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In Our Time: History
The Russo-Japanese War
00:48:51
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1904-5 clash of Japanese and Russian empires.
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Melvin Bragg
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Naoko Shimazu
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Melvin Bragg
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Episode Host/Presenter
Downloading this episode of In Our Time and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter BC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello. In February 1904, Japanese destroyers made a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur on the Yellow Sea, and the next day the countries were at war. To Russians, defeat was unthinkable, their fleet unsinkable. But they were soon humiliated and 1905 became a year of revolution, and victory advanced the Japanese goal of making Europe and America more wary of East Asia, adopting the newest weapons while calling on peasant conscripts to be more like samurai of old. With me to discuss the Russo Japanese War are Simon Dickson, Sir Bernard Pearse, professor of Russian History at University College London, Naoko Shimazu, professor of Humanities at Yale NUS College, Singapore and Oleg Benesh, Reader in Modern History at the University of York. Oleg Vanish it was only 50 years before this that Commodore Perry famously had arrived in Japan with American warships. What changes had that prompted in Japan from say, the middle of the 19th century?
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Simon Dixon
Yes, this is an incredible 50 year period that I think is quite necessary for understanding where these countries are on the eve of the war, especially Japan. And as you say, when Perry arrives in 1853, a lesser known Russian fleet arrives just a little bit after him, but at that point Japan is essentially ruled by what's called the Tokugawa Shogunate. There is a samurai warrior class that has been ruling the country for the past 250 years. Japan is fairly isolated from the rest of the world in a lot of ways, but it is also at peace. And this challenge from abroad really kind of sets a lot of things in motion. Japan is aware of the Opium wars and the Chinese defeat that had happened about a decade earlier in and they realize the severity of the Western threat. When Perry arrives, the Tokugawa government that was ruling ultimately is unable to deal with these threats. There are rebellions during the 1860s and the shogunate is overthrown in 1868. In its place, a new imperial government is created under the Meiji Emperor. And we have the Meiji period starting in 1868. And one of the big changes we have here is Japan realizes that the country needs to modernize, which at this time means really Westernizing. And one of the main things they want to do is to seek knowledge throughout the world. They send Japanese students and scholars all around the world to learn, especially Europe and America. And they also bring in a great number of foreign advisors and they start setting up modern institutions such as courts, post offices, they start building railways. And one of the most important here is a modern military. So whereas before the military matters in Japan were generally handled by the samurai warrior class in the Meiji period, now we are looking at a modern conscript army which is primarily constituted of commoners rather than samurai. So the samurai don't necessarily want to take this lying down. We have a series of rebellions in the 1870s, but ultimately they are essentially, essentially crushed.
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Episode Host/Presenter
It's massive change. The two aspects of it are extraordinary. One is that it's massive and B that it happens in 40 years. The idea of catching up on 400 years of Europe in 40 years. Was there any one person, a group of people who got this going?
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Simon Dixon
Yeah. So significantly, they all come from western Japan, the far west, and they are all from domains that were on the opposite side of the Tokugawa at the Battle of Six of Sekigahara in 1600. So we have 250 years of these domains, these people remembering which side they were on in a battle. And then we have this animosity towards the Tokugawa throughout the entire two and a half centuries. And what happens then once they have taken power is when they are westernizing. Initially we had this very strong anti foreign sentiment where we have this big push towards westernization in the 1870s. By the 1880s, there is some resistance to this, a bit of a backlash. One could Say, because people are feeling that Japan's earlier traditions are all being lost. And one of the big complexities with this is what is Japan's earlier traditions? Because much of this is related to China, which is kind of hegemon in East Asia up until that point. And so by the late 1880s, you're really getting a movement where people are trying to separate a unique Japanese spirit, so to speak, or identity from these kind of Western Chinese foreign influences.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Where did the Japanese military draw their inspiration from?
