western “pale,” but university graduates, businessmen, and professionals managed to get permission to reside in the big cities. Frustrated and radicalized Jewish youth joined the revolutionary movements which promised racial equality, while those who could afford it flocked abroad to find a better life in Western Europe or America. Others, awakened by the Zionist movement, turned to the old Jewish homeland in Palestine. The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, died at the age of forty-four in Austria-Hungary in July 1904, five months after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. The entrance of Jews into Russian society produced an anti-Semitic backlash that was encouraged by the authorities. In the early years of the century, the Russian secret police (okhrana) concocted and circulated the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which portrayed a Jewish plot to control the world. Tsar Nicholas II continued the anti-Semitic policies of his father Tsar Alexander III. He blamed the Jews for the social unrest in his country and condoned the anti-Jewish pogroms. The worst of them occurred in Kishinev, Bessarabia, during the Passover week of 1903, when incited mobs attacked the Jewish population, murdering forty-nine Jews, wounding 500, and destroying one thousand Jewish homes and shops. The tsar’s hatred of the Jews was matched by his hatred of the Japanese. Having been wounded by a Japanese policeman in Otsu near Kyoto in 1891, while on an official visit to Japan as Crown Prince, Nicholas called the Japanese “monkeys.” He also referred to anyone that he disliked, which included the British, as “zhyd,” a derogatory name in Russian for Jew.1

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 JEWISH SOLDIERS ON THE FRONT

When the war broke out, thousands of Jews were drafted, as part of the general mobilization. By the end of 1904, there were about 33,000 Jewish soldiers on the Manchurian front, constituting 6.6 per cent of the Russian army there of half a million men. This was more than their share in the general population. Never since the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in the second century, had so many Jews fought together in one war. Jewish conscripts were prominent in the medical corps, where more than half of the doctors were Jews. One of these Jewish doctors was Henryk Goldszmidt from Warsaw, later known as Janusz Korczak, whose innovative work with children in the 1920s and 1930s made him a prominent educator (He was murdered, with his pupils, in Treblinka in 1942.) Young Jewish women volunteered to serve as nurses in such numbers that the medical corps authorities had to waive the rule that military nurses should wear the red cross, which the Jewish volunteers could not do.2 About 3,000 Jewish soldiers perished in the war. Despite the official anti-Semitic policies, Jewish soldiers distinguished themselves in action and received high awards, believing that if they proved that they were as patriotic as the Christians, they would be entitled to the same rights. Among those who were cited for bravery was, ironically, a Jewish doctor from Kishinev by the name of Barashtsevski, who received the Cross of St. George for his bravery during the siege of Port Arthur. Other Jewish soldiers who received that medal were Mikhail Tchernomordnik, who saved an entire batallion by risking his life to deliver a dispatch, and Chaim Baratz, who risked his life to accomplish a dangerous mission.3 About 1,800 Jewish soldiers were captured together with the other Russians as prisoners of war. In October 1904, American Jewish representatives met the Japanese ambassador to Washington, Takahira Kogoro, and requested that Japan should take good care of the Jewish prisoners. The ambassador promised them that Japan would extend “special friendship of the highest degree” to the Jewish POWs. As a result, the Jews residing in Japan were permitted to take care of the religious needs of the Jewish prisoners. The Jewish community of Nagasaki, which numbered about a hundred families and was the largest Jewish community in Japan at that time, was allowed to supply prayer books and other religious items to the Jewish prisoners in the camp near their city. The Nagasaki synagogue conducted prayers for the victory of Japan, and its members donated money to the Japanese Red Cross. After the war, some of the Jewish prisoners decided to stay in Nagasaki and joined the Jewish community there.4 The most remembered Jewish soldier in that war was Joseph Trumpeldor. He was conscripted as a dentist, but volunteered for combat duty. He lost his left arm during the siege of Port Arthur, but refused to be evacuated, and asked to continue fighting with only one arm. For that he was cited in a special Order of the Day. When the fortress fell, he was taken prisoner with the other defenders and spent nearly a year in a POW

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camp near Osaka. The Japanese authorities, eager to encourage minority national movements in Russia, allowed Trumpeldor to conduct Hebrew classes in the camp, to establish a Zionist cell there, and to correspond with Zionist leaders in the world.5 After the war, Trumpeldor was repatriated to Russia and decorated for his bravery. He was commissioned as an officer, becoming one of the first Jewish officers in the Russian army. In 1912, he emigrated to Palestine, where he organized the first Jewish fighting unit (the Zion Mule Corps), which saw action on the British side in the battle of Gallipoli in World War I. After the Russian Revolution he returned to Russia to become the commissar of the Department of Jewish Soldiers’ Affairs. In 1919, disillusioned with the revolution, he went back to Palestine to establish a Jewish defense force there. He died in defending the northern Galilee village of Tel Hai against Arab attackers in 1920, and became a national hero and a symbol of Jewish self-defense. JEWISH ELATION OVER JAPANESE VICTORIES

Although thousands of Jews fought and died on the Russian side, Jews all over the world were elated by Japan’s victories. Japan appeared to them as a divine messenger, punishing the evil empire for its atrocities against the Jews. Within the Russian empire, the admiration for Japan had to be muted and concealed beneath a cover of innuendo. In 1905, the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Zefirah, which appeared in Warsaw, carried a story about an art exhibition of Japanese prisoners of war in St. Petersburg. The anonymous writer, probably the newspaper’s editor Nahum Sokolow, could hardly hide his admiration for the enemy. He wrote: Are we Japanophiles? . . . In the records of Jewish history you will not find the name of Japan . . . But I have to confess that in one respect I am a Japanophile, in admiring the speed in which they move and in which they adjust themselves to new circumstances . . . My dream is that sometime, someone will excavate from the soil of Japan a proof that the Japanese are the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.6

The Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem expressed his joy in a parody, which he published in Warsaw in 1905 under the title Uncle Piny and Aunt Reisy. It was a satiric story about a fat, ugly, and domineering woman, Aunt Reisy (Russia), and her short, weak, and delicate husband, Uncle Piny (Japan). For a long time, Uncle Piny had suffered from his tyrannical wife, until one day, encouraged by his friend Yankel Duvid (United States) he gathered his courage and beat her up severely. At that moment Yankel Duvid entered the room, exclaiming: “Bravo, Piny, Bravo.”7 The Russian censors, not understanding the actual meaning of the story, allowed it to be published as a family drama. Outside the Russian empire, the Jews could give full vent to their feelings. In late 1904, a booklet in Yiddish came out in Lvov, then in the

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Austro-Hungarian empire, under the name Latest Stories from the War Between Russia and Japan. At the end of that booklet, the author and printer, Jacob Ehrenpreis, attached his poem in praise of Japan and in derision of “Fonie,” the Jewish nickname for the tsar. The poem ended with the words: What do you say now, Fonie, you bloody tyrant, How do you like the blows from the mighty Japan? What do you think of this small, yet powerful country, It seems to be battering you not at all as a novice? Where are your heroes, your fleet and your might? Where are your warriors from the Kishinev fight?8

The most laudatory poems of Japan were written by Naphtali Herz Imber (1856–1909), the author of the Zionist, later Israeli, anthem Ha-Tikwa (The Hope). Imber became acquainted with Japan in the 1880s through the British diplomat and adventurer Laurence Oliphant (1829–88). In 1860, Oliphant went to Japan, as First Secretary of the British legation in Edo. In the following year, after being wounded by a group of samurai, he returned to England and was elected to the House of Commons. Unlike Nicholas II, being wounded by the Japanese did not make Oliphant hate Japan. After a two-year tenure as member of parliament, he went to the United States and entered a mystical community in upstate New York. He invited some of his former Japanese friends, including the future minister of education Mori Arinori, to join him there. In 1879, he returned to Europe and devoted himself to the idea of settling Jews in Palestine, which was then under Ottoman rule. He then settled in Haifa and helped Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms to find a home in Palestine. His Jewish secretary in Haifa, from 1882 until Oliphant’s death in 1888, was the poet Naphtali Herz Imber, who learned from him about Japan. At the time of the Russo-Japanese War, Imber was in New York. When hearing about the Japanese victories, he became jubilant and started writing poems in praise of them. In late 1904, he published a collection of these poems in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, which he named Barkoi Third, or The Blood Avenger, after his former two books which carried the titles Barkoi (Dawn) and The New Barkoi. He dedicated this book to “His Majesty the Mikado Mutsuhito, Ruler of Japan.” The poems hailed Japan for its valor and castigated Russia for its depravity and oppression of the Jews. One of the poems in English, called “On to War,” read in part: Tell ye the tidings to nations proclaim, How Ivan the Terrible fell, Revenge for Kishinev’s crime. To all tongues the tidings tell. In the blood of my people he washed his feet, Murdering their infants and child.

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Now he will suffer defeat, And from high mountains will flee wild. From sunrise the eagle I did invite, My men in counsel from land afar. I called Japan, Ivan to smite In battle, and crush him in war.9

Japanese victories were extolled all over the non-European world, where they were seen as an epoch-making event, in which a nonChristian Eastern nation, for the first time since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, defeated a Western, Christian one. The Egyptian poet Hafiz Ibrahim composed a poem in praise of the Japanese women who volunteered to serve as nurses on the front. For Egyptian Jews Japan’s victories provided a double joy. Some of them named their children, born in 1905, after Japanese generals and admirals. One such child was Togo Mizrahi, named after Admiral Togo Heihachiro, hero of the naval battle of Tsushima. When Togo Mizrahi grew up he became the pioneer of Egyptian cinema. He established the Togo Studios in Alexandria and distinguished himself as a writer, actor, producer, and director of Egyptian movies in the early 1930s. His pen name was Ahmad al-Mashriqi, Mashriqi being the Arabic translation of the Hebrew name Mizrahi, which means eastern.10 JEWS HELP JAPAN TO FINANCE THE WAR

In the late nineteenth century, Jewish financiers in Europe, including the Rothschild family, invested heavily in the construction of the TransSiberian Railway. When the Russo-Japanese War broke out, they stopped extending loans to Russia. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, among American Jews, many of whom were recent immigrants from Russia, pro-Japanese feelings ran high. In February 1904, a campaign was launched by Jews in Atlanta, Georgia, to collect three million dollars in order to purchase a battleship for Japan, which would be named Kishinev.11 The campaign did not materialize, but Jewish financiers in the United States came out to assist Japan. The leading figure among them was the German-born Jacob H. Schiff, president of the banking firm Kuhn, Loeb, and Co., one of the major investment banks in the United States at that time (see also Chapter 9 in this volume). After the outbreak of the war, the Japanese government dispatched the vice-governor of the Bank of Japan, Baron Takahashi Korekiyo, to the West to raise loans for the war. Because the Japanese prospects at that time looked bleak, he could not raise the needed loans. In April 1904, Schiff met Takahashi at a London dinner party and heard from him about his difficulties. Furious about the pogroms in Russia, he decided to help Japan. Schiff convinced his own bank, as well as the First National Bank and the National City Bank, to underwrite Japanese war bonds. As a

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result, Japan could raise nearly two hundred million dollars on the American and European markets. This money enabled Japan to finance the war. At first, Takahashi did not understand why Schiff wanted to help Japan, but Schiff explained to him later that he was motivated by a desire to help his brethren in Russia, who were suffering from tsarist oppression. In March 1906, six months after the conclusion of the war, Schiff and his family visited Japan. Emperor Meiji hosted them at a luncheon at the palace, and conferred upon Schiff the Order of the Rising Sun, making him the first foreigner to receive that order. At the luncheon, Schiff, against protocol, toasted the emperor, comparing him to George Washington, “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” The Japanese went out of their way to express their gratitude to Schiff. The Bank of Japan held a reception for him at the Korakuen Garden. Senior Statesman Okuma Shigenobu, Dai-Ichi Bank president Shibusawa Eiichi, and Tokyo mayor Ozaki Yukio gave dinner parties at their homes for the Schiffs. Before leaving Japan, Schiff conducted a Passover seder at his Tokyo hotel. He also made a donation to the Japanese Red Cross, the honorary president of which was the empress.12 The Russians resented Schiff’s activities. In 1911, the Russian finance minister admitted that Russia would never forget and would never forgive what “that Jew Schiff” had done.13 THE JEWS IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE WAR

Although the Russo-Japanese War ended with the Portsmouth Peace Treaty of 1905, for several years the Japanese feared a Russian war of revenge. Therefore Japan was interested in weakening the Russian empire by encouraging subversive national and social movements there. The Japanese government, fearful of socialism and anarchism at home, looked favorably on the Russian revolutionaries, some of whom were Jews. One such revolutionary was Grigori Gershuni, leader of the terrorist arm of the clandestine Socialist Revolutionary (S.R.) Party. In 1906, he managed to escape from his prison camp in Siberia and to make his way via China to Japan. He was allowed to enter the country and met with Japanese anarchists and with Sun Yat-sen, who was then residing in Japan. Gershuni’s advocacy of revolutionary terrorism was reported and praised in the anarchist journals of Japan at that time.14 The Russo-Japanese War stirred an interest in the Jews among the Japanese. In May and June 1905, the magazine Chuo koron carried, for the first time, a lengthy article about them. It appeared in two installments, under the title “Anti-Semitism and Zionism.” The author, Kemuyama Sentaro, a professor of European history at Waseda, described the severe persecution of Jews in Russia, the Kishinev pogrom, and the Zionist movement. Kemuyama’s unfamiliarity with the relevant terms was evident in his misspelling of the term “Anti-Semitism,” which in the May issue appeared as “anchi-setchizumu” and in the June issue, after an apology, as “anchi-semitchimuzumu.”15

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In 1908, Saeki Yoshiro, also a professor at Waseda, in a book he wrote on the Nestorians in China, claimed that the Hata clan, which arrived in Japan from Korea in the third century, was a Jewish tribe. He suggested that the name of the chieftain of that clan, Uzumasa, derived from the Hebrew words “Yesu Massiah.” The Uzumasa Shrine in Kyoto, he wrote, had once been known as Daiheki Shrine, and Daiheki is spelled with the same two Chinese characters that are used to spell the name David in Chinese. Saeki noted that near the Uzumasa Shrine there is a well called Isaryo, the name of which probably derived from the word Israel. Saeki was the first Japanese scholar to introduce the “theory about the common ancestry of the Japanese and the Jews” (Nichi-yu doso-ron). Although this theory had first been raised in a book by the Scottish businessman in Yokohama, Norman McLeod, in 1879, that book had not been translated into Japanese and was not known to the Japanese public.16 In 1906, the writer Tokutomi Kenjiro (Roka), on his way to visit Leo Tolstoy in Russia, toured Palestine. After returning to Japan, he published that year the book Junrei kiko (Pilgrimage Travel Account). This was the first travelogue in Japanese of the Holy Land, describing, among other things, the Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem.17 Leo Tolstoy, the writer whom Tokutomi visited, despite his humanistic values, blamed the Jews for Russia’s tragedy. In a letter to a friend in 1905, he stated that both the Jews and the Japanese were undermining the Christian foundations of Western civilization. Explaining the Russian defeat in the war, he wrote: This debacle is not only of the Russian army, the Russian fleet, and the Russian state, but of the pseudo-Christian civilization . . . The disintegration began long ago, with the struggle for money and success in the so-called scientific and artistic pursuits, where the Jews got the edge on the Christians in every country and thereby earned the envy and hatred of all. Today the Japanese have done the same in the military field, proving conclusively, by brute force, that there is a goal which Christians must not pursue, for in seeking it they will always fail, vanquished by non-Christians.18

While the Japanese developed an interest in the Jews in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian conservatives became more resentful of them. Despite their gallant fighting, the Jews were accused of dodging the draft, of profiteering from the war, and of trying to subvert the Russian state. The tsarist government tried to divert the social unrest and the national frustration, that had been created by the defeat, against the perennial outsider, the Jews. It supported the anti-Semitic Union of the Russian People and its fighting squads “The Black Hundreds,” which carried out pogroms against Jews. This drove more Jews to the ranks of the revolutionaries. In the autumn of 1905, Russia was paralyzed by strikes and demonstrations, in which Jewish revolutionary leaders, like Leon Trotskii

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(Trotsky; Lev Bronstein) and Julius Martov (Iulii Tsederbaum) played a prominent role. In October 1905, the tsar, afraid of an imminent revolution, granted a constitution and a legislative assembly (Duma). The anti-Semitic reaction was swift: A string of bloody pogroms, led by “The Black Hundreds” and supported by the army, was unleashed against Jewish communities in hundreds of cities, towns, and villages, resulting in the death of 800 Jews. These events convinced many Jews that there was no future for them in Russia. From mid-1905 to mid-1906, the year following the RussoJapanese War, about 200,000 Jews left Russia, more than in any other year. Most of them went to the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Western Europe. Some 3,500 of them, embracing Zionism as well as socialism, turned to their ancient homeland in Palestine. They established the first kibbutzim, the first labor parties and the first self-defense organizations. This was the beginning of the so-called second aliya, which produced the political leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine and of Israel for most of the century. NOTES 1 2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

Walder, 1973: 48. The Jewish World, September, 9 1904, September 29–30, 1904, October 28, 1904. Shillony, 1991: 143–144. Shillony, 1991: 149. Medzini, 1973: 299–304. Ha-Zefirah, April 5, 1905. The Hebrew translation of that short story appeared in the newspaper Ma’ariv (Tel Aviv) on September 7, 1983: 58. Ehrenpreis, 1904: 30. Imber, 1904: 19. Shamir, 1987: 132. Jewish Chronicle, February 26, 1904. Adler, 1928: ch. 7; Takahashi, 1936: 682–686; Best, 1972: 313–324; Japan Times, 5–14 April, 1906; Jewish World, February 26, 1904. Cohen, 1999: 134. Crump, 1983: 218–220. Kemuyama, 1905: May 77–82, June 74–75. Miyazawa, 1963: 63–65; McLeod, 1879. Tokutomi, 1989. Troyat, 1969: 711.

VII. RUDE AWAKENING? ASIA AND THE COLONIAL WORLD

27

Russo-Japanese Negotiations and the Japanese Annexation of Korea HUAJEONG SEOK

T

he Russo-Japanese negotiations after the conclusion of the war between the two belligerents affected Japan’s annexation of Korea. Soon after the Portsmouth Peace Conference, Japan forced the Korean emperor to sign the Treaty of Protection in 1905, putting his empire and its diplomacy under Japanese control. Before the final settlement of the 1907 Russo-Japanese Convention, Japan seized virtually complete control over Korea’s internal affairs. As the Japanese Premier Katsura Taro said, Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 was carried out “immediately after finishing business with Russia (with the 1910 Russo-Japanese Convention)”.1 Russo-Japanese negotiations shifted the Japanese policy toward Korea from “protection” to “annexation.” The Russo-Japanese Conventions both in 1907 and in 1910, which were done after the Portsmouth Treaty, became a final safety lock to Japan’s annexation.2 It was not until the conventions with Russia and the adjustment of interests among the imperial powers that Japan had a free hand in controlling Korea. The powers would not allow Japan to proceed with annexation, which was regarded as beyond Japan’s prudent diplomatic boundaries. This was the reason why Japan needed the second convention with Russia in 1910 to certify again the approval from Russia, even though they had already given tacit consent to Japan’s annexation of Korea in the 1907 convention. The Russo-Japanese Conventions and the following annexation of Korea symbolized the re-formation of the international balance of power after the Russo-Japanese War. The Russo-Japanese Convention weakened the anti-Russian character of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance; at the same time, the convention also threatened the existence of the Anglo-Japanese

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Alliance itself. The 1910 convention frustrated the Open Door principle in Manchuria and made it impossible for the Anglo-Japanese Alliance to stand against the Unites States. The renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the conclusion of the Anglo-American Unlimited Arbitration Treaty in 1911 are the proofs of reorganization in international relations. It can be said that the Russo-Japanese Convention escalated conflicts between the United States and Japan, mainly in East Asia and the Pacific throughout the Twentieth Century. As international relations became complicated regarding the interests in East Asia, some puzzling problems remain in the study of the RussoJapanese negotiations in relation to Japan’s annexation of Korea. In what way did the Russo-Japanese Convention have an impact upon transforming Korea’s situation from protectorate into colony? What influence did the Anglo-Japanese alliance have upon the Russo-Japanese Conventions? How did the powers’ interests over Manchuria affect Japan’s annexation of Korea? This chapter strongly emphasizes the second Russo-Japanese Convention and its surrounding international relations from 1905 to 1910. Russo-Japanese Conventions will be evaluated in relation to the East Asian Policies of Britain and America. The second convention made Japan employ firm and high-handed diplomacy and also was a clue to the entangled international environment whirling around the Korean Peninsula during its annexation by Japan. The Russo-Japanese Convention was an inevitable diplomatic product to supplement the Portsmouth Peace Treaty. The convention was a natural consequence of the Portsmouth Treaty, which uncertified certain concrete notions about the Chinese Empire, Manchuria, and Korea.3 At the Portsmouth preliminary consultation, Witte, the Russian plenipotentiary, insisted that the measures of guidance and control which Japan considered necessary to enforce upon Korea should not bring any prejudices to the sovereign rights of the Emperor of Korea, but Japan objected to including this in the original text of the Peace Treaty. However, in the end, the Japanese plenipotentiaries accepted Russia’s demand and declared that it would be appropriate that those measures to change the status quo by Japan should be taken in accordance with the Korean government.4 Japan accepted the fact that they would need the consent of Russia, one of the powers concerned in the Korean problem, in the case of annexing Korea.5 After the Portsmouth Peace Treaty, the biggest problem for Japan was to avoid repeating the disgrace of the Triple Intervention in 1895. Hayashi Tadasu, the Japanese Foreign Minister, had a series of collaboration plans with the European Powers to evade any kind of intervention or opposition from them. According to his plans, Japan needed to make the most of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and then to persuade the other powers – the United States, Russia, and France – to support Japan. The Franco-Japanese Convention, which was concluded before the Russo-Japanese Convention, was a kind of lever to turn Russia towards Japan. As a matter of fact, the two conventions made it possible for Japan

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to have Inner Mongolia under its sphere of influence. Because the Franco-Japanese Convention recognized some parts of Inner Mongolia to be under Japanese influence, the Russo-Japanese Convention stipulated the status quo of Inner Mongolia. Under the pressure of her ally, Russia, France postponed a new loan to Japan until finalizing the RussoJapanese Convention.6 The negotiations between Russia and Japan provided an impetus for establishment of the Franco-Russian alliance. Aleksandr Izvolskii, Russia’s new foreign minister in 1906, established a goal that the foreign policy of Russia should continue to stay on the unchangeable base of her alliance with France, but that this alliance should be fortified and enlarged through collaboration with England and Japan.7 He stated that Russia tried to make agreements with Britain and Japan in East Asia so that they could take action any time complications arose in the Near East.8 His policy was revisionist diplomacy compared to that of Vladimir Lamsdorf, the former foreign minister, which had been geared toward keeping the status quo in the Balkans. The Former Japanese Ambassador (1900–1902), Aleksandr Izvolskii, expressed his opinion that an Anglo-Russian agreement be left until the conclusion of the agreement between Russia and Japan because the agreement with Britain would be meaningless without an agreeable settlement with Japan.9 The Anglo-Russian negotiation was made to alleviate mutual dissatisfaction in Central Asia and the Near East, yet it gave Russia an opportunity to approach Japan in East Asia. It is an historic irony considering that the main concern of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was to hold Russia in check. The settlement of the Russo-Japanese Convention was closely connected with a great turn in European politics: the Anglo-Russian compromise. The preliminary course of negotiations between Russia and Japan revealed their most serious concerns. Izvolskii raised a question regarding Article IV in the Japanese draft – that Russia would not interfere with nor place any obstacle in the way of the further development of the relationship between Japan and Korea.10 At that time, Motono Ichiro, the Japanese ambassador in Russia, clarified that further development meant Japan’s annexation of Korea.11 However, Russia would not approve Korea’s annexation by Japan without receiving guarantees regarding Russian interests in Mongolia.12 Izvolskii’s main purpose was to get a guarantee from Japan of Russia’s rights as a most-favored-nation in Korea and, at the same time, its political rights in the Mongol-Sinkiang region.13 Through the draft as of April 30, Russia insisted that Japan should agree on exclusion of Outer Mongolia and the other western parts of the Chinese empire (Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang) from Japan’s sphere of influence.14 It turned out that Russia’s intent was to incorporate Inner Mongolia into her own sphere of influence in order to win the railway construction rights between Inner Mongolia and Kalgan, which would make it possible to penetrate directly toward northwestern Beijing.15 In other words, Russia intended to negotiate with Japan over Korea in exchange for Inner and Outer Mongolia and Sinkiang.

