A War of Others: British War Correspondents,Orientalist Discourse,and the Russo-Japanese War,1904–1905

I. Introduction

After the First World War (1914–18), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) fell into obscur-ity within the memory of the United States and Europe. Despite a renewed interest in the war sparked by ‘World War Zero’ literature, a ‘lessons not learned’ approach to the military analyses of Western observers in the Russo-Japanese War has perpetuated itself, despite some revisionism by military historians. ¹ This study attempts to offer a cultural explanation as to why observers, particularly British press correspondents, perhaps either accepted or dismissed particular lessons from the war in East Asia: Orientalism. Europe and the United States in 1904 saw the outbreak of the war as a globally important event worth observing and extracting lessons from, especially as it involved two modern armies in action for the first time since the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1). British war correspondents did seek to extract military and cultural lessons from the war. However, the influence of Orientalist discourse imposed an intellectual conflict and sparked contradictory perceptions of the Japanese and Russian ‘Others’ that perhaps hindered such an objective.

In his work Orientalism (1978) Edward Said argued that Orientalism is the ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ in terms of academic, political, and imaginative discourse. ² Essentially, Orientalism serves to justify and reinforce European imperialism as it situated the Occident in a self-imposed hege-monic position over the Orient. This becomes an issue with ambiguous cases such as Japan, as ‘the partnership of Orientalist studies and imperial military power simply did not hold’. Additionally, Said’s Orientalism focused solely on the Middle East and ‘the abiding cultural ties which bound the West to the Orient’. However, ‘Japan held no historical interest’ in the West. ³ Furthermore, as noted by historian John MacKenzie, Said’s theory provided ‘a historicism which is in itself essentially ahistorical’. Such an approach loses sight of Western cultural trends at various times in history that influenced various images of the Orient. For example, according to defence studies specialist Patrick Porter in his work entitled Military Orientalism (2009), British observers of the Russo-Japanese War sought to idealize Japan as a ‘superior strategic culture that could be copied’ due to the perceived negative state of their own society, which enabled them to ‘rise above dismissive and racist attitudes’. ⁴ Said’s Orientalism also loses sight of empire-building as an ‘internal process, with internalised Others’. MacKenzie also argued that, in the age of imperialism in the nineteenth century, ‘Others’ often took the form of European imperial rivals, such as Britain and Russia in the Great Game. ⁵

For the sake of this study, Orientalism is considered to be broadly the act of defining ‘Other’ objects, places, or cultures, whether internal or external, in terms of the exotic and alien which, in turn, intellectually conflict with a desire of ‘Self’ to seek positive inspiration from the ‘Other’. Many of these interpretations can spark racial stereotyping that produces images invoking fear, awe, disdain, or dismissal of the ‘Other’. It does not necessarily entail attitudes of superiority or inferiority between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, nor a desire to dominate. Rather, it predominates in ideas of cultural distinction and specificity, which in its most simplistic form could produce racist stereotypes of the ‘Other’ that, in turn, invoke images of inferiority, or radical difference, to ‘Self’.

Additionally, the cultural attitudes of the Self at various historical moments often condition views of the ‘Other’. Orientalism emphasizes the perception of the observer towards its case study – in this case, Japan and Russia – but does not deny agency to the targets of Orientalism in influencing its discourse, as asserted by Porter and those in the field of subaltern studies. ⁶ It argues that, in the Russo-Japanese War, British war corres-pondents, as agents of ‘popular’ Orientalism – as opposed to the ‘high’ Orientalism of strategic and military observers emphasized by Porter – viewed their time in East Asia as an experience in the exotic realm of the Other. Their post-war works were aimed at a much wider British audience that shared an interest in the nature of contemporary and future warfare (or the ‘Next Great War’) without having the technical knowledge of military personnel. ⁷ In viewing Japan’s victory and Russia’s defeat, correspondents explained the results of the war in cultural terms. However, while attempting to learn positive lessons from the war, these same correspondents fell into conflict with their Orientalist, or cultural, approach to both belligerents and the war itself. This sense of Japan, Russia, and the war itself as fundamentally alien to ‘Western’ warfare and culture seems to have influenced the dismissive and racist attitudes of British observers, as noted by Philip Towle in his work on Anglo-Japanese relations, in the years after 1905, and the ‘war correspondents led the way in this change of attitude … [Their] books reflected the prejudices, troubles, and anxieties of the age’. ⁸

Conditioned by social Darwinism and perceptions of the ‘degenerate’ nature of Western modernity, this ‘popular’ Orientalism presented the combatants and the war as so culturally distinct, or ‘Other’, that the transferability and utility of the ‘lessons learned’ for European warfare and culture came into question. This entailed not a desire to merely contrast the Occidental Self with the Oriental Other – or impose cultural hegemony on a targeted Other – but rather a general cultural practice between various cultures, Oriental or Occidental, at differentiating between one another. Just as British war correspondents sensed with Japan, they also saw in Russia, a fellow imperial power and creator of its own Orientalism, an inferior study to use for analysing Japanese culture and warfare.