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Simon Dixon
So at this time, really up until well into the 1890s, the Japanese army, well, the Imperial Japanese army is very much focused on reforming in Western lines. It's about Western drill, it's about Western technology, it's really about modernizing in that sense, rather than focusing too much on spiritual education, as it's called in the 20th century. And so when we end up having a war with China in 1894, 95, that war is really seen as emblematic of Japan's more successful modernization relative to China, rather than any sort of innate abilities. It's only after that that that we start getting other inspirations drawn on martial traditions invented and not centered especially around the samurai. The Japanese bring in French advisors to teach them first. After the Franco Prussian War, there's more of a shift towards German advisors. But they're really drawing on the best knowledge that they can get from around the world. I see they have a state of the art fleet when they go into war with China and again later into war with Russia.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Thank you, Simon. Simon Dixon, why was Russia interested in this region in East Asia, 4,000 miles away from Moscow? What was the point?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, since the humiliation in the Crimea, Russia had been very keen to project itself as not just a European empire, but as a Eurasian empire. And it was something rather like we saw in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. If you humiliated in the west, you turn more to the East. And of course, in the 19th century, the expression of that ambition was in terms of territorial expansion. So initially in Central asia in the 1860s, and then by the end of the 1890s, Russia had got as far as the Far east, as far as Manchuria. After the Sino Japanese War, three years after that, Russia was able to occupy the Liaodong Peninsula. And that's when they built Port Arthur, the port you referred to right at the beginning, Melvin. They built that in 1898. So the question then was really how much further than Manchuria would they go? And that question came into very clear focus after the Boxer Rebellion. In China, because the Russians had been amongst the international group of people who helped to suppress that rebellion. And the question was when, if at all, they would withdraw their troops. And there was a division of opinion about that in Russia. On the one hand, a group of senior ministers, led by the Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte, who's an extremely important person in this whole story, were in favor of withdrawal because they could see the dangers of overextension. But those ministers were effectively outflanked by a clique at court which decided basically that they were going to not only stay in Manchuria, but get as far as Korea as well. That was their main aim. And to do that, they set up a kind of timber concession on the Yalu river inside Korea in 1898. And Tsar himself was a shareholder in this company, and it was used as a kind of COVID for military activity. So this is the Russians moving way beyond the kind of interest in foreign trade with Japan, which started in the 1850s, as Oleg said, to a much more imperialist adventurism, where the state was going to follow this sort of informal empire set up by this court camarilla under Captain Bezobrozov.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Were the Russians were there responding to a possible threat from the Japanese?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, they certainly weren't responding to any kind of military threat from the Japanese. As far as they were concerned. The threat, if there was a threat, it was a cultural threat. The Russians regarded the Japanese as sort of degenerate descendants of the Mongol hordes who had invaded the Russian territory in the Middle Ages. They didn't, I think, realise the extent to which the Japanese would fundamentally object to Russian activity in Korea. And that's eventually what, of course, led to the outbreak of the war. If it had been possible to settle sort of zones of influence, Manchuria for the Russians career, for the Japanese, things might have been more straightforward. But the Russian aggressive forward policy in Korea effectively provoked the Japanese into attacking Port Arthur.
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Episode Host/Presenter
How did the Russians react to their first setbacks?
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Melvin Bragg
It's precisely because they were so confident of victory. The first setbacks came as a big surprise to the Russians, I think, because immediately the war started, things began to go fairly badly wrong. Russian communications were overstretched. The whole thing on the land became very difficult for them. And so the most obvious political response was that since the war was so closely identified with the Tsar and this court camarilla, who had sort of pushed him along this route into Korea, the most immediate reaction to defeat or to trouble in the war was among educated society and particularly amongst those liberal constitutionalists who wanted to restrict the activity of the autocratic monarchy wanted to establish some sort of constitution. So right from the beginning in 1904, you begin to connected to the war in Japan, political response saying, well, we should limit the autocracy.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Thank you. Naoko, can you tell us how national identity is changing in Japan at this time?
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Naoko Shimazu
Generally speaking, there was a powerful orthodoxy that Japan was a monolithic patriotic nation state when Japan fought against Russia in 1904. 05 and that's normally given as a reason for Japan's surprising victory, let's say. And this all centers on this idea of Meiji nationalism. So essentially nationalism of this period and which is sort of attained almost like a mythical status in Japanese history that, yes, in the good old days of Meiji, Japan had this incredibly patriotic, nationalistic state and everybody gathered together to fight for common objectives of the state. That is sort of half myth. If you look at Japanese society from bottom up, so to speak, what you soon find are contradictions. And so one of the things that I discovered in my research is that in fact, it's not at all clear where the power lay. And the Russo Japanese War and the Japanese society during this war is a particularly interesting example where the people TR to dictate or try to kind of sway local agenda so they would suit their own local needs or local interests rather than what the nation or what the state was trying to say. And this has a lot to do with the fact that the state basically did not have money.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Russian soldiers and sailors knew little of their opponents, and they thought of them as barbarians or machines. How did the Japanese troops see themselves?
