The Japanese Thrust Into Siberia 1918

The first complete narrative of Japan's Siberian Intervention in either Japanese or English placing the intervention in the context of the evolution of Japanese imperialism and of its domestic politics. It represents a missing link in the larger narrative of Japan's quest for modernity through empire and the ambivalent relationship of the Japanese with their imperial mission.

Excerpt from Japan or Germany: The Inside Story of the Struggle in Siberia Should Japan go to Siberia? Before a single soldier of the Land of the Rising Sun crosses the frontier of the Russian Far Bast, and for many years after the Great War has ended, the pros and cons of that question will be debated. What will the sending of the Japanese army to the Northland mean toward the development of the Far Eastern question and the struggle for the Mastery of the Pacific? How will Japan emerge from the World War? What effect will the participation of Japan in the solution of the Russian problem have on the Slav in Siberia and his ultimate destinies? Some of these queries must needs be left to Time himself for answer. A study of conditions in the Russian Far East and in Japan, extending over the period immediately prefacing the date of the proposal that Japan should send troops to Russian territory, may assist to a better understanding of the situation, at least so far as it can develop until the march of events has carried it beyond its initial stages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This is the gripping story of a forgotten Russia in turmoil, when the line between government and organized crime blurred into a chaotic continuum of kleptocracy, vengeance and sadism. It tells the tale of how, in the last days of 1917, a fugitive Cossack captain brashly led seven cohorts into a mutinous garrison at Manchuli, a squalid bordertown on Russia's frontier with Manchuria. The garrison had gone Red, revolted against its officers, and become a dangerous, ill-disciplined mob. Nevertheless, Cossack Captain Grigori Semionov cleverly harangued the garrison into laying down its arms and boarding a train that carried it back into the Bolsheviks' tenuous territory. Through such bold action, Semionov and a handful of young Cossack brethren established themselves as the warlords of Eastern Siberia and Russia's Pacific maritime provinces during the next bloody year. Like inland pirates, they menaced the Trans-Siberian Railroad with fleets of armoured trains, Cossack cavalry, mercenaries and pressgang cannon fodder. They undermined Admiral Kolchak's White armies, ruthlessly liquidated all Reds, terrorized the population, sold out to the Japanese, and antagonized the American Expeditionary Force and Czech Legion in a frenzied orchestration of the Russian Empire's gotterdammerung. Historians have long recognized that Ataman Semionov and Company were a nasty lot. This book details precisely how nasty they were.

For Japan, as one of the victorious allies, World War I meant territorial gains in China and the Pacific. At the end of the war, however, Japan discovered that in modeling itself on imperial Germany since the nineteenth century, it had perhaps been imitating the wrong national example. Japanese policy debates during World War I, particularly the clash between proponents of greater democratization and those who argued for military expansion, thus became part of the ongoing discussion of national identity among Japanese elites. This study links two sets of concerns—the focus of recent studies of the nation on language, culture, education, and race; and the emphasis of diplomatic history on international developments—to show how political, diplomatic, and cultural concerns work together to shape national identity.