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

It turned out that Russia and Japan exchanged their spheres of influence in the 1907 convention. The convention of July 30, 1907, made in public a preamble and two articles, stating the status quo in East Asia and mutual consultation between the two powers should their status be in peril, but this did not attract particular attention. On the other hand, the secret convention and its additional articles covered very significant matters. The secret convention, which was released after the Bolshevik Revolution, strengthened Japan’s position in South Manchuria and allowed the agreements on the railway construction with China. The secret convention accelerated Russia’s activities in North Manchuria and Outer Mongolia. Russia had to give up her ambition and exclusive rights in Manchuria according to Article III of the Portsmouth Treaty. But, she recovered the rights in North Manchuria as her sphere of influence (Article I). In exchange, Russia promised neither to interfere with nor place any obstacle in the further development of the relations between Japan and Korea (Article II). Russia wanted the whole region of Mongolia, but Japan recognized the special interests of Russia only in Outer Mongolia (Article III). In fact, these articles about Mongolia in the secret convention ran counter to the public convention that had stipulated the territorial integrity of the Chinese Empire. The additional article of the secret convention had already made explicit the demarcation between North and South Manchuria and eventually had a strong influence over the future of Korea. The demarcation started from the northwestern point of the Russo-Korean frontier and formed the boundary line between Harbin and Kirin. The demarcation finally opened the way for Japan to proceed with the annexation of Korea. This boundary encircled Japan’s sphere of influence – the Korean Peninsula, Manchuria, and Kirin – and cut off Russian rights and justification to intervene in matters with Korea. The resulting “balanced antagonism” between Russia and Japan16 was seized upon by Britain and the United States to enlarge their interests in Manchuria. After the Russo-Japanese Convention, steps toward the annexation of Korea proceeded with increasing speed. Japan regarded herself as a member of the Quadruple Alliance in Asia encircling Germany through the French-Japanese Convention, the Russo-Japanese Convention, and the Anglo-Russian Convention.17 With the second Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1905, the French-Japanese Convention and Russo-Japanese Convention produced a perfect China-pooling syndicate for Japan, enabling her to have exclusive rights in China.18 Therefore, isolated Germany criticized the Russo-Japanese Convention as a key to partitioning the Chinese Empire, which led to the abortive scheme of a Germany-China-America entente in 1908. The second Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which strengthened the military character of an anti-Russia offensive and defensive alliance, had to change its character due to the formation of the Russo-Japanese Convention and the Anglo-Russian Convention because the British got rid of the burden of offering military support to Japan in case of war with Russia. But now

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Britain would have a new burden, which Britain would not want to take on, to give support to Japan in the event that the situation with the United States became more complicated. In this respect, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was an agreement of convenience to meet the interests of Britain.19 It is not an exaggeration to say that the alliance turned out to be not worth the paper it was written on. In the course of negotiating with Russia, Britain read Russia’s interest as leaning to Mongolia. Britain had refused to include Mongolia as a subject of negotiation with Russia, but, instead, satisfied Russia by giving tacit consent to the Russo-Japanese Convention. It was also a kind of indirect measure taken by Britain toward a favorable settlement facilitating her entrance into the Black Sea, the Straits of Bosphorus, and the Dardanelles.20 It was an obvious outcome considering that the RussoJapanese Convention was concluded in the course of negotiations between Britain and Russia. Japan relied on the Russo-Japanese Convention, which would make up for any gaps in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and therefore intensify its penetration into China. Through the Russo-Japanese Convention, Japan strengthened her status in South Manchuria and forced China to sign the Japanese-Chinese Note about the construction rights of the railway (Hsinmintun [Xinmintun]-Fengtien, Kirin-Changchun, and AntungFengtien railway). Now Japan was faced with the United States, who tried to expand her position in Manchuria in the name of the Open Door policy. The second Russo-Japanese Convention was concluded in 1910 with the matter of Manchuria as its core subject. In the 1907 Convention, the two countries had already reached an agreement upon the division of the spheres of influence in Manchuria and the problems of Korea and Mongolia. Then, why did they need to discuss the matter of Manchuria again? What was the difference between the two Conventions? And how did their recurrent discussions of Manchuria influence the annexation of Korea by Japan? The 1910 Convention was the result of the American railway tycoon Harriman’s failure to purchase the Manchurian railways from Japan and a remarkable increase of investment by Britain and the United States .21 The Convention was also a common front against the United States, who insisted on the Open Door policy and proposed the neutrality of all Manchurian railways. With the confrontation with the United States as an impetus, Russia and Japan clearly wanted to settle the pending problems – setting up the demarcation lines of their spheres of influence in North and South Manchuria as based on their spheres of interests in the pertinent area, which was mainly regulated by the 1907 Convention, and the resolution of the mutual antagonism surrounding the Manchurian railway interests. The most direct factor in promoting the 1910 convention was the United States Secretary of State Knox’s proposal for the neutrality of the Manchurian railways.22 His plan was a strategic arrangement for cutting off in advance the bisection of Manchuria by Russia and Japan following the 1907 con-

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Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05

vention. This new strategy of economic diplomacy was started by the Administration of President Taft in 1909, and was embodied more forcefully than that of his predecessor Roosevelt.23 A series of United States railway plans was the more powerful threat to the Japanese. They sought to smoke out Japan with dollars, giving priority to their own economic interests in Manchuria. The second Russo-Japanese Convention was an expression of their natural response against American penetration into Manchuria. Second, the Convention was also the result of the failure of an American approach toward Russia that attempted to make use of the rival opinions of Izvolskii and Kokovtsov, Russian Minister of Finance. The two Russians intended to reconcile with the United States, expecting to hold back Japan’s monopoly over Manchuria. Their cooperation continued at least until Knox publicly proposed neutralization. It cannot be denied that like the American policy, Russia wanted to check the preponderance of Japan in East Asia and the Pacific.24 Japanese monopoly in Manchuria virtually provided a motivation for Russo-American collaboration. The main purpose of Resident General of Korea Ito’s visit to Harbin at the end of October 1909 was to block in advance RussoAmerican collaboration and to keep Japanese entente with Russia.25 While the antagonism between the United States and Japan surrounding the Manchurian problem was deepening, the relationship between the United States and Russia was getting closer. Kokovtsov agreed with Izvolskii about opposing United States construction of the Chinchou-Aihun Railway. Kokovtsov anticipated obtaining United States financial collaboration and was ready to sell the Chinese Eastern Railway to the United States. On the other hand, Izvolskii wanted to collaborate with Japan in certain strategic matters. Consequently, the American Consul-General of Fengtien Province, Willard D. Straight, who cooperated with Harriman, failed to produce any successful outcome in the conversation with Izvolskii. The failure of American diplomacy was followed by the approach to Kokovtsov by Knox and the American Ambassador W.W. Rockhill. As a result of these failures, the discord between Izvolskii and Kokovtsov became apparent.26 During the conversation with Rockhill, Izvolskii recognized his proposal, regarding it as parallel to what was expressed in the Russo-American Combination proposal of November 21, 1909.27 This alliance proposal was suggested to Russia almost at the same time that Knox made a proposal for the neutralization of Manchurian Railways in December 1909. On the other hand, Izvolskii, on the same day right after the conversation with Rockhill, accepted the suggestion from Japanese Ambassador Motono that Russia and Japan should engage in a “formal alliance.”28 Motono was thinking of the possibility of dividing Manchuria according to a set of official procedures to force China and the powers to give in. This proved that Russia had the advantage of playing a casting-vote role in the lever of American-Japanese opposition surrounding the Manchurian problem. Third, the momentum of the conclusion of the 1910 Convention arose from Russian military-strategic considerations in East Asia. Since

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the 1907 Convention, the Russian Far East was threatened by Japanese military management in South Manchuria and the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, and stood directly face to face with Japan’s sphere of influence without a buffer zone.29 Russia accepted that the Japanese expansion toward Gando (northwestern border area of the Korean Peninsula) would be threatening to not only the Korean-Manchurian frontier, but also the Russo-Korean border where Vladivostok was located. Although the Japanese threat was not a direct military attack,30 the potential military power of Japan, shown in a series of reports about the situation from 1909 to 1910, was growing so powerful that tensions increased enough to raise the possibility of a second Russo-Japanese War.31 As a matter of fact, the Japanese military actions violated the Portsmouth Peace Treaty regulations, which banned their military presence at the Russo-Korean frontier. It would justify Russia’s rather reluctant attitude toward recognizing the Japanese annexation of Korea.32 Russia’s apprehension over the possibility of war was eased substantially after the conclusion of the second convention.33 Russia officially recognized Japan’s annexation of Korea around the time when the convention was on the way to its settlement. On April 10, 1910, Russian Prime Minister Stolypin affirmed that Russia did not have any right to challenge Japan’s position and that therefore there was no reason to query the Japanese annexation of Korea. This was the first official statement of affirmation by Russia regarding the Japanese annexation. Five days before Stolypin’s statement, Izvolskii told Motono that he was politically in trouble due to the Bosnia-Herzegovina crisis.34 Both his position as a Foreign Minister and his pro-Japanese policy would be at stake when Japan carried out its annexation of Korea. In response to the statement of Izvolskii, Motono emphasized again that the Korean problem had already been settled through the Russo-Japanese War and the 1907 convention. And he once again made a strong emphasis upon the Japanese right to further development in Korea as stipulated in the convention.35 Izvolskii, after all, had to be satisfied with getting a promise from Motono that the Japanese would not change the status quo in Korea in the present situation, which meant that for the time being they would not take action in order to annex Korea.36 At 2:30 p.m. on July 4, 1910, in St. Petersburg, the second RussoJapanese Convention was signed as the final agreement on the unsettled Manchurian problems following the Russo-Japanese War. This agreement completely settled their mutual sphere of influence in Manchuria. The second convention advanced the regulations of mutual spheres of interests in the 1907 convention and eventually allowed Japan to annex Korea. It meant that Japan could not carry out the annexation without simultaneously agreeing a deal with Russia over the Korean-Manchurian problem. In brief, the second convention reflected complicated international circumstances. It disclosed political clashes in Russia over Manchurian policy between the strategic interests supported by Izvolskii and the economic interests supported by Kokovstov. As for the United States, their

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attempt at an alliance with Russia turned out to be a failure even though a good opportunity had been provided to them with the discord in the Russian political camp. In fact, the second convention was a product of Japanese policy to cut off a Russo-American entente by driving American influences out of Manchuria. Even though Russia was suffering after defeat in the war, they achieved a guarantee of their own sphere of influence in Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet, Outer Mongolia, and further in Manchuria by the Russo-Japanese and Anglo-Russian Conventions. In spite of her troubled situation in international politics and the war crisis in the Balkans, Russia acquired a degree of safety against another war in Asia through her recognition of the Korean annexation by Japan. The conclusion of the Russo-Japanese agreement meant the failure of the American policy, which aimed at keeping the balance of power between Russia and Japan in Manchuria, and also hindered the division of Manchuria by the two countries. The first Russo-Japanese Convention opposed the American open-door principle in Manchuria and the second one opposed full-scale American penetration into Manchuria using their dollar diplomacy. As the second convention opened to the public on July 13, the American mass media attacked the convention as having closed the door to Manchuria and made the division of Manchuria by Russia and Japan long-lasting.37 Considering the relationship between the American East Asian policy and Russo-Japanese Convention, Alfred Whitney Griswold concluded that the loss of American power to hold back Japan in Manchuria was a factor in failing to keep in check the Japanese annexation of Korea.38 On the other hand, as one of those who would not agree with Griswold, Leonid N. Kutakov took the Root-Takahira agreement of November 30, 1908, as a main factor in advancing the Japanese annexation of Korea.39 According to his research, the United States had been checking Japanese hegemony in East Asia and the Pacific since 1905, but made a decision to prompt Japan into taking over Korea in order to stem Japanese expansion in other directions. According to American documents, in fact, the United States officially recognized Korea as Japan’s “Protectorate” in 1904 before the RussoJapanese War and by 1907 American diplomatic officials generally recognized Korean independence to be a closed issue.40 Moreover, the United States partially abandoned their extraterritorial rights in Korea and instead secured the right of the protection of trademarks and copyrights by the American-Japanese agreement in May, 1908.41 The indifferent American attitude toward the problem of “independence of Korea” since 1907 was revealed again when Taft, American State Secretary, visited Japan in September, shortly before concluding the Root-Takahira agreement.42 He supported the Japanese decision to occupy Korea at their will. By recognizing Japan’s dominance over Korea, the Unites States hoped to avoid any hostility with Japan, including measures to decrease Japanese immigration to America. In other words, the United States did not intend to apply the open-door principle with

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Korea; nonetheless, antagonism with Japan in Manchuria increased rapidly. Several months before the annexation by Japan, the United States Department of State came to the following conclusion regarding Korea, namely, that American interests in Korea relating to mining and education would not be violated by the annexation and her extraterritorial rights would be protected in the event of any change in Korea’s tariff system.43 Compared with the attitude of the United States, that of Britain was quite different towards Japan’s annexation of Korea. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was weakened accordingly, while Japanese confrontation against the United States intensified. Over Manchuria, the political ties and collaboration between Japan and Russia became stronger. The British government constantly showed an ambiguous attitude toward the process of Japanese annexation. British Foreign Minister Edward Grey evaluated positively the Russo-Japanese Convention, saying that “a close relationship between Russia and Japan will be profitable to Britain.” 44 The British government expressed virtually no negative sentiment against Russia upon the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and then made it secure regarding their national interests. The open-door principle, which the British had been supporting, was merely a political catchphrase to guarantee commercial equality within the limits of not violating their privileges in Manchuria.45 On July 1, 1910, the British government expressed their favorable response to both parties regarding the settlement of the Second RussoJapanese Convention.46 It was soon after that Britain supported Japan’s intention on the condition that the Japanese would not oppose the principles of the open-door policy in China.47 Komura, Japan’s Foreign Minister, expressed his own viewpoint upon the two principles of the open door. It was based on commercial equality in Manchuria, and yet it would not include territorial integrity in the corresponding region. Britain and Japan agreed that they would pursue economic cooperation in Manchuria, while maintaining the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. At the least, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance did not infringe upon any of the terms of the Russo-Japanese Convention. This explains why Britain would hold in check the war between Japan and the United States. Britain noticed that their own policy would not keep up with that of the United States where the Americans sought territorial integrity and commercial equality in the whole of China and Manchuria. Willard Straight, the American Consul-General in Fengtien, criticized Britain for not keeping the open-door policy and yet supporting Russia and Japan in Manchuria. He pointed out that Britain was responsible for the failure of the Chinchou-Aigun railway negotiation.48 Grey had shown a cautious standpoint ever since the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese Convention. It provided Japan with a firm basis for annexing Korea with consent from Britain. Britain finally “accepted,” in principle, the annexation of Korea by Japan, on the condition that the present tariff system in Korea would not be subject to change for the next ten years.49 On the basis of her own commercial profits, Britain gave her consent to Japan regarding the annexation of Korea.

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The Japanese annexation of Korea made its way to the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.50 Both Britain and Japan wanted to change the terms on the basis of recognizing the Japanese annexation of Korea. The third Anglo-Japanese Alliance returned to the terms stipulating opendoor principles and the territorial integrity in China.51 In 1911, Britain stepped back from the issue of war against the United States with Japan and instead achieved guarantees upon their “security and commercial interests”52 in East Asia through the third Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Anglo-American Unlimited Arbitration Treaty. On the other hand, Japan showed her dependence on Russia rather than Britain when the dispute with the United States arose. According to Ruskoe slava, a Russian newspaper, the Russo-Japanese Convention “recovered political equilibrium in the Pacific,”53 which enabled Japan to achieve a powerful position when dealing with the dispute with the United States. The two Russo-Japanese negotiations revealed the complicated conflict of interests in the international power politics in East Asia, particularly over Manchuria and Korea. The two conventions, convened on the eve of World War I, were also closely connected with the situations in Europe and the Balkan Peninsula. In particular, the second convention was made use of by Russia as a means of breaking through their diplomatic predicament caused by the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Russo-Japanese Convention was a political product of British strategic considerations to use Russia in order to keep Germany in check before World War I. Along with the Franco-Russian Alliance and the Anglo-Russian Convention, the Russo-Japanese Convention was part of an encirclement network against Germany and formed an axis of power politics that led to World War I. In the process of Japan’s annexation of Korea, there were complicated situations in international politics. The first convention revealed severe conflicts between British and American interests in Manchuria and Korea and consequently led to the second convention over the issues in Manchuria and Korea. For the sake of their ambitious continental policy regarding Korea and Manchuria, the Japanese could not help but keep pace with the Manchurian policies of both Britain and the United States.54 For Japan, the purposes of the Russo-Japanese Convention were, first, to prepare herself for the revenge war against Russia, and second, to safeguard her interests in Manchuria and Korea.55 The convention meant a realization of the “Defense Plan of the Japanese Empire in 1907 to keep and safeguard the interests in Manchuria and Korea.” In this respect, the Japanese annexation of Korea was also the result of the “Defense Plan of the Japanese Empire.” NOTES 1

2

Katsura Taro bunsho 19. Unpublished manuscript. The author obtained this document from Professor Uno Fukuju. Choi, 1990: 339–365; Choi, 2004: chapter 4.

Russo-Japanese Negotiations and the Japanese Annexation 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

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Pooley, 1915:174. GARF, f. 818, op. 1, d. 181, ll. 53–4; Nichiro gowa gaigiroku, II [Conference on August 12, 1905]: 12; Meiji Gaiko Shiryo Kenkyukai, VIII: 12–13; Juhan Ilbon Gongsakwan Girok, 1998, XXV, Nos.165, 166. Juhan Ilbon Gongsakwan Girok, XXV, nos. 170, 172; NGB, 39–3: 90. Kutakov, 1988: 292. Seeger, 1920: 83. MacDonald, 1992: 193. Kutakov, 1988: 292; NGB, 40–1, no 97: 97–98. NGB, 40–1, nos. 108–109: 108–112. NGB, 40–1, no. 113: 114–115; no. 124: 121. NGB, 40–1, 40–1, no. 132: 128–129. AVPR, f. 150, op. 493, d. 1971; NGB, 40–1, nos.123, 124: 120–121. AVPR, f. 150, op. 493, d. 220, ll. 8–9; NGB, 40–1, no. 141: 134–135. BDOW, IV: 341–342. White, 1964: 310–329. White,1995. Pooley, 1915: 165. Nish, 1972: 7. Willams, 1977: 146. Romanov, 1989: 47–50; Zabriskie, 1946: 144–145. BDOW, VIII, p.485; NGB, 43–1, no. 96: 177. Iriye, 1972: 206–210. Zabriskie, 1946: 133, 148–149, 151–152. Kahn,1968: 300. Zabriskie, 1946: 163. AVPR, f. 150,op. 203, d. 206, l. 80. Romanov, 1928: 566. Kutakov, 1988: 313–314. Grigorzevich, 1965: 298. Kutakov, 1988: 315–317; BDFA, IX, Doc. 7 Inclosure [7620]: 140 and Doc. 49: 288. The French Minister in Fengtien at the time criticized these Japanese military threats in 1909–1910 as “diplomatic tactics” for favoring conclusion of the Convention with Russia. In Grigorzevich, 1965: 297, 299. Matsusaka, 2001: 125; See the following about the Japanese war threat in 1909–1910. BDOW,VIII, nos. 370, 372, 376, 380; NGB, 40–1, 99–101; BDFA, IX, Doc. 4: 97; Kutakov, 1988: 305–308. AVPR, f. 150, op. 493, d. 206, ll. 319–320. NGB, 43–1, no. 9: 111. Grigorzevich, 1965: 301–302. NGB, 43–1, nos. 84, 91: 162–163, 167. Griswold, 1966: 132. Kutakov, 1988: 303. Department of State, 1987, file 1166/23, 1166/78,1166/220, United States Policy Regarding Korea 1834–1950: 28. Papers Relating to Foreign Relations of the United) States, 1908: 518–520.

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Merrill, 1954: 167, 204. Cited in Nagata,1992: 192. BDOW,VIII, nos. 480–482; Nish, 1972: 31. BDOW, VIII, nos. 383–384. NGB, 43–1, 148–149: BDOW, VIII, no. 388. BDOW, VIII, no. 385. Kahn, 1968: 281–282. BDOW, VIII, no. 399. BDOW, VIII, nos. 402, 407. Nish, 1972: 56–68; Lowe, 1969: 43–50. Edwards, 1987: 145. Grigorzevich, 1965: 303–304. Kurobane, 1988: 132. Kitaoka, 1978: 12–13.

28

Japan’s Victory in Philippine, Vietnamese, and Burmese Perspectives GESA WESTERMANN

I

n the year 2005, we witnessed the hundredth anniversary of Japan’s victory at Tsushima over Russia’s Baltic fleet on May 28, 1905. By doing so, our historical memory originates in contemporary receptions like the one from the German politician and diplomat Baron von Falkenegg, who commented on the Japanese victory in his 1905 work Japan, die neue Weltmacht (Japan, an emerging World Power): “Today there are indeed still thousands of Europeans supposedly versed in history who are extremely pleased with the victories of Japan over Russia. In fact they are ignorant of history and do not see that it was Europe and not Russia that was defeated in Manchuria.”1 In Germany it did not take long until some commentators extended the cocoon of the “yellow peril”, a term originally coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II to describe the competition cheap Chinese goods and labor presented for the German economy, to include Japan.2 It was thought that if Japan were also to defeat China, it would be able to force the Chinese population into an army and thus create one of the largest armies in the history of the world. The attention professional historians are devoting to the episode today, even after such a long time, demonstrates that the Russo-Japanese War has become a true historical event. Without resorting to consultation of the relevant reference works, upon hearing the phrase “the Russo-Japanese War,” one thinks of the Asian country of Japan, doing battle against the European Goliath, Russia, from which Japan emerges as the surprise victor in an unequal struggle. It is both Japan’s unexpected victory and the defeat of the great European empire Russia that render the event historic.3 However, it appears that the deconstruction and examination of contemporary portrayals of the war, in short, the historicization of the

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event, is not yet complete: even in the public and scientific perception of today, the Russian-Japanese conflict is still considered using language resembling that of contemporary sources, which termed it an “Asian” war against “Europe” or a war of “the East” against “the West”. In general descriptions in Germany we read: “ . . . In this first armed conflict of an East Asian state hardly considered up till now in the Western world against one of the major European powers, the young, aspiring military might of Japan proved itself superior to the ponderous Russian armed forces in every way.”4 An English-language commentary opined: “. . . The Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War showed that a European power could be defeated in war by an Asian power, thus giving a boost to anti-colonial and anti-Western movements throughout the world.”5 With this claim, the interpretation goes beyond a mere technical analysis of the war and its military component and takes on the characteristic of a cultural assessment. First, it is semantically charged in a way – going past the actual facts of what happened militarily – that lets the event become a historic event. Simultaneously, it illustrates that the present perceptions of “East” and “West” as well as “Asia” and “Europe” seem to resemble those of former days.6 But not only does the fact that the defeat of the Russian Baltic fleet shook the very foundations of the theretofore unshakeable belief regarding the relative strengths of “Asia” and “Europe” justify the pronouncement of the Russo-Japanese War as an historical event. Also the fact that there was very rapid world-wide reception (at least as it is commonly supposed) of the news following Japan’s victory can be viewed as something remarkable from the perspective of global historiography. Although quite different from the European reception, especially in the Near East and Islamic World, the Japanese victory became the subject of the anticolonial emancipation discourse;7 daily papers in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Persia,8 and Malaysia carried articles covering the latest events in Tsushima. In India, too, the astounding happenings in the East were under discussion, first and foremost by the leader of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), who wrote in his autobiography: “The next important event that I remember affecting me was the RussoJapanese War. Japanese victories stirred up my enthusiasm and I waited eagerly for the papers for fresh news daily. I invested in a large number of books on Japan and tried to read some of them.”9 To sum up, there is virtually no doubt that these two phenomena, the perceived emergence of the “East” and a rapid world-wide dissemination of war news qualify the Russo-Japanese War as an historic event in both European and global historiography – although we still use more or less the same terms that contemporary authors did to depict the event in non-academic and academic description and analysis. Regarding the literature on the reception of the Japanese victory in 1905 in Southeast Asian countries this observation can be made, too.

