Russia and Its Northeast Asian Neighbors: China, Japan, and Korea, 1858-1945 PDF
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Russia and Its Northeast Asian Neighbors Russia and Its Northeast Asian Neighbors China, Japan, and Korea, 1858–1945 Edited by Kimitaka Matsuzato LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 wwwrowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-3704-9 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4985-3705-6 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Introduction: Russia as a Decisive Factor in the Modern History of Northeast Asia vii Kimitaka Matsuzato Explanatory Notes xix Map: The Heart of Northeast Asia in the Early Twentieth Century xxi 1 Russia’s Expansion to the Far East and Its Impact on Early Meiji Japan’s Korea Policy 1 Shinichi Fumoto 2 The Russian Factor Facilitating the Administrative Reform in Qing Manchuria in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 15 Susumu Tsukase 3 Imperial Ambitions: Russians, Britons and the Politics of Nationality in the Chinese Customs Service, 1890–1937 33 Catherine Ladds 4 Development of Trade on the Amur and the Sungari and the Customs Problem in the Last Years of the Russian Empire 49 Yukimura Sakon v vi Contents 5 Making a Vancouver in the Far East: “The Trinity Transportation System” of the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1896–1917 65 Masafumi Asada 6 Japanese–Russian Kulturkampf in the Far East, 1904–1905: Organization, Methods, Ideas 89 Dmitrii B. Pavlov 7 Captured or Captivated? The War against Japan (1904–1905) in the Memories of Russian POWs 117 Andreas Renner 8 From the Meiji Emperor’s Funeral to the Taisho Emperor’s Coronation: Reporting the Japanese Imperial System in the Russian Press 137 Yoshiro Ikeda 9 Two Russias in Harbin: The Émigré and the Soviet Communities 151 Michiko Ikuta 10 V. L. Kopp and Soviet Policy towards Japan after the Basic Convention of 1925: Moscow and Tokyo’s Failed “Honeymoon”? 167 Yaroslav Shulatov Index 187 About the Contributors 197 Introduction Russia as a Decisive Factor in the Modern History of Northeast Asia Kimitaka Matsuzato As a result of the Aigun Treaty (1858), Russia became a participant in the interstate community of Northeast Asia. Yet Russia’s presence in modern Northeast Asia has not attracted legitimate scholarly interest. Few have paid attention to how “Russia’s threat” determined state builders’ thinking in early Meiji Japan. Almost no research has been done to analyze the Qing Em- pire’s struggle over Manchuria against Russia’s growing influence, though this struggle dismantled the core of this empire’s political regime, the Eight Banner System. Few have noticed that the emerging border control between Russia and China since 1858 seriously affected the whole multinational semi-colonial system of China. No article has been written arguing that late imperial Russia’s mass journalism used the perception of Japan’s vigorously modernizing autocracy to criticize Russia’s conservative autocracy. No historian has proposed that the conflict between the first Soviet ambassador to Japan, Viktor Kopp, and the Soviet Foreign Ministry (People’s Commis- sariat) over the USSR’s China policy was a foretoken of the future antimony between the Soviet Union’s role as a compliant actor in interstate relations and that as an anti-Nazi fighter in the late 1930s. Rather, the history of mod- ern Northeast Asia has often been narrated in a tripolar scheme: the Western powers, Japan’s growing militarism, and the national liberation movements in China and Korea, while regarding Russia and the Soviet Union as being an insignificant newcomer. Obviously, a reason for the historiographical blank described above is the lack of command of Russian among most historians specializing in Northeast Asia. Another reason is the division of academic structure. In Japan, for example, his- torians specializing in the Russian Far East belong to departments of occidental history, specialists in China, Korea, and Inner Asia are affiliated with depart- ments of oriental history, and historians of Japan ran their own departments. vii viii Kimitaka Matsuzato In the second half of the 1990s, we witnessed three pioneering books, based on both Russian and Asian sources and trying to investigate Russia’s impact on Northeast Asia: S. C. M. Paine’s Imperial Rivals (1996),1 Ter- uyuki Hara’s A Tale of Vladivostok (in Japanese, 1998),2 and David Wolff’s To the Harbin Station (1999).3 However, the situation did not change with any speed. In 2003, in her book dedicated to the Sino-Japanese War, Paine lamented that “Japanese policies in Korea often reflected its interpretation of Russian intentions in the Far East. Russia is the all-too-ignored essential fac- tor in the Far Eastern equation.”4 The centenary of the Russo-Japanese War in 2004–2005 produced a number of works focusing on this war and its origins and thereby elucidating Russia’s role in the international relations of North- east Asia. Among them, most remarkable are two volumes of the collection The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective edited by John W. Steinberg et al. (2005 and 2007),5 “Not to Fall Behind Great