II. Japan: A ‘Nation’s Soul’ Modernized

Unlike the Orient and Orientalism of Said, Japan and Japanese studies ‘never experienced the naked “authority over the Orient” which Said sees as an integral part of Orientalism’ and was never a passive recipient of Western intellectual study. ⁹ Nevertheless, to British war correspondents, Japan presented an enigma: an Oriental nation that had successfully moulded Western progress to fit into its own culture, thus allowing it to succeed in its war against Russia. Although they praised Japan for the way in which it modernized and sought to learn from it, they sensed something strange in Japan. In their extremely contradictory analyses of Japanese culture and warfare, the correspondents praised Japan for its ‘primitiveness’ and modernity, admired its ‘way of war’, but cited its peculiarities and shortcomings, and simultaneously admired and feared it as an exceptional Oriental nation. With a desire to learn mixed with contradictory interpretations, British war correspondents undermined their original aim to learn from Japan by creating a highly exotic and alien image of Japanese culture and warfare that appeared incompatible with British needs.

Before the war had even begun, correspondents sought to justify to their readers the utility of observing and learning from the Russo-Japanese War. Essentially, correspondents attempted to view in parallel Japan and its strategic situation with Russia to that of Britain with Continental Europe. Interestingly, this was not an uncommon methodology for British writers studying Japan. According to Toshio Yokoyama, an intellectual conflict existed in Victorian Britain from the 1850s to 1880s regarding Japan’s cultural ‘familiarity’ or ‘singularity’. By the 1880s the image of ‘singularity’ prevailed owing to negative perceptions of Japan’s rapid modernization. ¹⁰ Times military correspondent Charles à Court Repington perhaps best articulated this in his article on the strategic situation in East Asia before the outbreak of the war in 1904, claiming the inevitable war between Japan and Russia featured ‘an island Empire [Japan] at grips with a first-rate continental Power [Russia]’. ¹¹ Indeed, Porter proposed similarly that this ‘Military Orientalism’ involved a ‘dialogic relationship between “Self” and “Other”’. ¹² Ultimately, this entailed an analytical approach to the Russo-Japanese War through the lens of British and European cultural and military circumstances which, with potential cultural or racial prejudice aside, would result in intellectual conflict due simply to the fact that Japan is not Britain and East Asia is not Continental Europe. Nevertheless, British war correspondents attempted to interpret the war and its belligerents through the framework of European cultural ideas, such as the effect of modernity on a culture’s ability to wage war and social Darwinism. By doing so, the goal of extracting lessons, or interest in applying the ‘lessons learned’, from the war came into conflict with the Otherness of Japan from both the East and West sensed by correspondents.

British war correspondents did not rise above ‘dismissive and racist attitudes’, as asserted by Porter regarding ‘high’ Orientalists, in their observation of the Russo-Japanese War. According to Ian Littlewood, Japan defied the Western distinction ‘between western and oriental … claiming a kinship with Europe which put at risk the sacred boundaries between east and west’. Essentially, Littlewood argued that the West has historically seen Japan as a ‘hybrid’ and a ‘paradox’ in the Orientalist division of the world. Thus, ‘as hybrids, they [the Japanese] have no clear place in the human … scheme of things. They are alien to it, and alien to us.’ ¹³ What prevailed in analyses of Japan were images of an ‘artificial’ culture, partly Eastern, yet not Western; modern, but still primitive. In the works of British war correspondents Japan became an inhuman ‘Other’, as it did not fit into the Orientalist order between East and West. Rather than acknowledging the Japanese as ‘kindred Westerners’, as Porter claimed that the West had done to intellectually confront Western defeats at the hands of the Other, correspondents viewed the Japanese as alien humans. ¹⁴ This approach is perhaps best articulated by Bennet Burleigh of the Daily Telegraph, who speculated that they were ‘of belated Malay origin’ and ‘kin to the race … that spread over North Europe, until cleared off by the white branches of the Aryan family’. ¹⁵ Despite Japan’s victory in the war, Burleigh only went as far as to link Japanese kinship to a branch of northern European peoples wiped out by his own ‘white’ race.

Aside from the actual conduct of the war itself, the perceived cultural ability of Japan to modernize without losing its ‘warrior spirit’ featured strongly within the works of British correspondents. This emphasis originated in the contemporary European belief (or fear) that urbanization and industrialization threatened the ability and resolve of a society to wage war, with writers such as Ian Hamilton – a military attaché in the Indian Army later known as the commander of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915 – utilizing social Darwinist warnings that ‘up-to-date civilisation is becoming less and less capable of conforming to the antique standards of military virtue’. With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan offered British society a case study of a fellow ‘modern’ nation capable of sustaining the strains of modern warfare. According to Hamilton, Britain had to adapt itself or ‘prepare to go down before some more natural, less complex and less nervous type’. This approach to Japan in itself was somewhat contradictory. With the original goal of approaching Japan as a model of a ‘modern nation’ to be learned from, Hamilton portrayed Japan as more representative of ‘the overlapping of two stages of civilisation’, between warlike primitive and modern human. ¹⁶ Through this lens Japan was no longer modern, or ‘like’ Britain. Rather, it became what Hamilton warned readers they should fear: a ‘more natural, less complex and less nervous type’ of civilization wielding the weapons of modernity.

