ABSTRACT
In wars fought between nation-states, we assume that soldiers fight fully aware of their collective national identity. The Russo-Japanese war was no exception. The contemporary slogan of ‘honourable war death’ (meiyo no senshi) extolled patriotism and selfless loyalty of the ‘kokumin’ (national subject) to the state. In fact, the term, ‘kokumin’, conveyed the Japanese state’s strongly modernist political agenda, to change people into ‘Japanese people’, by shifting their collective consciousness from their predominantly locally based identity to the centralised national identity of the New Japan. Arguably, the RussoJapanese war was the defining event in consolidating the identity of the ordinary Japanese as kokumin.1 Yet ‘[t]he Japanese . . . were no instant patriots either, nor was the process [of converting Japanese into kokumin] as irrevocably thorough as it may sometimes seem’.2