Powers...” by Igor’ Lu- koianov (in Russian, 2008),6 and two volumes of The Russo-Japanese War by Haruki Wada (in Japanese, 2009).7 While Lukoianov’s monograph is written thematically, Wada’s style in these volumes is strictly chronological. Ranging extensively over Russian archival sources, Wada focuses on Korea’s fate in the modern international relations of Northeast Asia and synchronically con- trasts the Korea policies unfolded by Japan, Russia, and China. Indeed, it is strange that few studies on the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars have been undertaken from the Korean vantage point, though this country became the belligerents’ main war purpose. During the last decade, researchers of later periods also published bril- liant works: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s many-times-awarded Racing the Enemy (2005),8 Takeshi Tomita’s Soviet-Japanese Relations during the Interwar Period (in Japanese, 2010),9 and a result of a Russo-Japanese joint project, a collection entitled Russo-Japanese Relations in the Format of Parallel His- tory (2015).10 Tomita remarks: “As a rule, specialists in Soviet history do not venture into Japanese history deeply, and vice versa. . . . In particular, specialists in Japanese history failed and continue to fail to use Soviet sources not only before the collapse of the USSR (when sources were indeed inacces- sible) but also after that. However, sources from the Soviet Union, the most serious imaginary enemy of prewar Japan, are indispensable for the study of the Japanese Army and strategy.”11 Thus, despite the progresses of the last decade, Tomita admits that we have not thus far left the situation criticized by Paine in 2003 and that colossal work still needs to be done to place Russia and the USSR in a legitimate place in Northeast Asian history. This volume intends to accelerate this historiographical turn12 and has sev- eral novel aspects for this purpose. First, three participants (Fumoto, Tsukase, and Ladds) are specialists in Asia, not Russia. Their chapters are extremely Introduction ix important and the volume as a whole puts more emphasis on Northeast Asia’s reaction to an expanding Russia than Russia’s policy towards Northeast Asia. Secondly, this volume analyzes not only international but also transnational relations. For this purpose, three chapters (by Ladds, Sakon, and Asada) are dedicated to transportation and customs service, while another chapter (by Ikuta) vividly describes the typical transnational city of Harbin. We intend to create a genuine macro-regional history of Northeast Asia, rather than a medley of national histories. Thirdly, this volume advances recent scholarly interest in cognitive factors in history, particularly mutual images of na- tions.13 Three chapters (by Pavlov, Renner, and Ikeda) analyze mutual im- ages between Russian and Japanese citizens. Last, but not least, seven of the eleven participants are Japanese and another, Yaroslav Shulatov, received doctoral course education and is teaching in Japan. As described above, Japan produces numerous not negligible studies on Northeast Asian history, but the language barrier prevents them from being shared by the international academic community. We should communicate the results of much more research conducted in Japan. Chronologically, this collection covers the pe- riod since 1858, when Russia became involved in the interstate relations of Northeast Asia, to 1945, when the Japanese Empire collapsed. According to Shinichi Fumoto, the author of chapter 1, East Asian (not only Chinese and Korean, but also Japanese) historiographies underestimate Russia’s presence in Northeast Asia after 1858 because of their anti-imperialist and anti-Japan bias. Asian historiographies regard the Japan-Korea Treaty of Amity of 1876 solely as an embryo of Japan’s future expansionism. Fumoto discloses how strongly “Russia’s threat” after 1858 determined Takamori Saigo and other Japanese policy-makers’ perception and escalated Japan’s interven- tionist attitude towards Korea. Fumoto argues that the Korean policy of early Meiji Japan was elaborated in the context of macro-regional politics around the Sea of Japan, an important component of which was Russia’s Sakhalin and straits policies. On the one hand, Japanese policy-makers feared that Russia would repeat its beloved scenario from mixed inhabitance to a joint, and even- tually an exclusive, sovereignty, which had been implemented in regard to the trans-Ussuri region and Sakhalin, towards Korea, too. Yet on the other hand, Meiji policy-makers understood that it was necessary to grant Russia the right of free passage through one of the five straits around the Sea of Japan and in fact conducted their Korean policy within this limit. As Susumu Tsukase describes in chapter 2, Manchuria was the birthplace of the Qing Empire and the administrative reforms conducted there inevitably affected the Eight Banner System, which was the core of Qing statehood. As a result of the first struggle between Russia and the Qing Empire in the sev- enteenth century around the Amur Basin, the Qings incorporated local native
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