Russo-Japanese War

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Russo-Japanese War Summary

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Russo-Japanese War

(1904–1905). Japan's use of Western-style military organization and armaments to triumph over Russia in 1905 was a turning point in relations between Asia and the West, in part because it was seen by many as a race war or a clash of civilizations. This allegation was denied by Japanese leaders, including Prime Minister General Katsura Taro, who admitted at the war's outset that Japan could never conquer Russia or force it to pay an indemnity for Japan's war expenses. They also knew that Japan's economic future was dependent on Western markets and the vast loans needed to fight the war could be obtained only in London and New York. Japan's military successes, however, were celebrated by anticolonial leaders from Asia to Africa; even Christian nationalist statesman Yun Chiho in Korea, who knew that a Japanese victory would endanger his country, still welcomed the humbling of Western arrogance. This revolution in Asian confidence made Japan feared in North America and Australasia; new defense policies were created in both these regioins against the perceived threat of Japanese invasion. By 1907, there was already talk of a coming war between Japan and the United States. As Japan became the target of Western suspicion, its own nationalist ideology increasingly stressed the Russo-Japanese war as a triumph of a uniquely Japanese spirit. In this way, Japan also ended up viewing the war in racial terms.

The direct regional significance of the war was that Japan became a continental power in Asia, at the expense of China and Korea. In the peace treaty of September 1905, negotiated at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Russia conceded Japan's special interest in Korea and also transferred to Japan its territorial concessions, which included rail and mines in southern Manchuria (northeast China). To protect these rights, Japan stationed troops in Manchuria that were to be the vanguard of further military expansion in the 1930s. In November 1905, Japan also intimidated the Korean government into signing a protectorate treaty whereby a Japanese resident-general in Seoul took charge of Korea's foreign relations and increasingly of its domestic politics. In 1910 Japan annexed Korea outright; it remained part of Japan's empire until the end of World War II.

Hostilities

The cause of the Russo-Japanese War was Japan's sense of insecurity. Japanese leaders feared that Korea could be used as a platform from which to attack Japan, as in the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion. Russian expansion in Manchuria in the 1890s, and its ongoing construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, were viewed in Tokyo as a threat to Korea. Japan attempted negotiations through 1903, with a view to trading spheres of influence (Russia to dominate Manchuria, Japan to dominate Korea). When negotiations failed, Japan attacked Russian vessels in the region in February 1904 without first declaring war. Japan was to do the same thing at Pearl Harbor in 1941, but in 1904, this covert action was applauded by its British ally. Initial land battles in Korea were easily won by the Japanese as Russian forces retreated to consolidate. The major conflicts were at Port Arthur (Lushun), where the Japanese forces under General Nogi Maresuke were held for five months and suffered enormous casualties. At the battle of Mukden in March 1905, approximately half a million Russian and Japanese troops fought in the biggest land battle before 1914. Shortly thereafter, the Japanese navy under Admiral Togo Heihachiro destroyed the exhausted Russian Baltic fleet at the battle of Tsushima. Although Japan appeared to have won every engagement, it had been forced to mobilize over one million men and had lost 81,000 (over six times the total figure for its 1894–1895 war with China), along with 381,000 sick and wounded. The losses in men and money actually crippled Japan and the government hurriedly accepted the peace treaty of September 1905, despite anger among the Japanese public at its terms.

Wartime Japan

The common wisdom has long been that the Japanese public demanded war with Russia (in revenge for Russia's diplomatic obstruction of Japan in its earlier war with China) and unhesitatingly supported the war effort. More recent scholarship, however, has revised this impression. There was broad wartime resentment in Japan at the rising number of mass funerals, the higher wartime taxes, and the length of the war. This was Japan's first war to be seen in moving pictures, yet audiences varied in their responses: some war movies and newsreels were very popular; others, especially those with fraudulent advertising, were scorned. Many people did respond to the recurring campaigns for war donations, often conducted by patriotic women's groups, but there was also a backlash as the demands continued. In this sense, there was a divergence between the public (propaganda) face of Japan accepted by the West, and the actuality of a Japanese public increasingly tired of the war. Public support of the military in Japan was always conditional, based on a balance between costs and rewards. One result of this was a growing fear among army commanders after 1905 of socialism among new conscripts. At the time, however, the socialist movement in Japan remained largely intellectual and peripheral. The major public protest at the war's end, the Hibiya riots in central Tokyo, are usually regarded as an ultranationalist demonstration insisting the war be reopened so that Japan might improve its meager rewards. These riots had no lasting impact on Japanese military or diplomatic policies or on the domestic polity; the changeover of cabinets from General Katsura to the head of the largest political party, the Seiyukai, had been agreed long before the war's end. Where the war did influence post-1905 politics was in civil-military relations. The huge debt burden of the war prevented the army from obtaining the extra forces some of its leaders felt essential to defend Japan's new position in Asia, and it was to clash with an alliance of the navy and the Seiyukai in the constitutional crisis of 1912–1913. This clash was to influence attitudes between politicians and the army until 1945.