To Hamilton and many correspondents, Japanese culture was a modern expression of medievalism rather than a genuinely ‘modern’ culture. Hamilton asserted that ‘the Japanese are just as civilized as would be the Black Prince and his army’ with the advantage of a ‘thorough good German education grafted on their unformed mediaeval minds’. William Maxwell of the Standard shared similar sentiments, arguing that the Japanese still lived under the codes of their former feudal society. ¹⁷ Maxwell claimed that this ‘short-cut’ to modernity allowed Japan to maintain its medieval culture in a modern context, thus avoiding the Oriental qualities of ‘luxury, sensuality and nerves’ affecting European modernity. ¹⁸ Repington focused almost exclusively on bushido, a code introduced to the West by Japan itself in Nitobe Inazo’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899), which incorporated ‘ideals of knightly chivalry and of Spartan simplicity’. ¹⁹ In their infatuation with bushido, correspondents presented the code (in addition to its deification of the mikado, or emperor) as the defining characteristic of modern Japanese society. According to Burleigh, ‘the modern Japanese has no religion, no system of rewards or punishments, but is only taught to revere the past and admire the deeds of the Samurai, the fighting-men’. There was no other driving force or complexity to Japanese society, which was merely developed and driven by what Burleigh called its ‘feudal nursery system’. ²⁰

In addition to describing Japan’s modernity as ‘artificial’ and ‘medieval’, correspondents also portrayed Japan as racially ‘warlike’. W. Richmond Smith of the Daily Telegraph asserted that ‘what the West has not given the Japanese is their conception of military duty and service’. Stemming from the ‘Spartan spirit of the old Samurai’, Japan had ‘transferred bodily to the national army’ its own indigenous martial culture, which was once only the privilege of the samurai. ²¹ Douglas Story of the Daily Express shared views similar to Hamilton’s towards the Japanese, whom he characterized as barbarians with the ‘fanatical patriotism’ of the Zulu and Dervishes under the ‘scientific intelligence’ of their government and generals. ²² Essentially, correspondents depicted Japan’s warlike abilities as part of their racial make-up rather than something learned from the West. Additionally, Norregaard went as far as to speculate that the military spirit exhibited by Japan would not last, stating that ‘so far no alien people has come under the influences of Western civilization without losing more than it has gained’. ²³ As correspondents perceived that Japan still remained in a ‘semi-barbaric’ state, it remained a possibility to them that Japanese society would fall victim to the effects of prosperity and urbanization that came with modernity, just as the contemporary West had begun experiencing. Therefore, as the West strove to cure its own ‘disease’ over time, the Japanese had yet to catch or feel the symptoms of it. Norregaard and other correspondents cited the potential for this at Port Arthur, noting that one particular regiment (2nd Reserve) recruited from a wealthy area of Japan refused to advance at one point in the siege. ²⁴ While they depicted Japan as an Other in their works, correspondents believed they also saw glimpses of their own modern Self, albeit only enough to speculate on the future course of Japan towards modernity rather than to confirm its sameness to Britain.

In essence the success of ‘modern’ Japan clashed with a pre-war discourse on modern-ity which dictated that more modern societies lost the moral and physical qualities necessary to sustain the demands of modern warfare, a view shared by correspondents. They often cited the poor performance of the British army in the Second Boer War (1899–1902) as indicative of this trend. When the victory of a modernized Japan challenged this assumption, correspondents sought to reconcile this apparent contradiction by explaining that the modernization of Japan was ‘different’ from that of Britain and the West or existed only superficially. Thus, by depicting the modernity of Japan as ‘exotic’ and ‘alien’ compared with that of Britain, correspondents created a conflict for their goal of learning and applying lessons from Japan for the benefit of Britain. Having initially justified the value of extracting the potential lessons from the war due to the ‘sameness’ of Japan, British correspondents instead highlighted the ‘alien’ nature of Japan to the point that ‘sameness’ faded away in their observations of Japan and the war.

Highlighting the ‘alien’ nature of Japan, correspondents doubted the possibility of cultural transferability between Japan and Britain. Ultimately, they depicted the attempts of Japan to adopt Western customs as odd and unnatural. Frederick Arthur McKenzie of the Daily Mail mocked efforts by the Japanese public to organize pro-war rallies, or ‘orderly expressions of public feeling’, claiming that such behaviour was ‘a strange attempt to apply a modified Western method to an essentially Eastern people’. ²⁵ Times correspondent David Fraser, in a chapter of his monograph entitled ‘Amongst the Philistines’, attempted to rationalize the idea of Japan’s ‘artificial’ modernization, remarking that ‘considering the unfathomable motives and remarkable habits of the Oriental himself, from our point of view, there is no need to marvel that, in his eyes, our ways are strange beyond words’. ²⁶ To the Occidental and Oriental alike, their Otherness from one another is no secret. Just as the West will never understand the East, the East will never understand the West. Thus, Western ways would only have a superficial rather than genuine application in the East, and, conversely, Eastern ways would have no genuine application in the West. Similar sentiments presented themselves within visual media as well. Frederick Villiers of the Graphic depicted an instance at Port Arthur of ‘Russian Humanity’ where a Russian soldier cradled a wounded Japanese officer in a paternal fashion as he took him back to his trench lines. ²⁷ While the Occidental Russian is shown as humane and paternalistic, Villiers depicted the Oriental Japanese officer in his sketch and writing as confused and childlike, unfamiliar with compassion and fearful until soothed by the unfamiliar sound of the Russian language. In one sketch Melton Prior of the Illustrated London News thought it important to show a ‘very exceptional proceeding’ of a Japanese NCO and private using ‘the European Handshake’, with the caption ‘so rare is the handshake among the Japanese that I thought it worthy of a sketch’. ²⁸ Like Orientals wearing European clothes, a Japanese attempting European customs appeared either odd or showing ‘a form of lèse-majesté which emphasises his savagery’. ²⁹ Essentially, no matter how much the Japanese adopted Occidental traits, they would always remain fundamentally alien in the minds of correspondents as the exotic was the natural state of the Orient.