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Naoko Shimazu
Most of the Japanese troops came from rural areas, basically because at the time, roughly 50% of the population lived in the countryside. And just to give you some statistics here, Japan mobilized about 1 million soldiers out of a population of 46 million. And they lost about 74,000 troops in the war. And so, relatively speaking, the scale of things, it wasn't that bad. Big, I suppose. But for Japan, this was the largest war fought to date. So this had a tremendous influence on, an impact basically on Japanese society. And if you read their diaries and letters, one of the most notable things you find out is this intense feeling of filial piety that they wrote about. And they're forever saying things like, you know, they felt really bad, bad about leaving their families back home, particularly their aging parents, and how they're going to fend for themselves. You know, they're left on their own and, you know, they as soldiers were the principal breadwinners and so on. So most importantly, all these soldiers basically say that they really want to return home uninjured and able bodied so that they can carry on looking after their families. And of course, this whole idea, you know, is completely opposite to the to what was called Honorable War death, which was the wartime slogan invented by the military Japanese Imperial army, in order to make people feel patriotic.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Thank you, Oleg Manesh, what were the Japanese aims in this war?
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Simon Dixon
One thing I might mention, just to follow that up a bit, as listeners might be more familiar with the situation of, say, Germany or Italy, which are both founded at roughly the same time as the modern Japanese nation state. And so, you know, the last three decades of the 19th century in all of these places, it's very much a project of kind of creating nationalism, creating patriotism and bringing people together. And so we have very similar dynamics going on in many countries throughout the world at that time with regard to the Japanese war aims here, what they're trying to do, I mean, much of this, as Simon touched on, is about Korea. And Japan is incredibly concerned, not so much that Korea itself is a threat, but that whoever takes over Korea would be the threat. And there's a German officer, for example, in the Meiji period, who tells the Japanese, who warns them that Korea is a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan and that if Russia, well, first China or Russia got into Korea, Japan itself would be at peril. And so what Japan is really looking for, and this is in the Sino Japanese War and then later in the Russo Japanese War, is to keep other powers out of Korea. And initially we could say this is, I mean, people in Japan are actually motivated by having a strong, independent Korea. We certainly see that in the 1880s there are a lot of people in Japan who are in favor of that. But by the time we get to the Russo Japanese War, it's more about having this kind of sphere of influence in Korea, getting everyone else out. But as part of that war aim, it's important to note that Japan wants a very limited war. They realize it is a much smaller country than Russia. A long war would be very detrimental to Japan. They have limited war aims. They want to essentially destroy the Russian fleet, win a few decisive victories, and then sue for peace and hopefully get that with American help then, which they ultimately do.
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Episode Host/Presenter
They destroyed the Russian fleet at hand in that area, Simon. But the Russians said, we will throw into the equation our Baltic fleet, which was seven months sailing away, and the Baltic fleet, bring that around the world. And they thought it was obviously going to be a great couple well, yes.
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Melvin Bragg
It'S an extraordinary story, isn't it, really? By October 1904, the Russians were effectively stymied on both land and sea, in that the fleet in the Pacific was trapped in Port Arthur, which was effectively besieged. And on land they'd had to retreat. After the Battle of Leoyang in September 1904, they'd had to retreat to Mukden. So the idea was to send the Baltic Fleet, as you say, from Kronstadt, halfway around the world, to relieve the Pacific fleet at Port Arthur. And you can imagine this was pretty unpopular amongst a lot of Russian sailors. There were an awful lot of sick notes just before the fleet left, left port in Kronstadt. They weren't keen to go. And they were even less keen a few days later when they got across the North Sea to Dogger bank, where perhaps the most extraordinary incident of the war, really, they thought they'd encountered the Russian admiral, thought he'd encountered a fleet of Japanese torpedo boats, because he'd had intelligence to this effect. So opened fire on what was, of course, a fleet of British trawlers just off Hull and Grimsby, and three British fishermen were killed. A Russian naval chaplain was killed and one or two of their others were killed. No doubt more would have been injured if the guns had been more accurate. And this was tremendously embarrassing. Of course, there was a great outcry in the British press. The Russian ambassador was heckled in London.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Meanwhile, this great Baltic Fleet is struggling around the world and eventually, after seven months, it gets there. Then what?
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Melvin Bragg
Yes, it had to go a long way around, of course, because most of the big ships couldn't get through the Suez Canal, so they had to go all the way around Western Africa. Then it arrived, you're quite right, in Japan in May 1905. Now, by that point, of course, the whole purpose of its journey was vitiated, because Port Arthur had long since been surrendered to the Japanese in December 1904. So there had to be a new plan. The new plan was to sail through to Vladivostok. But in order to get there from the East China Sea through to the Sea of Japan, the Russian fleet had to go through some fairly narrow straits. There was various possible options, but they chose the most direct route, which was through Tsushima Straits.
- [19:39]
Episode Host/Presenter
So, having heaved their way halfway around the world, what happened when they got there?
- [19:43]
Melvin Bragg
They were destroyed. They were destroyed by the Japanese fleet in very rapid order. And it was that destruction that persuaded Nicholas II to sue for peace. That's the last major engagement of the war. After that The Russians were quite clear that this was something they had to get out of, and they sued for peace very quickly.