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Like the contemporary depiction of Japan as a “yellow peril” for Europe, corresponding stereotypes sprang up with regard to Southeast Asian countries. For instance, U. Sauter, German Professor of Geography, wrote in his 1909 work Das Problem Japans (Japan’s Problem): “Japan’s demonstration of what an Oriental nation was able to achieve in a confrontation with Western civilization has awoken new interests and aspirations in all Eastern peoples: They are prepared to submit to Japan’s protection and leadership if it enables them to cast off the yoke of their Western masters.”10 In an earlier chapter entitled “The Awakening of the East” he states: “. . . because the East has been awoken. The nations and peoples of the East have learned from the whites and, realizing that resistance to attack and intervention is only possible through utilization of exactly the same means, the East is doing just that with all its might.”11 Sauter feared that the West could be defeated with its own methods by popular movements in Asia, whom the example of Japan’s victory had “awoken”. With “The Awakening of the East” Sauter projected a scenario of growing selfconfidence of Asian nations, which was menacing for the West, a topos that continued in the postwar period. About fifty years later, in a similar vein, in Philip Thayer’s book Nationalism and Progress in Free Asia, Japanese victory is attributed a seminal and inspirational role for the Asian (and Islamic) decolonization movements. We read: “In all the regions of Southeast Asia, native cultures were overwhelmed by the new culture of the colonial powers. But the well-trumpeted victory of Japan over Russia and the emergence of Japan as a great world power aroused the dormant nationalism of the Burmese and inspired nationalistic ideas in the other Southeast Asian countries, and like a giant awakened, nationalism turned militant against colonialism.”12 Another portrayal states: “. . . But before this policy was well under way, all the combustible material, long ready to take fire, burst suddenly into flame with the victory of Japan over Russia. This did much to give a new stimulus and a new aspect to the growing impatience of foreign rule; hitherto it had been for the most part critical, seditious, destructive, but now it was inspired by a new constructive patriotism.”13 In the recent work by Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia 1895–1945, Japan also becomes the model of the Asians: “. . . Japan’s achievements inspired admiration: Japan’s early success in industrializing and its spectacular victory in the RussoJapanese War inspired many Asians.” It continues: “. . . The electrifying effect on other Asians of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War is well known.”14 Similarly, because of its victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Japan is considered a role model in studies about specific countries: “Filipinos respected Japan as an advanced Asian country because of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War.”15 In these rather general references to the Russo-Japanese War in non-European historiography, Japan’s victory is given an interpretation as a shared “awakening experience” of the strengthening anti-Western emancipation movements in Asia.

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Although these observations might apply for the Islamic world and India, the “victory effect” on the Southeast Asian region must be doubted. A search for the details of the reception and interpretations of the Japanese victory in the primary sources of individual Southeast Asian countries fails to produce the commonly contended epoch-making effect in the unambiguous form that is frequently postulated in the nonEuropean research on colonial Southeast Asia. Moreover, I think Japan’s appearance as a paradigm and archetype of indigenous national and independence movements after 1905 rather appears to be an interpretation that is linked to the period of research into modernization and decolonization in the 1970s and 1980s and was projected onto historigraphical research and persists down to the present. We can observe that during the late 1970s and 1980s, Economics and Political Science “discovered” Japan as a shining example of Asian development and declared it the model for the Southeast Asian countries. It is assumed here that this post World War II image of Japan is possibly also projected in the research into Southeast Asian decolonization processes. Leading further through the supposed reception effect of “1905” in search of the sources that nourish the general impression of a “Japanese model,” one is in for a surprise: a close look at how and against what this effect can be measured reveals that only limited analysis based upon sources has ever been undertaken in regard to the oft-cited effect of the Russo-Japanese War in Southeast Asia. For this reason in the following I would like to examine the origin, existence, and effect of the topos “1905” and its actual substance in regard to three Southeast Asian countries – the Philippines, Vietnam and Burma (today Myanmar). I will also examine whether and how the reception of Japan actually changed as a result of the country’s victory over Russia. Therefore, I will also look at Southeast Asian images of Japan before and after the Russo-Japanese War and ask for the reasons that proved decisive for each of the respective specific receptions.16 Japan’s victory undoubtedly had an encouraging effect on the early anti-colonial emancipation movements in Southeast Asia, but nonetheless, according to my thesis, the actual effect on some of the Southeast Asian countries has possibly been exaggerated.17 Before turning to the reception of the Russo-Japanese War in the Philippines, Vietnam and Burma, the 1905 event itself and its historical context must briefly be touched upon.18 Its causes were already in the evolutionary stages in 1895, following the Sino-Japanese War. When Russia joined France and Germany in what became known as the Triple Intervention against the peace of Shimonoseki of April 17, 1895, Russia’s expansion plans in Eastern Asia became apparent. Russia viewed the cession to Japan of the Lioatung Peninsula, a stipulation of the peace agreements, as unacceptable since it lies directly in the area that was to be the site of the Chinese Eastern Railway, Russia’s extension of the Trans-Siberian Railway that began in 1897. Russia re-confirmed its claim to Lioatung in March 1898 when Tsingtao was ceded to Germany and

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Russia could make use of the ports Port Arthur and Dalny as the result of a lease contract with China. When no agreement was reached with Russia in 1902 over the demarcation of their respective spheres of influence in Korea and Manchuria as the result of the American Open Door Policy in China, Great Britain and Japan united to stem Russia’s southern expansion in eastern Asia in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Japan re-entered negotiations with Russia about the situation in Korea and Manchuria, but these proved fruitless and were broken off by Japan on February 5, 1904 following the assurance of the Unites States of its neutrality should war break out. On February 8, two days prior to its official declaration of war on Russia, Japan attacked the Russian army in Port Arthur. There were only two months between the fall of Port Arthur to Japan on January 1, 1905 – followed immediately by the fall of the city of Mukden – and the sea battle at Tsushima from which Admiral Togo Heihachiro emerged the victor. The Peace of Portsmouth, arranged by President Theodore Roosevelt, assured Japan’s interests in Korea and leases for Port Arthur and Dalny. Furthermore, Russia was obliged to evacuate Manchuria and hand over control of the South Manchurian Railroad to Japan. A mere two years later, however, Japan and Russia established an entente aimed against the American Open Door Policy in China. Both countries wanted to prevent the Western powers present in eastern Asia from achieving economic advantages through the exploitation of China, which could not utilize them itself due to the underdeveloped state of its economy. THE REACTION TO THE WAR IN THE PHILIPPINES

At the time of the Japanese navy’s victory over the Baltic fleet, the Philippines was an American colony. The American colonial domination, though, was relatively new, only dating back to the mid-1898 American victory in the Spanish-American War. This conquest bequeathed Spain’s colonial legacy to the Americans,19 a facet of which was the liberation movement that waxed in the 1880s and 1890s. In December 1896, the militant wing of this movement had called for “Revolution” against Spanish colonial domination, and on June 12, 1898 its leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, proclaimed the Philippines’ independence. The new colonial power, however, smashed this movement in an extremely bloody battle. Until the colonial takeover of the United States, Japan played a rather significant part in the Philippine emancipation movement. In practical terms it served as a potential supplier of arms, and on the rhetorical level it was conjured up in the emancipation discourses as a new imperial power in eastern Asia that might dispute Spain’s claims to power. The first contacts between the two developing island nations had already been initiated at the end of the 1880s. These and the accompanying perceptual model of Japan that developed until about 1900 were to survive with some interruptions into the 1930s – though no particular Filipino interest in Japan following the latter’s victory of 1905 can be observed.

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Sixteen years before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, one of the most prominent Filipinos toured the main Japanese island Honshu. In February 1888, the author and physician José Rizal, a Catholic and an intellectual progenitor of the Philippine emancipation movement, sojourned in the port of Yokohama on his trip to San Francisco. He spent two weeks in Japan, leaving impressions in several letters and diary entries about the admirable integrity and moral maturity of the Japanese and recommending that his countrymen imitate them: There are very few thieves among the Japanese. It is said that houses are left open; their walls are made of paper, and in the hotels one can leave money on the table without fear of losing it. The Japanese are very merry and they are courteous; in the streets fighting is not seen. They are very industrious.20

On April 7, 1888 he writes to his family: I have stayed here longer than I intended, for the country seems to me very interesting and because in the future we shall have much to do and to deal with Japan.21

Rizal’s prophecy about Japan’s role for the Philippines referred in this case to the moral role model that Japan – in contrast to the Spanish colonial power represented by the overall unjust and demoralizing rule of the friars – could play for the Philippines. Also in 1888, at the same time as Rizal began his travels, Marcelo del Pilar, another central figure in the Philippine emancipation movement left the colony for Madrid, the capital of Spanish colonial power. There he served as a journalist and publisher with various journals, first and foremost as editor of Solidaridad. This authoritative propaganda organ of the Filipinos was anti-colonial but moderate, calling for expansion of the rights of political participation in the colony but not for independence from Spain. In the years 1894–95, Pilar wrote a series of editorials about the Sino-Japanese War, commenting therein on the development of Sino-Japanese relations and thus – unlike Rizal – perceiving Japan as a political actor rather than a moral model. His first remark in Solidaridad on the War is dated August 15, 1894.22 Following a precise analysis of the balance of power between the two countries he admonishes: . . . and if Spain does not anticipate the needs of the Philippines, if she allows herself to be taken by surprise, then it would be impossible to extricate that country from the influence of the new currents being established in the Far East. We have said it more than once: the Spanish flag will be perpetuated in the Philippines by Philippinos, but against the Philippinos, this is impossible.

With the euphemism “new currents,” Pilar was alluding to those developments in Korea that played a causal role in the Sino-Japanese War

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of 1894–95: Since the beginning of the 1880s, Japan had won increasing influence at the Korean court, and, through advisers like Saito Shuichiro, was able to boost the pro-Japanese forces striving for independence from China. Revolts and uprisings against the foreign rule of the Manchu and the demand for Japanese leadership in Korea were the result. This was a scenario that was equally possible in the Philippines as well, the Manchu dynasty just being an equivalent to the Spanish colonial power. This type of pro-Japanese ideas spread in the Philippines and strengthened the militant wing of the Philippine national movement striving for independence from Spain. These developments might have eventually led to a war between Japan and Spain, but apparently the Japanese aggression against China served here as a pretext to put pressure on the Spanish colonial power: Japanese expansion in the Philippines could only be repulsed if the Spaniards made concessions to the Filipinos in their demands for participation. In the language of the nationalist fighters, this meant an expansion of the political shareholding and co-determination in a Spanish-Philippine government of the country. A few days later, Pilar reinforced his apprehensions that a Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese War might strengthen the radical wing of the Philippine national movement, writing on October 31, 1894 in the Solidaridad: We recommend these considerations to appreciate in its just value the danger that Japan could offer, not in its policy of invasion, but in inspiring and fomenting in the Philippines the ideas of emancipation from Spain and constituting herself an independent nation, with or without the protection of Japan or any other colonizing power.

At the end of the article he added: If it were possible to live a free life in the Philippines as it is lived in Hong Kong and Singapore, Japan and other countries surrounding it, would emancipationist propaganda from any foreign nation be worth it for the Philippinos? [. . .] We can well understand that if Japanese redemptionist propaganda were effective in Korea, it could not be so in the Philippines, if the Spanish governors conducted themselves in another way.23

Pilar’s rhetorical strategy sought to present “Japan” as an enemy of Spain and potential new colonial (protector-) power of the Filipinos. With his analysis he struck a sensitive nerve with the Spanish colonialists: in 1891 Spain had already had to note with concern Japan’s annexation of the three Volcano Islands of Iojima, close to the Spanish Marianas.24 The plans for the establishment of a Japanese colony on Taiwan in case of a victory against China intensified apprehensions over Japanese expansion in direct proximity to the Spanish Philippines. Public comments in the Japanese press making it clear that Japan actually sought to take over Taiwan provided grounds for this assumption.25

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Indeed Pilar’s allusions to Japan’s role as a strategic partner in the struggle against the Spanish colonial power are understandable in light of the fact that relations between the militant wing of the Philippine national movement and Japanese Pan-Asianists like Sakamoto Shiro26 were in motion since 1895. In that year, Mariano Ponce, a representative of one of the exiled Hong Kong-based splinter groups of the Philippine independence movement led by Emilio Aguinaldo and Teodore Sandiko, went to Japan to negotiate the delivery of weapons for a planned war against Spain. Likewise, four years later, with the Filipinos now under American colonial domination, the Hong Kong group again turned to Japan, but this time to seek support in its fight against the United States.27 Due to the changed political situation, Philippine interest in Japan waned after the United States formally took over the Spanish colony in 1899. The Americans introduced a liberal colonial policy that came into effect through the Philippine Bill of Rights that was passed by the American Congress on July 1, 1902.28 The law included provisions against racism, safeguarded Filipino human rights, and laid the groundwork for diplomatic representation in Washington.29 The new colonial policy also provided for separation of church, state, and education. Most important, though, the Unites States pursued a policy of working toward Filipino independence. In 1907, in accordance with the American promise, the parliament composed of eight Filipino delegates came into being.30 The reduced interest in Japan, however, was not linked to the disappearance of the images of Japan. Manuel Quezon, the first President of the Philippines after 1935, had belonged to the pro-Japanese wing of the Philippine resistance movement in the Philippine Revolutionary War of 1896–97 and later fought against the new American colonial power. Nonetheless, he became the Philippines’ diplomatic representative to the United States from 1909 to 1916 and on his trips to Washington, repeatedly traveled via Japan, where he undertook brief stays.31 In Washington, he demanded the expansion of Filipino autonomy. Similar to the way Pilar had threatened the Spanish colonial power with “Japan” as a potential strategic partner, Quezon repeatedly pointed out to the Americans the imperialist danger still posed by Japan. He warned that the longer the independence process took, the greater the likelihood that either Japan would incorporate the Philippines militarily or could exploit the Filipinos’ dissatisfaction in support of a revolt against the United States. Shortly after the passing of the 1916 Jones Act that set the Philippines’ de facto independence – scheduled for 1935 – on its path, Quezon’s instrumentalization of Japan changed. From that point on, the picture of Japan as a potential imperialist actor in eastern Asia was no longer necessary. Thus, in the Manila Press of 1916, Quezon offered the opinion that Japan no longer presented a military danger.32 The Jones Act put the final touch on the American colonial policy strategy to lead the Philippines gradually to independence. The Philippines were on an American path to independence as early as 1905 and already by that time no longer expected Japanese support in this matter.

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THE REACTION TO THE WAR IN VIETNAM

Unlike the Philippines, in 1905 the Vietnamese resistance movement was in a transition phase, evolving from a semi-militia resistance movement that was loyal to the emperor, Confucian oriented, and against foreign domination to a “modern” anti-colonialist national movement. Could this “late development” with regard to the country’s decolonization process have had any effect on the reception of Japan before and during the Russo-Japanese War? How was the war between Japan and Russia viewed here? Furthermore, the question needs to be raised as to how the image of Japan was changed by the news of the victory or whether the emerging emancipation movement received a perceptible boost through the message of the victory at Tsushima. The sources remain opaque as to precisely when the news of Tsushima reached Vietnam. The principal leader of the anti-colonial resistance movement was Phan Boi Chau. From his memoirs, written in the 1910s,33 it can be deduced that he viewed the effects of the Russo-Japanese War in retrospect as an important incident in the history of Vietnam. He wrote: In the middle of the nineteenth century, even though the universe was shaken by American winds and European rains, our country was still in a period of dreaming in a deep sleep. Our people were still blind and resigned to their lot. We cannot blame them, for even well-known people from the higher classes like myself were like frogs at the bottom of a well. It is only because in former times we shut our doors and stayed at home, going round and round in circles of literary knowledge, examinations, and Chinese studies. To say frankly that our people were deaf and blind is no exaggeration . . . If we had not been awakened by the violent sound of the guns at Port Arthur, perhaps we should not yet know that there were other foreign countries besides France.34

But Phan’s hindsight concerning the effect of the Russo-Japanese War needs to be examined in greater detail. When Phan Boi Chau wrote his memoirs in the 1910s he was imprisoned in Kwantung, China, for instigating several attempted uprisings after the Chinese Revolution of 1911. We, therefore, may assume that his memory, at least to some extent, preferred to reminisce about times when he himself was at the center of anticolonial activities. With regard to Japan this had been the case between 1903 and 1909, a time we shall explore in more detail. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Vietnam had already been under French colonial domination for about thirty years. This paralleled the period – beginning with the 1885 flight of the child Emperor Hàm Nghi (who reigned 1884–85) – that the Annamite monarchy had been incapable of ruling, and for the same length of time the resistance to foreign rule had been in action.35 If one goes into Phan Boi Chau’s memoirs, one discovers that he already had a marked interest in Japan before the Russo-Japanese War,

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which can be attributed to his having read Chinese reform literature at the turn of the twentieth century. From these books, the so-called New Books (Chin. Hsin-shu, Viet. Tan-thu' ), Phan Boi Chau learned that the Japanese reform process following the Meiji Restoration had become a political and social model for the Chinese literati. In 1904, when Phan decided to establish an association for the reform of Vietnam, the Viet Nam Duy Tan Hoi (Society for the Restoration of Vietnam), many of his formative thoughts were already oriented toward the Japanese reform model. The term duy tan already represented the Vietnamese equivalent for the Japanese term isshin (restoration).36 The restoration of the monarchy in Vietnam was a recurring theme in Phan Boi Chau’s writings. Maintaining to a large degree the traditional Confucian loyalty to the Vietnamese Emperor, “Japan” also was a role model for him with regard to restoration of a monarchic system. As a result, the prince Cu'ò'ng –De, a fourth-generation descendant of the Annamite emperor Gia-Long, became the monarchic representative of the Duy Tan Hoi,37 thus – similar to the tenno (emperor) in Japan – he represented a strong, “modern” monarchy and, at least in Phan’s eyes, an “enlightened” monarch.38 In a poem about Cu'ò'ng –De written on the occasion of the foundation of the Duy Tan Hoi, Phan, with a view of Japan, assigns him a role similar to that of the tenno: The first to wave the flag of independence, Japan is naturally a country of the same culture, As East Asia is entering the era of modernization, Who could vie with the Japanese Emperor, an enlightened monarch, The example that Japan has set for us in East Asia, We should follow, lest to fall into error.39

Similar to Emilio Aguinaldo and Mariano Ponce, Phan, too, saw in Japan a trading partner for the weapons businesses. A year after the foundation of the Viet Nam Duy Tan Hoi, in February 1905, still before the end of the Russo-Japanese War, he embarked on a trip to Japan in order to procure arms for the fight against the French occupation as had been decided in the founding manifesto of the Viet Nam Duy Tan Hoi.40 However, at the time of the battle of Tsushima in May 1905, Phan seems to have been far more concerned with the organization of his arms deals than with the news about the progress of the war in the Sea of Japan. From his memoirs, written in chronological order contemporaneous with the events, it emerges that there was a hiatus in the regular Japanese sea traffic between Hong Kong and Yokohama due to the war, obliging him to remain in the south Chinese port longer than anticipated. Later entries likewise make no reference to the Japanese victory. In Yamashita-cho, Phan Boi Chau had his first contacts with the Chinese reformer Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, who was living in exile in Yokohama.41 Liang advised Phan that, rather than providing the youth

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with weapons, he should form a student movement that encouraged young Vietnamese to go to Japan, where they would have the opportunity to study the Japanese reform process. Liang’s efforts were successful, and shortly after their encounter Phan authored An Appeal to the Nation to Support Financially Students Studying Abroad (Viet. Khuyen quo?c dan tu' tro' du Ko.c van).42 In it he expresses especially high esteem for the concept of study abroad and the Japanese thirst for knowledge and calls on his countrymen to support Vietnamese students in Japan, saying: If you study the history of renovation in Japan, you can clearly understand that the Japanese have been aware of the fact that they could not have achieved a great success without sending students abroad to develop the people’s knowledge and cultivate men of talents.43

And further: . . . in this age when strong powers are competing against each other we would be a loser unless we absorb civilization . . . and to absorb civilization is to study in Japan.44

At the beginning, the student movement, soon to be called –Dong Du (A View to the East / Look East) that Phan established, did not attract any great following that could be attributed to the news of Japan’s victory in 1905. Until the year 1907, no more than around forty Vietnamese had found their way to the Japanese capital. The rise in the numbers in 1907 to about 200 can probably be attributed to the generous support of the silk trader and naturalized French citizen of Chinese origin, Gilbert Tran Chanh Chieu from Saigon.45 Not only did the students’ financial situation improve through Chieu’s contributions but also the organization of the movement was fortified. An organization assumed the task of sending the students that was known as Tan Viet Nam Cong Hien Hoi (Society for Relief/Construction of a New Vietnam). Its function comprised the financing, preparation and arrangement of the trips to Japan.46 The Japanese authorities dismembered the –Dong Du movement in 1908 and the students had to return to Vietnam. Japan remained a model of reform for many, but from 1908 until immediately before the outbreak of the Pacific War, never regained the status it had held in the early Vietnamese emancipation discourses. THE REACTION TO THE WAR IN BURMA

As was the case in Vietnam, the analysis of the Burmese reception of the Russo-Japanese War must also begin with a quotation that looks to the past. Ba Maw, later Burma’s Prime Minister, mentions in his memoirs, written at the time of the Pacific War:

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I can even now recall the Russo-Japanese War and the emotion with which we heard about the Japanese victories. I was then just a little boy at school, but the feeling was so widespread that even the little ones caught it. For instance in the war games that became popular, we fought each other to be on the Japanese side. That would have been inconceivable before the Japanese victories . . . Historically that victory could be called the beginning of an awakening in Asia.47

Here, too, an inquiry as to the true significance of the reception of the Russo-Japanese War in May 1905 would appear justified. Going into the literature about Burma in search of an image of Japan in the discourses related to colonial emancipation yields very few results for the period prior to 1935. In fact any research at all regarding Burmese voices before this date produces quite meagre findings,48 and not until the period following World War I do extensive sources exist that reflect the national and liberation striving of Burmese intellectuals. One has to take into consideration that at the time of the RussoJapanese War those who were to form Burma’s emancipation movement were still children, and in the 1920s – when they became the bearers of the Burmese national movement – “Japan” had already long ceased to be a unique point of orientation as an alternative to Western development and reform. This was mainly due to the attention commanded by the 1911 Chinese Revolution in the eyes of the leaders of national and liberation movements. Their focus was now on Sun Yat-Sen’s San Min Chui (The Three Principles of the People / the Nation) in China.49 Moreover, what was probably the strongest and most lasting influence on the Southeast Asian liberation movements emanated from the first Communist Internationale, founded in 1919 as a consequence of the Russian Revolution of November 8–9, 1918. In this context, relations based on colonial power were cast into the crucible of Marxist-Leninist vocabulary and re-forged in terms of relations in the global hierarchy. Communist propaganda also proved to have an extremely powerful effect on the educated elite in the colonies. Furthermore, Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” which acknowledged a “national right to self-determination,” added fuel to the global censure of colonialism and imperialism after World War I, even though his comments had actually been aimed at the peoples of Austro-Hungary and merely spoke of “autonomous developments.”50 Besides the communist and “self-determinationist” orientation, the concepts of the Indian National Congress movement also achieved a large following in Burma in the 1920s. One of the few cases where there is evidence of a Burmese reception of Japan before World War I concerns the Buddhist monk U Ottama. Japan seemed to play an important role for him with regard to religious issues, and he traveled there several times in the years 1907, 1911 and 1912–16. On his second trip he took along three Burmese students for whom he found placement in Buddhist cloisters. In 1914, he published a book in Tokyo entitled Japan that reflected his religious and spiritual

