Exactly 100 years ago this week, Japan embarked on its first war with a major Western power. Though Emperor Meiji's forces scored a technical knockout the following year, the outcome was to shape Japan's destiny through to the A-bombs and beyond
With the United States last year poised to launch its "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder declared as one their blunt opposition to America's proposed "unilateral" warmongering in defiance of, not least, the United Nations.
A yearning for peace was obviously not the only reason for their declaration, since angels are few at the pinnacle of politics anywhere. Certainly, in echoing the global antiwar sentiment, vested interests in the oil-rich soil of the Arab world also figured in their thinking.
But this was not the first time in history that Russia, France and Germany had put themselves in the same political boat. Soon after the end of the yearlong Sino-Japanese War in 1895, the same triumvirate pressured Japan to give up the Liaodong Peninsula to the west of the Korean Peninsula, which China had ceded to it along with Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands in the Taiwan Strait following its defeat in the war.
On that occasion, of course, it wasn't oil that brought the three together, but rather -- especially in the case of Russia -- a fear that Japan's military presence in China would threaten their vested interests in the coal-rich soil of the Far East.
Because of that so-called Tripartite Intervention, which left Japan with little choice but to give up its spoils on the Liaodong Peninsula, public opinion in Japan shifted strongly in favor of war against Russia. This sentiment was fueled in 1896, when China gave Russia permission to build the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria to Vladivostok, providing a useful short cut for the Trans-Siberian Railway. Then, when Russia moved into the Liaodong Peninsula after winning a lease contract from China, feelings in Japan became even more heated. Russia began joining the Chinese Eastern Railway with the South Manchurian Railway to link the peninsula's key ports of Port Arthur (Lushun) and Dalian.
Despite this provocation, though, government leaders in Tokyo, including Prime Minister Hirobumi Ito, were well aware that Japan was not ready to take on one of the most powerful nations in the West.
So, how was it that within just a few years Japan and Russia were at war in the Far East? The Boxer movement in China held the key.
The Boxer Rebellion was a xenophobic uprising that broke out in northeast China in 1900 and resulted in the slaying of many foreigners. The movement was instigated by a secret society called the Harmonious Fists, which was hostile to European influence and exploitation in post-Opium War China. Among the movement's supporters was Empress Dowager Hsi-tai-hou.
The legations of Western powers were besieged for nearly two months by the rebels until they were relieved by an eight-nation military force dominated, mainly for geographical reasons, by Russia and Japan. Then, on Sept. 7, 1901, China was forced to sign the humiliating Boxer Protocol, promising to pay a huge indemnity to the allied nations.
However, Russia had used the incident as a pretext to occupy southern Manchuria, and when it failed to withdraw its troops after the protocol was signed -- despite calls to do so from China, Japan the United States and other Western powers -- Japan and Britain, in particular, became concerned. In Tokyo, where Russia's rejection of Japan's proposed "Manchuria-Korea Exchange" to give the Czarist state a free hand in Manchuria and Japan sway over the Korean Peninsula was keenly felt, there were also real fears of a Russian military presence on the Korean Peninsula
While Ito made desperate efforts for talks with Russia, Taro Katsura, who had succeeded him as prime minister, warmly received Britain's call for an alliance. The resulting Anglo-Japanese Alliance signed on July 30, 1902, was enthusiastically received in Japan by those who believed it put the small nation in the Far East -- that had opened its doors to the West a mere three decades earlier -- on an equal footing with European powers.
With the ink dry on this document, which also effectively removed the risk of intervention by other European powers, Japan was now able to take a hardline stance against Russia. Consequently, after repeated fruitless talks in a tug of war over control of the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria, Japan severed diplomatic relations with Russia on Feb. 6, 1904.
Then, with public opinion at home massively behind it, on Feb. 8, the Imperial Japanese Navy trapped and attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. Two days later, Japan formally declared war on Russia.
Later that month and through March, the Japanese First Army descended on the Korean Peninsula. The First reached Manchuria by May, by which time the Second had landed on the Liaodong Peninsula and occupied Nanshan and Dalian.
But the most brutal battle took place at Port Arthur. After arriving there in August, the Third Army launched an intense assault under Gen. Maresuke Nogi (1849-1912). Port Arthur was Japan's key target, with its land forces desperate to take control before Russia's most powerful naval force, the Baltic Fleet, arrived with stupendous firepower to blast Japan's land forces off the face of the Earth. However, even though about 130,000 Japanese troops surrounded Russia's fortresses at Port Arthur on the tip of the peninsula, and repeatedly stormed the Russian positions in ferocious hand-to-hand assaults first launched in August, the besieged defenders were to hold out for nearly seven months.
Finally, despite the failure of a second two-week campaign, Nogi's army at last prevailed on the third attempt. Then, after capturing "203-Meter Hill" in December -- without which the Russians could not continue to defend the port -- all resistance was finally overcome. On New Year's Day, 1905, the Russian commander, Anatolii Mikailovich Stessel, sent a messenger to Nogi bearing a note written in English. The key word it contained was "capitulation."