- [20:02]
Naoko Shimazu
This story of the battle of the Baltic Fleet is absolutely astonishing. And, of course, you know, if you look at Japanese popular culture, there's been films made about this. And Admiral Togy, who was the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, became an instant war hero. And, of course, Togo studied in England back in the 1870s, and when he died in 1934, there was a shrine built after him, and it still exists in Tokyo today. So if you ever go to Tokyo, you can visit this shrine. So the thing about this Baltic plate and the story surrounding it is absolutely riveting because Simons explained the. One of the very famous stories. But every time that the fleet went around the world, right, when they came to corners like the Cape of Good Hope, around Ceylon, Straits of Malacca, they always somehow expecting the Japanese navy to ambush them. And so they feel very frightened and prepared. But of course, the Japanese have no reach down in that part of the world, so they sail through and they essentially reach Tsushima. But one of the things that you read a lot about in Japanese literature is this famous Welsh coal, which didn't emit smoke. And because of the Anglo Japanese alliance of 1902, Japan being a naval alliance partner of Britain, Britain refused to sell this coal to Russia. And so therefore, everywhere they went, they were billowing this kind of thick black smoke or whatever it is. And so they were very noticeable, you see. So this is another story that you hear or you read a lot about. And the Welsh coal mine owner was invited to Japan during the war. There was a bit of war tourism going on when fairly famous Europeans were visiting Japan to come and inspect how this Oriental country was fighting a war against a monolithic power like Russia. And so, of course, they were wined and dined, and they were shown Red Cross hospitals and all sorts of things. And they're normally uniformly impressed by what they saw. So there was a lot of wartime diplomacy going on on the part of Japan in order to kind of impress the Western powers and Western visitors that Japan was indeed in a civilized state, on the par with Russia, and that this was certainly not a war which ought to be seen as a war between Christians and heathens or between the white race and the yellow race, you know, that sort of binaries that the Japanese hated. So that sort of public diplomacy during the war was really quite big. And they went to America and they went to Europe. There were special delegations formed in order to try to convince Western media and the elites in these countries that Japan was fighting a very rightful war.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Thank you, Oleg. In what ways was this war portrayed perhaps more in the west, as has been mentioned, as a clash of civilizations?
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Simon Dixon
Yeah, I think Naoko summarized it very well. I mean, I would just point out it really. Japan is in a tricky position here because we have, as I mean, Simon touched on earlier, we have this kind of yellow peril discourse coming around that there's concern that Japan might kind of lead Asia against the west, so to speak, and be a great threat. At the same time, Japan is also being celebrated, I mean, especially in Britain, for example. So we have this kind of celebration of Japan. Japan is a great inspiration to the colonial world, for example, in Asia, in Africa, so we have the celebration of Japan, but then we also see this great kind of perception of Japan as a threat. And I think if we look at one individual, perhaps, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, who ultimately, I think, wins the Nobel Peace Prize for the treaty there, for brokering the treaty at the end of the war, you know, he is. He takes up judo, he's enamored with Japan. He buys a lot of copies of a Japanese book on the way of the Warrior. At the same time, you know, we have a lot of anti Asian racism in the us it's very prevalent at this time. And so, you know, these two perceptions can kind of coexist of Japan as a great new power and hope, but at the same time as this kind of terrifying Oriental other, so to speak.
- [24:24]
Episode Host/Presenter
Simon, what's the connection between this war and the Russian Revolution of 1905?
- [24:31]
Melvin Bragg
Well, certainly there were revolutionaries right from the start who wanted to take advantage of this war, most famously, I suppose, in Poland, where the Polish Socialist leader Pisudski actually went to Japan to try and persuade the Japanese to foment some sort of trouble in Poland. But when he got to Tokyo, he discovered that his rival, Roman Domoski, was already there telling the Japanese how unreliable Pisudski was. And they had an argument about it, apparently on the street in Japan. Now, in 1905, when the Russian Revolution blew up, Poland was very much one of the hotspots of it, and the government had to send as many soldiers there to put it down as they'd sent to Japan. So there is a big connection between the war and the revolution. And I suppose the clearest evidence comes after the fall of port Arthur in December 1904. It's not very long after that, that Bloody Sunday, the 9th of January, 1905. The demonstration of Father Gapon and his workers to the Winter palace was fired on by the Cossack troops and Russia collapsed into a series of strikes and demonstrations, all against the background of increasingly bad news from the Japanese front. Late February to March, a huge battle, the Battle of Mukden, comes out very badly for the Russians. All the news is bad throughout the spring of 1905. And of course the danger is not just the news. It's all the disillusioned, injured soldiers who are coming back down the Trans Siberian Railway. There are only so many places that they can stop off in the Urals. So they become sort of flash points, danger points for the government. And clearly it became a very strong priority for the Russian government over the course of 1905 to try and split apart these various different rebellious groups. The liberal constitutionalists I mentioned earlier, the workers who were on strike and demonstrating through 1905, the potentially rebellious soldiers. It was absolutely crucial to bring the war to an end, to stop that which happened in September 1905. And then of course, in the following month, Witte persuaded the Tsar to offer the October manifesto and the potential for a parliamentary regime.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Naoko, I know we've touched on this, but perhaps you, in the light of what Simon said, would like to make a few more remarks about this relatively novel experience on the Japanese home front. Their men folk away and dying and so far away. How did the people at home, as it were responding?