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interest in the country; it describes the national religion, Shinto, as well as some customs and traditions. In 1920, he went back to Japan and taught at the University of Tokyo Pali until 1922. After his return to Burma he became a leading figure of insurgent farmers.51 Until the end of the 1920s, no more Burmese appear to have traveled to Japan.52 CONCLUSION

As can be discerned from the analyses presented here, the Japanese fleet’s victory at Tsushima did not have the accepted impelling and extremely stimulating effect on the national and independence movements in the Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, and Burma. There had already been a Japanese orientation in the Philippines and Vietnam before the Russo-Japanese War that did not change noticeably in the period immediately following the events of 1905. The Burmese reception of Japan is first seen in the run up to the Pacific War. Such divergent findings about the receptions of one and the same event lend credence to the assumption that the event itself was only one factor that determined the process of reception. At least as relevant for the reception as the event itself appears to have been the domestic situation and the colonial setting surrounding the perceiver. The degree of development of indigenous liberation movements can be regarded as such a domestic situation that influenced the reception. We can find evidence for this assumption. In the Philippines the first emancipation endeavors emerged in the 1870s, and thus José Rizal and Marcelo del Pilar had become aware of the developments in Japan relatively early on – long before the Russo-Japanese War. By 1905, political participation in the Philippine government already appeared on the horizon for their successors, so that strengthening the liberation movement through reference to Japan was no longer of any particular interest. By comparison, the situation in Vietnam was very different. In the year 1905, the liberation movement was only in its formative stages, and the end of French colonial domination appeared far off in the distance. At this stage of evolution toward decolonization, the Vietnamese literati were probably more receptive to the news about the defeat of a major European major power in their struggle against France. The more pervasive reception of Japan provides evidence for this. The weak presence of an image of Japan in the Burmese national and independence discourses around 1905 can be attributed to the weakness of the national movement in general at this time. A further reason for the rather restrained reception of Japan’s 1905 victory related to the fear – from the perspective of the Southeast Asian nationalists – that Japan might establish itself as a new imperial power in eastern Asia, a fear that Japan’s behavior in foreign policy seemed to confirm. The victory in the war against China in August 1895 had brought Japan its first “true” colony‚ Taiwan. The 1900 suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing, carried out jointly with the Western

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powers, did not result in Japan’s territorial growth, but it nevertheless manifested the Japanese military’s first concerted action with the Western imperialist powers. The conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902 meant a further step toward the establishment of Japan as an East Asian imperial power,53 and the Japanese victory of 1905 confirmed the country’s striving for an extension of its sphere of influence in eastern Asia. Due to its geographic proximity, the Philippines would be the first to be particularly affected. At this juncture a difference must be pointed out between the reception of Japan in the Islamic Southeast Asian countries and the nonIslamic lands examined in the present work. In the Islamic world, Japan did not appear as a potential new imperial power due to its geographic remoteness. This might also be a factor that weighs in the longer duration of the positive image Japan enjoyed in the Islamic world after 1905. There are also, however, patterns of reception that are similar in both the Muslim and non-Muslim countries of the region. As Klaus Kreiser portrays it, the Muslim reception was based upon a very much simplified view of Japan as a model of development; “Japan,” became primarily a political argument for the assertion of the individual states’ own interests and anti-Western goals of their respective reform processes. Thus, despite its simplification, in the Muslim World, the reception there, too, is characterized by Japan’s instrumentalization in political debates.54 In returning to the world-wide reception of the Russo-Japanese War mentioned at the outset of this chapter, which is also repeatedly attested to in the Southeast Asia region, it appears advisable to view the perception of Japan in the colonial context of the respective countries. Restraint seems likewise prudent with regard to the acceptance of an overly hasty generalization about the reception of the Russian-Japanese War. The assertion that the Japanese victory became a world-wide stimulus for anti-colonial resistance movements must at least be called into question with regard to Southeast Asia. NOTES 1

2 3

4 5 6

7

Falkenegg, 1905: 16. For the German reception of Japan after 1905, cf. also: Rathgen, 1911; Grünfeld, 1913; Wertheimer, 1910. Gollwitzer, 1962; Lehmann, 1978: 152–173. In connection with the Russo-Japanese War, Russia is considered as a part of Europe even if this is not always the case in the context of other discourses. The discussion about Russia’s belonging to Europe cannot be dealt with here. Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1992: 344–345. Stockwin, 1998: 56. Relevant contributions to the perception of the dichotomies of Asia/Europe are Said, 1978; Schwab, 1986; Osterhammel, 1998. The term “emancipation” is used here as a generic term for anti-colonial resistance movements. It is applied to various kinds of movements like apolitical and semi-militia resistance movements, anti-colonial or national movements

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8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18

19

20 21 22

23

24

427

or even independence movements as well as movements “only” activities struggling for an enlarged political voice or the participatory rights of indigenous populations without actual ambitions striving for the independence from the colonial power. Haag-Higuchi, 1996; Kreiser, 1981. Nehru, 1982: 16. Regarding the reception of the Russo-Japanese War in India, see also the slightly positively prejudiced presentation of Dua, 1966. Sauter, 1909: 137–138. Sauter, 1909: 23. Htin Aung, 1956: 87. Furnivall, 1978: 51. Li and Cribb, 2003: 2–3. Yu-Jones, 1999: 42. “Reception” here refers to the representation of Japan in anti-colonial emancipation discourses. Receptions constitute various descriptions of Japan in the widest sense and represent historical semantics for the term “Japan”. It is not claimed that the results of the analysis presented here are transferable in other regional reception contexts. Dutch-Indonesia and British-Malaya have not been included into the investigation since a majority of the indigenous educational elites were oriented toward the Islamic reform schools and adopted their images of Japan from these sources. Siam was left out because the country’s non-colonial status does not make it comparable with the other Southeast Asian countries under observation here. Nevertheless, a major comparative study of the world-wide reception of the Russo-Japanese War in various political and cultural contexts would be an interesting research desideratum. Relevant to the political history of the Russo-Japanese War are Nish, 1972, and Asakawa, 1904. The short war between Spain and America began in April 1898 and ended on 1 May the same year with the defeat of the Spanish navy. However, Manila did not fall to the Americans until August 13. The outbreak of the war was triggered by the still-mysterious sinking of the battleship the USS Maine on February 15, 1898 in Havana harbor. This gave the Americans a pretext to declare war on Spain, the colonial power in Cuba. By this time the Spanish colonial empire had been reduced to Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines, the Mariana and Caroline Islands in the Pacific. Shortly after Cuba had fallen to the Unites States in June/July, the military actions continued in the Pacific. Rizal, 1961a: 164. Rizal, 1961b: 291ff. The following passages are quoted from the English version of the journal Solidaridad housed in the School of Oriental and African Studies library in London. The extremely extensive reports about Japan that appeared in Solidaridad before and during the Sino-Japanese War (which cannot be detailed here) became less frequent after China’s defeat in 1895. Regarding Spain’s apprehensions about Japanese expansion into the area of the Philippines at the beginning of the 1890s, see Yano, 1979: 36; Saniel, 1962: 104–105, 154, 160–164.

428 25

26

27

28

29 30 31

32 33

34

35

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See “Nisshin jiken to shogaikoku-Supein koku” and “Nippon no taibo.” Through the treaty Spain initiated with Japan on August 2, 1895 that regulated conflicting territorial claims in the region, it became clear that Spain was pushing for clarification of the issue of territorial possessions in the Western Pacific following the Sino-Japanese War. Sakamoto Shiro was a so-called shishi [pan-asianist adventurer] who in 1896 worked as a reporter for the Chugai shogyo, the Jiji shimpo, and the Tokyo shimpo. In 1897 he was sent by Kususe Kiyohiko, officer of the Japanese colonial administration in Taiwan, to Manila to observe the Philippine revolution of 1896–7. See, Ozaki, 1932: 208, 223, 274–275, 313–319). Epistola, 1961; Agoncillo, 1960: 130–132, 154–155. A second unsuccessful attempt to secure the delivery of arms from Japan was made by Inukai Ki, a leading politician of the opposition Civil Rights Movement [Jiyu minken undo]. This took place in Japan in July 1899. Sun Yat-sen, later leader of the Chinese revolution and then in exile in Japan, also participated. In Epistola, 1961. The pressure groups of the Cuban sugar lobby were the leading force behind the American movement for Philippine independence. Fearing for their market because of low sugar prices, they strove for absolute disengagement of the Philippines from the American market (Larkin, 1993). Maring, 1973: 169. Reinhard, 1988, III: 41–44. Quezon visited Japan in the years 1908, 1913, 1915, and 1921 on his trips to the Unites States. (Goodman, 1983: 80–84). Goodmann, 1983, III: 81–83. Phan Boi Chau’s autobiography was translated into English, cf. Phan, 1978. A later autobiography, written by Phan in the 1920s while being under home arrest, will be quoted here, too, if cross-checking made statements more plausible, cf. Phan, 1999. In this essay my following remarks on the Vietnamese reception of Japan are based on the writings of Phan only, although much time was spent to find further hints of the reception of Japan in the writings of other authors. So far Phan’s work is considered as the main primary source for the time around the turn of the twentieth century in regard to emancipation discourse. This is reflected in the studies of the eminent scholars of Vietnamese history David Marr and William Duiker. However, in the last few years, the focus of research left the person of Phan and turned to less radical and anti-Western intellectuals, cf. McLeod, 1994; Bradley, 2000, to name but a few. See Phan, 1978: 23. In another comment he says: “Japan’s victory in its war with Russia is also a great advance for us. Our minds may now contemplate a new, exquisite world. Prior to its domination by France, our country knew only the existence of China in this whole wide world. When the French came we then knew nothing but France. The world has changed, with amazing new developments of which our people have never dreamed . . . it is impossible to deny that thanks to the Russo-Japanese War our consciousness has been raised. In Phan, 1978: 129. Le Thành Khoi, 1998: 146–168.

Japan’s Victory in Philippine, Vietnamese 36

37 38

39

40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

50 51

52 53 54

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Already in 1903–4 with his work New Letter Written in Blood and Tears on the Ryukyus [Viet. Lu'u cau huyet 1e tan thu], Phan had been occupied with Japan. See Phan, 1999: 65. Phan, 1999: 64–65. Whether the meiji tenno Mutsuhito can be termed an “enlightened and modern” monarch has in the meantime become a subject of controversy in research into Japan’s history; see, for example, Swale, 2000. See Vinh Sinh, 1988: 131. Whether the term “modernization” reflects anything but the common scientific paradigm of the 1970s and 80s here must at least be given consideration. The term “modernization” first appears in Vietnamese in the 1920s. Phan, 1999: 59, 73. Phan, 1978: 30–31, 36. Phan, 1999: 90–91. Phan, 1999: 95; Phan, 1978: 141. Shiraishi, 1988: 62. In Hong Kong, Phan had been able to convince Gilbert’s son of the necessity of the student movement and moved him to ask his father for support. See Phan, 1999: 128. At the same time, Gilbert financed the establishment of the Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc [The Free School in the East]. Marr, 1971: 142; Duiker, 1976: 48. Ba Maw, 1968: 47–48. Zöllner, 2000: 29–130. In 1911 Phan supported the Chinese revolution in situ. Here, too, similar to the way he had sought support in Japan for a monarchic revolution in 1905, he requested military assistance from Sun for a republican revolution in Vietnam; see Phan, 1999: 213. Schieder, 1998: 361. Ni Ni Myint, 1983: 48, 64, 209–210; U Nu, 1954: XVIII-XIX; Guyot, 1976: 45–46. See the interview with the later Prime Minister Ba Maw by Guyot, 1976: 46. Duus, 1989: 6–11. Kreiser, 1981: 234–238; Haag-Higuchi, 1996: 77; Pistor-Hatam, 1996: 116–119.

29

The War and the British Invasion of Tibet, 1904 GORDON T. STEWART

I

n 1904, the year that the Russo-Japanese War broke out, the British invaded Tibet. The Tibet Frontier Commission, led by Colonel Francis Younghusband, and accompanied by an armed column, fought its way to Lhasa where it pressured the Tibetans to agree to British demands.1 The Lhasa agreement – what Younghusband insisted on calling a “treaty” – was signed in September 1904. The British advance to Lhasa forced the Tibetans into negotiations on trade and frontier matters which the Tibetans had declined to discuss since the early 1890s. The British expedition had also been launched because of fears, particularly on the part of Lord Curzon, the current Viceroy of India, that Russian influence was building up in Lhasa through the agency of Argvan Dorjieff, a Buriat Mongol monk who was close to the Dalai Lama. This British invasion of Tibet took place at the same time that war broke out in Manchuria. Many commentators at the time believed that there was a direct connection between these two events. The allegation was that the British had waited to invade Tibet until the Russians were tied down by the war with Japan. This chapter will investigate that allegation. The contemporary allegations about a link between the Tibet invasion and the war in Manchuria were quite explicit. The most direct accusations came in foreign press accounts. As early as December 1903, The Times drew attention to the common French view that English policy in Tibet was seeking to take advantage of Russian difficulties in Manchuria. The conservative Russo-phile newspaper Politick in Prague stated bluntly that “the incursion of British troops into Tibet is one proof more that English whisperings alone decided Japan to go to war . . . The march of Anglo-Indian troops into Tibet is, whatever English statesmen may say, a blow struck at Russia, and is an audacious exploitation of the RussoJapanese War.” In Berlin, the Vossiche Zeitung linked the timing of the

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British advance into Tibet to Russian intrigues against Britain during the Boer war of 1899–1902 in an attempt to threaten the British position in Persia and India. The German editors argued: When England was engaged in the South African war, Russia instituted experiments, which created much discussion at the time, in the transfer of a few regiments to Turkestan. On that occasion, however, nothing came of it. The British, on the other hand, are clearly turning to the embarrassments of Russia in East Asia to account in a very different manner.2

In a general overview, on April 2, 1904, of the British and European press reactions to the British killing of the primitively-armed Tibetan forces at Guru, the New York Times described a typical argument in France: “it is manifest that Russia’s hands being tied gives Great Britain an opportunity to advance in Tibet.”3 Inside British India, The Bengalee, an English-language Calcutta daily, reflected widespread Indian criticism of the invasion when it excoriated the British attack on the harmless Tibetans, and again linked it to the Russian plight in northern China. It may be good policy for England to attempt to bring Tibet within the sphere of her influence at a time when Russia is occupied elsewhere, but surely that will not alter the fact that England is making war upon the inefficient and unwarlike nation which has the misfortune to find itself between the Russian anvil and the British hammer.4

From Calcutta to New York, from Paris to Prague, and from Vienna to Berlin, critics of Britain were not shy about making a connection between Tibet and Manchuria. Such evidence, while bountiful, is not at all compelling, however, because it comes from sources remote from British policy-making, and from editorial writers and opinion-makers hostile to Britain’s imperial position in India and elsewhere. Much more telling is some evidence from the inner circles of British policy-making with respect to Tibet which seems to lend some credibility to the critique sketched out above. At the early stages of the planning for the Tibet expedition, Louis W. Dane, the Secretary to the Government of India in the Foreign Department (the chief foreign affairs advisor to the Viceroy), linked the Tibet matter to Russia’s deepening imbroglio in Manchuria. In a note written to Curzon in May 1903, Dane argued: The fact is that the Tibetan nettle has to be grasped, and the Tibetan Government made to understand that henceforward they must look to us for protection and support, and place no reliance on distant powers like China and Russia, who cannot help them at present. We shall never get such a chance again, as both Russia and China have their hands full.5

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Dane repeated this reasoning three months later, telling the Viceroy that “it will be a thousand pities to miss the present chance of doing something while Russia has her hands full in the Balkans and Northeast Asia.”6 As the expedition wintered in the Chumbi valley, just inside Tibet, and prepared for the march to Gyantse, half-way to Lhasa, Dane wrote to Younghusband on February 17, 1904 and again referred to its relationship to the Russo-Japanese War which had now broken out in earnest. “We never shall have any chance as this of finally settling the Tibet question,” he told Younghusband. “Nepal is actively friendly, Bhutan now appears to be complaisant, while Russia has her hands full in Manchuria, and China connives at, if she does not actually approve of, our adventure Tibetaine.”7 While Dane broadened the canvas to show the range of international factors that played into policy making at Simla, he confirmed that Russia’s plight in Manchuria did indeed play a role in the decision to push forward in Tibet. Dane’s commentary suggests there is something worth investigating here, and that jaundiced foreign critics of Britain may well have been correct in their assessment of British motives and timing. Dane was in at the origins of this Tibet expedition; he was at the side of the two Viceroys (Curzon and Ampthill) who were in power throughout the entire affair; and he was in continuous correspondence with the India Office and, through those officials, the Foreign Office, in London. The fact that someone with a ringside seat could see a connection between the Russian predicament in Manchuria and the British invasion of Tibet seems convincing proof that the connection was indeed there. Let us look more closely at the evidence. The Indian government formally proposed a diplomatic mission, to be accompanied by an armed escort, on January 8, 1903. The case made to the Home government ran along the following lines: ever since 1893 the Tibetans had declined to enter into direct talks with the British Indian government over trade and boundary issues; the Tibetans had refused to open trade marts and they had encroached into northern Sikkim (a British-protected state); the Tibetans did so on the grounds that the agreement made in 1893 had been completed by the Chinese and the British without consulting the Tibetans; the position of the two Chinese Ambans (Imperial Representatives) in Lhasa was so weak that they could do nothing to force the Dalai Lama and his governing council into compliance with the 1893 treaty; and, on top of all this, the Dalai Lama, through the channels opened up by Argvan Dorjieff, was developing a relationship with Russia. It was imperative, Curzon and his Council concluded, that the Tibetans be forced to respond to British power in India (including placing a British agent at Lhasa) before they were drawn more deeply into the Russian orbit.8 In the large scheme of things, Tibet had now become a piece on the chess-board of the Great Game – the struggle between Britain and Russia for influence in Persia and Central Asia that had been under way since the 1830s.9 The British cabinet was not at all impressed by this long and

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somber despatch from Simla. Once the Tibet issue came alive, Lord Lansdowne, the Foreign Secretary, formally questioned the Russians and received categorical assurances from Count Benckendorff, the Ambassador in London, that Russia had no intrigue going on with Lhasa. In February 1903 Charles Hardinge, Under Secretary at the Foreign Office (and soon to be appointed British Ambassador to Russia), provided a detailed insider’s commentary on how Curzon’s case had been received in London: As regards Tibet, we had a little sort of Cabinet Council at the India Office in order to discuss Curzon’s proposal to forestall the Russians in Thibet by sending an Agent to Lhasa with an armed force of 1000 men, the Nepalese being employed to keep the passes open. Balfour, Ritchie, Ld. Lansdowne, Ld. G. Hamilton, Duke of Devonshire, Percy, two of the India Council, and myself were there and discussed Benckendorff’s memorandum and the reply to be given to Lord Curzon. There was a strong feeling against Curzon’s proposal and when Balfour asked my opinion as to what the Russians would think of such a step, I said it would be an act of provocation towards the Russian Government and that they would probably retaliate by a similar measure at Kashgar or even by sending an Agent with similar force whatever the cost might be in men and money.10

The approach taken by ministers and officials in London at this stage was to calm the crisis atmosphere evoked by Curzon’s despatch. At the same time, Benckendorff was warned by Landsdowne against any attempt to insert a Russian influence at Lhasa. After consulting with St. Petersburg, Benckendorff repeated that any contacts that did exist with Tibet were the result of cultural and religious affiliation between Tibetan Buddhism and the Buddhist peoples of Russian Mongolia and Central Asia. A categorical assurance was given that there were no Russian plans for establishing a diplomatic representation at Lhasa, or of creating any kind of political presence there. Lansdowne accepted these assurances, passed them on to the India Office, and urged Curzon and the Indian government to exercise restraint in settling their differences with Tibet. On the basis of Benckendorff’s assurances, the British government fully accepted that Russia was not trying to establish a foothold in Lhasa. As Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, explained to Curzon: The main reason for sending a mission with force to Lhasa was fear of being anticipated by Russia. All fear of such movement has now gone, and, therefore, whilst negotiations could be resumed, there would not be the necessity there was before to associate commencement of such negotiations with the despatch of a mission to Lhasa.11

In response to further importuning from Simla, the British government continued to deny permission for a mission to Lhasa, but in view of the fifteen years of frustration and provocation described in the January 8,

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1903 despatch, they did give permission for a mission to proceed to the Tibet border to negotiate with Tibetan officials to be sent (it was hoped) from Lhasa. Younghusband set out for Khamba Jong, the first Tibetan village across the disputed boundary between Tibet and northern Sikkim, but no suitable Tibetan officials came to meet him. The Tibetans objected to this armed incursion into their territory and insisted they would only talk if Younghusband moved out of Tibet. In face of this Tibetan intransigence, the mission was withdrawn from Khamba Jong but only in order to organize a larger and more intimidating expedition – to be launched up through the Chumbi valley, a southern salient of Tibetan territory which marched with Sikkim’s eastern boundary. The British government reluctantly agreed to this revised plan which provided for the mission proceeding as far as Gyantse, about half-way to Lhasa, in another attempt to force the Tibetans to negotiate. In April 1904, the Tibetans attempted to halt the mission at Guru but they were easily defeated, and the little army moved on to Gyantse. In July 1904 the Tibetans attacked the mission camp at Gyantse, which gave Curzon the leverage he needed. The London government finally gave permission for the march to Lhasa (The British Invasion of Tibet, 1999). As these series of decisions and military movements were made, developments in Manchuria were frequently mentioned but the looming crisis there did not shape British policy-making in the way hostile critics claimed. Indeed, the Manchuria situation had the very opposite impact – it prompted the British ministers in London to be even more cautious. In May 1903, Hamilton informed Curzon that: The Cabinet were unanimous and immovable in their opposition to the proposal to establish an Agent either at Gyantse or Lhasa, and nothing I could say would move them from that attitude. The trade advantages to be gained from a freer intercourse with that country were, they contended, so slight, and not sufficient to justify us in a permanent embroilment with that country.12

Hamilton allowed that Curzon would be annoyed by this check on his forward policy. As he attempted to mollify Curzon by supplying him with an insider’s view of the root cause of the caution, he turned to developments in Manchuria. “I think it was Manchuria,” he confided in Curzon, “which so influenced the Cabinet, as the Russians have practically receded from none of their pretensions, and we may at any moment have a somewhat disagreeable controversy with them.”13 Far from seeing the Russian predicament in Manchuria as an opportunity for action, the British government, during the summer and autumn months of 1903, viewed the deepening imbroglio there as yet another world trouble-spot that might lead to a crisis in the AngloRussian relationship – and to great power relations in general. They did not wish to add complications by choosing this moment to launch an armed expedition to Lhasa. Hamilton explained this in the plainest

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possible terms to Curzon. He urged the Viceroy to make an effort to view the Tibetan matter in a broader context: I am too old a hand now to be influenced by the representations that local authorities all over the Empire invariably make that our prestige is going down unless in some particular incident we push matters to an extremity, or attempt to settle them by a reasonable compromise. I have heard this ever since I have been in politics, and I think it is the invariable criticism of those on the spot who wished to push matters further, and who naturally do not take cognizance of the serious inconveniences and embarrassments which must ensue, if every small incident is treated with the seriousness suitable only for grave emergencies.14

Having delivered himself of this general observation, Hamilton got down to brass tacks and bluntly told Curzon that the Viceroy’s pushiness was not all helpful. He drew a parallel with South Africa where Alfred Milner’s forceful policies in the late 1890s had ended up by causing a fullscale and difficult war: You are a very big Proconsul in India. Milner is a big, but lesser Proconsul, in South Africa. We let him push things to extremities, and we know the result; and although I quite admit there are occasions on which we ought to risk everything for the attainment of our object, they are few and far between, and we cannot afford, looking to the dispersed nature of our interests, and to the manner in which we cross the aspirations of almost every other great European Power, to adopt a truculent and intolerant tone upon every difference which may arise.15

This message seemed plain enough but, following this admonitory lecture, Hamilton hedged his case and ended up the letter with words that Curzon could take as giving some encouragement to push on. Hamilton conceded: At the same time, I agree with you that it was a pity that the Cabinet did not allow you a free hand in Tibet. We are absolutely masters of the situation there. We have material force on the spot, and moral right behind us, and, when those are combined I should be disposed to go ahead, because all that a power like Russia can do in such a contingency is to exercise a little more pressure in other parts of Asia, where the conditions are reversed, and she has the material strength behind her.16