Despite the advantages of Japan perceived by Hamilton and the correspondents, they did not go as far as to depict Japan as an appropriate model for Britain to follow. Rather, they dwelled on identifying the Otherness and potential disadvantages of the Japanese character that would deem them inferior in other circumstances. Story believed that Japanese success stemmed from their ‘intense absorption in the affair of the moment’, a quality that he saw as indicative of the ‘better’ humanity of the Russians, who revealed to him a ‘breadth of view’ that allowed them to think beyond their military occupations. ³⁰ Hamilton concluded that the Japanese were collectively ‘slow thinkers’, incapable of genius, but still capable of accurate thinking. Nevertheless, his national pride led him to insist that ‘the Japanese army … surpasses any European army, excepting only the British army at its best’. ³¹

Some correspondents even claimed to have found biological evidence alien to the West to explain Japan’s success in modern warfare. For example, correspondents at Port Arthur alluded to the ‘entirely different nervous system’ of the Japanese ‘from Western peoples’ supposedly witnessed by correspondents at field hospitals. Along with Norregaard and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett of the Times at Port Arthur, Smith attributed this biological Otherness to Japan’s diet of fish and rice, which ‘is not a diet calculated to produce great vitality’, and its cultural stoicism, which allowed – or required, according to Smith – Japanese surgeons to operate without anaesthetics. ³² Additionally, this diet also led to the contraction of an ‘Other’ disease in the war referred to as ‘Beri-beri’. ³³ Thus, the almost superhuman ability of the Japanese at Port Arthur to sustain enormous casualties was a testament to the alien humanity of Japan sensed by the correspondents. Indeed, many of these beliefs provoked images of the ‘Yellow Peril’. Francis McCullagh of the New York Herald and Guardian, who spent the war with the Russians until captured by the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) at Mukden, wrote with fear of the Japanese ‘banzai’, or what he referred to as the cry ‘for the blood of white men’. While some looked upon the ‘banzai’ with fascination, he found it as disturbing evidence of Japanese Otherness which reminded him of the cries of the dervishes in Sudan and, perhaps even more terrifying to British memory, the French Revolution Orientalized. ³⁴ He feared the ‘terrible fellows’ that called themselves Japanese, believing their ‘fanatical patriotism’ and ‘superhuman perseverance’ would one day challenge Western supremacy as it made them ‘demons for warfare’. ³⁵ While military observers did potentially project Japan as a model of ‘superiority’ in their studies of the war, the correspondents focused far more on the sensed ‘alien’ nature of Japan.

Even with Japan’s success in the war and the awe they expressed regarding its transformation, correspondents continually denied the similarity of the Japanese to Europeans in various ways. They focused particularly on intelligence, rationality, and Japanese peculiarity – especially its poor cavalry force, which correspondents universally found abhorrent – that could not translate into a European context. Smith often wrote of the Japanese in terms that almost questioned their humanity, emphasizing what he perceived their ‘lower vitality’. Despite having German-trained doctors, the Japanese to Smith were better surgeons than doctors, best suited to the physical work with a knife rather than the intelligence required of the diagnostician, mechanical, yet lacking in creative capabilities. Fraser also believed that the IJA represented a dehumanizing institution when compared with Western armies, asserting that ‘with our armies, every man is a comrade, a fellow-being with whom converse and the exchange of ideas or sympathy is possible’, none of which appeared to be the case with the soldiers of the IJA. ³⁶

Additionally, Smith and others shared observations of Japan in their writings riddled with contradictions. According to Smith, the ‘Japanese as a nation know little or nothing about even the elementary principles of sanitation’, despite noting they had high standards of personal and domestic cleanliness. ³⁷ Norregaard also attributed to Japanese culture the irrational decision-making resulting in the high casualty rates at Port Arthur. As the battle required European-style siege tactics involving entrenchment and sapping, Norregaard claimed that such a system opposed the Japanese’s natural tenacity and fortitude, which preferred open assaults and close-quarter fighting. As a result, Japanese troops did not sufficiently complete sapping operations, which compelled them to advance in the open over greater distances against Russian fortifications. ³⁸ In addition, the second general assault on Port Arthur on 30 October 1904, which Norregaard, Smith, and others estimated resulted in 10,000 Japanese casualties, was the product of Japanese sentimentality – General Nogi sought to provide the Emperor with a gift for his birthday on 3 November – rather than rational calculation. ³⁹ Story criticized the ‘barbarism’ of Japan, citing in particular its lack of either a free press (because of his experience with strict censorship) or freedom of speech. He also claimed that Japan had obstructed the British and other powers from mediating a peaceful solution to the problems that had sparked the war, declaring that sooner or later it ‘must depend upon the great English-speaking nations for protection from the glacier of Russia’. Since it ignored Britain and the United States in 1904, Japan would ‘marvel at their unresponsiveness’ in the future, and its gains in the war would thus be made only temporary and the potential prey of future imperialist ambition in the West. ⁴⁰

