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  • The Dominion and the Rising Sun: Canada Encounters Japan, 1929–1941
  • Hyung Gu Lynn (bio)
John D. Meehan. The Dominion and the Rising Sun: Canada Encounters Japan, 1929–1941 University of British Columbia Press 2004. 288. $29.95

With its seamless prose and array of interesting details, John Meehan's The Dominion and the Rising Sun is an accessible piece of scholarship on a previously neglected story within Canadian diplomatic history, Canada's official relations with Japan from 1929 to 1941. The book presents Canada's reactions as a diplomatic fledgling towards the expanding power of Japan in a chronological sequence. The two central characters, Canada's first minister to Tokyo, Herbert Marler, and the first chargé d'affaires, Hugh Keenleyside, are painted with a rich palette, but the book is also filled with interesting details on prime minister Mackenzie King and undersecretary of state for external affairs, O.D. Skelton, as they informed Ottawa's perceptions and reactions to Japan in the 1930s.

While the book is laced with useful anecdotes and mellifluous descriptions, it would have benefited from a more substantive and sustained argument. For example, it oddly lacks an analytical introduction or conclusion that explains its relation to existing literature on related subjects, or systematically outlines the various implications of the argument for specific fields. Without such a context, the exact parameters of what the author asserts are 'new insights' into Canada's 'diplomatic coming of age' remain unclear.

Furthermore, the fragments of argument that do surface seem contradictory. Meehan states in his last chapter, titled 'Pacific Promises,' that the Tokyo legation's lobbies for immigration, trade, and missionary interests were 'significant.' However, in 'tracing ... changing perceptions of Japan,' the book actually shows that Tokyo was in fact emphatically insignificant in Ottawa compared to London, Paris, and Washington; that the timing of the opening of the Tokyo legation in 1929 was ill conceived given Japan's foreign policies throughout the 1930s; and that internal divisions hampered the relatively few occasions Canadian officials thought seriously about Japan. While Meehan provides readers with a clear picture of Marler's frustrations, he does not explain how or if such micro-level empirical details demonstrate Tokyo's 'significant' place in Ottawa's agenda. Moreover, while there has been, as the author states, a paucity of works on the history of official Canada-Japan relations, simply telling a heretofore-overlooked story does not necessarily make a compelling case for larger intellectual significance. For example, in the prologue, Meehan asks, how did Canada react to Japanese interaction and how did these change? The answer to this question is presented as a narrative of who said and did what and when, but not as an explicitly framed analysis of why Canada's Japan policy was either ineffective in or indifferent to ameliorating Japanese expansion or capturing the interest of larger numbers of Canadian officials and businessmen. [End Page 533]

The book also contains some puzzling historiographic assertions. Meehan states that details of Canada's reaction to Japan have a 'particular relevance now that appeasement studies and Japanese imperialism are attracting a growing number of historians.' Considering the large body of articles and books published on Japanese imperialism and colonialism from 1945 on in English (let alone in Japanese, Korean, and other languages), this is a curious suggestion at best. A similar lack of depth emerges in the cryptic statement that a 'modern version' of the Institute of Pacific Relations (ipr) might improve understanding between 'East and West.' The numerous academic associations, university departments and programs, conferences, think tanks, and organizations in North America that have devoted themselves to Asia-related issues and research since the dissolution of the ipr in 1961 apparently do not count as 'modern versions' of the ipr. Even if there were characteristics that were unique to the ipr and absent in post-1961 organizations, the author certainly never makes an attempt to make these explicit within the text.

The overall approach seems curiously distanced from the numerous methodological and epistemological debates that have long been circulating in various subfields of history. Nonetheless, the book provides a range of useful and fascinating details that should make it an important...

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