At the business end of Curzon’s policy, Younghusband became convinced in the late autumn and winter months of 1903–04 that the deepening crisis in Manchuria would be used as an excuse to hold him back rather than the occasion for pushing him on. He complained to his father on November 11 about the “shilly-shallying” of the home government and reported that Curzon had told him that “what Government was

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afraid of was being dragged into a war between Russia and Japan, and they did not want any ‘entanglements’ elsewhere.”17 In February 1904, the continuing reluctance of London to allow an advance to Lhasa led Younghusband into a diatribe against the timid thinking in Whitehall where concern for the general international situation led to an incapacity to seize opportunities. “My point is,” he wrote to his father on February 5, 1904: . . . that if for the general diplomatic situation, it is unwise to make a splash in Tibet just now I would agree at once. Upon that I am not in a position to express an opinion for I have not all the threads in my hand like the Cabinet at home have. But if it is a question of how to deal with the Tibetans, whether if shilly-shallying about like we did at Khamba Jong or by going straight to Lhasa – then, I say, that I am in a better position to judge than the whole Cabinet and India Office put together. Lord Curzon, of course, knows that and does not deny it. But even a strong man like he is dare not say this but has to play with and wheedle the Cabinet as if they were children.18

He also told his father, in an effort to show that he was aware of the wider context, that “when the Japanese war broke out I wrote to Government saying that if they did not want to lock up troops and transport in Tibet I was quite prepared to mark time here instead of going on to Gyantse.”19 As he made his way across the frozen Tibetan plateau towards Gyantse, Younghusband remained pessimistic about the impact of Manchuria on his mission. He lamented to Dane on February 10, 1904, “now that war between Russia and Japan is a fact, H[is] M[ajesty’s] G[overnment] may be still more anxious not to be entangled more than is absolutely necessary in Tibet.”20 There was some hope in India that, when Curzon went home on leave in May 1904, his presence in London would enable him to press more effectively for an immediate advance to Lhasa. But, when he reached London, Curzon discovered that ministers could not be budged. In fact, Curzon found that the international situation as it impinged on his Tibet policy was even more complex that he had imagined in India. The British government was anxious to secure Russian goodwill at this very moment in connection with negotiations with France over Egypt by which new financial arrangements were to be made that would strengthen Britain’s position as the occupying power. Following a series of discussions between Landsdowne and Benckendorff, Brodrick summarized the position to Lord Ampthill, the Acting Viceroy, on May 20, 1904: “The gist of them [the discussions] is that Russia is ready to withdraw all opposition to the changes we propose to make to our position in Egypt under the Anglo-French agreement, if we reiterate the understandings we gave . . . respecting Tibet.”21 Writing from Walmer Castle, Curzon briefed Younghusband in a “Private and Very Confidential” letter on his new-found understanding

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of the international complexities. “What has been going on in the background is this. The Government in order to purchase the assent of Russia to the new financial arrangements in Egypt (to which the assent of all the Great Powers is required) have repeated to the Russian Ambassador the (as I think) particular pledges [not to intervene in Tibet in any permanent fashion].”22 Curzon assured Younghusband in a later letter that “I am doing my best. Governments in England are very timid and very ignorant . . . My one desire is to save the mission from proving abortive and to keep you there until you have got the Treaty you want and obtained the guarantees without which you cannot retire.”23 Curzon at this stage was attempting to persuade the cabinet to give sanction to Younghusband’s advance beyond Gyantse to Lhasa. As long as Curzon was the Viceroy the severe tensions between his forward policy and London’s caution were obscured because of Curzon’s dissembling tactics. He officially accepted the cautionary warnings from the cabinet while at the same time encouraging Younghusband that “their” more aggressive policy would eventually prevail. He advised Younghusband on January 23, 1904 to be more careful in his language about going on to Lhasa to avoid “frightening the authorities at home by showing your hand too plainly, or by dragging in Lhasa before Lhasa is required.”24 It was a question of being circumspect while applying constant lobbying efforts with officials and ministers in London. In his correspondence with Younghusband, and even with Ampthill, Curzon portrayed the Government of India as being checked by the India Office and a too timid cabinet. In an irate letter to Ampthill on June 21, 1904, Curzon gave vent to his frustration, decrying “the collective ignorance and timidity of the whole [cabinet] while Landsdowne who valiantly declared six months ago that the Russians had no voice in the matter has now made a bargain with them over Tibet in connection with Egypt! Good God. Such is the wisdom with which we are governed.”25 Once Curzon left India and the viceroyalty was taken over by Lord Ampthill, the full force of London’s caution was conveyed to Younghusband with none of the collusive language that had characterized Curzon’s letters. There was now no longer any insinuation that London and Simla were at odds. In a long, private letter written to Younghusband on June 13, 1904 the new Viceroy comprehensively explained why “we are obliged to pour cold water on your recent proposals.” Younghusband had made the case that since the British camp at Gyantse was being bombarded almost daily, Tibetan aggression was now reason enough to put caution aside and advance to Lhasa. Ampthill responded by first giving fulsome recognition to Younghusband’s views, and to his current predicament: I accept without question all that you have reported officially and privately about the attitude of the Tibetans and the difficulties before the Mission. As to all this, you, as the man on the spot, must know best. But your view, accurate though it no doubt is, is necessarily limited to your immediate surroundings. Hemmed in, cut off from communication,

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bombarded with jingal ball as well as insults as you have been, your estimate of the situation naturally differs from that of a man at Simla or a London office.

He proceeded to educate Younghusband on the wider policy issues at stake, and the array of factors that Simla and London together had to take into consideration. Ampthill continued: The Government of India have to take a wider view of the situation and to take into consideration such matters as finance, the position on other frontiers, and public opinion. The Home Government have to take a still wider view for, isolated though Tibet may seem to be to those who are cooped up in an inhospitable valley, that which we are doing in Tibet closely affects our political relations with all the great Powers. Public opinion too, in England, is a matter which Government have to take far more into account than is necessary in India.

Ampthill ended by directly addressing the Russian aspect of all this and, more particularly, the impact of the Russo-Japanese War. As in Curzon’s letters to Younghusband written from England, the negotiations over Egypt were prominently featured. Ampthill assumed a grand tone for this culminating section of his homily: Now the principal object which His Majesty’s Government have at heart is to complete the great and important Treaty which they have just negotiated with France. To do so, it is necessary to persuade all the great Powers to assent to the arrangements which we proposed with respect to Egypt. Russia makes the condition of assent an understanding on the part of Great Britain not to intervene permanently in Tibetan affairs and she thinks, not unnaturally, though without any real justification, that we are taking advantage of her present troubles to extend our frontiers towards her own dominions. The Russians of course judge us by themselves and we must admit appearances are against us . . . But nothing would be more disastrous to the peace of the world that Russian dislike and resentment against us should be increased at the present time. It is all important to diminish it, and hence the policy of His Majesty’s Government. That policy may result in the failure of the Tibet Mission but even that is better than the certain prospect of a war with Russia, from the point of view of the whole British Empire.26

While the Viceroy tried his utmost to broaden the horizons of Younghusband, he was helped by an even higher placed authority. The British Prime Minister himself, Arthur Balfour, was drawn into this web of private discussion. The intervention was brought about by a mutual friend of Younghusband and Balfour. Younghusband, a prolific correspondent, even when apparently isolated in Tibet, had written to his friend Harry Cust, Conservative MP and former editor of the Pall Mall

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Gazette, to engage him in the forward cause. Cust was a close friend of the Prime Minister and took it upon himself to speak to Balfour. “I meditated much what was the best thing to do in order to press your views,” Cust explained to Younghusband, “and finally determined to show your letter to the Prime Minister, not on the basis of a politician, but because he is one of the most intimate of personal friends I have got. This I did last night.” Younghusband could not get closer to the center of imperial power than this – a late night tête-à-tête about his mission between a close friend and the Prime Minister. Cust had given Younghusband’s letter to Balfour before the meeting. He [Balfour] read it with much interest and asked me to go and have a long talk with him on the whole subject. He said he was already aware of your view and that it had been, and was being, strenuously backed by George Curzon. On the other hand, he observed that Tibet was not the world, or indeed the British Empire, and it seems at this moment, the position with Russia being so delicate, that he was unwilling to go back on his promise (most needless I think) either to occupy or leave a resident in Lhasa.27

The evidence from the innermost sanctum of British power leaves no doubt whatsoever about the baselessness of the allegation that the invasion of Tibet was launched to take advantage of the Russo-Japanese War. The Tibet mission was not launched for that reason. Indeed, the evidence shows that a determination to mollify Russia, because of Egypt and Russia’s “delicate” position in Manchuria, led ministers in London to keep putting a leash on Curzon and Younghusband. The language used by participants in the debate over Tibet reveals some of the differences over what it meant to be an “imperialist” in 1904 Britain. Younghusband was convinced he and Curzon were the genuine article. Writing from the Viceregal Lodge in Simla in October 1904 that: He could never forget that in my hour of trial neither the Home Government nor the Government of India supported me. The only true man was Lord Curzon. So unless Lord Curzon in London and I in Tibet had remained steady, we would have had a terrible fiasco instead of a brilliant success.28

Younghusband castigated all the other officials in London for letting down the empire. In February 1904, when he was still waiting for permission to proceed directly to Lhasa, he complained about the timidity of the India Office and the cabinet. “It is a rotten way of running an empire like ours,” he expostulated.29 When the cabinet and the India Office repudiated sections of the Lhasa agreement (allowing occupation of the Chumbi valley for seventy-five years) on the grounds that Younghusband had exceeded his instructions, Younghusband described St. John Brodrick, who had replaced Hamilton as the Secretary of State

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for India in September 1903, as “just one of those pig-headed bunglers who ruin the Empire, and the sooner they get rid of him from English politics the better.”30 Younghusband’s friends egged him on in cultivating this self-image. E.C. Wilton wrote from Calcutta in 1905 congratulating Younghusband on his KCIE (Knight Commander of the Indian Empire). It was a meager reward in Wilton’s view for what Younghusband had done – “But then you had the courage of your opinions and acted for the Empire rather than for the interests of those estimable elderly gentlemen in the Cabinet.”31 On the other side, the advocates of caution, and of the need to think in multilateral terms about Britain’s world position, thought they were the true imperialists because they were attentive to the long-term needs of the empire as a whole. Brodrick reminded Younghusband that “questions of Indian frontier policy could no longer be regarded from an exclusively Indian point of view.”32 Ministers in London went even further than this and described Curzon as a hindrance to effective policy-making for the empire. Just as Milner’s aggressive local initiatives in South Africa had brought about a difficult and draining war, so Curzon’s forcefulness over Tibet, at a dangerous moment in international affairs, threatened to undermine Britain’s interests. “The truth is, my dear George,” Hamilton wrote at the beginning stages of the Tibetan affair, “if there were two more of you in other parts of the British Empire occupying big posts, the machine would not be manageable.”33 The constant refrain in London is that they were being attentive to general imperial interests of Britain while Curzon was blinkered by a local Indian perspective. As Brodrick observed to Ampthill in June 1904, “to be perfectly frank, I do not admit Curzon’s contention that the Government of India stand in a totally different relation to Downing Street from that of any other representative of the Sovereign.”34 The connection between the Russo-Japanese War and the invasion of Tibet was not the simple one that many contemporary critics made out. The evidence shows that the outbreak of war between Russia and Japan made the British government even more reluctant than they had been early in 1903 to march to Lhasa. In addition to the need to secure Russian agreement with respect to Egypt, British ministers saw nothing but trouble if they used the Russo-Japanese War as an excuse for the invasion of Tibet. Even Britain’s own long-term interests in Central Asia would not be helped if such a policy were pursued. Brodrick sketched out the considerations to Ampthill in May 1904: The Russians, between ourselves, show a sensitiveness about Tibet which goes some distance to justify the Viceroy’s belief that he has only anticipated them there. They are naturally working this sore for what it is worth in regard to their rights in Egypt which, in pursuance of the Anglo-French agreement, we want them to give up. I am quite sure it is undesirable in our own interests to give the Persians, Afghans or anyone else the idea that Russia’s preoccupation with Japan has been chosen for

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the occasion for pressing forward. It would stereotype the view, already carefully engineered by the Russians, that it is only their influence which prevents our designs on all our Asiatic neighbours.35

The British cabinet accepted Curzon’s case that something had to be done to bring Tibet into a relationship with India and prevent Russian influence from growing in Lhasa. They also agreed that open defiance from Tibet could not be countenanced by an imperial power with great interests at stake in India and throughout Asia. But they were convinced these goals could be achieved by diplomatic actions in London and by a quick punitive expedition followed by a speedy withdrawal rather than mounting an invasion to establish a British presence in Lhasa, as Curzon and Younghusband wished to do. Brodrick summed up the position in brutal terms in July 1904: Our main point is to re-establish our prestige, and to make clear to Russia that we will not surrender predominance in Tibet to them. In our judgment the mere fact of a British force marching to Lhasa and slaughtering a great number of Tibetans on the way ought, even without a treaty, to establish our claims and show our power.36

The Conservative government that made the decisions about Tibet was politically weak and was soon to lose power to the Liberals in the general election early in 1905. The Conservative ministers also had painful memories of earlier problems stemming from over-eager imperial officials. When Curzon called for bold moves in Tibet, the responsible ministers at the India Office, the Foreign Office, and the War Office began anticipating the costs and the problems. As Brodrick explained to Ampthill: We dwell on these points not for the purpose of making a case against the Indian Government, but of showing that the whole business, like the Boer War and the Somali Land Expedition, is far more costly and intricate than people suppose. We do not want any big undertaking of the kind: public opinion here would not in the least support it.37

The palpable reluctance of the British government to take advantage of the Russo-Japanese War during the Tibet invasion was a sign of how even the world’s leading global power believed its best interests lay through working within the international system of the day. For historians seeking to produce lessons for American global power in the twentyfirst century that is worth thinking about. The controversial Boer War, the daunting difficulties of defending India’s northwest frontier, the rising challenge of Germany all fed into the sense that Britain’s resources were being stretched and that multilateral approaches to international problems were wise and statesmanlike. The Russo-Japanese War was one more factor that added to the uncertainty. Far from taking advantage of

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that war to invade Tibet, the British did all that they could to mollify the Russians and reassure them about the limited nature of Britain’s intentions in Tibet. The “lessons for global power” which historians confidently derive from their accounts of the British empire are as much the products of historians as of history.38 To be willing to exercise economic and military power with confidence round the world (in this case opening Tibet to freer trade and responsive diplomacy by a military invasion) was not a lesson British imperial policy-makers in London thought was a sensible one in 1904. They feared the unintended consequences of invasion. As it turned out, they were right. The Conservative government had been reluctant to support the mission to Lhasa. When the Liberals took over in 1905 they negotiated with China and then Russia to clarify Tibet’s international position, while the exiled Dali Lama (who had fled as the British troops approached Lhasa) looked on helplessly from Urga in Mongolia. Hugh Richardson has pointed out that as a result of the post-invasion agreements with China and Russia “Chinese rights in Tibet were thus recognized to an extent to which the Chinese had been wholly unable to exercise them.”39 The outcome was an explicit assertion of Chinese claims over Tibet, now recognized for the first time in international conventions and treaties between the great powers, which were then used to justify Chinese policy for the remainder of the twentieth century. As Melvyn Goldstein and Gelek Rimpoche have noted, the British military success in 1904 “. . . was a Pyrrhic victory precipitating a new activist, annexationist Chinese policy towards Tibet.”40 While the British invasion of Tibet was a tiny military event compared with the Russo-Japanese War, it too had an impact on the chess board of Asian politics. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Lamb, 1960; Addy, 1985. The Times, December 10, 1903: 3; August 11, 1904: 3; August 9, 1904: 3. The New York Times, April 3, 1904: 1. The Bengalee (Calcutta), February 16, 1904. Government of India, Foreign Department, 1903b, Nos. 38–95: 9. Government of India. Foreign Department, 1903c, Nos. 118–158: 4. Government of India. Foreign Departmen, 1904, Nos. 219–299: February 17, 1904. Government of India. Foreign Department. 1903a, Nos. 1–88: 84–95. Hopkirk, 1992: 504–508; Meyer and Brysac, 1999: 261–298. British Library, Add.Mss. 52302: f.211. Curzon Papers, MSS. EUR. F 123/1: April 8, 1903. Curzon Papers, MSS. EUR. F 123/1: May 28, 1903. Curzon Papers, MSS. EUR. F 123/1: May 28, 1903. Curzon Papers, MSS. EUR. F123/1: July 9, 1903. Curzon Papers, MSS. EUR. F123/1: July 9, 1903. Curzon Papers, MSS. EUR F123/1: July 9, 1903.

The War and the British Invasion of Tibet, 1904 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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Younghusband Papers, MSS. EUR. F197/145: November 11, 1903. Younghusband Papers, MSS. EUR. F197/145: February 5, 1904. Younghusband Papers, MSS. EUR. F197/145: February 25, 1904. Government of India. Foreign Department. Secret E. Proceedings, June 1904, Nos. 219–299: February 10, 1904. Ampthill Papers, MSS. EUR. E233/2: 36. Younghusband Papers, MSS. EUR. F197/80: May 26, 1904. Younghusband Papers, MSS. EUR. F197/80: June 17, 1904. Younghusband Papers, MSS.EUR. F197/80: January 23, 1904. Ampthill Papers, MSS. EUR. E233/2: 98. Younghusband Papers, MSS. EUR. F197/81: June 13, 1904. Younghusband Papers, MSS. EUR. F197/82: August 10, 1904. Younghusband Papers, MSS.EUR. F197/145: October 18, 1904. Younghusband Papers, MSS. EUR. F197/145: February 5, 1904. Youngusband Papers, MSS. EUR. F197/95: October 12, 1904. Younghusband Papers, MSS. EUR. F197/83: January 24, 1905. Government of India. Foreign Department. Secret E. Proceedings, February 1905, Nos. 1246–1261: December 2, 1904. Curzon Papers, MSS. EUR. F123/1: July 9, 1903. The Ampthill Papers, MSS. EUR. E233/2: 116. The Ampthill Papers, MSS. EUR. E233/2: 24. The Ampthill Papers, MSS. EUR. E233/2: 127. The Ampthill Papers, MSS. EUR. E233/2: 158. Ferguson, 2003, 178. Richardson, 1962: 94. Goldstein and Gelek, 1989: 46.

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Distant Echoes: The Reflection of the War in the Middle East RINA BIEGANIEC

T

he social elites and the enlightenment groups in the Middle East perceived Russia and Japan as representatives of two different, opposing stereotypes, between whom the conflict was parallel to the battle between the Good and the Bad, the Right and the Corrupt, Progress and Reactionism. These groups perceived Russia as the representative of the European imperialist powers and as the enemy of Islam because of its aspiration to spread to the south and to get as close “as possible to Constantinople and India and to provoke continued wars, not only in Turkey but in Persia too,” as was written in a document published in 1755, and accepted in Russia as the political testament of Peter the Great.1 The reputation of Russia in the Middle East was damaged because of its actions along these lines, including interference in the internal affairs of Iran in the course of almost 250 years, and involvement in the fighting in Navarino alongside Britain and France against the Ottoman forces at the time of the Greek independence war from the Ottoman Empire and in destroying their fleets; Japan, on the other hand was perceived in the Middle East as the antithesis of Russia. It was a rising Asian force; therefore, it represented an Eastern nationality facing European imperialism, and was perceived as a check to colonial rule and spread of European powers, similar to the national movements in the Middle East. The fact of Japan being the only Eastern nation with a constitution and its stand against Russia greatly encouraged the national and constitutional movements which began to flourish at that time in the Middle East, and its victory appeared to them as vindication of the righteousness of their cause. In Iran, the war had the effect of encouraging the opposition movement. Iran underwent prolonged Russian presence and interference from

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the days of the Muscovite principality in 1668; but the fact that an Asian force had succeeded in defeating a European force gave the Iranians the hope that this presence would not necessarily be permanent. The Iranians noticed the so-called, democratic aspects of the war: the winner was the only Asiatic force with a democratic constitution, whereas the loser was the only Western power without one. Therefore some saw the constitution as the secret of Western power; following the war, articles and studies began to appear in Iran explaining different constitutions and analyzing values. Another significant event was the 1905 Russian revolution, which demonstrated the power of a mass uprising against a tyrannical monarchy, forcing the monarchy to embrace a constitution.2 In Iran, the concepts of Constitution, Parliament, and Democracy were not completely clear, as the Iranian intellectual Said Muhammad Taba’-Tabi’ admitted: “We had not experienced constitutional rule, but we were told, by those who had visited countries with this kind of rule, that it had brought them security and prosperity, and this is the reason for our striving for the establishment of a constitutional system.” But very soon the Iranians learned the methods of the Russian revolutionaries and in 1906 the markets went on strike. As a consequence, the Shah Musafir Al-Din Amr agreed on August 5, 1906, to establish a constitution and to assemble a parliament, which was democratic in a very limited way, declaring: “All the European kings rule with the assistance of the parliament, and they are much stronger than the Shah of Iran.”3 This declaration and others alike strengthened the apprehension that in Iran democracy and a constitutional system were perceived not as a goal in itself, but as a means to strengthen the country and the economy which had suffered from inflation as an indirect result of the war. The secular and the liberal circles believed that the West could be defeated only if some of its ways were imitated, but the revolutionaries called for the establishment of armies along the lines of those of the West, the implementation of constitutional reforms, the establishment of a wellorganized government, and modern economical development.4 Japan had even more ongoing influence in the Ottoman Empire, due to the institutionalization of the political and economical relations between Japan and the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s.5 The Ottoman Empire perceived Japan as a country embraced by the Western countries, but remaining in its essence an “Asian country,” with all that that implies. In other words, Japan was a model for a country that had succeeded in adopting Western sciences, technology, and education without losing its national and religious identity, and thus succeeded in reaching the level of a European country in every field of life. After the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the general climate of opinion in Istanbul inclined towards the establishment of a constitution after the Japanese model as a way to becoming equal to the Western powers, to halting the continued foreign interference in the internal politics and

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foreign policy of Middle Eastern countries, and to proving that they were entitled to external loans and support. Most of these goals eventually failed, but at least the Ottoman attempt contained within it an implicit major promise, that if fulfilled could be set as an example to the whole world.6 Turkish intellectuals accused the Western countries of equating their nation with the Japanese, sons of the “yellow race” at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The Russo-Japanese War put an end to this claim, by disproving the idea of Japanese inferiority, and therefore restored Turkish self-respect and dignity. The war also affected the “Young Turks,” a group of young officers, under whose pressure, the Sultan Abd al-Hamid the second restored in 1908 the constitution which he had cancelled thirty years before. They concluded that their evolving nationalism should be based upon a racial base. This kind of nationalism evolved due to the ethnic diversity of the Ottoman Empire and the lack of unity within it. The “Young Turks” aim of turning the Ottoman Empire into the “Japan of the Middle East” was a clear expression of their anti-imperialist feeling, and their desire for a modern country that would be able to face any Western aggression. Unfortunately, however, this reform that was meant to strengthen the country and which was supported by the European powers and the Christian sections of the country actually weakened it. The Ottoman Empire lost territories in the Balkan such as Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austro-Hungary, Crete to Greece after the declaration of their (Crete and Greece) unification, and Bulgaria after its declaration of independence. Furthermore, the new regime had to deal with a violent anti-revolutionary mutiny in 1909.7 The Young Turks portrayed Japan as a model of a strong country that could contend and defeat the Western imperialism, but the modernization procedure Japan went through did not resemble the one the Ottoman Empire had experienced; and the state of Japan in the beginning of the process had been fundamentally different from the state of the Ottoman Empire when it took upon itself this enormous change.8 In contrast to the upheavals in Iran and the Ottoman Empire, the war’s influence on the other parts of the Middle East was less obvious. Egypt, the case study in this chapter, was at that time in the vanguard of the movement towards national awakening and the intellectual debate on Western occupation and its influence on the Middle East. This was a two-faced debate between Islamic and secular factions, between which there evolved a middle line which tried to find a compromise between the two opposing perceptions. Japan had a major part in this intellectual debate; but no less interesting was Japanese influence on the Islamic faction’s campaign policy, and the perception of the relevance of the Russo-Japanese War to the controversy between Pan-Islamism and Secularism factions on the future of the nationalism in Egypt and the whole Middle East. Mustafa Kamel, author of The Rising Sun, a book that praised the rise of Japan’s power in the world, as an Eastern power, is cited by Egyptian

