The impact of World War I and the Russian Revolution on northeast Asia is less obvious than that on Europe and the United States. For Japan, World War I was only a two-and-a-half month operation from August 23 to November 7, 1914, during which Japan conquered German colonies in the Shandong Peninsula and the South Pacific. The burdens and sacrifices that Japan bore for this operation were much smaller than those for the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, and therefore hardly remained in Japanese memory. Japan's intervention in Siberia after the Russian Revolution cost Japan ten time more causalities than World War I (about 300 vs more than 3000). Yet this intervention's poor performance demotivated Japanese policy-makers and militaries to draw lessons from it. These circumstances affected western historiography, too. This reviewed collection aims to overcome this historiographical deficit. Eight Japanese historians (including Yaroslav Shulatov, educated and teaching in Japan), whose excellent research results have not sufficiently been shared with the English-speaking audience, contribute to the collection. They mobilize a huge bulk of Japanese archival sources, which is an invaluable merit for specialists in Far Eastern history who do not read Japanese. The collection highlights important but barely studied topics, such as the emergence of antisemitism in Japan and Canada's participation in the Siberian Intervention.
From Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War until the end of the Siberian Intervention in 1925, international relations in northeast Asia were drastically reshuffled. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902 was a continuation of the Great Game in the nineteenth century. Japan was Britain's junior partner in their struggle against Russia. Japan desperately challenged much stronger enemies in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, but facing World War I, Japan “could wage wars as planning for the future preservation of the homeland” (63). Especially after the Xinhai Revolution, the United States began to protect China against Japan, while Britain began to occupy an equivocal position between Japan and the US. In this situation, the Russian Empire had become Japan's natural ally, and the two countries repeatedly concluded conventions. Their military cooperation during World War I was the logical completion of this trend. Symptomatically, Japan proposed that Russia would receive weapons from Japan immediately after the beginning of hostilities, much before Russia faced a munitions crisis in 2015 (26–27). Dmitry Pavlov and Shulatov investigate Japan's supply of arms to Russia, their court diplomacy, and joint navy operations in the Pacific. As Saito Seiji describes, Japan quickly adapted itself to the decline of its most reliable ally, the Russian Empire, and began to exploit the post-imperial power vacuum in Eurasia to expand its sphere of interest. Indeed, after the demise of the Qing and Romanov Empires, non-state actors such as the Czech Legion could easily gain international importance, and guerilla-style adventurers, such as Baron Roman Ungern and Ataman Grigory Semenov, could build quasi-states. These adventurers had their own resources: Babujab exploited the Mongolians’ aspiration for Inner Mongolia (Nakami Tatsuo's chapter); Semenov and Khorvat's influence depended on their control of the Chinese Eastern Railway (David Wolff's chapter); and Baltic German Ungern brought a multicultural paramilitary tradition from European battlefields to the east (Willard Sunderland calls it “violent migration”). Japan's support slightly supplemented these resources. As Nakami argues, it was in this period of easy expansion that the Japanese right began to regard Manchuria and Inner Mongolia as Japan's Lebensraum. In the 1930s, when European powers resumed their commitment to Far East matters, Japan faced the question of how to maintain its overextended sphere of interest.
Total mobilization during World War I facilitated mass democracy, to which Tomita Takeshi attributes emerging new strategies in Japan's military circles. Tomita compares the generations of Tanaka Giichi (b. 1864, prime minister in 1927–1929) and Araki Sadao (b. 1877, war minister in 1931–1934). Tanaka was not only a general, but also a patronal politician of the Seiyukai (Constitutional Association of Political Friendship), and was aware that wars after World War I could not be conducted without total mobilization of the national economy and feared that Japan's intervention in Siberia would radicalize Russian peasants. Araki would become a leader of Kodo-ha (intra-army faction of Imperial Way) in the 1930s. Tomita explains the diversion of these figures by their differing commitments to World War I and the Intervention. For example, Araki earnestly supported Semenov because both of them had anti-aristocratic tendencies. Yokote Shinji investigates the Pan-Asianism proposed by Okawa Shumei (1886–1957), the only civilian (non-government officer) defendant in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. In the 1910s, Toyama Mitsuru, Okawa, and other Japanese right-wing advocates had close contacts with Asian nationalists, such as Sun Yatsen and Chandra Bose. Yokote traces Okawa's ideological trajectory, which ended up advocating anti-imperialist cooperation with the Soviet Union. Japan could not become a consistent anti-imperial empire, however. The Japanese right supported nationalism in British India, but the Japanese Army conflicted with the Czech Legion, encouraging Korean and Chinese nationalist movements against Japan (Hayashi Tadayuki's chapter).
The collection is voluminous and may seem to lack central concepts that serve to unify chapters, which are excellent by themselves. Yet this is a reflection of the early stage of studies on the Eastern Front of World War I and the Intervention. This collection is an indispensable volume for specialists in modern Far East history.