- [27:10]
Naoko Shimazu
On the whole, there were sort of 2 responses in a way. One was the sense that these were their boys really and they had to give them a good send off to the front because they were going to fight this war for the country. And so there was a lot of work being put in to the mobilization of the home front, primarily orchestrated by the local elites. And, you know, you just wouldn't believe the amount of effort they put into this. And they were sort of. There was a bit of sense of competition going on between villages and towns and who was going to put which village or which town was going to put on the best show for their troops. And so they kind of, you know, it was like you read a lot about this, which is that when the war began, Japan nationalized all these railway networks which had been previously held mostly under private ownership. And so soldiers were mobilized along these now nationalized railway tracks. And these are the railway routes which present day bullet trains run. And so, you know, Japan is a very long country as an archipelago. And so if you were in the northern parts of the, of Honshu island and go to, in order to go to Hiroshima, which was the main naval port where most of the soldiers embarked and went across to the. To the Korean side. They, you know, they went through all sorts of famous Japanese sites, like Mount Fuji, for example, Lake Biwa by Kyoto. And so bit by bit, they realized that this is the country, Japan, that they are fighting for, because previously, their source of identity were largely localized, very localized identities. Right.
- [29:08]
Episode Host/Presenter
What did that do to their view of themselves?
- [29:10]
Naoko Shimazu
Yeah, so they began to acquire the sense of the national self. They sort of began to feel that actually they're Japanese soldiers rather than soldiers from this and this region of Japan. And this sense of the kind of national self was in incredibly important. And I think it was really a transformative experience. And even the best, you know, attempts made by the army would have never been able to, you know, purposefully get to this level of enabling a kind of transformative experience to take place amongst the soldiers.
- [29:49]
Episode Host/Presenter
Thank you, Simon. Simon Dixon, how did Russia's defeat affect the balance of power in Europe? They'd been defeated quite recently in Crimea, and one of the reasons they wanted to move east, as I understand it, was to show that they could conquer somewhere. But how did this defeat by the Japanese affect their reputation in Europe?
- [30:09]
Melvin Bragg
Well, in some ways that was rather paradoxical because the Kaiser, for example, had always been egging the Tsar on in the Far east in the hope that that would in some way destabilize the frank alliance the kaiser made in 1893-94. The Kaiser always hoped for a German alliance with the Russians, and he was trying to prize the French out of their hands. And in the short term, I suppose, 1905 created the possibility for that. But in the end, it didn't work out like that, largely because there was still a very strong sense of Russian power. There was a sense that this was a blip on the part of the Russians. And even worse, it might be that they would seek to compensate for the defeat that they'd had against Japan by trying their hand somewhere else. And that was a particular anxiety in Britain. In Britain, the danger was always that the Russians might in some way try some sort of adventure in India. And so there was a strong motive for the new Liberal government, which came to power in London in 1906 and was committed to spend less on military matters, especially on the northwestern frontier. There was a strong motive for that Liberal government to make a deal with the Russians rather than try to antagonize them in any way. And indeed, they did make a deal with the Russians in February 1907 where effectively the Anglo Russian convention was about Persia, the gateway to India. So that's the British side. The Russian side of it, of course, is the Russians, having been defeated in the east, turned back west again, and they started to focus on the Balkans. Their only real option left. And the favoured option, of course, of the Pan Slavist group in the Duma, most of the moderate right in the Russian parliament imagined that it would be possible to create a sort of national identity, a populist national identity, rather as the Germans had done, on the basis of Pan Slavism. They were turned out to be wrong about that. And all these things were done against the background, of course, of military reform in Russia. Because the one thing the Russians had decided was that if it had been such a disaster against Japan and if there were to be a war in the west in some future period, as seemed at least possible, then they mustn't be in the same desperate position. They mustn't be so bad at coordinating and tactical matters.
