It must be said that, following the collapse of the USSR (and Sovietology) in the 1990s, China has eclipsed Russia and the former Soviet Union as a subject of paramount interest in Japanese studies; even though I work with Russian-language documents, I am also guilty of this oversight. This is particularly problematic because late imperial Russia and the Soviet Union were a consistent preoccupation for Japanese military strategists, economic planners, and even science fiction writers; in other words, the Russians captured the imagination of the Japanese at both the elite and popular levels. Two recent monographs by Peter Berton and Naoko Shimazu make us revisit Japan's encounter with Russia from 1905 to 1917 and expose the gulf that existed between “civilized and enlightened” elites and a largely disenfranchised public that increasingly demanded a voice in foreign affairs.

Peter Berton's study of Russo-Japanese relations, at just ninety-one pages of text (minus notes and bibliography), is surprisingly difficult to complete, as it is replete with detailed minutiae regarding Russo-Japanese rivalry and, interestingly, cooperation. It operates within the orthodox genre of the history of international relations, featuring an argosy of barons and generals who were highly influential in directing foreign policy. Nevertheless, one should persevere to fully comprehend Berton's analysis of this period: after 1905, but before the 1917 revolution, Japan performed an important role in Russia's war machine, both in the form of buying Russian bonds and supplying desperately underequipped soldiers with Japanese-made rifles during World War I—even from Japan's reserve stockpiles. This level of cooperation and nonantagonistic interaction is reminiscent of Shō Konishi's work, wherein the two countries are not implacable adversaries, but neighbors facing similar historical challenges.Footnote ¹²

There are some places where I found the phrasing a bit strange: on page 26, when discussing a memorandum by Yamagata Aritomo, Berton wrote:

While I agree that it is “undeniable” that racial discourse came to define international conflicts at the beginning of the twentieth century, the passage can be read as a reification of race itself. It is unclear from the text if it was Berton's view or a summary of Yamagata's memorandum, but I assume the latter. Apart from a few confusing passages, the book is clear concerning the evolution of an unlikely alliance that emerged from a desire to “drive another wedge into the ‘white’ camp” of imperial powers (p. 18).

The book would have benefited from greater attention to Japan's economic situation, as it successfully highlights the uniqueness of this period of Japanese politics and foreign policy; since Berton is doubtless aware of the conflict over economic policy, this seems to be a casualty of the book's brevity. As we know from recent works by Michael Schiltz, Richard Smethurst, and Mark Metzler,Footnote ¹³ Japan's foreign policy from 1905 to 1917 was not merely driven by a need to divide “white powers,” but also to regain tariff autonomy, establish a coherent monetary policy, reduce its sovereign debt, accumulate specie in its banks to facilitate trade, and establish financial dominance over Asian markets. As Berton shows, becoming part of the major powers required multilateral and bilateral cooperation with foreign countries, including but not limited to Russia, but this was especially true when dealing with foreign financial institutions during a period of fierce competition over Asian markets. The financial story makes Berton's project all the more surprising: Russia's reentry into Japanese foreign policy circles after 1905 as an ally is counterintuitive from the long view of Japanese modern history, considering it is bookended by the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance (designed in part to contain Russia) and the 1918 Siberian Intervention. As Berton shows, the devil was in the details, and a Russo-Japanese alliance would have gone a long way to resolve some of Japan's economic, strategic, and political vulnerabilities were it not for those troublesome Bolsheviks. The fact that Russo-Japanese agreements during World War I were modeled on the Anglo-Japanese Alliance appears in this light to be a historical irony and a testament to the “rationality” with which elite foreign policy makers strategized with (and against) foreign powers. Berton's book is worth a read if not simply to grasp this dynamic at the elite level.

During this period, however, ordinary people were becoming increasingly important to the state. Berton notes that the 1916 Russo-Japanese alliance was greeted in Japan with 37,000 Tokyo citizens participating in a lantern parade and shouting “banzai” in front of the Russian consulate (p. 68). In order to grasp the growing importance of the “everyman,” Naoko Shimazu's 2009 book is crucial because it focuses on the social and cultural history of the war, delving into published diaries, mass media, monument construction, and memorial practices. I am sure that time will show the book consolidating its status as the first port of call for both students and scholars interested in the Russo-Japanese War. It richly captures the ritualized send-offs, journeys overseas, encounters with the foreign “Other” (both European and Asian), and opposition to romanticized images of battle.