Correspondents also observed what they saw as uniquely Japanese traits that translated into military success, such as the ability to work in the cramped positions of trenches and mines. Smith and others claimed that ‘no other soldiers in the world’ could work in such positions, ‘but it was the position the Japanese always take even when sitting in their own houses’. Additionally, he cited that the philosophical nature of the Japanese allowed them an ‘immovability and patience which would be impossible to Western troops’. ⁴¹ Ernest Brindle of the Daily Mail pointed to the ‘few needs of the Japanese soldiers’ that simplified logistics and organization ‘to a point without parallel in modern times’. ⁴² The Japanese were declared to be the ‘poorest horsemen, the word “horsemen” being taken in its widest significance’. ⁴³ Story concluded that the IJA’s lack of effective cavalry resulted in its inability to ‘secure the fruits of their victory, to clear the ground of their demoralised enemy’. ⁴⁴ Thus, its lack of cavalry denied Japan any decisive victory throughout the course of the war. Correspondents also highlighted what they perceived as a Japanese disregard for life on the battlefield exhibited in the war. Story condemned the ‘barbarism’ of the Japanese that resulted in looting, ‘the absence of quarter’, and an attack on a Western missionary at Liaoyang. ⁴⁵ James at Port Arthur claimed to have witnessed Japanese soldiers impale themselves on Russian bayonets at the orders of their officer (‘“Throw yourselves on their bayonets, honourable comrades!” he [the officer] shouted; “those who come behind will do the rest.”’) in order to capture a trench. As eight men followed these orders, James described an almost animalistic frenzy of a pack of Japanese ‘war-dogs’ inflicting a massacre on the Russian defenders who could not free their bayonets from the bodies. ⁴⁶ Lord Brooke of Reuters, alluding to the IJA casualties at Liaoyang, informed his readers that ‘eye-witnesses assure me that it is impossible to exaggerate the utter disregard of death exhibited by the Japanese’. ⁴⁷ Maurice Baring of the Morning Post also recalled the horror of Russian officers, who depicted a scene where ‘line after line of Japanese came smiling up to the trenches to be mown down with bullets, until the trenches were full of bodies, and then more came on over the bodies of the dead’. ⁴⁸ Where the primitive Japanese ‘smiled’ at death, the ‘civilized’ Russians looked upon it with horror.

British correspondents identified what they believed to be a ‘Japanese way of war’, a style of warfare that contained many peculiarities and some advantages, yet these advantages often appeared as alien and thus not fully adaptable to European military needs. Fraser imposed Otherness on the environment of the war. He noted that ‘European transport wagons were not suitable’ for the landscapes of Korea and Manchuria, concluding that ‘though the Japanese transport system works so easily, it does not follow that it is a perfect system, and one worthy of adoption by other armies’. ⁴⁹ One perceived peculiarity most cited by correspondents was the massive espionage system and its ‘fog of secrecy’, which Maxwell claimed made the Japanese ‘the most Oriental of people’. ⁵⁰ Correspondents saw this system as a product of the Oriental mind that Occidentals would never have considered under different circumstances. James asserted that the Japanese went beyond lengths ever contemplated by Europeans to gather intelligence, claiming that high-ranking Japanese officers accepted ‘menial posts in all quarters of the globe in the service of those from whom they have something to learn’. ⁵¹ Correspondents also insisted that espionage was not a system culturally compatible in the West. Story declared that ‘the closer one sees it, the less one esteems it as a profession for the man of Western birth’. Noting the omnipresence of Japanese spies behind Russian lines – disguised often as Chinese coolies, peasants, and even in one instance as a hairdresser to Russian officers, he declared that Japanese espion-age ‘cost the Russians more lives in this war than Japanese strategy or Japanese leadership’. ⁵² Thus, the peculiarities of ‘Eastern’ war, found distasteful by the West, rather than military capabilities on the battlefield resulted in Japanese success in the war.

In viewing Japanese society and its ‘way of war’, British correspondents sought to understand how a society fought in and withstood the strains of modern war. While many did attempt to advocate or highlight plenty of military and social observations made of Japan during the war, they also contradicted their efforts in their presentation of Otherness. Highlighting various Japanese peculiarities, correspondents in a way presented a society very alien to that of Britain and other Western nations. Thus, while correspondents attempted to draw particular lessons from Japan in the war, it seems that their own perception of Japan as an alien culture or ‘Other’ hindered such efforts.

III. Russia: The Decline into Oriental Despotism

With Russia’s defeat by Japan, the West faced an intellectual dilemma: how did Russia, the nation that had defeated Napoleon and was a major force in European diplomacy, lose to Japan, an Oriental nation? As with Japan, a culturally deterministic approach to war and notions of social Darwinism influenced the response of British correspondents. Although some correspondents characterized Russia as Western despite its declining status in the wake of the Crimean War (1854–6), many isolated it in the category of ‘Slav’ or ‘partially Western’. Additionally, through the lens of social Darwinism, they also presented Russia as a society that had once attained the status of ‘Western’, but had declined to the status of ‘Oriental’ owing to the corruption and negligence of its autocratic tsarist government to vigorously improve the country as a whole. Through this cultural approach to Russia, correspondents indirectly developed further grounds for dismissing Japan’s accomplishments by belittling the military and societal state of its opponent.

In ‘Othering’ Russia, correspondents did not characterize it with significant hostility. In fact, many correspondents advocated creating closer ties with Russia – perhaps in response to the ‘Yellow Peril’ – and sympathized with the Russian people. Some corres-pondents hoped that the Russo-Japanese War would spark Russian regeneration. The best example of this was in the allusions of correspondents to the Russian Revolution of 1905 caused by the war. Repington hoped that ‘Russian history may trace the earliest dawn of real emancipation from this useless, bloody, and disastrous war’, believing that without the war ‘Russia might have borne her chains, without hope of redemption, for another fifty years.’ ⁵³ Having left East Asia to follow the uprisings in Warsaw and Tiflis (Tbilisi) during the revolution, F.A. McKenzie of the Daily Mail insisted that the tsarist government had to reform itself or face its downfall, noting that ‘in far too many cases officialism is rotten’ and ‘once the army is weakened the autocracy has gone’. ⁵⁴ While Repington saw hope in the revolution, McKenzie was somewhat alarmed at the prospect of it, hoping that the Russian government would reform itself under the threat of a general uprising.