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historians as an enthusiastic nationalist, and as a promoter of the initiative towards liberalism in Egypt. He was seen as a member of the secular stream in the national debate. Together with Muhammad Farid, Ahmed Lutfi al-Sa’id and others, he established and led the “Movement for the Revival of the Nation” which was later known by the name “The National Party.” Kamel tried to convince European individuals and governments to support the demand for the British exit from Egypt, a promise given by many British governments but never kept. Kamel also established a daily Arabic newspaper which was the voice of the National Party, and also founded a boys’ school which was named after him. The Russo-Japanese War made a big impression on Mustafa Kamel. Two months before the end of the war, on June 9, 1905, he wrote a letter to Mrs. Juliette Adam in which he expressed his enthusiastic support for Japan:9 You are surprised that I’m supporting the Japanese. The whole nation agrees with me. Please investigate the subject from the Egyptian and Muslim point of view. Of the two combatants, Japan has done no harm to Egypt or the Islam, whereas Russia did most damage to Egypt at the time when she was flourishing under Muhammad Ali by burning her fleets together with treacherous England, and the eternally doubledealing France. By her determined opposition to Muhammad Ali, she deeply wronged Islam and the Muslims. She is the primary enemy. On the other hand, it is not the alliance between Japan and England, that destroys the independence of my country, but the entente between treacherous England and France. Hence, why should I be anti-Japanese? I, the admirer of Patriotism, I who see the Japanese as the best example of patriotism? Is not Japan, the only Eastern nation to put Europe in its place? So why cannot I love them?10 RASHID RIDA AND AL-MANAR

In this section we will focus on the effect of the Russo-Japanese War on the Islamic periodical Al-Manar which was published in Egypt between the years 1897 and 1935.11 The editor of this journal was Rashid Rida, an ‘Alem originally from Syria.12 The journal dealt with a range of problems which Western occupation caused for the Islamic religion, inside and outside Egypt, during the period in which the question of national identity was being raised. Al-Manar was initially (between the years 1898 and 1900) a weekly newspaper with eight pages, but during its ninth year (1906–07) it became a monthly newspaper. During the first four years after its foundation, it had a fairly small circulation, but later this expanded.13 The newspaper’s editor had two prominent orientations in Egyptian intellectual thought at that time. On one hand, it was the PanIslamic identity which was consolidated in the last third of the nineteenth century.14 This orientation saw political unity as an integral part

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of Islam which is a perfect moral, cultural, legal, social political system. This meant political and spiritual solidarity with the Ottoman Empire, expressed by loyalty to the Khalif who was the head of the community of Believers, and acceptance of his authority as an alternative to a total submission to Europe. Such an ideology called for the establishment of an Islamic state which would include all the countries where Muslims could be found. This orientation led to an examination of methods of addressing the challenge that the “West” had posed to Muslim society in order to respond to this challenge by strengthening the essence of Islam and its reestablishment.15 On the other hand, Rida supported also the concept of “Easternism,” a trend that consolidated itself in Egypt after World War I, but whose first signs can be traced in the intellectual debate that evolved during the nineteenth century. After 1914, many intellectuals sought an alternative to the Ottoman Empire and the continuation of the contacts with the East. The alternative they found was “Easternism.”16 The aim was to spread knowledge and fraternity among the Eastern nations without reference to religion and race, and to create a reform or awakening. Another target of the Eastern philosophers was to consolidate Afro-Asian unity in order to foil the Western intention of denying the cultural uniqueness of the East, including unique Eastern values, contents, and symbols. The philosophers also claimed that the East should formulate for itself a Pan-Eastern loyalty, which would highlight the national-cultural uniqueness of the East, but also selectively merge within it Western ideas, institutions, and innovations.17 JAPAN’S IMAGE AS REFLECTED IN AL-MANAR

Japan took a considerable place in the intellectual debate which was conducted in Al-Manar. The very extensive discussion of the Russo-Japanese War in Al-Manar may seem surprising since Japan is not an Islamic country – and even if there were any Muslims there, it was not they who justified discussion of the war. Furthermore, Japan at that period was not part of the Middle East as conceived by the Egyptian intellectual. When the intellectuals described the international balance of power in the context of opposition to the European powers, Japan was usually perceived as peripheral, as a secondary actor lacking any ability to make any significant contribution towards moving events significant to the Middle East. It could not supply, for example, arms, support or protection for Middle Eastern countries. Although this conception was influenced by power relations at that time, Rashid Rida could not ignore the influence of the Russo-Japanese War on the mood in Egypt at the time of the evolution of nationalism there. Any defeat of Western powers was a source of inspiration. The sudden rise of Japan as a modern state stimulated the imagination of many intellectuals in Egypt and the Middle East as whole. They admired Japan for daring to stand against what was considered in the Muslim world as a Western superpower.18

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Rida wrote a good deal about Japan in Al-Manar, a country that had entered the international consciousness as one of the most powerful countries in the twentieth century, at least in the area of industry. Beyond that, he tried to learn about the Japanese methods in order to evaluate and understand its success, and to draw conclusions with a view to outlining a course of development and progress of the Islamic nation. Through this discussion Rida tried to show that the concept of Muslim “bad luck,” in his opinion, was not acceptable, and the Muslims should reject it.19 In his discussion on Japan, Rida used two basic concepts –“East” and “West.” The distinction between East and West was very explicit in Rida’s writings whether he himself saw this distinction as a reality or copied the concepts from his sources. The West meant specifically the European Christian countries, whereas the East included all the Middle Eastern countries and Asia, meaning the entire geographic area comprising mainly Muslim countries and vast Muslim civilizations. Today, Japan is considered to be a modern, industrial, Western nation, but in those days Japan was not perceived that way, at least not in the eyes of the intellectual in the Muslim world. For them, Japan was an Eastern nation, because its people were living and had always lived in the “far” East. In contrast, Russia was considered to be a “Western” nation, although its domains extended to the edge of eastern Asia. THE IMAGE OF THE WAR IN AL-MANAR

The articles on Japan in Al-Manar began to appear from its first volume in 1897 and dealt mainly with socio-cultural aspects. However, Japan gained a lot of attention in the sixth and seventh volumes that appeared during the years of the Russo-Japanese War itself. Rida reported on the war’s development as it happened. He revealed great knowledge not only of events linked to the progress of the war, but also of every country involved: its state, its military readiness, and its previous interests.20 According to Rida’s description, the Russian army comprised at peacetime almost two million soldiers, and in theory could have recruited about four and a half million soldiers, were it not for financial and moral difficulties. The Russian fleet, in the years before the war, had grown to become the third biggest fleet in the world, after those of Britain and France. But according to the reports out of one hundred Russian battleships deployed in different seas, there were in fact only fifty fit for combat. According to Rida, the Russian nation, from a political and social point of view, was sunk in ignorance and tyranny because the Russian politicians were not capable of the administration of so huge a country as Russia: there was, therefore, a need for economical, political, military, administrative, and educational reforms. Rida described Russia as “a boy in his twenties, while Germany is in its thirties, England in its middle age, the forties, and France is closer to the fifties.” Rida mentioned Russian indifference and confidence in her own power, a belief

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that strengthened her self-assurance that Japan would not dare to fight against her.21 He saw Russia as a country with imperialistic intentions which had reached an agreement with Germany and France intended to force Japan to withdraw from Manchuria and free Korea. As soon as Japan withdrew from Manchuria, Russia took it over, using as an excuse the desire to maintain the unity of China, a claim that only served to demonstrate her imperialistic intentions.22 Compared to Russia, Japan had made progress socially, politically, and militarily. She could have recruited, at time of peace, three hundred thousand soldiers only, and her fleet was much smaller than that of Russia, comprising only thirty-three ships. The Japanese, however, had many dockyards for repairing ships and minerals such as stone and coal readily available, which facilitated production and repair work. Also, Japan was capable of transferring supplies, equipment, ammunition, and soldiers rapidly by sea and land – an obvious advantage over the cumbersome character and lack of mobility of the Russian army.23 The war descriptions reported by Rida were focused on two fronts: the sea front and the offensive against the main Russian stronghold of Port Arthur harbor that symbolized Russian control over eastern Asia. Rida emphasized Japan’s naval supremacy in that its fleet was more ready for war and its sailors more professional and experienced than the Russian ones. He described in detail the difficult Japanese siege on Port Arthur, and when the stronghold surrendered he claimed that Japan was the formal victor.24 Rida wanted to paint a full picture of the war, so he did not neglect the Western powers but informed the reader about the views and trends prevailing in each of these relating to the combatants, and the variety of their interests in the war.25 England and the United States, in Rida’s opinion, were not eager to be involved in the war, but they both believed that the West might face a bigger danger if Russia won. In the case of a Russian victory, the Western powers would face two alternative courses of action: the first would be through peaceful negotiation, meaning the signing of an agreement that would force Russia to give up Manchuria and Korea while imposing economic sanctions on Japan, and the second would be through armed combat. Rida claimed that either possible outcome of the war would create problems: there would be difficulty in forcing Russia to sign an agreement, and there was a concern, on the other hand, Japan’s victory would destabilize the Western powers’ balance of control in the world. It was not clear until almost the end of the war which way the balance of power would tend.26 Rida believed that the Muslim world should prefer Russian weakness, because of its being a Western state and because it was a threat to free Muslim countries such as the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, he thought that the war would not resolve the general “Eastern problem,” and that the strong Western countries would continue the policy of “swallowing” the weaker countries, as they had

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always done.27 Rida concluded that the Russian surrender to the Japanese caused huge reverberations in the entire world. In his opinion, the Japanese victory was not due only to Japanese military capability, but also to the Japanese leaders’ able political and military planning. The Japanese victory caused the rise of Japan’s political and military prestige and the corresponding decrease of that of Russia.28 Rida claimed that the war, apart from resulting in Russian defeat, demonstrated basic defects in the Russian system. As a result, the Russian people understood the need for a fundamental and radical change. The stillborn revolution in 1905 was thus one of the results of the war and of the perceived need for change.29 THE VICTORY OF THE “EAST” OVER THE “WEST”

Through the descriptions of the Russo-Japanese War, Rida tried to convey to the Muslim world a message of hope, because in his opinion, the Japanese had not discarded their own traditions although they had adopted Western technology and weapons and by doing so had succeeded in defeating the West. Furthermore, Japan had succeeded in its cultural borrowing from the West thanks to Japanese consensus on the essence of the borrowing.30 Already in the first volume, seven years before the outbreak of the war, Rida wrote about Japan’s uniqueness: The first nation that understood [that if the East did not stand firmly again Western occupation, it would fall under its attacks in every field of life], was Japan. But since it understood the dangers entailed in the events coming from the West – Japan had learned [Western] culture and used it in order to defend itself with these weapons [of Western culture], so that she had no fear of the Western nations or of their power.31

Rida claimed that the Eastern peoples should consolidate for themselves a Pan-Eastern loyalty in the spirit of modern times, which would be an effective response to the Western intention to deny the Eastern national-cultural uniqueness. Rida saw the revival of the East as depending on its capability to merge within its own unique heritage Western ideas, institutions, and innovations which would be selectively assimilated. The adoption he suggested included industry and scientific and technical skills; and he even suggested studying Western history in order to discover the root causes of the progress of the West so that these could be adopted within the Islamic context.32 In Rida’s view, imperialistic Western interference in Eastern matters was a factor that prevented the East from achieving the freedom and independence to choose what it needed for achieving progress on the one hand, and for keeping its own cultural heritage on the other. In his opinion, Japan was one of the only Eastern nations which had succeeded in evolving the same way the West had done, and even so had kept its unique identity, character, and culture. In this vision, the criticism of the

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Islamic world was apparent: that it, in contrast to the Japanese, had not succeeded in preserving and developing its culture in the face of the Western penetration. Rida claimed that the responsibility for finding a solution lay on the shoulders of the individuals who had not succeeded in preserving the Islamic character and identity.33 Rida believed that the victory of “Eastern” Japan over “Western” Russia in 1905 disproved all claims about the inferiority of the East compared to the West. In Rida’s view, this success was achieved due to the moral and military independence of the Japanese spirit and to the guiding hand of the Japanese leaders which had remained unchanged for thousand of years. The Muslims, on the other hand, were leaderless, or lacked leaders who could guide them to an appropriate adoption of the advantages of the Western world, and help them to avoid the harmful influences which could result from such adoption.34 Rida also noticed the Western fear of the creation of a strong industrial country in the East, and regarded with suspicion Europe’s striving against the “unity” of the nations of the East. He thought that Europe wanted the disintegration of the unity of the Muslims in order to facilitate its conquest of Eastern territories, as in the Middle East. He found evidence for this view in the Western press where, he claimed, it was stated that the fast progress and development of Japan caused unease to the politicians in the West, who constantly warned against the expected danger to Europe if the Eastern nations united:35 The war teaches a great lesson about Japanese scientific, industrial, and cultural progress. All the lies of those who claimed that Oriental races were inferior to whites in ability were refuted. Europeans acknowledged that their progress did not exceed that of the Japanese, and that this Oriental nation had achieved in a quarter of a century what had taken Europe centuries, and reached a parallel level of progress.36

Rida added that not only had Japan, a small and backward Eastern nation, beaten Russia, a huge progressive Western nation, but that it had succeeded in undermining the stability of Russia and causing inner turbulence there that had led eventually to a revolution. The victory had raised Japan’s status among the nations of the world and gained for her respect and appreciation.37 In contrast, the nations of the Middle East could not recognize opportunities that they could have used to help themselves and beat the West solely because they did not believe in their own talents and hidden potential. These nations had, therefore, continued their submission to the West and could not escape it in order to prove themselves, as the Japanese had done. Rida expressed this allegorically: The sleeper [the Muslims] had been awakened, but the sleep yet fills its eyes, and he still has to march a long way until he will be on the road of progress and will reach the same status as the Japanese had done in the way of equality to the West, so he could beat the West.38

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The Japanese political leaders, at that time, had gained Rida’s admiration because they had pragmatism and analytical skills that had helped them to adopt any technology, institutions, and ideas that seemed to them appropriate to the development of the country, without harming its unique identity, culture, and character. For the Japanese, acquiring Western tools and ideas meant being the owner of Western interests while keeping the Japanese patriotism, culture, and identity. Despite its fast modernization, Japan had kept a large part of its heritage. For example, family life did not change, nor the status of women. Even the traditional costume, cuisine, concepts of obedience, respect, and admiration of nature were not disturbed by the acquisition of Western ideas and thinking patterns.39 Rida mentioned readiness as an important component in the Japanese ability to adopt different elements from the West while keeping a separate identity. He claimed that Western patterns must not be adopted without prior readiness for them, because then the adoption would become blind imitation. In contrast to the Muslims, the Japanese had succeeded in a short period of time in readying themselves for “selective” acquisition from the West and in preparing their political and cultural foundations. By doing so, they had succeeded in acquiring appropriate tools from the West without harming their unique character and identity. This readiness had helped the Japanese to progress in science and industry within the short period of twenty-five years only.40 An illustration Rida provides was the adoption of Western educational principles by the Japanese Imperial family. They had drunk in thirst the Western educational principles and they did not feel its influence on their culture and tradition, because they were ready for it in time. Traditional rules did not stop their thoughts, and they had succeeded in arousing the spirit of the Western education in the hearts of their subjects. Later, this spirit had passed on gradually form one stage to another until it became a low in Japan, as we see today.41

Had it not been for their ability and cultural talent and their intuitive leaning towards the European sources, they would not have succeeded in obtaining the Western education. Due to these qualities, claimed Rida, Japan succeeded so well in catching up with the West as to become a progressive modern country, especially in science and industry. Rida thought that part of the reason for this rapid progress was the separation between religion and state in the Japanese kingdom. He supported the Japanese policy that ensured religious freedom as long as this freedom did not harm or oppose civic duties. Rida included the progress in science and industry within the concept of “civil duties.” He saw a correlation between religion and culture in Japan, and tried consistently in his writing to demonstrate, especially to the conservatives in the Pan-Islamic stream in Egypt, that it was possible to preserve cultural features while

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adopting technological innovations. In his opinion Japan was an excellent example of this.42 Throughout this debate, Rida made a distinction between the concepts of Modernization and Westernization, concepts that were at the center of the intellectual debate in Egypt. For him, modernization meant selective acquisition of scientific and technological skills from the West, while keeping a unique Egyptian identity. The Japanese example teaches us, so he claimed, that it is possible to acquire modernization if the nation unifies around mutual aims and if there is an efficient government directing the nation toward industrialization, a mission the Muslims could not achieve, in contrast to the Japanese. On the other hand, the concept of Westernization according to Rida, presupposes that the Muslim nation is by its very nature retarded, and that to extricate itself from this degeneration the Muslims should cut off their past connections and rebuild the Muslim nation according to the European model. From the above, we see that in Rida’s eyes, Japan had experienced modernization while Egypt had only Westernized.43 NOTES 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

10

11

12

13 14 15

16 17

For a comparison between the procedures in both countries see Ward and Rustow, 1964. Afary, 1996: 37, 181. Bagley, 1983: 50–51. Afary, 1996: 36–37, 180–181; Khalidi et al., 1991: 76. Esenbel, 2000: 95–99, 112–118. Bernard, 1997: 284. Bernard, 1997: 284. Esenbel, 2000: 95–99; Davidson, 1990: 80; Berkes, 1959: 277; Hanioglu, 2001: 35, 160, 297, 302, 304. On Mustafa Kamel and the modern history of Egypt, see Goldschmidt, 1994: 156. Mustafa Kamel’s book appears in the catalogs under Mustafa Kamel, Alshams al-mushriqa (1904). The letter is a part of a correspondence between Kamel and Mrs. Juliette Adam, published by the School Named after Mustafa Kamel, The Mustafa Kamel School, in Kamel, 1909: 202. Ayalon, 1995: 50–53. See also Biernatzki, 1993: 125–137; Schleifer, 1993: 163–177; Vatikiotis, 1985: 186. On Rashid Rida see Safran, 1961: 75; Kerr, 1966: 54. See the entry ‘Rashid Rida’ in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1995, VIII: 446–447. See also Tauber, 1994: 195; Adams, 1933: 176, 178. Adams, 1933: 180. Sharabi, 1970: 109. On the pan-Islam in the Middle East and in Egypt see Landau, 1990. See also Sharabi, 1970: 24–25; Safran, 1961: 59; Kerr, 1966: 54; Vatikiotis, 1985: 224. Binder, 1964: 25; Gershoni and Jankowski, 1986: 255–264. Wendel, 1972: 21; Vatikiotis, 1985: 225; Kedourie, 1993.

Distant Echoes 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

455

Dawisha, 1985: 13–15. Haim, 1971: 5–6l; Mohammad, 1960: 65. AM, 1904–1905: 92, 630–635. AM, 1903–1904: 946, 952. AM, 1903–1904: 947–948, 952. AM, 1903–1904: 947–948. AM, 1904–1905: 300. Kuwabara, 1983: 86. AM, 1903–1904: 949–951. AM, 1903–1904: 949–951. AM, 1904–1905: 300. AM, 1904–1905: 880; Haim, 1971: 11. AM, 1903–1904: 949–950; 1907–1908: 92; Shahin, 1989: 123. AM 1904 – 1905: 300. AM, 1904–1905: 300; Gershoni and Jankowski, 1986: 70; Shahin, 1989: 124; Binder, 1964: 25. AM, 1903–1904: 949–950; 1907–1908: 92; Shahin, 1989: 123. AM, 1903–1904: 947–948. AM, 1903–1904: 950. AM 1904 – 1905: 629. AM, 1904–1905: 880. AM 1903 – 1904: 952. Fairbank et al., 1985: 113; Maurer, 1951: 100, 113; Haim, 1971: 6, 10. AM, 1903–1904: 953; 1904–1905: 29; 1906–1907: 705–706; 1907–1908: 92; 1913: 793. AM, 1907–1908: 921. Maurer, 1951: 99–100. AM, 1903–1904: 949–950, 705–706; 1911: 395–396.

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Index

Abdulhamid II, 383–5, 389–91 Adam, Juliette, 447 Admiral Nakhimov, 345 Aehrenthal, Alois Lexa von, 371, 375 Afghanistan, 76, 203, 271, 293, 302, 310, 408, 450 Africa, 86, 109, 307, 308, 333, 342, 359, 369, 371–2, 435, 440 Aguinaldo, Emilio, 417, 420, 422 Aikoku-fujin-kai, 161 Akabane, Shiro¯, 89 Akashi, Motojiro¯, 79–80, 84–5, 269 Akiduki, Satsuo, 89 Akiyama, Saneyuki, 72, 156n Albert Wilhelm Heinrich, Prince, 335 Al-Din, Musafir, Shah, 445 Aleichem, Sholem, 395 Aleksandrovich, Aleksandr, 387 Aleksandrovich, Mikhail, 32, 34, 36 Aleksandrovsk, 94, 96–8, 100 Alekseev, Evgenii, 40, 53, 67, 69 Alekseev, Mikhail, 300, 303 Alexander II, 345 Alexander II, Tsar, 48 Alexander III, Tsar, 34, 40, 49, 393 Algeciras Conference of 1906, 315, 348 Al-Manar, 447–9 al-Mashriqi, Ahmad, 397 al-Sa’id, Ahmed Lutfi, 447 American Civil War, 5, 109, 189, American Standard Oil Company, 131 Amur region, 48–50, 53–4, 56–7, 282 Amur, River, 17, 50, 57, 60, 197, 266

Anatolia, 271 Angell, Norman, 319, 329 Anglo-American Unlimited Arbitration Treaty (1911), 402, 410 Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, 302 Anglo-French Entente Cordiale (1904), 127, 131, 308, 311, 313–15, 333, 335, 436, 440 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 27, 85, 127, 308, 309–10, 312, 314–15, 328, 370, 401–403, 405, 409–10, 417, 426 Anglo-Japanese Treaty (1902), 121, 312 Anglo-Russian Convention, 301, 315, 390, 404, 410 Aniwa Bay, 96 Ankara, 271–2, 274 Annam, 343 Annexation of Korea (1910), 3, 401–10 Antisemitism, 123, 131, 133, 393–4, 398–400 Antung (Dandong), 405 Aoki, Norizumi, 85, 349 Aoyanagi, Katsutoshi, 270 Araki, Sadao, 269 Army, Imperial Russian, 5, 47, 52, 67–8, 70, 76, 79, 82, 85, 101, 144, 237, 291, 297, 299–301, 316, 335, 352, 361, 385–6, 388, 394–5, 399, 417, 449–50

498

Index

Army, Japanese First, 68 Army, Japanese Fourth, 68–9 Army, Japanese Second, 68 Army, Japanese Third, 68, 70 Army, Kwantung, 269–70, 275 Army, Manchurian, 82, 85, 210, 283, 285, 287 Army, Red, 300 Arnold-Forster, H.O., 310 Arsen’ev, Vladimir K., 59 Artillery, 5, 35, 70, 96, 284, 292, 296, 319–20, 323–4, 326, 339, 340, 345, 360 Ashmead-Bartlett, E., 327–8 Asiatische Geschichten, 374 Astafieva-Pukhir, Varvara, 211 Asya Taburu (Asian Battalion), 271 Austria-Hungary, 140–1, 292, 294, 299, 301, 307, 316, 367–79, 393 Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 301, 410 Austro-Hungary, 7, 424, 446 Aventine Hill, 235–6 Aver’ianov, P.I., 299–300, 302–304 Axis Alliance, 268 Azuma, Otohiko, 89 Ba Maw, 423 Baba, Tsunego, 258 Baikal, Lake, 47–8, 51, 56, 58–9, 68, 295 Baikov, Nikolai, 52 Baku, 301 Balfour, Arthur, 127–8, 310–13, 315, 319, 433, 438–9 Balkan Peninsula, 81, 140, 301, 410 Balkan Wars, 316 Balmont, Konstantin, 243 Baltic Fleet, Russian, 5, 70–3, 80, 83, 86–7, 281, 314, 335–9, 341, 345, 388, 413–14, 417 Bank of Japan, 19, 114, 118, 124, 152–3, 157n, 397–8 Baratz, Chaim, 394 Baring Brothers & Co., 124 Baring, Maurice, 322, 328 Barkoi (Dawn), 396