- [32:29]
Naoko Shimazu
In a way, this war was a bit of a wake up call for the colonized world. And you know the very famous Bengali poet, right? Rabindranath Tagore, he celebrated the Japanese victory, dancing in rain and composing a Japanese style poem about it. And then over in Cairo there is Mustafa Camille, who is the Egyptian nationalist, and he wrote a book called the Rising Sun. And similarly, another Egyptian is a poet called Hafiz Ibrahim and he dedicated a whole poem to Japan called the Japanese Maiden. So in other words, this was a moment when the Islamic world saw in Japan not only as a role of a modern kind of nation state against Western colonization, but also as an inspiration for Islamic reform and revival.
- [33:30]
Episode Host/Presenter
Oleg, what were the wider social consequences of the war for Japan? What ideas became more dominant?
- [33:39]
Simon Dixon
Well, to follow up a bit, and this touches on also what Simon mentions with Pan Slavism, but Naoko mentions how nationalism really grows at this time. But I think one thing that's very important is what kind of nationalism? What is the content of that nationalism beyond identifying with the nation? And I think probably the most significant idea that really gets solidified at the time of the Russo Japanese War is an identification with an idealized samurai heritage, or Bushido, which is translated as the way of the warrior, the way of the samurai, which is quite a new concept actually, in a lot of ways. The term isn't really used much before the 1890s. And people start theorizing this. It becomes a bit more important after the war against China in 1894, 95. And then when we get into the Russo Japanese War, a lot of people are starting to try to portray the Japanese soldiers as the heirs of the samurai. Because while Japan could have defeated China as just, you know, by just having modernized more effectively, when it comes up against Russia, many people are looking for cultural or spiritual reasons for Japan to defeat a European enemy. And the cultural, spiritual reason they're looking for here is this kind of martial warrior heritage. And this is actually where we get a lot of the things that I think listeners will identify with, say the Japanese in the Second World War, attitudes towards POWs, not surrendering, kind of sacrifice, disloyalty to the emperor, even though people aren't necessarily doing that. In the Russo Japanese War, we really get the military and the government trying to promote these narratives, saying that a Japanese soldier should die in battle, that that was the most glorious thing one could do, and one should never surrender. We actually get a big debate going on in 1904, the kamikaze culture. Yes, essentially we have. There's quite a famous incident where there's a troop transport that gets ambushed by the Russians. And rather than surrendering this kind of unarmed troop transport, supposedly all the men refuse to surrender. They're shooting themselves, they're stabbing themselves, they're throwing themselves into the water, and they don't have a chance. And really they should have surrendered. And the big debate that follows is if they had surrendered, many intellectuals at the time say they could have gone to Russia, they would have become POWs, they would have learned Russian, they would have come back after the war bilingual, and they would have been very useful to the nation. Whereas a lot of people on the kind of hard right, especially the military, are saying, no, becoming a POW is not like going and becoming an exchange student. You should die in battle and thereby uplift the spirit of the entire nation. And so a lot of this rhetoric actually really comes into its own in the 1930s and 1940s, when a lot of the military who were kind of low ranking officers or perhaps soldiers in the Russo Japanese War are now commanders in the 1930s.
- [36:37]
Episode Host/Presenter
Simon, what were the wider geopolitical impacts of the war on the terms of the peace?
- [36:44]
Melvin Bragg
Well, in the terms of the peace, of course, that was all settled at the Treaty of Portsmouth. That's the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in September 1905, thanks to the brokerage, as it were, of President Roosevelt, as Aliyah said, and some bits of it were fairly straightforward. They were simply that Russia gave up its interests in Korea, they gave up most of their leases in southern Manchuria. They Kept a bit of the railway in northern Manchuria. That was all settled fairly straightforwardly. The more complex bit was whether or not the Russians should pay any reparations and whether there should be any territorial sacrifice. And in the end, the Russian team at Portsmouth, led by Sergei Vita, again did pretty well there. They were confident that the Japanese were weakened economically by the conflict and couldn't carry on. And so they held out and they didn't, in the end, pay any reparations at all, and they didn't have to sacrifice very much except the south of Sakhalin, the southern part of Sakhalin Island. Now, from the Japanese point of view, particularly from the public's point of view, that didn't look too good. They thought they'd won, you know, and they wanted a sort of more symbolic statement of the victory. And the resentment was turned not against the Russians, but really against the Americans. So I suppose the widest geopolitical impact of the settlement and everything afterwards was not tension between Russia and Japan, which was never again ridiculous, quite so strong as it had been, at least not in the immediate term, but a very strong competition between the United States and Japan in the Pacific area. And that, of course, was a long legacy for the next 50 years in the 20th century.
