Japan and the League of Nations by Thomas W. Burkman is a rich account of Japan's involvement in the creation and operation of the League; its eight chapters are masterfully grounded in exhaustive research from archives and interviews on three continents. Chapter 1 presents the advantages that Japan gained from World War I—economic advancement, regional leadership, and international equality—along with the political tensions posed by Woodrow Wilson's democratic ideals for monarchical Japan. Chapters 2 and 3 recount the debates in Japan surrounding the reception of Wilson's plans for the League. Japanese leaders were surprisingly unprepared for the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the war, having focused all their attention on gaining control of German territories in China and the Pacific. Accordingly, Japanese leaders faced off between those who would support the League and its ideals of international cooperation and those who criticized the League as a tool of the European powers, whose commitment to national self-interest was likely to interfere with Japan's territorial ambitions and leadership in east Asia.

Chapter 4 narrates Japan's participation in the peace conference and the debates over the League covenant. Japanese delegates had given little thought to drafting a League of Nations constitution, but their lack of enthusiasm gave way to insistent support for a statement on racial equality and the establishment of a mandate system that would ratify Japanese control of Germany's former Pacific islands (the Nan'yô territories). The former effort failed but the latter succeeded, and a grudging public opposition acquiesced as Japan ratified the peace treaty and assumed its new role as a world leader.

Chapters 5 and 6 cover Japanese work in League affairs during the 1920s. Burkman presents fresh accounts of Japan's participation in the debates over the Geneva Protocol, opium in East Asia, and international labor standards; these are complemented by biographical sketches of the two distinguished diplomats who presented Japan's “public face” in Geneva: Nitobe Inazô and Ishii Kikujirô. Chapter 7 turns to the Manchurian crisis and the diplomatic fallout in Europe and the United States, where Nitobe, Ishii, and others attempted unsuccessfully to justify their government's actions. Chapter 8 recounts Japan's decision to quit the League in 1933, which became effective in 1935. Japanese diplomats continued to serve in humanitarian offices of the League until 1938, when the war in China made their service untenable.

Apart from Burkman's excellent narrative and engaging detail, his thesis raises a question. When he argues that others have dismissed Japan's international role in the 1920s as minor and its involvement with the League as negligible, Burkman proves that Japan took its new international position seriously and pursued constructive involvement with the League (pp. xi, 111, 141). But he is less successful in specifying Japanese “internationalism” as a phenomenon that arose after World War I, in the context of the League (pp. xiii, 24, 210), and that was expressed in government policy as taisei junnô or “international accomodationism” (pp. xiv, 44, 100, 108, 111, 212). According to Burkman, Japanese internationalism was an expectation “that Japan should function harmoniously within an interstate system” and a willingness “to accept some limitations on independent national prerogatives in deference to the collective interests of other major nations” (p. 144). But Japan's national interests—especially territorial expansion into China—always compromised international cooperation, and Burkman finally admits that Japan “pursued a double strategy of entente with one group of states in combination with an active hegemonic policy toward another” (p. 213).

What can we make of this internationalism? In Japan, such a form did not arise in the wake of World War I; it arguably developed in tandem with the Meiji state. Certainly, Japanese experts in international law—including Sugimura Yôtarô, a prominent diplomat committed to internationalism in Burkman's narrative—always justified Japan's national interests and its prosecution of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars as consistent with international legality. Moreover, the policy of “international accomodationism” marks only a greater prevalence (p. 25). Japan modeled its international relations after those of its imperialist tutors, and Japan's commitment to national interests was always compatible with its internationalism. However, Burkman does outline a new shift in internationalism with Japan's wish for formal regional hegemony, several plans for which are discussed in chapter 8. If the early Meiji state's drive for national independence and international equality developed into a desire for regional dominance free of Western meddling, is Burkman in fact describing a new form of internationalism informed by both nationalism and regionalism?

Despite this reviewer's wish for a deeper interrogation of internationalism, Burkman's history of Japan's debut as world leader merits careful reading because he raises compelling questions about Japan's “internationality” in the interwar period.