However, the victory had come at a terrible cost. In their efforts to capture the strategic heights, Japanese commanders had thrown waves after suicidal waves of infantry into the Russians' guns and rifles -- often leaving the battlefields literally covered with corpses, some in layers. By the end, Nogi's forces counted 15,400 dead -- including his own two sons -- and 44,000 wounded, a toll far higher than the Russians'.
The other Japanese armies, meanwhile, occupied Liaoyang and pushed the Russians back to Mukden, where the war's largest and last land battle was fought. There, all the forces Japan could muster, amounting to some 250,000 troops including 16 divisions and Nogi's Third Army, confronted a 320,000-strong Russian force defending the city now called Shenyang.
Once again the campaign, which began on Feb. 20, 1905, saw a series of gruesome close-combat engagements until the Russians eventually fled to the north in March. By then, the Battle of Mukden had claimed some 70,000 Japanese casualties and 90,000 Russians, as well as some 20,000 Russians taken prisoner.
With the key land battles won, Japan could turn its attention to the sea -- and the dire necessity of containing Russia's Second Pacific Fleet -- now popularly termed the Baltic Fleet. Under Vice Adm. Zinovii Rozhestvensky, 45 warships had left the Gulf of Finland in October 1904; their aim was to restore Russian naval power in the Far East and to relieve Port Arthur. Though ultimately bound for Vladivostok, however, the fleet's precise course was unknown. Nonetheless, with 73 patrol boats sweeping the waters around Japan, at 2:45 a.m. on May 27, 1905, one called the Shinano spotted suspicious lights off the Goto islets, Nagasaki Prefecture. Moving closer to investigate, the patrol boat steamed further into the Tsushima Strait between Japan and Korea -- and found itself in the midst of the Baltic Fleet. Startled but achieving confirmation, the Shinano reported the sighting at 4:45 a.m. that day.
Shortly after 5 a.m., the Shinano's dramatic message reached Adm. Heihachiro Togo at Chinhae, Korea, aboard the Mikasa, the flagship of Japan's combined fleet of fast British-built battleships, cruisers and scores of torpedo boats.
Togo's campaign staff officer Saneyuki Akiyama at once issued an order to all warships: "Having received the report that the enemy's warships have been sighted, the Combined Fleet will immediately set out to attack and annihilate them. Weather is fine and clear, but the sea is high."
The well-prepared Combined Fleet intercepted the unwieldy Baltic Fleet in the strait. The naval battle was lopsided and overwhelmingly, if not completely, in favor of Japan. By the next day, the Russians had lost 34 warships, including all its battleships, and only three of its vessels reached Vladivostok intact, with all the others being scuttled at sea or interned at neutral ports.
Japan lost only three torpedo boats in the Battle of Tsushima -- and in the process confirmed its naval supremacy in northeast Asian waters.
Despite that epic victory, and the bloody capture of Port Arthur, back in Tokyo the government was desperate to end the war. Massively in debt, and financially unable to continue its struggle against Russia, Japan's leaders knew that unilaterally proposing a truce would only give the advantage to Russia, despite its reverses both on land and at sea.
So, in a face-saving move, three days after the Battle of Tsushima, Kogoro Takahira, the ambassador to Washington, was instructed to ask U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to mediate.
Fortunately for Japan, pressing events back home made the Russians more receptive than they might otherwise have been. Foremost among those events was the so-called 1905 Revolution, which began on "Bloody Sunday," Jan. 22, when troops fired on a workers' demonstration in St. Petersburg. Widespread disorder followed, including a mutiny on the battleship Potemkin and a general strike organized by the St. Petersburg Soviet Workers' Council.
As a result, when Roosevelt approached Russia, peace talks were speedily arranged in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Foreign Minister Jutaro Komura and his delegation met their Russian counterparts in August that year. As befitted the apparent victor, Japan's demands were stiff -- including recognition of its supremacy in Korea, Russia's ceding of Sakhalin Island and the transfer of its interests there, as well as on the Liaodong Peninsula (including its railway), and payment of a substantial war indemnity.
For the Russians this was just too much, and -- perhaps as a face-saver on its side -- Japan's demands for all of Sakhalin and the indemnity were flatly rejected.
With its means to wage and fund the war exhausted, though, Tokyo had no choice but to accept Russia's compromise offer of the southern half of Sakhalin only. And it gave up on the indemnity.
With that, the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on Sept. 5, 1905, and the Russo-Japanese War (called Nichiro Senso in Japanese) was over.
The Japanese public, which had pushed the government to continue the campaigns against Russia without knowing the country's parlous financial state had expected far greater returns, and outrage followed the declaration of terms.
On the day of the treaty's signing, that anger manifested itself in a riot in Tokyo after a mass demonstration in Hibiya Park broke up. Groups of protesters attacked the offices of newspapers that supported the treaty, and torched police boxes, streetcars and the Prime Minister's Official Residence.
In response to the unrest, martial law was imposed in the capital -- but antigovernment sentiment spread across the country, leading to a series of large-scale riots. The crackdowns on all forms of dissidence that followed enormously strengthened the hand of hardliners in the government -- and before long opened the doors of the highest offices in the land to the militarists who would preside over the nation and lead it to its doom in 1945.
If there is a moment in the history of every country that marks a turning point for better or worse, that moment for Japan came with its victory in the Russo-Japanese War.
