The Sino-Japanese War and the Birth of Japanese Nationalism by Saya Makito, translated by David Noble, LTCB International Library Selection No.28, International House of Japan, 184 pages including bibliography and index, 2011, ISBN 978-4-934971-30-1
Review by Sir Hugh Cortazzi
Much more has been published in English about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/5 than about the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/5. Yet the war with China was possibly even more significant for Japan and for Asia. Professor Mitani in his foreword explains: “The Sino-Japanese War did more than rob China of its centrality. It served as the impetus that transformed the Japanese, until then confined to their limited island habitat, into a nascent empire that had just gained the first of its colonial possessions.” It also, as the author states in his preface to the English edition, “had a decisive effect in rooting nationalism in the minds of the Japanese people.” In his preface to the Japanese edition he expands this by remarking that: “as a result of their wartime experience, the Japanese evolved into a modern nation state.”
The author aims in this book to show how ordinary Japanese people not involved in the fighting responded to the war. It was the first large scale foreign war experienced by modern Japan. “It took on the trappings of an immense carnival stirring up the populace and plunging the entire nation into a frenetic whirlpool of emotion.” The war led to a major development of the Japanese media, newspapers and magazines which made use of modern photographs as well as traditional Japanese prints.
Chapter one “The Revival of The Korean Question” discusses the background to the war and the rehabilitation of Saigo Takamori, the hero who had led the Satsuma rebellion of 1877 and who had lobbied hard in 1873 to be sent as Japan’s envoy to Korea. Chapter two explains how the war was reported in Japan by the nation’s first war correspondents and by leading Japanese writers. The image of the valiant Japanese soldier ready to lay down his life for his country was propagated. It was glorious to die in combat. Universal conscription tended to break down the old class structure of Edo Japan. The author notes the media’s reluctance to report on the extent of the massacre of civilians after the Japanese capture of Port Arthur. His conclusion is worth repeating: “If this incident had been properly and rigorously investigated at the time and the responsible parties disciplined, it would have been a valuable object lesson for Japan in the years to come.” I recently reread an eye-witness account from Port Arthur in The Times of London which graphically described the atrocities perpetrated there.
Chapter Three headed “He Died With His Bugle to His Lips” outlines the way in which the image of the ordinary soldier as hero was burnished in the media and was used to promote Japanese patriotism. This almost inevitably turned to an unattractive form of jingoism. But jingoism was not a monopoly of the Japanese: British jingoism probably reached its worst moments in the Boer War of 1899-1902. The rear cover of this book may be regarded as exemplifying Japanese jingoism in the Sino-Japanese war:
Chapter Four entitled “The New Theater of Kawakami Otojiro” shows how war fever inspired new Japanese drama. “With the Sino-Japanese War as the turning point, the Japanese people abandoned the framework provided by kabuki and woodblock prints as a means for understanding the contemporary world.” They turned instead to newspapers, photographs and contemporary theatre.
Chapter Five headed “Excited Crowds and Victory Celebrations” describes some of the performances which were put on in response to public enthusiasm such as the mock sea-battle in Ueno Park’s Shinobazu pond which was intended to recreate the Battle of the Yalu River. Enormous replicas of the two great Chinese battleships sunk at the battle were set on fire to cheers from the spectators. Chapter Six “Children’s Play, School and the Military” shows how the war was exploited “to promote loyalty to the nation and to the emperor.” The author explains: “Compulsory education and the system of universal military conscription were the two wheels propelling the modernization of Japanese society.”
The final Chapter Seven entitled “The Fate of the Dead and Japan’s Place in the World” deals with the enshrinement of the war dead at the Yasukuni shrine and with Japanese shock and anger at the tripartite intervention by Germany, France and Russia and at the pressure which forced Japan to give up the Liaodong Peninsula which China had ceded to Japan. Japan had been an aggressor in the war, but its modernization represented a model for other Asian countries. The book concludes: “This idealization of Japan transmitted the political model of the modern nation-state throughout East Asia, becoming a force that changed world history.”
This book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of an important episode in modern Japanese history, but it does not constitute a history or the war or of the development of Japanese nationalism which its title might suggest. Japanese nationalism had much earlier origins. Astonishingly the book makes no mention of the sinking before war was declared of the Kowshing. This was a highly controversial action which surely deserved attention in a book devoted to “the birth of Japanese nationalism.” It will be recalled that hostilities were started in the Russo-Japanese war and in the Pacific War before war was declared. I was also disappointed that the bibliography did not mention the late Professor W. Beasley’s Japanese Imperialism 1894-1945, Oxford, 1997.
