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Reviewed by:
  • Japan's Imperial Diplomacy: Consuls, Treaty Ports, and War in China, 1895-1938
  • Donald A. Jordan (bio)
Barbara J. Brooks. Japan's Imperial Diplomacy: Consuls, Treaty Ports, and War in China, 1895-1938. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000. xi, 213 pp. Paperback $27.95, ISBN 0-8248-2325-7.

For the book jacket of Barbara J. Brooks' Japan's Imperial Diplomacy, Akira Iriye of Harvard states that the author "has written a highly original study ... good diplomatic history." Both contentions are worthy of discussion here. The book in its current form is an expansion of the chapter "China Experts in the Gaimushô, 1895-1937," published in 1989 in the monumental anthology The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937, edited by Peter Duus, Ramon Myers, and Mark Peattie, yet omitted from the bibliography of the present work. Of the book's four tables, three were provided in the earlier chapter, while the first, "Changes in Early Foreign Ministry Organization," augments Gaimushô background material prior to 1895. This exemplifies a work that amplifies its precursor but scarcely pioneers in new territory. The study was worthwhile in the 1980s and will be of use to the new generation of historians of Japan with an interest in China. Unfortunately, the study also fits the traditional paradigm of one-sided diplomatic history, a scholarly version of the Japanese unilateralism of the prewar era.

In the best of all possible worlds a bilateral topic would have two sides. In our imperfect world, Japanese diplomatic history still tends to present one side of an equation, although this is coming under criticism. From its title, Brooks' work would seem to include the Chinese side, but, instead, it follows down the well-worn path of such eminent historians of Japan as Akira Iriye, James Morley, and Walter LaFeber. References to Chinese sources and historians of China are seldom seen, although their titles seem to promise more. Citing Iriye's The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (London and New York: Longman, 1987), Brooks complains that "there are fewer good studies of Chinese-Japanese relations in the 1930's" and proceeds to cite the Taiheiyô Sensô e no michi and Usui Katsumi, Mark Peattie, and other scholars of Japan—but only one work for China of the 1930s from Taipei's excellent Ministry of Foreign Affairs Library and none from the Nanjing Republican Archives. Of course, the Morley series is invaluable for its translated Japanese scholarship, but the first volume, Japan Erupts: The London Naval Conference and the Manchurian Incident, 1928-1932, in its chapters on the Manchurian and Shanghai "incidents" excludes Chinese sources in favor of documents from Japanese ministries and scholars. More recently, LaFeber stated in 1997 in his popular Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations throughout History, which this reviewer has used as a course text, that although those two nations disagreed on their visions of Asia, by 1941 "both versions centered on China." Footnotes [End Page 371] for his chapters on the thirties through Pearl Harbor, as in Brooks' study, include only American and Japanese works although Sun Youli's landmark China and the Origins of the Pacific War 1931-1941 became available in 1993, and Donald A. Jordan, Chinese Boycotts versus Japanese Bombs: The Failure of China's "Revolutionary Diplomacy," 1931-32, was available by 1991.

This blind side among scholars of Japanese diplomatic history may remind some of the attitude among diplomats at the Washington Conference in 1921 when Japan and the powers tried to check rivalry over the China market but excluded Chinese opinion. Just as historians of American diplomacy are beginning to be more inclusive in their bilateral topics, so should Sino-Japanese studies be more equitable toward both sides. Why do scholars still cling to the device of the Japanese imperialists of the 1930s who euphemistically titled aggression on the mainland as the Shanghai "incident" and the China "incident"? Brooks sticks generally with the pack of historians of Japanese diplomacy in this usage. When she states, "it is surprising that little scholarly attention has been given to the eventual occupation of northern...

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