Seeing the potential for Russian regeneration, some British correspondents advocated improving Britain’s diplomatic relationship with Russia, despite the Dogger Bank incident (1904) during the Russo-Japanese War that nearly provoked war between Britain and Russia. Interestingly, this attitude indirectly opposed Britain’s actual alliance with Japan, signed in 1902, aimed at checking Russian expansion into East Asia and the Pacific. According to Towle, many in Britain feared that, aside from souring relations with Russia, the alliance had the potential of sparking ‘anti-colonial nationalism in India, Egypt, and elsewhere’. ⁵⁵ Baring criticized British diplomacy towards Russia, believing that, as with France, ‘the relations of nations [Britain and France] shift and change as quickly as those of individuals, and out of the bitterness came the entente’. ⁵⁶ In September 1904 Repington argued in the National Review that ‘England and Russia have need of each other in order to allow the full and peaceful development of their respective people and subject races,’ indirectly alluding to imperial agitation caused by the Great Game. ⁵⁷

Despite the alliance with Japan, Russian defeat alarmed some British correspondents. In his view of Japan, McCullagh believed that East Asia and Europe would eternally be at odds with one another. ⁵⁸ He saw Japanese victory as a foreboding for the Western powers, and lamented the British alliance with Japan. At Mukden he told his readers that he and the correspondents from Britain, Germany, France, and the United States, or ‘the only White Powers now left on the face of the earth’, envisioned the ‘Yellow Wave toppling over us, it almost seemed to us as if old Europe were undone’. ⁵⁹ Hamilton also shared ‘Yellow Peril’ warnings with his readers, insisting that ‘Japan is our ally, and not one, if I may presume to judge so early, who will prove ungrateful.’ ⁶⁰ Much to his indignation, Maxwell had to admit the ‘dangerous argument by analogy’ of a Japanese cavalry officer who asserted to him that, despite their cavalry and infantry being ‘darker and smaller’ than their European counterparts, they achieved resounding success in warfare. ⁶¹ In the war, Westerners had to acknowledge the martial abilities of an Oriental nation, a prospect they viewed with fascination, fear, and distaste.

Despite their sympathy, the descriptions of Russia by correspondents presented a society in decline. In the people of Russia, Repington saw a ‘patient, silent mass of in-articulate humanity’ deserving of Britain’s concern. ⁶² Correspondents often portrayed the Russian soldiers in an almost childlike, irrational state incapable of controlling their passions and inhibitions. Following the surrender of Port Arthur, Smith claimed that the Russian commander, General Stoessel, had to request Japanese assistance in restoring order to the city after his troops ‘broke open bonded warehouses and liquor-stores and drank vodka until the streets were full of drunken soldiers’, a direct result of what Maxwell saw as the Russian garrison’s concern to ensure an ‘inexhaustible store’ of alcohol in the siege. ⁶³ Norregaard concluded that ‘Russian soldiers are children of the moment, impressionable and easily moved by changing circumstances’. Rather than strive to persevere in the wake of defeat, Russian soldiers fell sway to their childlike, violently changing mood that hindered their warlike abilities. Lord Brooke also criticized the Russians’ ‘kind-hearted’, gentle, and sympathetic attitudes to the Chinese – with the exceptions of being in battle or intoxicated, insisting that no other European soldier would have behaved in such a way. ⁶⁴ While he acknowledged the European identity of the Russians, he still denied their kinship to the rest of Europe by characterizing their behaviour as ‘Other’. Moreover, he speculated that the ‘rapid recovery of morale’ among Russian soldiers in the war came from ‘a dulness of imagination … or a simple child-like nature’, which allowed the ‘memory of a reverse’ to be soon forgotten and the soldier to return to ‘his careless self’. ⁶⁵ At the battle of Shaho, Maxwell remarked that the Russians ‘fought with the courage and fatalism of their race’, indicative of their declining ‘aptitude for war’. ⁶⁶ A military force once feared in the West had fallen into a decrepit state, as reflected in its defeat to an Oriental army.

Militarily, perhaps most shocking to correspondents was the poor performance of the once formidable Cossacks in the war, especially considering the poor quality of cavalry units employed by the IJA recognized by nearly every correspondent and attaché. Brindle lamented that they had ‘in measure lost the fame which at one time fascinated the attention of the world’, insisting that the ‘force of the conditions of warfare imposed upon him in Manchuria’ had resulted in the Cossack’s decline. ⁶⁷ Maxwell maintained that the theatre of the Russo-Japanese War was ‘not a country for cavalry, as the Cossacks have found’. ⁶⁸ By these statements, like other conclusions made by Western military attachés following the war, the Russo-Japanese War became Orientalized itself, where conditions of Otherness applied to the failure of cavalry such as the Cossacks on the Eastern battlefield. ⁶⁹ Story asserted that cavalry became a burden to Russian tactical circumstances in the war as they lacked the artillery to support them. ⁷⁰ Others, however, insisted that the Cossacks had declined like the rest of Russian society. Hamilton quoted the opinion of General Fukushima, an IJA staff officer who found the Cossack had ‘lost all of his former Boer attributes, except that of horsemanship, and is now simply a yokel who is living on the Napoleonic legend’. ⁷¹

