Abstract
Brill continues to expand its impressive collection of titles on East Asian history with this beautifully produced volume of 23 essays and editors’ introduction. Those essays are divided into two sections, the first covering Japan’s diplomacy and foreign relations during the decade of the First World War, the second treating networks, both national and transnational, for a somewhat wider span of time. The collection overall resulted from a series of conferences held over five years, and the cohesion of the essays, particularly in the first section, is an evident result.
Any examination of Japanese diplomacy in the 1910s might be expected to focus on the Twenty-One Demands crisis with China and the Siberian intervention. Sōchi Naraoka’s chapter makes clear the poor judgement of the Imperial Army and deserved scepticism of the Foreign Ministry in the former. Isao Chiba argues that many civilian leaders joined their military counterparts in urging the latter.
The most intriguing argument of Chiba’s essay, though, and a focus of several other chapters, revolves around changing Japanese perceptions of Britain and the United States during the decade. Despite Japan’s opportunistic use of its alliance with Britain to war with Germany in 1914 for colonial advantage, many Japanese leaders saw Britain as a declining power. Germany and the United States were on the rise, an unfortunate development as Germany was preoccupied by the war and America increasingly hostile. So were the British dominions. John Meehan traces antipodal ambivalence towards Japan and rising Canadian wariness, especially over immigration issues. In these, Canada was very much in an American pattern, as Tosh Minohara describes in an expert analysis of the domestic politics behind immigration in the United States.
But it was not simply a matter of race behind changing Japanese perceptions. By the end of the First World War, the Japanese were openly suspicious of America’s economic and humanitarian imperialism, so much so that Gōto Shimpei urged calling the international forces engaged in the Siberian intervention a ‘new Salvation Army’ (p. 142). This approach sat uneasily aside more traditional diplomatic approaches, perhaps, but it hardly contradicted them. Shusuke’s study of the Pacific mandates makes clear that Woodrow Wilson regarded the mandate system as vital to the functioning of the League of Nations. His insistence irritated Australia and South Africa, but above all Japan’s Imperial Navy, which saw it through the lens of power politics and base rights. Whether it was immigration, humanitarian imperialism, or naval bases, a constellation of factors combined in the 1910s to alter trans-Pacific relations considerably before the dark valley of the 1930s.
There was much more to Japanese diplomacy than these relations. Chapters by Bert Edström, Ewa Pałasz-Rutkowska, and Selçuk Esenbel on Japan and Scandinavia, Poland, and the Ottoman Turks illustrate how the Japanese army’s obsession with Russia extended far beyond Siberia. All three areas gave Japan’s generals useful listening posts on their continental rival, even if none seemed immediately attractive as an ally.
Almost necessarily, the chapters of this book’s second section are less easy to link together. There are fascinating stand-alones, such as Susan Townsend’s look at urban planning ideas in Britain and Japan, Martin Dusinberre’s study of a village diaspora that reached both Korea and Hawaii, or Tze-ki Hon’s examination of evolving Chinese understandings of China’s place and role in the world through the emerging study of geography. A number of studies on this theme are emerging for Japan, and a reference to or comparison with them would have been useful.
Even so, some themes emerge across several of these studies. The role of Japanese women in articulating the colonial apparatus in Taiwan, a role informed by female pioneers in Japanese higher education, comes under consideration in chapters by Evan Dawley and Chika Shinohara.
Even more strongly, the impact of health and hygiene in a decade of easy global transportation and cruel total war is made evident in studies on railway workers by Chaisung Lim, on the spread of cholera through an East Asia plagued (literally) by the breakdown of public health mechanisms in China by Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, and on an amazing painstaking analysis by Sumiko Otsubo of Imperial Army records to examine Asian disease vectors of the ‘Spanish’ flu epidemic during the Siberian intervention.
It is a tribute to the editors that they were able to assemble such an impressively deep and broad array of studies for this volume. This reviewer hopes that, in addition to apologies for not mentioning all contributors by name here, the editors will excuse a criticism that a heavier editorial hand might have been used to offer explicit connections among the individual studies, especially in the second section. Even without such help, however, any student of modern Japan or the early twentieth century will benefit from reading these fine works.