- [38:30]
Episode Host/Presenter
Thank you. Finally, Naoko, how's the war remembered in Japan now? How's that war, Russia, Japanese war?
- [38:38]
Naoko Shimazu
The first thing to say is that the Russell Japanese Japanese War aged rather quickly. And this had a lot to do with the technological leaps that took place during the. During the First World War, you know, particularly with the introduction of aerial fighting. And so, you know, by the 1930s, when actually there was quite a lot of utility value in bringing out this war, from 1904, 5, when the Japanese state was trying to kind of inculcate the sense of martial spirit in the people, the young boys, young men, they saw the Russo Japanese War as a grandfather's war. So if you fast forward to the centenary of the war in 2005, I mean, quite frankly, I was a bit disappointed with, with the range of things which I was expecting to happen in Japan, but it actually didn't. And I thought, Smith, I was expecting a bit more sort of, you know, exhibitions about it or just kind of more mentions about these things. And there was one thing that happened which is that the national, you know, Japan Broadcasting Corporation, nhk, did start this massive, massively costly television kind of drama serialization of the Russo Japanese War based on this kind of historical fiction written by a very famous Japanese writer. And it's based on two brothers who fought in the Russo Japanese War. And so that was basically the one big thing that commemorated the centenary. But I did go to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 2005, September, actually, and there was an incredible sense of celebration in Portsmouth. You know, the whole kind of town was festooned with streamers, and there were lots and lots of kind of historical events taking place. So that was quite a surprising thing. Of course, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was the place where the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed, you know, in September 1905. And so they kind of took it as one sort of, you know, big kind of, you know, historic moment of pride. And as I think Oleg mentioned before, Teddy Roosevelt did get a Nobel Prize out of this.
- [41:08]
Simon Dixon
I wanted to perhaps pick up on Naoko's kind of last point there about the commemoration. And I agree there wasn't much going on kind of more recently when you'd expect a centennial. I think there was a lot of commemoration actually shortly after the Second World War, so in the late 1950s, kind of early 1960s, when we're coming up to the centenary of the Meiji Restoration. And I think there's some incredibly popular films that come out in the late 1950s about the Russo Japanese War, because I think Japan is coming out of the Second World War, which is. Which is seen as quite a. Obviously a very problematic war defeat. And looking back at the Russo Japanese War, that seems to be, in a sense, the last good war for Japan. And so in terms of memorialization, you know, we have this big boom in the 50s and 60s, but then, you know, the centennial perhaps not so much.
- [41:59]
Episode Host/Presenter
Thank you very much. Thank you, all of you. Thank you. Naoko Shimazu, Oleg Benesh and Simon Dixon, and our studio engineer, Emma Harth. Next week, it's Pierre Simon Laplace, sometimes called the French Newton, who introduced some fundamental concepts to modern mathematics. Thanks for listening.
- [42:19]
Naoko Shimazu
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [42:26]
Episode Host/Presenter
What was not said that you think we missed? That is would have been very important had we said it.
- [42:34]
Naoko Shimazu
Can I just say something about the significance of the victory for the colonial colonized world? So, in a way, this war had quite a big impact on the kind of. On the. On the colonized world. And the funny thing is that the Japanese essentially were not interested in this dimension. So this is one of the kind of big contradictions of the war as far as Japan was concerned. And another thing that I'd just like to mention is, so Puccini's Madame Butterfly, you know, quite a lot of people's favorite opera was first performed at the Scala in Milan in February 1904. So this is just about a week after that surprise Japanese naval attack on the Russian ships, right? And then Madame Butterfly came to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in July 1905. So this is before the war had ended. And so it's absolutely fascinating for me to imagine, right, this juxtaposition of an opera where Japan had been personified as the wronged Cho Cho San in the hands of the American Pinkerton. And whilst at the same time, these same audiences must have been following war coverage in major broadsheets when Japan was taking on this largest land army in the world. So these kind of cultural stereotypes that often involve Japan, they're very hard to go away. And so this thing about the geishas, Mount Fuji, you know, Fujiyama samurais, they have this incredibly enduring life. And it's one of those things that one really struggles in understanding Japan as a society and how the outside world wants to see Japan and keep on wanting to see Japan in certain ways.
- [44:37]
Melvin Bragg
Could I just add something? This, of course, is a war which on the whole, Russians quite happy to forget. But there's one exception to that, and a lot of attention has been paid to him in the last 20 years or so, and that was the Russian archbishop in. In Japan, Nikolai Kasatkin, who's now canonized, who first went there in 1861 and stayed all the way through and established quite a big mission, far more successful than any of the other Orthodox missions. And it became a great center for most of the major bishops to go when they were young, learned monks. Sergei Stragorovsky, for example, famous one who ran into trouble with style in the 1920s. He'd had two years in Japan in the 1890s. So this was a major sort of locus of Russian interest in Japan. And Nikolai stayed in Tokyo all the way through the war, and like a lot of embassy chaplains, as it were, looked after prisoners of war during. During that time. So Nikolai Kasatkin has certainly had a lot of attention recently among the Russians.