Shimazu wisely grounds her discussion in the contentious history of conscription and popular opposition to the state in Meiji. The first chapter of the book focuses on the Meiji state's efforts to instill a spirit of righteousness and obligation to make the “ultimate sacrifice” by tapping into local social organizations and rituals. In analyzing conscription and popular culture, she is expanding the findings of Japanese scholars, such as Ōe Shinobu and Fujii Tadatoshi, and showing the origins of such practices prior to the larger 1937–45 conflict.Footnote ¹⁴ This chapter also ably shows how a wide gulf existed between the elite actors described by Berton, on the one hand, and the (sometimes rowdy) public, on the other.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the process of mobilization and the experience of the battlefield, which Shimazu reveals through a solid analysis of personal accounts. Women's societies, veterans’ groups, and religious organizations all conspired to make “soldiers feel that ‘they’—the soldiers and the people—were united in this war together” (p. 65). The farewell rituals, although not quite as well organized or funded as those of the 1937–45 wartime period, were the seeds of future mobilization practice. Once on the battlefield, of course, the experience was nothing like the illustrations of heroic victory in the mass media. The “everyman” culture of the 1930s and 1940s, in which every soldier felt himself to be an important part of a national endeavor, had not yet fully emerged, but men independently formed important bonds between each other; these would be crucial in the later formation of militaristic social organizations, such as the Imperial Reservists. Shimazu was even able to identify personal narratives that questioned the “honorable war death” that the men were encouraged to accept: “Soldiering is an honourable occupation. People respect honour. But, if one were to know what lies behind it, then, one may no longer think thus. If you think of honour, observe what's behind it” (p. 101). Shimazu exposes the fundamental flaw in late Meiji military mobilization discourse: in a country where even most men had no representation in their own government, infantrymen had little reason to accept the elite rhetoric of “honorable death” that their commanding officers celebrated.

Chapter 4 is a nuanced analysis of how the persistent localism structured the monuments and celebrations for dead and returning soldiers. Yasukuni Shrine emerges here, but in a decidedly peripheral way—local heroes were celebrated at home, not in the capital. Nevertheless, one woman, served tea by Princess Konoe, remarked tearfully, “I was mourning the death of my son until yesterday but I should not cry anymore” (p. 152). As she later acknowledges, the Russo-Japanese War was a turning point in the nationalization of the war dead—noting an article by Ōe Shinobu that argues that the imperial recognition of “war god” Hirose Takeo was instrumental to his apotheosis (pp. 208 and 213, fn. 52).

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on representation, expanding on the work of such historians as Ōhama Tetsuya.Footnote ¹⁵ Chapter 5, in particular, shows how the cash-strapped Meiji central government usually allowed town elites and social organizations to take charge of war memorialization, which was mirrored in the highly regionalized popular press's focus on “local heroes.” The feckless attempts of Yasukuni to make state Shintō a center of public remembrance at this time are artfully revealed in Shimazu's detailed examination of locally funded public and private memorials. In addition to an interesting study of the treatment of Russian POWs as a performance of “civilized” behavior, Shimazu uses Chapter 6 to discuss Japanese mass media images of the Russians as “barbaric whites.” It should be said that her analysis of the Japanese view of the Russians is slightly different than that of Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton.Footnote ¹⁶ Swinton emphasizes the importance of Russia as a “formidable enemy” to serve as a “foil” for the “Japanese spirit” (p. 132), whereas Shimazu leans toward showing how Russians were considered barbaric and suspiciously Asiatic (pp. 162–67). This discrepancy in emphasis underlines the continuing inadequacy of our understanding of historical Japanese views of race and demands further research. Richard Berton even claims that it is “not improbable” that the Russian empire, had it survived World War I, would have supported Japan's demand for a racial equality clause (p. 90). All will certainly agree that public discussions of the Russo-Japanese War were a performance of “civilized” military prowess, and that the empire tried to use this discourse to gain inclusion into the ranks of imperial powers.

Both Berton and Shimazu reflect on the impact and memory of the Russo-Japanese War. For Berton, the Russo-Japanese War was followed by a comparative golden age of amicable relations between the two countries, based on careful, sometimes secret, negotiations at the highest levels. In Shimazu's final chapter, she notes that representations of the Russo-Japanese War became the foundation for the popular militarism that infested the Japanese electorate throughout the 1930s. By 1905, pacifist Kōtoku Shūsui's Heimin Shinbun’s subscription rate had dropped from 8,000 to 1,700, and even Uchimura Kanzō admitted to privately cheering Japanese naval victories.Footnote ¹⁷ The later popular militarism of the Shōwa era thus emerges as a successful effort to “frame” public discourse and nurture preexisting sociocultural practices; these had the potential to dramatically undermine the interests of more careful elite actors and embolden those who fantasized about harnessing public enthusiasm to support global empire and “race war.”