ABSTRACT
For provincial communities in Japan, the war against Russia had been extremely unprofitable. Although they contributed the bodies of their men, their money and possessions, and had accepted the wartime taxes and austerity measures, they received no benefit to the local economy and, most disappointing of all in any balance sheet of a war, no greater sense of personal security. Instead, Japan’s international environment seemed far more hostile and threatening after 1905. Although it was recognized that Russia, for the moment at least, was more concerned with its internal problems, people still expected it to seek revenge on Japan; there was increasing internal opposition to Japanese hegemony in Korea (now a very unwilling Japanese protectorate); the growth of a revolutionary movement in China threatening to bring about the collapse of the Qing dynasty; and increasingly abrasive disputes between Japan and the USA over Japanese migrants to the point whereby, in January 1907, the Gifu press stated that the British and German navies were already planning for a USAJapan war within anything from the next five to 25 years. Moreover, the transfer to Japan of Russia’s lease of territory in Manchuria meant only additional costs in terms of guarding and policing the region plus all the bills to repair the damaged rail lines and rolling stock. It would seem that neither war nor empire was the answer to the needs of ordinary people and few among them were ardent advocates of either in the years after 1905.1
The bill for the Russian war continued to weigh heavily on the Japanese economy for nearly a decade. The special wartime taxes, for example, remained in place after their intended expiration date of December 1906 and the average annual tax burden between 1905 and 1907 was over twice that of 1900-02; this continued to increase sharply up until World War I but, at that point, Japan as a nation remained in debt to the tune of approximately 1.1 billion yen.2 During the Russian conflict, one description of Gifu commerce had been that it was as if a light had been extinguished. In the immediate postwar years, Gifu city was literally in semi-darkness as some stores which stayed open late attempted to cut expenses by reducing their evening lighting to a single oil lamp. The national debt, however, acted as a fire blanket to prevent any renewed spark of life in local consumption. One consequence in Gifu was a dramatic rise in the number of people looking to emigrate, mainly
to the open spaces of Hokkaido (in 1904, 176 men and women of Gifu moved to Hokkaido, in 1905 this rose to 1,150 and, in 1906, soared to over 4,400). Those consumer industries which could adapt to adversity tended to look for markets away from war. The Gifu postcard business, which had done so well in 1904-05, was stagnant after 1906 and managed to subsist only on the old reliables of landscapes and pretty women; the wartime fad for postcards of the military had evaporated to the level where they were described as virtually obsolescent.3 The movie theatres were able to maintain good audiences but generally by emphasizing novelty more than the military. A typical programme for the Asahi-za Theatre from May 1907 begins with ‘The great railway journey’ and ‘World travel of the twentieth century’, followed by scenes of Shimbashi geisha, ‘Bicycle laughter’, ‘Love marriage among the smart set’, and then onto ‘Military vehicles of the Russo-Japanese war’ and ‘General O - yama’s landing at Ujina’.4
