Table Of ContentRussia and Its Northeast
Asian Neighbors
Russia and Its Northeast
Asian Neighbors
China, Japan, and Korea,
1858–1945
Edited by Kimitaka Matsuzato
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Contents
Introduction: Russia as a Decisive Factor in the Modern History of
Northeast Asia vii
Kimitaka Matsuzato
Explanatory Notes xix
Map: The Heart of Northeast Asia in the Early Twentieth Century xxi
1 Russia’s Expansion to the Far East and Its Impact on
Early Meiji Japan’s Korea Policy 1
Shinichi Fumoto
2 The Russian Factor Facilitating the Administrative Reform in
Qing Manchuria in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries 15
Susumu Tsukase
3 Imperial Ambitions: Russians, Britons and the Politics of
Nationality in the Chinese Customs Service, 1890–1937 33
Catherine Ladds
4 Development of Trade on the Amur and the Sungari and the
Customs Problem in the Last Years of the Russian Empire 49
Yukimura Sakon
v
vi Contents
5 Making a Vancouver in the Far East: “The Trinity
Transportation System” of the Chinese Eastern Railway,
1896–1917 65
Masafumi Asada
6 Japanese–Russian Kulturkampf in the Far East, 1904–1905:
Organization, Methods, Ideas 89
Dmitrii B. Pavlov
7 Captured or Captivated? The War against Japan (1904–1905)
in the Memories of Russian POWs 117
Andreas Renner
8 From the Meiji Emperor’s Funeral to the Taisho Emperor’s
Coronation: Reporting the Japanese Imperial System in the
Russian Press 137
Yoshiro Ikeda
9 Two Russias in Harbin: The Émigré and the
Soviet Communities 151
Michiko Ikuta
10 V. L. Kopp and Soviet Policy towards Japan after the
Basic Convention of 1925: Moscow and Tokyo’s
Failed “Honeymoon”? 167
Yaroslav Shulatov
Index 187
About the Contributors 197
Introduction
Russia as a Decisive Factor in the
Modern History of Northeast Asia
Kimitaka Matsuzato
As a result of the Aigun Treaty (1858), Russia became a participant in the
interstate community of Northeast Asia. Yet Russia’s presence in modern
Northeast Asia has not attracted legitimate scholarly interest. Few have paid
attention to how “Russia’s threat” determined state builders’ thinking in early
Meiji Japan. Almost no research has been done to analyze the Qing Em-
pire’s struggle over Manchuria against Russia’s growing influence, though
this struggle dismantled the core of this empire’s political regime, the Eight
Banner System. Few have noticed that the emerging border control between
Russia and China since 1858 seriously affected the whole multinational
semi-colonial system of China. No article has been written arguing that late
imperial Russia’s mass journalism used the perception of Japan’s vigorously
modernizing autocracy to criticize Russia’s conservative autocracy. No
historian has proposed that the conflict between the first Soviet ambassador
to Japan, Viktor Kopp, and the Soviet Foreign Ministry (People’s Commis-
sariat) over the USSR’s China policy was a foretoken of the future antimony
between the Soviet Union’s role as a compliant actor in interstate relations
and that as an anti-Nazi fighter in the late 1930s. Rather, the history of mod-
ern Northeast Asia has often been narrated in a tripolar scheme: the Western
powers, Japan’s growing militarism, and the national liberation movements
in China and Korea, while regarding Russia and the Soviet Union as being an
insignificant newcomer.
Obviously, a reason for the historiographical blank described above is the lack
of command of Russian among most historians specializing in Northeast Asia.
Another reason is the division of academic structure. In Japan, for example, his-
torians specializing in the Russian Far East belong to departments of occidental
history, specialists in China, Korea, and Inner Asia are affiliated with depart-
ments of oriental history, and historians of Japan ran their own departments.
vii
viii Kimitaka Matsuzato
In the second half of the 1990s, we witnessed three pioneering books,
based on both Russian and Asian sources and trying to investigate Russia’s
impact on Northeast Asia: S. C. M. Paine’s Imperial Rivals (1996),1 Ter-
uyuki Hara’s A Tale of Vladivostok (in Japanese, 1998),2 and David Wolff’s
To the Harbin Station (1999).3 However, the situation did not change with
any speed. In 2003, in her book dedicated to the Sino-Japanese War, Paine
lamented that “Japanese policies in Korea often reflected its interpretation of
Russian intentions in the Far East. Russia is the all-too-ignored essential fac-
tor in the Far Eastern equation.”4 The centenary of the Russo-Japanese War in
2004–2005 produced a number of works focusing on this war and its origins
and thereby elucidating Russia’s role in the international relations of North-
east Asia. Among them, most remarkable are two volumes of the collection
The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective edited by John W. Steinberg
et al. (2005 and 2007),5 “Not to Fall Behind Great Powers...” by Igor’ Lu-
koianov (in Russian, 2008),6 and two volumes of The Russo-Japanese War by
Haruki Wada (in Japanese, 2009).7 While Lukoianov’s monograph is written
thematically, Wada’s style in these volumes is strictly chronological. Ranging
extensively over Russian archival sources, Wada focuses on Korea’s fate in
the modern international relations of Northeast Asia and synchronically con-
trasts the Korea policies unfolded by Japan, Russia, and China. Indeed, it is
strange that few studies on the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars have
been undertaken from the Korean vantage point, though this country became
the belligerents’ main war purpose.
