Packing significant interpretive punch, Erik Esselstrom's tightly focused book zeroes in on the Japanese Foreign Ministry's consular police during the period of Japanese imperialism from the 1880s through the end of World War II. The book offers a new vantage point on many important events of this time, including the penetration and annexation of Korea, the suppression of the Korean independence movement, and the Manchurian Incident.
As opposed to a top-down account of foreign policy making, Esselstrom's history of the consular police provides a look at Japan's Foreign Ministry at the local level abroad, where the police worked on the ground at the empire's periphery, at the intersection of official metropole policy and the reality of local conditions. The consular police program was first established in treaty ports in newly “opened” Korea in 1880 at the request of local Japanese residents. Following the Sino-Japanese War, the force was expanded, both in number and geographic reach, again because of calls from the Japanese resident community, whose population was swelling beyond the treaty ports into the interior of China. Esselstrom asserts that the consular police's establishment of police boxes and substations throughout the peninsula, which pushed their jurisdictional limits, created an “infrastructure for police surveillance” (p. 37) that eased the Japanese annexation in 1910. Because the protection of Japanese residents was the primary reason for the development of the consular police in Korea, Esselstrom lays a significant amount of the blame at the residents’ feet for “accelerating the complete imperial colonization of Korea” (p. 37).
The consular police's mission of protecting Japanese life and property either within or beyond the boundaries of a recognized treaty port did not transfer well to China; there, it met with strong resistance from both Chinese and Westerners as an abuse of consular jurisdiction. Along with the main treaty ports of Shanghai and Tianjin, a key area of consular police activity was the Sino-Korean border region of Jiandao, which was home to Korean resistance fighters and, later, Chinese and Korean communists. Chinese officials and locals offered challenges—many violent—to the legality of the consular police in Jiandao and in other areas in China. The consular police were able to fight off these challenges to move forward with their mission, in part through the 1915 Sino-Japanese treaty following the infamous Twenty-One Demands, which resulted in an expanded police presence in Jiandao.
Reacting to the spread of the international communist movement based in Moscow, and the outbreak of the Korean independence movement in March 1919, the consular police joined their counterparts in Japan and the colonies to form a “transregional chain of political security institutions” (p. 69) devoted to combating these two subversive movements. While the consular police continued to protect nationals living abroad, a group that now included Taiwanese and Korean subjects, they increasingly devoted their time to monitoring the subversive ideas of Japanese socialists and keeping tabs on the activities of Korean rebels. Esselstrom argues that the Foreign Ministry was as instrumental an institution as any of the imperial bureaucracies in playing its part in eradicating socialist thought from the empire.
The Jiandao region proved to be a veritable frontline for the consular police in carrying out their new mission. Here, officers acted more like soldiers than security personnel and regularly skirmished with Korean independence activists and Chinese and Korean communists. It is no surprise to learn, then, that following the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident in September 1931, the consular police assisted the Japanese Kwantung Army in its takeover of Manchuria. In fact, the consular police resembled a vanguard unit, for, as Esselstrom argues, “the Foreign Ministry's commitment to policing radical politics beyond boundaries of the formal empire placed it at the forefront of Japanese encroachments upon Chinese sovereignty” (p. 93).
Through his study of the consular police, Esselstrom makes a strong case for the link between Japanese domestic stability and security throughout the empire. He argues that the force behind Japanese expansion can be found in the relationship between the “metropolitan core” and the “colonial periphery” (p. 8). This compelling argument makes Esselstrom's book essential reading for those interested in Japanese imperialism and prewar foreign policy. Still, Esselstrom relies heavily on the experiences of the consular police in Jiandao to make several of his arguments. One might question whether the entire Foreign Ministry shares the blame for the activities of the Jiandao consular police, who, fighting a “unilateral war of their own” (p. 148), repeatedly violated Chinese sovereignty, but in doing so were often at odds with their superiors in Tokyo. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the Jiandao consular police were particularly egregious in their encroachment on Chinese sovereignty and not necessarily even representative of Japanese consular police as a whole in China.
These questions aside, Esselstrom succeeds in his goal of challenging the long-held “conceptual binary” (p. 148) of an expansionist Japanese army versus an internationalist Foreign Ministry. Another major contribution of this book is as an institutional history. It is an important and overdue addition to our understanding of the Foreign Ministry and builds on earlier scholarship that highlighted the diversity of opinion within the multilevel and multifaceted institution. Moreover, because the consular police worked directly with other imperial institutions, most notably the Home Ministry and the various colonial authorities, this insightful book also advances our understanding of the relationships between the various prewar bureaucracies.