- [45:46]
Simon Dixon
I suppose a bit on, as Naoko touched on this and Simon just mentioned it again, is this religious aspect of kind of memorialization of the war dead, which I think really does get solidified during the Russo Japanese War. Just because you have such a huge number of war dead that then have to be memorialized, that you have to find systems for them, and you really only get that again then in the 1930s and I think a lot of the things, as Naoko mentioned, you know, the Russo Japanese war by the 1930s is technologically and in some ways, you know, a grandfather's war. But in some other ways, you want to challenge this kind of spirit and you want to kind of draw on some of the lessons from that time in terms of how you commemorate the war dead. This is often associated with the Yasukuni shrine. But then we also see some of the tactics. There's this idea of the Nikudan or the human bullets, especially in the attack on Port Arthur, that these kind of human wave attacks, which were militarily, I mean, a complete and a humanitarian level, a complete disaster in the Russo Japanese War. But we kind of see those coming back in the 1930s and 1940s, and these are not things that go back to any supposed ancient samurai spirit. I mean, these are very much kind of modern inventions that really kind of come out of that period. So it's just how influential, I think, personally, that war is on what we see happening kind of four decades, three. Four decades later.
- [47:21]
Naoko Shimazu
Could I just also say something about the Japanese treatment of Russian POWs, which is that obviously most of the perceptions about the Japanese treatment of POWs derive from the Second World War experiences. And it's actually very difficult to imagine that Japan was very influential in the early 19th century, particularly because of the Russo Japanese War, in setting up standards for the international standards for the treatment of POWs. And like, for example, during the Russo Japanese War, Russian officers were allowed to rent houses in towns, employ servants, you know, and get wives to come over and children to join them. And there's sort of lots of very interesting things happening. And then what happens is, of course, there is a continuity into the First World War experiences of POW treatments and captivity treatments, generally speaking, in Western cases. And so the 190405 war essentially allowed Japan to put into practice the ideas that had been embodied in the Hague Conference of 1899, which introduced this idea that, you know, POW should be analogous, treated to the troops of the detaining power. And so this was revised in 1907 at the Hague Convention and continued in effect until the Geneva Prisoners of war Convention in 1927. So, in other words, the treatment of POWs, right, in World War I, which came under the 1907 Convention, Hague Convention, was to some extent based on the Japanese experiences of 1904.
- [49:16]
Episode Host/Presenter
5 well, thank you all very much. Thank you.
- [49:19]
Naoko Shimazu
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.
- [49:23]
Episode Host/Presenter
She looked at me and she said, you can't tell anyone until after I die.
- [49:29]
Naoko Shimazu
Do you have a secret?
- [49:31]
Episode Host/Presenter
None of my father's family knew of her true identity.
- [49:34]
Naoko Shimazu
I'm Emily Webb, the presenter of Outlook from the BBC World Service. It's the place where people open up about their extraordinary story. And we have a new series called Secrets and Lies. You know it's not true, but your mind starts questioning your own sanity.
- [49:51]
Episode Host/Presenter
I felt such rage. At first it was just a whisper. People pick up those rumors and make.
- [49:58]
Naoko Shimazu
Those whispers a lot louder. Subscribe to Outlook on BBC. Sounds.
- [50:07]
Melvin Bragg
Limu Emu and Doug.
- [50:10]
BBC Audio Drama Announcer
Here we have the Limu Emu in.
- [50:13]
Melvin Bragg
Its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Melvin Bragg
Cut the camera. They see us.
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CarMax Advertiser
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty.
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Simon Dixon
Liberty. Liberty.
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Episode Host/Presenter
Liberty Savings.
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CarMax Advertiser
Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. Affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
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BBC Audio Drama Announcer
Discover the wit, romance and charm of Jane Austen like you never heard before. From Pride and Prejudice to Emma, experience all six classics in full cast. BBC audio dramatizations. Featuring David Tennant and Benedict Cumberbatch, these productions bring Austen's timeless world to life.
- [50:56]
Naoko Shimazu
I cannot tell you how welcome your words are, how I have wished for them.
- [50:59]
Melvin Bragg
My dearest Elizabeth, can it be true that you love me too?
- [51:04]
Naoko Shimazu
It is true.
- [51:06]
BBC Audio Drama Announcer
Listen to the Jane Austen BBC Radio drama collection, available wherever you get your audiobooks.