During the last decade, researchers of later periods also published bril-
liant works: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s many-times-awarded Racing the Enemy
(2005),8 Takeshi Tomita’s Soviet-Japanese Relations during the Interwar
Period (in Japanese, 2010),9 and a result of a Russo-Japanese joint project, a
collection entitled Russo-Japanese Relations in the Format of Parallel His-
tory (2015).10 Tomita remarks: “As a rule, specialists in Soviet history do
not venture into Japanese history deeply, and vice versa. . . . In particular,
specialists in Japanese history failed and continue to fail to use Soviet sources
not only before the collapse of the USSR (when sources were indeed inacces-
sible) but also after that. However, sources from the Soviet Union, the most
serious imaginary enemy of prewar Japan, are indispensable for the study of
the Japanese Army and strategy.”11 Thus, despite the progresses of the last
decade, Tomita admits that we have not thus far left the situation criticized
by Paine in 2003 and that colossal work still needs to be done to place Russia
and the USSR in a legitimate place in Northeast Asian history.
This volume intends to accelerate this historiographical turn12 and has sev-
eral novel aspects for this purpose. First, three participants (Fumoto, Tsukase,
and Ladds) are specialists in Asia, not Russia. Their chapters are extremely
Introduction ix
important and the volume as a whole puts more emphasis on Northeast Asia’s
reaction to an expanding Russia than Russia’s policy towards Northeast Asia.
Secondly, this volume analyzes not only international but also transnational
relations. For this purpose, three chapters (by Ladds, Sakon, and Asada) are
dedicated to transportation and customs service, while another chapter (by
Ikuta) vividly describes the typical transnational city of Harbin. We intend
to create a genuine macro-regional history of Northeast Asia, rather than a
medley of national histories. Thirdly, this volume advances recent scholarly
interest in cognitive factors in history, particularly mutual images of na-
tions.13 Three chapters (by Pavlov, Renner, and Ikeda) analyze mutual im-
ages between Russian and Japanese citizens. Last, but not least, seven of the
eleven participants are Japanese and another, Yaroslav Shulatov, received
doctoral course education and is teaching in Japan. As described above,
Japan produces numerous not negligible studies on Northeast Asian history,
but the language barrier prevents them from being shared by the international
academic community. We should communicate the results of much more
research conducted in Japan. Chronologically, this collection covers the pe-
riod since 1858, when Russia became involved in the interstate relations of
Northeast Asia, to 1945, when the Japanese Empire collapsed.
According to Shinichi Fumoto, the author of chapter 1, East Asian (not
only Chinese and Korean, but also Japanese) historiographies underestimate
Russia’s presence in Northeast Asia after 1858 because of their anti-imperialist
and anti-Japan bias. Asian historiographies regard the Japan-Korea Treaty of
Amity of 1876 solely as an embryo of Japan’s future expansionism. Fumoto
discloses how strongly “Russia’s threat” after 1858 determined Takamori Saigo
and other Japanese policy-makers’ perception and escalated Japan’s interven-
tionist attitude towards Korea. Fumoto argues that the Korean policy of early
Meiji Japan was elaborated in the context of macro-regional politics around
the Sea of Japan, an important component of which was Russia’s Sakhalin and
straits policies. On the one hand, Japanese policy-makers feared that Russia
would repeat its beloved scenario from mixed inhabitance to a joint, and even-
tually an exclusive, sovereignty, which had been implemented in regard to the
trans-Ussuri region and Sakhalin, towards Korea, too. Yet on the other hand,
Meiji policy-makers understood that it was necessary to grant Russia the right
of free passage through one of the five straits around the Sea of Japan and in
fact conducted their Korean policy within this limit.
As Susumu Tsukase describes in chapter 2, Manchuria was the birthplace
of the Qing Empire and the administrative reforms conducted there inevitably
affected the Eight Banner System, which was the core of Qing statehood. As
a result of the first struggle between Russia and the Qing Empire in the sev-
enteenth century around the Amur Basin, the Qings incorporated local native
