ABSTRACT
The war with Czarist Russia between February 1904 and September 1905 was a direct consequence of Japan’s earlier defeat of China. In this sense, one war simply led to another. The concessions which a weakened China had granted to the imperial powers after 1895 meant that, by 1903, Russia was economically and militarily entrenched in Manchuria. The long-standing belief among Japanese statesmen and military commanders was that no Western power would ever fully trust or respect a strong Asian state and would, instead, seek its destruction. Consequently, the proximity of Russian forces to Korea and, by extension, to Japan created fear in Tokyo. However, Japan’s leaders were not confident in their nation’s ability to wage a successful war against Russia and they attempted to negotiate a compromise. This was unsuccessful and, at the end of 1903, the government of PrimeMinister Katsura Taro-, himself an army general, decided on a pre-emptive attack on Russian forces in northeast Asia. The hope was to win early victories and force the Russians to sue for peace before they could concentrate their full force on Asia. Few in Tokyo believed this was really possible and, once battle commenced, senior statesmen and officials made it painfully clear to the Japanese public that this was to be a long, hard war, demanding extreme sacrifices. Indeed, it proved to be a ‘total war’ in that, throughout its course, it remained the dominant political, economic and even social fact of everyday existence for Japanese civilians. The battlefields, similar to those of 1894-95, were Korea and northeast
China, with the war at sea dominated by a single engagement in the Tsushima Straits between Japan and Korea. Where the two wars differed most obviously was in their scale. In 1894-95, the Japanese forces numbered just over 240,000 with total losses from battle and wounds around 4,500 and another 10,750 dying of illness. In 1904-05, the Japanese military was about 1.1 million men and, of these, over 80,000 were killed and more than 380,000 hospitalized with injury or disease. The cost of the war with China was just over 200 million yen; the cost of fighting Russia was over 1.5 billion yen. As in 1894, however, the justification for war was generally accepted by the public, political parties, media and civilian intelligentsia. The principal exception was a small group of socialists who protested and published against
the Russian war but their activities were heavily constrained by police surveillance and arrest. Gifu, with a population of roughly one million, sent over 32,000 men to
war in 1904-05 (more than six times the figure for 1894-95). Allowing for those males who were either too young or too old, this is about 15 per cent of the able-bodied male population. The removal of so many of the fittest and most productive males impacted most heavily on the villages. The impact, of course, varied from location to location. Kasahara was one of the larger villages in lowland Gifu at over 3,000 residents; it sent 77 men to war (of whom 12 were killed). Kurono, a village of just over 1,000 residents in Inaba county near Gifu city, had 80 of its men in the field in May 1905 (of these, nine had already been killed). An extreme case is Kokufu village in the high country of Hida which, from a population of about 2-3,000, provided 240 men to the forces (of whom, 46 were killed).1 From these and other figures, it would be fair to assume an average of something like 50-60 men per village went to war in 1904-05. As a result, in the first half-year or more of hostilities, one of the most common jobs of a village head was to farewell local men drafted for military service. At villages close to the existing rail lines, this could, as shown by the diary of the village head of Kita Nagamori just east of Gifu city, involve him in considerable travel to and from major transit points.2
