Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2014. xxi, 540 pp. (Figures, maps, tables.) US$234.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-27001-5.
Perhaps at least in part because the impact of World War II on Japanese society was so enormous (and has thus been examined so exhaustively), Japan’s place within the historical context of World War I and that conflict’s global diplomatic, political, and cultural consequences has been less studied in English language scholarship to date. The Decade of the Great War is thus a welcome addition to the field that offers a rich variety of detailed explorations concerning the impact of the First World War on Japan’s relationships with nations both within and beyond East Asia. In particular, the editors contend that, more than merely complicating the typically Eurocentric chronology of the era, the chapters contained within this volume illuminate two significant East Asia-driven shifts in global history during the 1910s: first, “Japan replaced China as the core of East Asia” and, second, “Japan and the United States displaced Europe and began to shift the epicenter of global affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific” (17). While not all of the essays speak directly to these interpretive themes, the book as a whole offers a nonetheless fresh and valuable rendition of Japan’s engagement with the global scene during the first decades of the twentieth century.
A total of twenty-three chapters divided into two broad thematic categories of “Diplomacy and Foreign Relations” and “National and Transnational Networks” give the book a substantial and wide-sweeping range of vision. Part 1 covers topics ranging from immigration policy, the Siberian Intervention and merchant marine commerce to Swedish perceptions of Japan’s regional rise, Japan’s recognition of independent Poland, and the interactions of Pan-Asian activists in Japan and Ottoman Turkey. Part 2 then features studies on issues such as colonial migration, urban planning, and women’s education to Buddhist internationalism, railroad labour management, and cholera epidemics. Such diversity of research foci is one of the book’s greatest strengths, as is the editors’ inclusion of numerous East Asian scholars among their contributors. Not many multi-author edited volumes on modern East Asian history have done as well to bring the work of Japanese and Chinese historians to an English-reading audience. While some readers might find the topics examined by those authors to be a tad esoteric and data-heavy, the book deserves merit even so for its commitment to internationalism in both content and authorship.
For a work that aims to de-emphasize Europe, however, one might regret that Japan’s relations with the Western world still garner the lion’s share of interest from the volume’s contributors. Indeed, because a considerable majority of the book examines Japanese engagement with the peoples and states of Europe and North America, other more explicitly East Asian-focused and equally significant topics do not always receive their due attention. For example, the wartime years fundamentally transformed the developmental course of Chinese and Korean nationalism vis-à-vis Japan’s position at Versailles and the nature of the settlements reached there. While Caroline Rose’s insightful chapter reviews the politics of Sino-Japanese memory regarding the 1910s, and both Sōchi Naraoka and Yoshiko Okamoto unearth important new layers of meaning in Japan’s Twenty-One Demands upon China in 1915, that no chapter directly explores Japan’s impact on China’s May Fourth Movement of 1919 seems a striking absence. Likewise, the 1919 March First Movement in Korea significantly shaped the changing nature of Japan’s colonial rule on the peninsula, but Japan-Korea relations during the 1910s also largely escape the purview of the book (save for passing references in chapters by Shinohara and Dusinberre). Such observations, however, do not significantly detract from the overall value of this collection. In fact, that a reader would want to learn more about some of the topics left untreated in the volume is a testament to the power of the book as a whole to inspire deeper consideration of this complex and critically important period in early twentieth-century global history.
In sum, The Decade of the Great War is an exemplary achievement in transnational scholarly collaboration that offers its readers a valuable array of methodological approaches to the study of how Japanese society both influenced and was transformed by global events during the 1910s. Accessible to both East Asia specialists and World War I enthusiasts from other regional disciplines, the book will surely prove valuable as a source of new knowledge and an inspiration for future studies.
Erik Esselstrom
The University of Vermont, Burlington, USA
pp. 911-913