To correspondents the root cause of Russia’s decay came from the tsar and his government, which produced the culture that could not prevail over Japan in the war. Noting the antagonism between Russia and Britain, Repington placed the blame entirely on the Russian government, whose ‘diplomacy is calculated to tire out the patience of its best friends’ and whose leaders blunder ‘due to the absence of all serious knowledge of statecraft’. ⁷² Additionally, he argued that the tsarist government failed to socially engineer the Russian people, who remained ‘in the slough of ignorance’, for the requirements of modern warfare, which ‘demanded the attributes of freemen from the sons of serfs’. ⁷³ Like other correspondents, Repington showed a belief in the positive influences of state-driven social engineering, particularly through the medium of education. While Japan became a successful model of modernization from above, Russia became a model for utter backwardness and stagnation created from above, admired for the achievements of its past and despised for the state of its present. Some correspondents also perceived that the policies of the tsarist government socially engineered the Russian people in the wrong direction. Brindle saw the Russian soldier as ‘splendid but spoiled … a slave to a conservatism as fatal to the development of individual qualities as that of the Chinese mandarin’. ⁷⁴ The Russian people thus became the victims of Oriental despotism. The tsarist regime represented the source of Russian stagnation apparent in the Russo-Japanese War.

While correspondents never went as far as to express any imperial ambitions towards Russia, they believed that Russia required a new force or influence that would spark progressive change. Hamilton asserted that this state of affairs had resulted in the decline of its once powerful military under modern conditions, claiming that it had peasant soldiers lacking in the ‘habitude of war’, the ‘martial ardour’ outside home defence, and the intelligence to act independently on the battlefield. ⁷⁵ Thus, Russians only fought well for their own individual self-interests as the Russian government had not sought to instil the education, training, or patriotic ardour that would improve their abilities in modern warfare. Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace, a Times correspondent at the Portsmouth peace negotiations, asserted in his historical study of Russia that, unlike the nobility, the peasantry was never compelled by the tsarist government to abandon its ‘primitive moral habitat’. Thus, for a time, the greatest successes of the tsarist regime came under the leadership of tsars such as Peter the Great, who attempted to socially engineer a portion of Russian society to accept modern reforms. As the tsars began to abandon such policies, Wallace claimed that the new noble culture lost control of itself, with the Russian nobility constantly adopting ‘foreign manners, customs, and institutions’ without any governing force to control or direct such influences into something uniquely Russian. ⁷⁶ Essentially, Wallace depicted Russian society as a product of a chaotic system of government which neither encouraged the development of its peasantry nor controlled the development of its nobility.

Correspondents often remarked on what they saw as the backwards, superstitious religious beliefs of Russians. Story saw Russian religious devotion as ‘strangely pathetic’, driving Russian soldiers to ‘sing their hymns with a manly conviction that is given to no western nation’. ⁷⁷ Brindle believed that Russian Orthodoxy left the Russians ‘children in knowledge’, forced to remain in such a state ‘by a feudal system of government which permits no revolt against the ways of orthodoxy’. While he wondered if Russia would benefit from the eradication of such a religion, he concluded that the Russian soldier’s ‘simple faith alone saved him from a dark and pitiable life’. ⁷⁸ Wallace saw Russian conceptions of religion, especially among the peasantry, as a result of superstitious beliefs and stagnation in the ‘Eastern Church’, and its Otherness to Western Protestantism. Influenced by Russian religion, the Russian people remained in a primitive state and outside Wallace’s perceptions of ‘ordinary morality’, which influenced such acts as a robber ‘commend[ing] his undertaking to the protection of the saints’. Additionally, he asserted that the influence of Russian Orthodoxy discouraged the development of primary education as it did not emphasize the reading of scripture, as did Protestantism. Wallace also noted that Orthodoxy did not develop any conceptions of Protestant ‘inner religious life’ or theology, which resulted in the ‘unbounded, childlike confidence in the saving efficacy of the rites which he practices’. ⁷⁹ Thus, the peasantry, content with adhering to religious ceremonies rather than developing a Western, or Protestant, sense of self-improvement, remained in a childlike and fatalistic religious state.

Correspondents also applied their own racial explanations to the defeat of Russia in the war. Influenced perhaps by European trends of highlighting racial or national identity in this period, they alluded to the ‘Slavic’ or ‘multiracial’ character of the Russians. Story regarded the racial diversity of the Russian officer corps as both the strength and weakness of the Russian army. He admired their linguistic abilities and cultural adaptability, but criticized their tendency to be ‘nervous’ fighters. ⁸⁰ On his train ride from Moscow to Manchuria, Baring noted that ‘there is a Teutonic mass of rules and regulations, but the Slav temperament is not equal to the task of insisting on their literal execution’. The Slavic character of the Russians – which Baring found akin to the ‘Irish character’ of the Irish – was incapable of comprehending or effectively running a complex bureaucracy, an emerging part of the machinery of modern warfare and society. While Baring placed much of the blame on the Russian system, he believed that ‘its most crying faults are inherent in the Russian national character’, citing particularly a lack of discipline from both officers and enlisted. ⁸¹ Brooke also insisted that Europeans could not expect the same ‘European’ behaviours from the Russians as they were a ‘race of soldiers both “old fashioned” and half-Oriental’. ⁸² The closest he came to attributing ‘European’ characteristics to Russians was to compare their martial abilities to the Spaniards and their ‘manana’ state of mind, which equated more to an insult than a compliment as it attributed them with indecisiveness and ‘a lack of forethought’. ⁸³ Story also perceived a similar characteristic of the Russian officers, although he found it to be a positive trait. He referred to it as their fatalism indicative of their common exclamation of ‘Nichevo’ (‘It doesn’t matter’), which Story claimed allowed the Russians to overcome a potential reverse in morale following a defeat. ⁸⁴ Positive or negative, Brooke, Baring, and Story observed evidence of a sort of ‘indifference’ among Russians inherently ‘Other’ to Europeans.

