War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914-1919 (review)

War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914-1919. By Frederick R. Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999) 325 pp. $40.00

This is an expert, well-crafted study of politics and diplomacy during a critical period of Japanese history. It demonstrates how important these years were for determining Japan's stance toward China and the West, especially the United States and President Wilson's doctrines. It proves how vital these years were for determining who would rule Japan, and how Japan would be ruled, during the first half of the twentieth century. It is, in brief, a study of elites in the best manner of a wider diplomatic history that sees domestic rivalries and definitions as far more central to those elites than any foreign threat.

As Dickinson argues at the outset, the Japanese polity created during the Meiji Restoration was neither fully defined nor legitimized even as late as 1910. Three challenges to that polity arose shortly thereafter: the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the Taisho Crisis accompanying the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912, and the outbreak of World War I. Any one of these would have jolted Meiji Japan. Dickinson skillfully depicts Japanese conservatives' fear that the successful creation of a Chinese republic would undermine their monarchy. The Taisho Crisis made all too clear that Japan's own political parties were newly confident in their own challenges to the aging Meiji oligarchs even as the twin guarantors of the old order--the Imperial Army and Navy--were at each other's throats.

But the third challenge, the outbreak of the war, offered a way to defuse the first two, but to what redefinition of the Japanese polity? To his credit, Dickinson refuses to be bound by such simple divisions as civilian versus military or oligarchic versus democratic. His portraits of the leading protagonists, such as Kato Takaaki, Tanaka Gi'ichi, and Terauchi Masatake, are exquisitely drawn. They are also revisions in many regards. Kato emerges as a champion of the parties. His aggressive program in China, known as the "Twenty-one Demands," was in fact a way to wrest control from the oligarchs. Those oligarchs, such as Yamagata Aritomo and his protégé Tanaka, were willing to sacrifice Kato's career and the lives of Chinese leaders to ensure the failure of the Chinese Revolution, the defeat of American hopes for China, and, not least, the reaffirmation of oligarchic control over Japan. They won decisively, setting Japan firmly on a collision course with the United States, because they diagnosed Wilsonianism as an even graver threat to their sort of Japan than Kato's ambitions and the Chinese, or even Bolshevik, revolutions. In fact, in Dickinson's account, the Siberian Intervention of 1918 was as much to contain "the surge of democracy" within Japan as to fend off Red advances into Asiatic Russia (198).

As with any study, especially first books, this one sometimes shows a tendency to overstate the novelty of the approach, the weight of the conclusions, and the significance of the subject. But Dickinson makes an impressive and convincing case for the re-examination of this period of Japanese history. Fortunately for his readers, he also provides that re-examination, and in a most compelling way, by demonstrating how the research methods of traditional political and diplomatic history can be successfully applied to new understandings of how the dynamics of foreign threats can be, and invariably are, manipulated by domestic elites to their personal advantage and to the reshaping of their institutional environments in fundamental and, in this case, ultimately tragic ways.

Michael A. Barnhart
SUNY, Stony Brook

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