Battle of Borodino, 297 Battle of Gallipoli, 3, 95 Battle of Gettysburg, 109 Battle of Kut Al Amara, 271 Battle of Liaoyang, 5, 84, 328 Battle of Mukden, 4, 144, 296, 343 Battle of Nanshan, 68 Battle of Port Arthur, 67–70 Battle of Sedan, 5 Battle of Sha-ho, 5, 69, 321, 324 Battle of Tashihchiao, 5 Battle of the Korean Straits, 86 Battle of the Yalu River, 68 Battle of Tsushima, 2, 72, 84, 86–7, 104, 345, 347, 377, 397, 422 Batum, 301 Baumgarten, Olga Aleksandrovna von, 204–206, Bebel, August, 42 Beijing, 19, 26, 43, 50, 68, 84–5, 370, 375–6, 403 Belgium, 360 Benckendorff, Aleksandr, 433, 436 Benois, Alexandre (Aleksandr Benua), 218, 221, 223–6, 229 Bering Sea, 55 Berlin Covenant of 1878, 387 Berliner Tagesblatt, 356 Bessarabia, 393 Bhutan, 432 Bijutsu shimpo¯ (“Art News”), 160, 163 Birich, Kh. P., 99 Bismarck, Otto von, 33, 333 Björkö Treaty of 1905, 130, 315, 348 Black Hundreds, the, 399–400 Black Sea, 39, 337, 405 Black Sea Fleet, 87, 386, 388 Black Sea Volunteer Fleet. See Volunteer Fleet Blake, Robert, 188 Bloch, Ivan Stanislavovich, 319–20, 327 Bloch, Jan, 35 Bloody Sunday, 224, 240–1, 281–2, 314, 343, 363 Boer War, 4, 26, 127, 140, 142, 205, 302, 308–309, 431, 441

Index Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, 60, 269, 404 Bonaparte, Napoleon I, 297–8, 359 Bond, Brian, 327 Borodino, 345 Bosnian Crisis of 1908–09, 316 Bosphorus Straits, 71, 294–5, 387, 405 Boxer expedition, 13, 16, 26–7, 68 Boxer Rebellion, 8, 26, 52, 150, 207, 208, 308, 336, 425 Britain, 7, 8, 17, 18, 23, 27, 33, 50, 52–3, 68, 71, 111, 114, 118, 126–8, 130–1, 135, 140–2, 145, 149, 155n, 263, 266, 276, 302–303, 307–17, 319–29, 332–4, 341–2, 347–8, 369, 371, 372–4, 379, 387–90, 402–405, 409–10, 417, 431–2, 438–40, 444, 449 British foreign policy, 127, 307–17, 327, 389 British Admiralty, 86, 310 British India, 299, 302, 316, 431 British War Office, 85, 310, 441 Briusov, Valerii Iakovlevich, 233–9, 241–2 Brooke, Guy (Lord), 321–3, 324–5, 327–8 Brusilov, Aleksei, 300 Buddhism, 190, 265, 433 Bulgaria, 446 Bülow, Bernhard Fürst von, 332, 347, 349n, 360, 376 Burleigh, Bennet, 322, 327–8 Burma, 268, 374, 416, 423–5 Bushido¯, 52, 193 Caesar, Julius, 233, 236–41 Cam Ranh Bay, 72–3, 343 Cape of Good Hope, 72 Capitalism, 42–3 Carnegie, Andrew, 35 Cassel, Ernst, 124–7, 131, 134 Caucasus, 53, 293, 299, 301, 304 Cavalry, 199, 285, 296–7, 322–3 Central Asia, 50, 52, 56, 68, 76, 292–3,

499

297, 299, 308–309, 403, 432–3, 440 Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 374 Ch’ang-te, 267 Chamberlain, Austen, 312 Changsha, 267–8 Chekhov, Anton, 216 Chemulpo, 67, 86, 176 China, 2–3, 7–8, 14–15, 17–18, 18–20, 22–3, 25–6, 27, 36, 38, 42, 47, 50–1, 51–2, 59–60, 65–7, 68, 72, 81, 85, 87, 110–11, 112, 118, 120–1, 166, 191, 197, 233, 238, 257, 264–5, 267–8, 272–3, 275–6, 293, 299, 302, 308–10, 315, 320, 329, 334, 336, 343, 346, 355, 369–71, 373–5, 378–9, 398–9, 404–406, 409–10, 413–17, 419, 421, 424, 425, 428n, 431–2, 442, 450 Chinchou (Kin-chau; pinyin: Chinhsien), 116, 209, 406, 409 Chinese Eastern Railway, 37–8, 46–7, 51, 66, 69, 81, 292, 300, 406, 416 Chinhae, 86, 344 Chita, 282–3, 285–7 Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, 398 Churin Company, 51 Cixi, Empress Dowager, 375 Cold War, 4, 164 Colonialism, 42, 194, 264, 415, 424 Combined Fleet, Japanese, 68, 71–2, 82, 86, 156n Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), 309 Communism, 278, 332 Community of St. Eugene, 204 Confucianism, 186, 421–2 Constantinople. See also Istanbul, 7, 238, 387, 389, 397, 444 Cossacks, 48, 54, 59, 209, 224, 285, 324, 326 Crete, 342, 446 Cribb, Robert, 415

500

Index

Crimea, 191, 322–4, 329 Crimean War, 5, 48–50 Cromer, Earl of, 127 Cuba, 24, 372, 427n Cust, Harry, 438–9 Daiheki Shrine, 399 Dai-Ichi Bank, 398 Dairen. See Dalny Dalai Lama, 430, 432 Dalian. See Dalny Dalny (Ch. Dalian; Jpn. Dairen; Rus. Dalnii), 18, 68–9, 275, 382n, 417 Dane, Louis W., 431–2, 436 Danilov. Vladimir N., 304 Dardanelle Straits, 387, 405 De Castries Bay, 97 Delcassé, Théophile, 341 Denmark, 86 Der Floh, 368, 373, 377 Derbinskoe, 97 Diet (Japan’s legislature), 19, 79, 146, 250–1, 255, 257–9, 260, 265 Dilon, M.L., 213 Disraeli, Benjamin, 1 Dobuzhinskii, Mstislav, 225 Dogger Bank incident, 73, 314–15, 340–1, 347, 392 Dollar Diplomacy, 408 Dorjieff, Argvan, 430, 432 Doryan, 283 Do¯shikai (The Association of Like Minds), 22–3, 252, 260 Dreadnought, 5, 145, 157 Dukhovskii, S.M., 49 Duma, 241, 288–9, 400 Durnovo, Pyotr N., 283, 303 Dutch East Indies, 7 Eastern Crisis of 1878, 292 Edirne Straits convention of 1829, 386 Education Law of 1872, 185 Edward VII, King, 310, 334 Egypt, 87, 127, 270, 384, 414, 436–40, 446–7, 447–8, 453–4 Ehrenpreis, Jacob, 396

Elder Statesmen. See genro¯ Ellinskii, B., 100 Emirate of Bukhara, 295 Emperor Meiji. See Meiji, Emperor Engels, Friedrich, 42 English Channel, 72 Enomoto, Momotaro¯, 275 Ertugˇrul, 384, 391n Eurasia, 36, 48, 57, 291, 298, 303 Evans, Robley, 67 Exhibition For The Artists’ Hospital, 228 Falkenegg, Baron von, 413 Far Eastern Crisis of 1897–98, 14, 17–18, 18–21, 23, 28, 384 Farid, Muhammad, 447 Fasching 1904, 372, 380n Fascism, 264, 278, 332 Fedorovna, Aleksandra, 39 Fedorovna, Marie, 39 Felkerzam, Dmitrii von (Fölkersam), 87, 342 Feminism, 161, 204, 216 Fengtien (Fengtian, Liaoning Province), 405, 406, 409, 411n Fenollosa, Ernest, 160 Figaro, 368, 373, 376 Filipino independence, 420 Finland, 348 First Depression, 19 First Hague Peace Conference, 35, 324 Formosa. See Taiwan Fourteen Points, 424 France, 16–17, 22, 81, 130, 140–1, 208, 310–11, 313, 314, 328, 329, 332, 333–5, 337, 341–2, 347–8, 360–1, 369, 372, 379, 384, 402–403, 416, 421, 425, 428n, 431, 436, 438, 444, 447, 449–50 Franco-Japanese Convention, 402–403 Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, 5, 321 Franco-Russian Agreement of 1894, 311

Index Franco-Russian Alliance, 127, 130, 307, 316, 333, 403, 410 Franz Joseph I, Emperor, 369 French Indochina. See Vietnam French Revolution, 1 French-Japanese Convention (FrancoJapanese agreement of 1907), 404 Frunze, M.V., 300 Fukushima, Yasumasa, 52, 81 Fukuzawa, Yukichi, 7, 20 Futabata, Shimei, 3 Gaedke, Richard, 356–62 Gascoyne-Cecil, William, 325 Gasparov, Mikhail L., 233 Gedroits, Vera Ignatievna, 208 Geller, I.I., 213 Geneva, 268 Genro¯, 19, 249–50, 252–3, 254, 256, 259 Gensan, 70 Genyo¯sha (Dark/Black Ocean Society), 53, 266–7, 272, 274 Geok Tepe expedition of 1881, 294 Germany, 16–17, 18–19, 21–3, 25, 33, 37, 127, 130, 134, 140–1, 266, 271, 292, 294, 296, 299, 301–303, 307–308, 313–14, 316, 325, 332–48, 352–66, 367, 369, 372, 379, 404, 410, 413–14, 416, 441, 449–50 Gershuni, Grigori, 398 Gia-Long, 422 Giolitti, Giovanni, 376 Glinskii, Boris, 31 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 367, 378 Goken undo¯ (Movement to protect constitutional government), 259 Gold Standard, 115, 118, 120, 121 Goldstein, Melvyn, 442 Goldszmidt, Henryk. See Janusz Korczak Golgotha, 222 Gollerbakh, Erik, 232

501

Goltz, Colmar Freiher von der, 385 Gol-uchowski, Agenor Graf, 369–71, 372, 376 Goto Islands, 86 Grabar, Igor, 225 Graetz, Friedrich, 377 Great Han Empire, 3 Greater East Asian Zone of Prosperity, 57 Greece, 392n, 446 Greinz, Rudolf, 212 Grey, Edward, 319, 409 Griswold, Alfred Whitney, 408 Gulf War, 203 Gumilev, Nikolai, 238 gunshin, 2 Habsburg dynasty, 369–70, 379 Hague, 35 Halstead, Murat, 1 Hàm Nghi, Emperor, 421 Hamburg-America Line, 342, 346 Hamidian administration, 385, 388, 390 Hamilton, Angus, 325 Hamilton, George, 308, 433–5, 439–40 Hara, Takashi (Kei), 251–3, 253–4, 256–7, 258–60 Haraguchi, Kanenari, 96–7 Harbin, 70, 74, 81, 85, 209, 282–3, 285, 287, 357, 404, 406 Hardinge, Charles, 75–6, 433 Harriman, Edward Henry, 406 Hasegawa, Yoshimosuke, 89 Hashimoto, Kingoro¯, 271 Hattori, Unokichi, 273 Hay, John, 135 Hayashi, Gonsuke, 89 Hayashi, Tadasu, 128, 131, 402 Ha-Zefirah, 395 Hilungkiang (Heilongjiang), 197 Heimin Shinbun, 161, 166 Heine, Heinrich, 367, 378 Hellville, 342–3 Herzl, Theodor, 393 Hibiya riots, 76 Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, 133

502

Index

Hintze, Paul von, 346, 362–3 Hiroshima, 74, 177, 234 Hisamatsu, Sadakoto, 89 Hobson, John, 42 Hokusai (Katsushika Hokusai), 234 Holland, 81 Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, 125, 127 Hong Kong, 84, 87, 336, 419–20, 422, 429 Hopman, Albert, 355 Hosokawa, Muhammad Abdul Muniam, 275 House of Commons, British, 319, 396 House of Peers, Japanese, 250–1, 256–7, 259 Hsinking, 70 Hsipingkai (Shiheigai), 70 Humanism, 172, 176 Humoristische Blätter, 368 Hunhuzes. See Hunkhuz Hünkar I˙skelesi Straits Convention of 1833, 386 Hunkhuz, 209 Iaponskii, Nikolai, archbishop (Ivan D. Kasatki), 99, 101 Ibn Saud, King, 266, 275, 279n Ibrahim, Abdurresid, 269–78 Ibrahim, Hafiz, 397 Ichijo, Saneteru, 89 Ienaga, Saburo¯, 163 Iguchi, Sho¯go, 79 Iijima, Kametaro¯, 89 Iimura, Jo, 271–2 Ijichi, Kosuke, 89 Ijuin, Hikokichi, 89 Imber, Herz Naphtali, 396 Imperial Academy, 219, 224 Imperial Defense Plan, 143–4, 146 Imperial Industrial Bank of Japan, 118 Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts, 222 Imperialism, 3, 31, 42–3, 46–7, 49–50, 65, 268, 277–8, 370, 424, 444, 446 Inagami, Manjiro¯, 89

Inchon, 67, 86, 176 Indian National Congress, 414, 424 Infantry, 70, 96, 232, 284, 287, 320, 323, 359, 364 Inner Mongolia, 403 Inoue, Kaoru, 249 Inoue, Katsunosuke, 89 Inoue, Kowashi, 187 Intelligence, military, 78–90, 267, 291 Inukai, Tsuyoshi, 259, 269–70 Iran, 295, 302, 310, 313, 408, 414, 431–2, 444–6, 450 Iraq, 203, 271 Irkutsk, 47, 53–4, 283, 287 Ishii, Hakutei, 161 Ishikawa, Takuboku, 3 Ishimitsu, Makiyo, 85 Ishizaka, Zenjiro¯, 89 Islam, 238, 263–78, 301, 444, 447–8 Islam Dunyasi (The World of Islam), 271 Isogaya, Rensuke, 269 Istanbul. See also Constantinople, 270, 272–3, 278, 384–5, 388–9, 445 Itagaki, Seishiro¯, 269 Itagaki, Taisuke, 256 Ito¯, Hirobumi, 17, 19, 22, 66, 76, 249–50, 255–6, 325 Ivan the Terrible, Tsar, 135, 363, 396 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 233, 241–2 Ivanovna, Matilda, 39 Izvolskii, Aleksandr, 75, 300–301, 303, 310, 403, 406–407 J.P. Morgan & Co., 133 James, Lionel, 321 Japan, Art, 159–82 Economy, 112–14, 116–21, 139–55 Education, 185–200 Foreign policy, 15–18 Internal politics, 13–28, 247–61 Militarism, 200 Military conduct, 98–101 Military intelligence, 78–90 National identity, 182 War loans, 112–14, 116–21, 124–6

Index Jeune Ecole, 337 Jews, 123–4, 131, 133–4, 135–6, 372, 393–400 Jiji shinpo¯, 14 Jiyu¯ minken undo¯ (the Movement for liberty and people’s rights of 1870–80s), 249, 428n Johoji, Goro¯, 89 Jomini, Antoine Henri, 297 Kabuki, 182 Kabul, 274–5 Kaburagi Makoto, 86 Kairakuen, 21 Kaiserreich, 332 Kaiyuen, 70 Kala-i Sultaniyye Straits convention (1809), 386 Kalgan, 403 Kamakura era, 160, 183 (as Kamakura Period) Kamchatka, 55 Kamel, Mustafa, 446–7 Kamikaze, 193 Kamimura Hikonojo, 86 Kamoto, Toshio, 273 Karafuto. See Sakhalin Karymskoye, 81 Kashgaria, 293 Kataoka, Shichiro¯, 96 Kato, Tsunetada, 89 Katsura, Taro¯, 22, 28, 76, 105, 247–59, 401 Kawakami, Toshitsune, 22, 28, 76, 105, 247–8, 249–51, 251–3, 255–6, 256–8, 259, 401 Kawasaki, Ryo¯saburo¯, 89 Kemal Ataturk, Mustafa, 271 Kemuyama, Sentaro¯, 398 Kennedy, Paul, 369 Kenseihonto¯ (True constitutional party), 250, 253, 254, 257, 260 Kenseikai (the Association of constitutional politics), 260 Kenseito¯ (Constitutional party), 255, 261n Kenseito¯ Cabinet, 25

503

Kerenskii, Aleksandr, 56 Kerr, Walter, 311 Khabarovsk, 82, 101 Khabarovskii krai, 59 Khamba Jong, 434, 436 Khanate of Khiva, 293 Kharkov, 39, 207 Khodasevich, Vera, 227 Khuliganstvo, 285 Kiakhta, 50 Kikeriki, 368, 372–3, 375–6 Kin-chau. See Chinchou Kirin (Jilin), 197, 404–405 Kishinev, 393–4, 396–7 Kishinev pogrom, 133, 398 Kiyonaga (Torii Kiyonaga), 234 Kniaz Suvorov, 343, 345 Knox, Philander, 406 Kodama, Gentaro¯, 55 Koizuka, Ryu ¯, 22 Kokovtsov, Vladimir, 406 Kokumin do¯meikai, 22, 27 Kokumin Shimbun, 75 Kokumin sho¯ka-shu¯ (“Collection of school songs for citizens”), 187 Kokuminto¯, 260 Kokuryu ¯kai (Amur River Society), 53, 266–7, 269–70, 273–7 Kolchak government, 57–8 Ko¯muchi, Tomotsune, 22 Komura, Jutaro¯, 22, 66, 71, 74–6, 84, 377–8, 382n, 409 Ko¯no, Hironaka, 22, 251, 270 Konoe, Atsumaro, 25, 27 Korea, 2, 3, 6, 13–15, 23, 26, 27, 50–1, 52, 56–7, 65–6, 68, 70–1, 74, 79, 81–2, 84, 86, 90, 129, 151, 188, 197, 267, 311, 313, 320, 324–6, 328–9, 334, 336–7, 344, 346, 348, 371, 373–4, 378, 382n, 399, 401–10, 417, 418–19, 450 Korea’s annexation. See Annexation of Korea Korean Peninsula, 371, 402, 404, 407 Kori, Muhammad Abdul Valis Shozo¯, 275 Kornilov, Lavr G., 299

504

Index

Korotkevich, Haritina, 209 Kosugi, Misei, 176, 183n Ko¯toku, Shu ¯sui, 20 Koyama, Sakunosuke, 187, 197 Krasnoyarsk, 282, 285–8 Kravchenko, Nikolai, 223 Kreiser, Klaus, 426 Krik, Wilhelmina, 210 Kronstadt, 284, 286, 301 Kudo¯, Yukimoto, 22 Kuga, Katsunan, 16–17, 21, 23 Kuhara Mining Company, 56 Kuhn, Loeb & Co., 123, 125–6, 134–5 Kure Naval Shipyard, 145 Kurile Islands, 55, 93 Kurino, Shin’ichiro¯, 89 Kuroda, Kiyotaka, 249 Kuroki, Tametomo, 68, 182 Kuropatkin, Aleksei, 31, 40, 47, 67, 69, 94, 232, 293–8, 300, 321, 352–3, 355, 358–9 Kuskova, Ekaterina, 216 Kusumi, Onsaburo¯, 197 Kutakov, Leonid N., 408 Kyoto, 193, 393, 399 Lambsdorff, Gustav Graf von, 364 Lamsdorf, Vladimir, 43, 347, 387, 389, 403 Lansdowne, Henry, 127–8, 130, 309–13, 433 Lansere, Evgenii, 225 Lauenstein, Otto von, 352–7, 360 Lawton, Lancelot, 324 Lea, Homer, 328 League of Nations, 268 Lenin, Vladimir, 2, 43 Lessar, Pavel M., 293 Levant Herald, 385 Levitskii, Dmitrii, 223 Lezgaft, Petr F., 208 Lhasa, 430, 432–4, 436–7, 439–42 Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, 422 Liaodong Peninsula. See Liaotung Peninsula Liaoning, 197

Liaotung Peninsula (Liaodong Peninsula), 16–17, 27, 50, 68 Liaoyang, 5, 9n, 69, 84, 207, 210, 232, 281, 323–4, 328, 353, 356–7 Liapunov, Mikhail N., 94–7, 100–101, 102–104, 108n Libau (Libava), 72, 336–7, 340, 363–4 Linievich, Nikolai, 94, 232, 282–7, 290n, 298 List, Friedrich, 33–4 Lobanov-Rostovskii, Alexei, 49 Lombok Straits, 87 London Covenant of 1871, 387 London Stock Exchange, 110, 111 London Times, 110, 112–14, 116, 321–2, 335, 372, 430 Lucina, 241–2 Lüderitz Bay, 342 Lushun. See Port Arthur Luxembourg, 360 Lytton Report, 268 M.M. Warburg & Co., 134 MacDonald, Claude, 309 Madagascar, 72, 342 Madrid, 418 Makarov, Stepan, 71 Makenkov, Arkhip, 98–9 Makino, Nobuaki, 84 Malacca Straits, 72, 87, 343 Malaysia, 414 Maliavin, Filipp Andreevich, 224 Manchuria, 2, 3, 6, 13, 22, 27, 31, 38, 42, 46–51, 51–7, 60, 66, 68, 73, 74, 77, 79, 81–2, 84–5, 90, 95, 102, 129, 144, 151, 167, 170, 197, 212, 218, 221, 225, 229, 234, 243, 263, 268, 273, 276, 282–3, 285, 292, 295, 297–8, 300, 308–10, 317, 320–3, 326–8, 331, 333, 337–8, 352–3, 356–7, 359–63, 370–1, 374, 376–8, 402, 404–10, 413, 417, 430–2, 434–6, 439, 450 Mandelshtam, Osip, 236, 243 Mantetsu (The South Manchuria Railway Company), 275

Index Martov, Julius (Iulii Tsederbaum), 400 Marx, Karl, 33 Masampo, 313 Matsuda, Masahisa, 251 Matsukata, Masayoshi, 115 Matsuo, Takayoshi, 248 Matsuoka, Yosuke, 268 Maxwell, William, 323 McCarthy, Michael, 327 McCormick, Frederick, 325–6 McCullagh, Francis, 327 McKenzie, Frederick Arthur, 323–4, 326–7 McLeod, Norman, 399 Mecca, 265–6, 270, 272–3 Meckel, Klemens Wilhelm Jakob, 335, 349n Medina, 265–6, 270 Meiji Constitution, 114, 249–50, 252, 259 Meiji era, 110–11, 116, 121, 160, 166, 185–7, 193, 198–9, 263, 265–7, 269, 274, 276–7 Meiji oligarchs, 19, 27, 250 Meiji reforms, 20, 48 Meiji Restoration, 7, 261n, 268, 277, 422 Meiji, Emperor (Mutsuhito), 19, 81, 396, 398, 429n Mendelssohn & Co., 131 Mensdorff, Albert Graf, 371 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 229 Middle East, 444–54 Mikasa, 72–3, 145, 345 Mikhailovich, Sergei, 300 Militarism, 3, 34–5, 37, 155, 372 Miliutin, Dmitrii, 292–5, 298, 303 Milner, Alfred, 435 Ministry of Army, 149 Ministry of Education, 163, 185–6 Ministry of Navy, 337, 345 Ministry of the Imperial Household, 80 Mishchenko, Pavel, 285 Mitsubishi Co., 48, 55, 59, 275–6 Mitsuhashi Nobukata, 89 Mitsui Co., 48, 55, 59, 275–6 Mitsutani Kunishiro¯, 161, 164