While British correspondents of the Russo-Japanese War consciously acknowledged the defeat of a European nation, Russia, to Japan, they viewed Russia as an ‘internal Other’. Although its defeat sparked some alarm among correspondents, many attempted to rationalize that Russia was inherently ‘Other’ to the rest of Europe and therefore backwards and inferior. Russia had once been revered by Europe as a formidable power, but the war suggested to them that the tsarist government had caused its society to stagnate, which resulted in its inability to succeed in the conditions of modern warfare.

IV. Conclusion

In his analysis of Said’s Orientalism and its relation to Japanese studies, Richard Minear noted that ‘even in the absence of overt Western domination, the attitudes manifested in the discourse on Japan seem to resemble closely those of Said’s Orientalists’. ⁸⁵ In the case of British analysis of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, Orientalism also engages ‘internal Others’, as argued by MacKenzie, which also have the potential to create either positive or negative discourses of the Other without the presence of overt domination. ⁸⁶ While British war correspondents praised Japan’s societal ability to fight a war and become a power in its own right, they also sensed a sort of remoteness from the conditions of the war and both belligerents. In essence, they saw the Russo-Japanese War as a war between Others. They perceived the Japanese as culturally, intellectually, and even biologically Other. They saw their opponent, Russia, as an Other. The environment the war took place in resulted in a war with Other conditions. When analysing ‘lessons not learned’ from the Russo-Japanese War, it must be realized that cultural perceptions of ‘sameness’ or ‘difference’ on the part of observers affected the conclusions they made. ⁸⁷

This does not mean that European observers as a whole ignored military lessons from the Russo-Japanese War. According to Michael Howard, European observers – particularly French and German – learned several lessons from the war dealing with offensive operations, technical details concerning artillery and infantry tactics, and a belief in the primacy of psychological over material elements in warfare. ⁸⁸ This study does not attempt to reject the claims made by Howard. However, it aims to consider them from a European – more specifically, British – cultural perspective. Indeed, British correspondents did remark on these lessons from the Russo-Japanese War, but they also saw them as indicative of ‘Other’ cultural and material factors that did not necessarily translate directly into European culture or warfare. Essentially, this intellectual conflict perhaps caused those outside the circle of professional military theorists to interpret the war within the framework of pre-1904 cultural ideas or agendas on war, such as a social Darwinist demand for ‘sacrifice’ in war indicative of ‘a measure of national resolve’. ⁸⁹ Similarly, in his work on pre-1914 military thought entitled After Clausewitz, Echevarria argued that while European observers drew many tactical lessons from the Russo-Japanese War, they also sensed that such lessons would only be ‘tentative’ and ‘less than universal’ because of the rapid changes in war at the time, the unique landscape, a ‘racial element’, and ‘significant differences in the training and doctrine of the combatants’ present in the conflict. ⁹⁰ Additionally, in his conclusion, Echevarria also pointed to a divide between military theorists and the wider European culture of the time, which ‘placed more value on action than deliberation’. ⁹¹ Towle also argued that ‘British officers believed that German and Japanese tactics reflected their national characteristics’, which led to the dismissal of Japan as a military model to follow. ⁹² Thus, correspondents did not have issues taking lessons from the war, but they questioned their utility to European warfare owing to the sensed ‘alien’ nature of the war, which perhaps hindered the application of viable theoretical lessons learned from it.

Nevertheless, the perceptions of Russia and Japan shown at times by these corres-pondents resulted in some deep contradictions. Japan, an Oriental, ‘barbaric’ nation, yet still a cultural and political model for success in modern warfare, had defeated Russia, an Occidental, ‘civilized’ nation. In their observation of the Russo-Japanese War, British correspondents seemed to attempt to reconcile pre-existing notions of the Orient from the Orientalist tradition with contemporary conceptions of social Darwinism and attitudes towards modernization. Essentially, Russia and Japan appeared as internal and external Others, respectively. While Japan was indeed Oriental, it was an exceptional Oriental nation endowed with martial traits nurtured by the policies of the Meiji government, but was only artificially Occidental and thus remained an Other. Citing Russia’s Slavic nature and the corruption of the tsarist government, correspondents maintained Russia as an Occidental nation, culturally and politically explained its defeat to an Oriental nation, and declared it Other from the rest of the Occident. Thus, Russia remained an inferior Occidental, Japan was an almost ‘inhuman’ paradox that was neither Occidental nor Oriental, and British cultural ideas of the Orient remained intact. In a sense the Orientalist discourse of British correspondents perhaps showed a ‘Western ignorance which becomes more refined and complex’ and may indicate a potential issue with the ‘cultural turn’ in contemporary strategic studies noted by Porter and in cultural determinism as a whole. ⁹³ Indeed, such contradictions may have threatened the hege-monic potential of this discourse, as ‘orientalist constructions are profoundly vulnerable to war’s contingencies, which perhaps explains why war is such an incitement to orientalist discourse’. ⁹⁴ In the end, like British military observers, British correspondents reinforced an image of Japan as an alien society whose culture and warfare were incompatible with Britain.