ABSTRACT

Would modern Japanese history have changed if the Japanese had lost the Russo-Japanese War? Even before the fighting began the country’s leaders recognized that the outcome was by no means certain. Kaneko Kentarø later recalled that the army projected only a 50/50 chance of defeating Russia and that the navy expected to lose half its fleet. Neither were the country’s leaders confident that they could hold out very long against such a formidable power.1 The wartime situation was so fraught with disastrous possibilities that Japan’s ultimate success seems all the more astonishing. Only in retrospect does the inevitability of its victory appear obvious.