The October Revolution of 1917 resulted in civil war and the withdrawal of Russia from World War I. When Russia concluded a separate peace with the Central Powers in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the eastern front collapsed, and some 50,000 soldiers of the Czech Legion found themselves behind enemy lines in Russia's Far East. The remaining powers of the Entente dispatched troops to Russia's Maritime Region to aid the Czechs, but more to prevent the large caches of war matériel in Vladivostok from falling into the hands of the Germans or Bolsheviks, to prop up a White Russian government, and to reestablish the Eastern Front. In July 1918, President Woodrow Wilson urged Japan to contribute 7,000 troops to the international coalition converging on Siberia. By November, over 70,000 troops of the Imperial Japanese Army occupied the Russian Far East and northern Manchuria. This book focuses primarily on how this rapid escalation of Japan's military presence in the region came to pass, the difficulty the government encountered in trying to withdraw troops once committed, and the political fallout that continued occupation engendered.

Author Paul Dunscomb, associate professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage, presents Japan's Siberian Intervention as “a case study in failure” (p. 1), and “not just a story about Japanese foreign policy… [but] also part of the tale of the development of Japanese domestic politics under the Meiji constitution” (p. 2). He posits that the Siberian Intervention served as an “acid test” of Japan's ability to reconfigure itself within the “trends of the times,” that is, the milieu of Wilsonian internationalism, which determined if Japan would emerge as a constitutional and democratic government at home while also adopting a “spirit of cooperation rather than conquest” abroad (p. 4). In this, Japan failed. Dunscomb's central thesis is that the Siberian Intervention “was critical in undermining the initial enthusiasm for democracy at the end of the First World War. The impotence of democratic government to carry out the popular will and the inability of Japanese civil society to compel meaningful change disheartened democratic advocates” (pp. 5–6). Dunscomb argues fundamental flaws inherent in the Meiji constitution and the political system it produced allowed the power of the general staffs of the military services to go unchecked by civilian authority, thus sounding the death knell for the nascent Taishō democracy (pp. 11–15). Thus, one may infer, the intervention foreshadowed many of the same complexities that were to arise in the 1930s ultimately leading to World War II in Asia and the Pacific.

The book is largely a narrative of the “tug of war between the civilian, party cabinet of Hara Takashi (Kei) and the army general staff under Uehara Yusaku” (p. 5). He argues that the general public was “generally well informed on what sort of actions the government contemplated taking in Siberia, debated the merits of the various ideas vigorously in open forums, and were not in the least shy about putting forward their own suggestions on what ought to be done there. In doing so they, too, played a role in shaping the way various actors within Japan's decision making circles pursued the courses they did.” (p. 5) Dunscomb carefully illustrates this point through numerous well-documented references to various magazines and editorials in national and local newspapers. While he suggests that the general public may have had some measure of agency in determining policy decisions concerning the Siberian Intervention, he also notes the “almost universal ambivalence which the public held towards it” (p. 3). In the end, the Siberian Intervention revealed the inability of political parties rent by factionalism to impose their will on the military, and when the decision to withdraw was made in 1922—fully two years after all other coalition forces had thrown in the towel—the impetus came as much from within the services as from without (p. 178).

The study deftly exploits an impressive array of Japanese sources, including collections at the National Diet Library, print media from regional and local archives, and several contemporary published primary sources. Given that the last major study of the Siberian Intervention in English was published over fifty years ago (viz. James William Morley' The Japanese Thrust Into Siberia, [New York: Columbia University Press, 1954]), the body of literature remains thin, and a return to the subject has been long over due. But Dunscomb cautions us his book is not a sequel to Morley's, which focuses on “the diplomatic process by which Japan's Siberian Intervention began,” nor is it a “campaign history” of the Japanese army in Siberia (p. 1). Rather, the book is largely a political history of the diplomatic and military entanglements the intervention posed for Japan's policy makers at home. As such, it should be of interest to scholars of Japanese imperialism and political history, more so than military, and is a solid contribution to those fields. This author shares Dunscomb's hope that the book will spark new interest and scholarship on this often overlooked but very important episode in Japan's modern history.