505

Miura Hokkyo¯, 180 Miyaji Tamisaburo¯, 89 Miyake, Setsurei, 15 Mizrahi, Togo, 397 Mizuno, Kokichi, 89 Moltke, Helmuth von (the Elder), 297, 300 Moltke, Helmuth von (the Younger), 361 Mongolia, 46–7, 50, 52, 81, 299, 300, 304, 403–405, 408, 442 Monroe Doctrine, 24–5 Morgan, Pierpoint, 302 Mori, Arinori, 396 Mori, Yoshitaro¯, 89 Morita, Toshito, 89 Moroccan crisis, 92n, 314, 348 Morocco, 127, 335, 342 Morris, Anthony, 321 Moscow, 60, 84, 220, 222, 224, 228, 234, 243, 287, 297, 377, 387 Moscow Architectural Society, 222 Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, 224 Moskovitism, 132 Motono, Ichiro¯, 56, 403, 406–407 Movement for the Revival of the Nation (The National Party), 447 Muhammad, 265 Mukden (Shenyang), 2–3, 4, 68–70, 95, 117, 144, 208, 275, 281, 296, 298, 324, 326–7, 343, 356–7, 417 Murav’ev, Nikolai V., 75 Murav’ev-Amurskii, 49 Muto¯, Nobuyoshi, 89 Mutsu, Munemitsu, 14, 253 Mutsuhito. See Emperor Meiji Myanmar. See Burma Myo¯jo (“Bright Star”), 161 Mythology, Greek, 367 Mythology, Roman, 367 Nagaoka Gaishi, 79 Nagasaki, 394 Nakamuro, Ejiro¯, 384–5

506

Index

Nakano, Tsunetaro¯, 270, 274 Nakao, Hideo, 274 Nakashima, Abdul Hamid Saishi, 301 Nakayama, Yasuzo, 270 Napoleonic Wars, 34, 139, 142, 149 Nassho, Benjiro¯, 188, 193, 199 Nathan, Paul, 133 National Socialism, 332 Naval General Staff, Japanese, 80–2, 83, 87 Naval General Staff, Russian, 300 Navy, Imperial Japanese, 5, 14, 59, 73, 86, 96, 145–6, 198, 334, 338–9 Navy, Imperial Russian, 3, 79, 316, 336–7, 341 Navy, United States, 3 Nebogatov, Nikolai, 72, 343, 345–6 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 414 Nelidov, Aleksandr, 75 Nelson, Horatio, 188 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vasilii, 207 Nepal, 432 Nesterov, Mikhail, 221–2, 229 Nestorians, 399 Neue Glühlichter, 368 New Books (Ch. Hsin-shu, Viet. Tânthu' ), 422 New Hampshire, 41, 74 New York, 116, 118, 123–4, 126, 133, 396 New York Times, 163, 431 Newcomb McGee, Anita, 175 Nichiro senso¯ shashin gaho¯ (“The RussoJapanese Illustrated News”), 161 Nicholas General Staff Academy, 297 Nicholas II, Tsar [Romanov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich], 33, 40, 96, 105, 130, 198, 315, 363, 393, 396 Nihilism, 32 Nihon Yu¯sen Kaisha, 87 Nikolaevich, Mikhail, 209 Nippon (“Japan”), 16, 23 Nishi, Shinrokuro ¯, 89 Nishida, Kitaro ¯, 3 Nishiki-e, 8 Nobel Prize for Peace, 3

Nobel, Alfred, 35 Nogi Jinja, 2 Nogi, Maresuke, 2, 6, 68–70, 202 Noma, Seiichi, 89 North Sea, 314, 336, 340 Novitskii, V.F., 299 Novoe krai, 67 Novoe vremia, 221–2 Obizhenno ukhodiat na kholmy, 236 Obruchev, Nikolai, 292–5, 303 October Manifesto, 282, 284, 288, 289n Odagiri, Masunosuke, 89 Odessa, 39, 84, 106, 363 Ogonek (“The Flame”), 220 Ohara, Bukeiji, 270 ¯ i, Kikutaro O ¯ (Shigemoto), 85 ¯ ishi, Masami, 254 O Oka, Yakichi, 187, 256, Okakura, Kakuzo, 160 ¯ kawa, Shu O ¯ mei, 264, 266, 269 Okhrana, 84, 393 Oku, Yasukata, 68 Oku, Yoshiisa, 189 Okubo, Ko ¯ji, 269 ¯ kuma, Shigenobu, 25, 247, 256, 257, O 398 Oliphant, Laurence, 396 Omsk, 57, 282 Open Door policy, 58, 334, 405, 409, 417 Orel, 345 Orenburg, 308 Orientalism, 57, 167 Osaka, 118, 179, 254, 395 Osliabia, 345 Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Anna Petrovna, 227 ¯ tsu, 393 O Ottoman Empire, 7, 383, 385, 389–391, 414, 444–6, 448, 450 Outer Mongolia, 300, 403–404, 408 ¯ yama, Iwao, 53 O ¯ yama, Tsunasuke, 89 O Ozaki, Yukio, 398 Ozim (“Winter Crop”), 242

Index Pacific Fleet, 54, 66, 72, 86, 146, 235, 284, 334, 338–9, 386, 388 Pacific Ocean, 6, 36, 42–3, 87, 233–5, 388, 391n, 392n Pacific Painting Society (Taiheiyo ¯ gakai), 161 Pacific War (1941–45), 3, 6–7, 88, 200, 275, 423, 425 Painting, 159, 221, 222, 224, 225 Palestine, 393, 395–6, 399–400 Palitsyn, Fedor F., 299–301, 303–304 Pall Mall Gazette, 438–9 Palmer, Frederick, 325 Pan-Asianism, 264, 267, 274, 276–8 Paris Straits Convention of 1856, 386 Pasha, Ahmed Muhtar, 384 Pasha, Hasan Enver, 271, 392n Pashchenko, Olga, 206 Pearl Harbor, 3 Peking. See Beijing Penjdeh Incident of 1885, 292 Perry, Matthew Calbraith, 302 Persia. See Iran Pertev Bey (Demirhan), 385–6, 389 Peter the Great, Tsar, 444 Petrograd, 228 Petropavlovsk, 71, 221, 339 Petrovskii, Nikolai F., 293 Petrov-Vodkin, Kuz’ma, 220–1 Phan Bo ¯i Châu, 421–2 Philippine Bill of Rights, 420 Philippine Revolutionary War of 1896–7, 420 Philippines, 416, 417–20, 421, 425–6, 427n, 428n Pilar, Marcelo del, 418–20, 425 Playne, Caroline, 320 Plehve, Viacheslav, 9n, 40, 128–9, 132–3, 136 Pleske, Eduard, 41 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich, 387 Pokrovskoe, 99 Politovskii, E. S., 73 Polovtsov, Aleksandr, 40 Poltava, 39

507

Ponce, Mariano, 420, 422 Ponting, Herbert, 167, 184n Port Arthur (Ch. Lüshun; Rus. Port Artur; Jpn. Ryojun), 1–3, 6, 9n, 18, 21, 27, 53, 66–7, 67–70, 71–2, 82–3, 84, 86, 95, 102, 108n, 116, 182, 198, 204–205, 209–10, 210–11, 212, 220, 232, 281, 297, 314, 322–3, 334–5, 338–9, 342, 348, 355, 358, 376, 378, 382n, 386, 388, 394, 417, 421, 450 Port Arthur Harbor Blockade, 198 Port Said, 87 Portsmouth, 41, 74–6, 298, 315, 377, Portsmouth Peace Treaty. See Treaty of Portsmouth Portuguese, 73, 342 Pos’iet, K.N., 48 Potemkin, 284 Powder-keg of Europe, 317 Predvestiia (“Portent”), 240 Primor’e, 51, 53, 56, 59–60, 301 Prisoner camps, 6, 98 Privy Council, Japanese, 250–1, 258–9 Przheval’skii, Nikolai, 52–3 Pskov, Filofej of, 239 Punch, 368 Punin, Nikolai, 221, 224 Pusan, 66, 86 Putiata, D.V., 293 Qing dynasty, 38, 43, 375 Quezon, Manuel, 420 Radio telegraph, 5 Red Cross, 100, 108n, 161, 172, 176–7, 179, 182, 196, 204, 207–208, 222, 324, 327, 384–6, 394, 398 Red Sea, 314 Rediger, Aleksandr Fedorovich, 284, 287, 300 Rennenkampf, Pavel, 287 Repin, Ilya, 222–4 Resadiye, 271

508

Index

Reuters, 321, 323, 367, 372 Richmond Smith, W., 323 Rida, Rashid, 447–8, 448–9, 449–51, 451–4 Rimpoche, Gelek, 442 Risk premium, 110, 113 Rizal, José, 418, 425 Rockhill, W.W., 406 Rodakowski, Nikolaus Ritter von, 376 Romania, 299 Roosevelt, Theodore, 3, 74, 104–105, 134–5, 315, 388, 381–2n, 406, 417 Root-Takahira agreement, 408 Rothschild, Alphonse de, 130 Rothschilds, 124, 125, 127, 130–1, 134 Rothstein, Adolph, 131, 134 Rozhestvenskii, Zinovii, 72–3, 336, 339–46, 388 Ruskoe slava, 410 Russel, Arthur (Baron Ampthill), 432, 436–8, 440–1 Russell, William Howard, 321–4 Russia, Art, 218–29 Economy, 132–5 Foreign policy, 32–8 Internal affairs, 281–9 Internal politics, 38–41 Military conduct, 101–105 Military intelligence, 292 Military planning, 291–304 Military unrest, 282–9 Poetry, 232–43 Society, 202–16 Russian Imperial Geographical Society, 292 Russian Revolution of 1905, 117, 218–19, 224, 236, 282, 363 Russian Revolution of 1917, 56, 60, 218, 228, 289, 299, 364 Russian-Chinese Bank, 131 Russo-American Combination proposal of 1909, 406 Russo-Japanese Convention of 1907, 401–402

Russo-Japanese relations, 47–60 Russo-Japanese War, Land campaigns, 67–71 See also Battle of Liaoyang Battle of Mukden Battle of Nanshan Battle of Port Arthur Battle of Sha-ho Battle of Tashihchiao Battle of the Yalu River Naval warfare, 71–4 See also Battle of the Korean Straits Battle of Tsushima Peace agreement. See Treaty of Portsmouth Military units See Army, Japanese First Army, Japanese Fourth Army, Japanese Second Army, Japanese Third Baltic Fleet, Russian Pacific Fleet, Russian Volunteer Fleet Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, 50, 68, 102, 220, 387 Rutkovskii, P., 101 Rykovskoe, 97 Saeki, Yoshiro ¯, 399 Saigon, 423 Saionji, Kinmochi, 146, 247, 248–9, 250–1, 251–3, 253–4, 255–6, 256–8, 260 Saito ¯, Makoto, 145–6, 156n Saito ¯, Shu ¯ ichiro ¯, 419 Sakai, Tadatoshi, 89 Sakamoto, Shiro ¯, 420, 428n Sakatani, Yoshiro ¯, 144, 155n Sakhalin, 55–6, 73, 74, 77, 93–106, 108n, 151, 348, 377–8 Sakurakai group of the Imperial Way, 271 Samuel, Marcus, 128, 131 San Francisco, 418

Index Sanderson, Thomas, 310 Sandiko, Teodore, 420 Sasaki, Nobutsuna, 197 Sasebo, 145, 169 Satsuma, 145–6, 150, 188, 258, 261n Saudi Arabia, 265–6, 273–5 Sauter, U., 415 Schiff, Jacob H., 123–4, 124–8, 131, 132–6, 397–8 Schiller, Friedrich, 367, 378 Schlieffen plan, 341 Scott, Charles, 309 Sea of Japan, 93, 221, 422 Sea of Okhotsk, 55, 93 Second Bureau, 81 Second Pacific Fleet, 72, 86 Segawa, Asanoshin, 89 Seiyu ¯ kai (Association of Political Friends), 76, 247, 250–3, 254, 255, 256–8, 259, 260, 261n Self-sacrifice, 174, 188, 190–1, 194, 196, 198, 213 Senji gaho¯ (“Illustrated War Time Magazine”), 161, 167 Sennami, Taro ¯, 89 Seoul, 68, 167, 325 Serbia, 7 Serov, Valentin, 224 Sevastopol, 323, 363 Shabanova, Anna, 216 Shanghai, 72, 84, 87, 125, 127, 283 Shantung (Shandong Province and Pennisula), 18, 22, 50 Shchepkina-Kupernik, Tatiana L’vovna, 212 Shenyang. See Mukden Shibusawa Eiichi, 398 Shimonoseki, Peace Treaty of. See Treaty of Shimonoseki Shina hozen, 25–6 Shinano maru, 86 Shuster, Morgan, 301 Siberia, 36, 46–55, 55–60, 81, 170, 213, 281–3, 287–8, 290n, 296, 360, 374, 398 Siberian Civil War, 46, 55

509

Siberian Economic Aid, 57 Siberian military district, 296 Sidenser, A.K., 47 Siege of Port Arthur, 1, 211, 322–3, 334–5, 358, 394 Sikkim, 432, 434 Sikorskii, Ivan, 54 Simla, 432–3, 437–9 Simplicissimus, 368 Singapore, 70, 84, 87, 343, 419 Sinkiang (Xinjiang), 271, 403 Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, 13, 14–15, 15–16, 18, 19–20, 23, 26–7, 48–9, 80, 83, 88, 139–40, 143, 145, 147–51, 153, 154, 157n, 162, 176, 185, 187, 189–91, 196–7, 200, 254, 255, 277, 332, 369–70, 416, 418–19, 427n, 428n Smolensk, 388 Smolka, Elena Mikhailovna (“Mikhail”), 208–209 Snesarev, Andrey E., 299, 302–304 Sobolev, L.N., 101, 293 Social Darwinism, 320, 324 Social Democratic Party (German), 335 Socialist Revolutionary (S.R.) Party, 398 Society for the Preservation of Art, 228 Society of the Red Crescent, 386 Sokolow, Nahum, 395 Solidaridad, 418–19, 427n Solovev, Vladimir, 233, 237–9 Somali Land Expedition, 441 Somov, Konstanin, 225 South Manchurian Rail Company, 118 Southeast Asia, 6, 414–16, 424, 425–6, 427n Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.), 4–5, 202–203, 271 Spanish-American War, 23–4, 417 Splendid isolation, 127, 308 St. George Community of Sisters of Charity, 204, 205, 210

510

Index

St. John Brodrick, 439 St. Petersburg, 5, 38–9, 41–3, 47, 49–50, 52, 54–5, 55–6, 67, 72, 81, 84–5, 131, 213, 220, 240, 281–5, 287, 292, 303, 310–11, 313–14, 316, 333, 338–9, 342–3, 356, 361, 370–1, 375–6, 385, 387–9, 395, 407, 433 Stakheev, Ivan, 56 Stalin, Joseph, 2, 65 Standard Oil, 131, 135 Stasov, Vladimir, 223, 226 State Defence Council, 300 Stockholm, 84–5, 340 Stoessel, Anatolii, 6, 211, 232, 355 Stoessel, Vera Alekseevna, 211 Stolypin, Petr, 48, 407 Story, Douglas, 321 Straight, Willard D., 409 Strait of Malacca, 343 Straits of Tsushima. See Tsushima Straits Studenskaya, Evgeniya Mikhailovana, 212 Sublime Porte, the, 384, 388, 390 Submarine, 5, 83, 84, 87 Suez Canal, 7, 87, 342 Sukhomlinov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich, 299, 303 Sun Yat-Sen, 3, 7, 393, 424, 428n Sunda, 87 Sungari River, 81 Suzuki, Muhammad Haji Saleh Tsuyomi, 113, 275–6 Sweden, 79, 86, 299 Szechuwan, 267 Taba’-Tabi’, Muhammad, 445 Tachibana, Koichiro ¯, 89 Taft, William, 406, 408 Taguchi, Ukichi, 22 Taigai do ¯shikai, 22–3 taigai-ko¯ undo¯, 13 Taira-no Kiyomori, 187 Taira-no Shigemori, 187 Tairo Do ¯shikai (“Anti-Russian League”), 22–3, 252

Taisho democracy, 249, 259–60, 278 Taisho political crisis (Taisho¯ Seihen), 257, 259 Taiwan, 16, 19, 72–3, 273, 419, 425, 428 Takahashi, Korekiyo, 124–7, 131–2, 397–8 Takahira, Kogoro ¯, 394, 408 Takarabe, Takeshi, 146 Takasagi, Shinzo ¯ (Abdullah), 269 Takekoshi, Yosaburo ¯, 256 Takeshita, Isamu, 89 Takeuchi, Keishu, 179 Takigawa, Kazumasa, 89 Talienvan, 209 Tamura, Torazo ¯, 193, 199 Tanaka, Giichi, 84, 144, 155n Tanaka, Haji Nur Ippei, 272–6 Tanaka, Seijiro ¯, 168 Tanaka, Tokichi, 89 Tangier, 72, 314, 335, 342 Taoka, Reiun, 15, 26–7 Tarle, Evgenii, 38 Tartar Straight, 97 Tashkent, 308 Tchernomordnik, Mikhail, 394 Telegraph, 5, 60, 84, 95, 114, 283, 286, 323 Terauchi, Masatake, 80, 90n Tetsuo, Najita, 259 Tettau, Freiherr von, 359 Thaer, Albrecht von, 362 Thayer, Philip, 415 The Bengalee, 431 The Daily Mail, 329, 372 The Daily Telegraph, 322, 325 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 393 The Rising Sun, 446 The Soldier’s Wife, 161, 165 The Times, 110, 112–14, 116, 321–2, 335, 372, 430 Third Pacific Fleet, 72 Three-Power Intervention (Tripartite Intervention), 15–18, 20, 28 Tianjin (Wade Giles: Tientsin), 26, 369

Index Tibet, 374, 408, 430–42 Tieling (Tiehling), 70, 208 Tientsin. See Tianjin Tirpitz, Alfred von, 336–7, 339, 345 To ¯ a do ¯bunkai, 25, 270 To¯a senkaku shishi kiden, 267, 276 To ¯ go ¯ Heihachiro ¯, 2, 53–4, 68, 71–3, 202, 337–8, 344–5, 397, 417 To ¯ go ¯ Jinja, 2 Togo Studios, 397 To ¯ho ¯ kyo ¯kai, 25 To ¯jo ¯ Akitsugu, 89 Tokugawa era, 268 Tokugawa Shogunate, 261n, 268 Tokutomi, Kenjiro ¯ (Roka), 399 Tokyo, 2–3, 17, 21–2, 25, 47, 57–8, 69–70, 74–5, 79–80, 82, 83–4, 107n, 111, 118, 168, 234, 253, 261n, 267, 269, 283, 297, 309–10, 313, 321, 338, 349n, 370–1, 398, 424–5 Tolstoy, Leo, 399 Tomsk, 282 Tonami, Kurakichi, 87 Torture, 98, 206 Toyama, Shigeki, 277 Toyotomi, Hideyoshi, 187 Trans-Siberian Railway, 5, 31, 36, 39, 43, 46, 47–9, 51–4, 59, 74, 80–2, 85, 87, 281–4, 308, 397, 416 Treaty of Paris (1856), 71 Treaty of Portsmouth, 51, 55, 105, 281, 284, 315, 348, 389, 417 Treaty of Protection (1905), 401 Treaty of Shimoda, 93 Treaty of Shimonoseki, 49, 189, 416 Trepov, D.F., 282 Tretiakov Gallery, 225 Tripartite Intervention. See ThreePower Intervention Triple Alliance, 301, 307, 347 Trotskii, Leon (Trotsky; Lev Bronstein), 300, 399 Trumpeldor, Joseph, 394–5 Tsarskoe Selo, 41, 96 Tsingtao (Qingdao), 18, 72, 336, 339, 349, 416

511

Tsugaru Straits, 72 Tsuneyoshi,Tadamichi, 89 Tsushima islands, 86 Tsushima Straits. See Straits of Tsushima Tung-t’ing Lake, 267 Turkey, Republic of. See also Ottoman Empire, 127, 204, 271–3, 275, 383, 389–90, 444 Twenty-one Demands, 60 Tyrkova, Ariadna, 216 Uchida, Ryo ¯hei, 267–8, 270, 272–4, 277–8 Uchida, Yasuya, 89 Uchimura, Kanzo ¯, 14–15 Ue, Sanemichi, 197 Ukhtomskii, Esper, 37, 55 Union of Russian Artists, 221 Union of the Russian People, 399 United States, 3, 6–8, 23–4, 51, 56, 58–60, 70, 74, 81, 125–6, 133–4, 140–1, 146, 268, 328–9, 334, 348, 369, 373, 373, 379, 389, 395–6, 397, 400, 402, 404–10, 417, 420, 450 United States Pacific Squadron, 67 Unterberger, Pavel, 48 Urals, 47, 282, 286–8 Urgent Naval Expansion Plan (1912), 147 Ussuri, River, 48, 50, 52, 59 Utamaro (Kitagawa Utamaro), 234 Utsunomiya, Taro ¯, 85 Uzumasa Shrine, 399 Vandam, A.E., 302–303 Vannovskii, G.M., 79 Vannovskii, Petr Semenovich, 294 Variag, 67, 202 Vasnetsov, Viktor, 221 Veniukov, Mikhail, 293 Vereshchagin, Vasilii, 221, 233 Vienna, 84, 367, 389, 431 Vietnam, 343, 416, 421–3, 425 Vigo, 314, 341–2 Vitgeft, Vilgelm, 72, 339

512

Index

Vladivostok, 27, 47, 51, 53–5, 56, 59, 60, 68, 70, 71–2, 74, 82–3, 84, 86, 87, 94, 172, 208–209, 234, 284–7, 300–301, 336–9, 343–5, 407 Vladivostok Independent Cruiser Squadron, 86 Voloshin, Maksimilian, 233, 240–1 Volunteer Fleet, 71, 314, 387–8, 392n Voronova, Evdokiya Alekseevna, 207 Vyshnegradskii, Ivan, 39 Wakabayashi, Han, 263–78 Wakabayashi, Kyu ¯ man, 267–8, 278 Wall Street, 124–5 Warsaw, 394, 395 Washington, George, 398 Weihaiwei, 18, 21–2, 199 Wells, H.G., 320 Western Europe, 35–6, 301, 393, 400 Westernization, 9n, 160, 454 Whitehall, 436 Wiju (Uiju), 66 Wilhelm II, Emperor, 314–15, 332, 333, 335, 347, 413 Wilson, Woodrow, 424 Wilton, E.C., 440 Winter Palace, 363–4 Witte, Sergei, 31–43, 48, 66, 75–6, 105, 108n, 128–35, 135–6, 285, 287–8, 294–5, 377–8, 381n, 402 Wolkenstein, Anton Graf, 370 World War I, 1, 4–5, 44n, 56, 58, 109–11, 124, 126, 139, 141, 142, 144, 149, 218, 228–9, 271, 276, 289, 298, 303, 307, 314, 316, 321–3, 329, 332, 335, 352, 367, 395, 410, 424, 448 World War II, 2, 3, 5–6, 47, 53, 57, 80,

139, 142, 193, 195, 203, 265, 268–70, 273, 277–8, 332, 416 Wullf, Leo, 377, 382n Yakovenko-Yakovleva, Lyudmila Vladimirovna, 207 Yamada, Genichiro ¯, 189 Yamada, Kinosuke, 270 Yamada, Torajiro ¯, 384 Yamagata, Aritomo, 249, 250, 251–2, 255, 258, 259 Yamamoto, Gonnohyo ¯ e, 258, 259 Yamamoto, Taro ¯ (Muhammad Ahmad Taro ¯), 274–5 Yamamoto, Yukichi, 267 yamato damashii, 7 Yamaza, Enjiro ¯, 80 Yantai, 87 Yekaterino-Nikolskii okruh, 285 Yellow peril, 7, 48, 54, 48, 333, 347, 413, 415 Yellow Russia, 49 Yellow Sea, 69, 71–2, 191, 338 Yokahama Bank, 58 Yokohama, 399, 418, 422 Yongampo, 66 Yosano, Akiko, 161, 183n Yoshida, Masujiro ¯, 89 Young Turks, 271, 391, 446 Younghusband, Francis, 430, 432, 434–41 Yuan, Shikai, 85 Yuchi, Fumio, 189 Yunnan, 267 Zaibatsu, 55–6, 58–60 Zaostrovskii, M.A., 54 Zemstvo Movement, 281 Zepelin, Constantin von, 359 Ziegler, Philip, 126 Zinoviev, Ivan Alekseevich, 387, 389 Zionism, 393, 398, 400 Zvyagintseva, M.R., 210