Table Of ContentHuman Bullets : A Soldier's Story of Port
title:
Arthur
Sakurai, Tadayoshi.; åOkuma, Shigenobu;
author: Honda, Masujiro.; Bacon, Alice Mabel;
Spiller, Roger J.
publisher: University of Nebraska Press
isbn10 | asin: 080329266X
print isbn13: 9780803292666
ebook isbn13: 9780585266534
language: English
Lüshun (China)--History--Siege, 1904-
subject
1905.
publication date: 1999
lcc: DS517.3.S24 1999eb
ddc: 952.03/1
Lüshun (China)--History--Siege, 1904-
subject: 1905.
Page i
Page ii
Page iii
Human Bullets
A Soldier's Story of Port Arthur
By
Tadayoshi Sakurai
Lieutenant I. J. A.
With an Introduction by Count Okuma
Translated by
Masujiro Honda
Edited by
Alice Mabel Bacon
Introduction to the Bison Books Edition by Roger Spiller
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Introduction to the Bison Books Edition © 1999 by the
University of Nebraska Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Bison Books printing: 1999
Most recent printing indicated by the last digit below:
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sakurai, Tadayoshi, 1879-1965.
[Nikudan. English]
Human bullets: a soldier's story of Port Arthur / by Tadayoshi
Sakurai; with an introduction by Count Okuma; translated by
Masujiro Honda; edited by Alice Mabel Bacon; introduction to
the Bison books edition by Roger Spiller.
p. cm. ISBN 0-8032-9266-X (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Port Arthur (China)HistorySiege, 1904-1905.
I. Okuma, Shigenobu, 1838-1922. II. Honda, Masujiro.
III. Bacon, Alice Mabel, 1858 1918. IV. Spiller, Roger J.
V. Title.
DS517.3.S24 1999
952.03'1dc21
99-10482 CIP
Reprinted from the original 1907 edition by Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston.
Page v
Introduction to the Bison Books Edition
Roger Spiller
The war that cost the author of this book his right arm began in the
early hours of February 8, 1904. A Japanese fleet commanded by
Admiral Heihachiro Togo launched a torpedo attack on the main body
of the Russian Far East fleet, which was laying at anchor in the harbor
at Port Arthur at the tip of Manchuria's Liaotung peninsula.
The Russians were surprised, certainly. In the days that followed, as
news of the Russian declaration of war flashed to world capitals by
wireless telegraphy. Official communiqués issuing from St. Petersburg
sounded notes of genteel disappointment as if Japan had committed a
breach of propriety. An Asiatic nation had presumed to challenge one
of the world's Great Powers. But behind the professions of injury, one
detects an overweening confidence: Japan may have stolen a march,
but Imperial Russia would make short work of these curious upstarts.
General Aleksei Kuropatkin, Czar Nicholas II's Minister of War since
1897, elected to take command of the army in the field himself.
Kuropatkin sent a public word to those of his generals who were
already in Manchuria, "Be patient, leave a little glory for the rest of
us."
This much was true: Japan was an upstart in the society of nations.
After several hundred years of determined isolation from the world
beyond its shores, in the Meiji Restora-
Page vi
tion of 1868 Japan had inaugurated sweeping political and social
reforms aimed at preparing itself for a new role in the international
world. Outside, imperialism was running at high tide. Great Britain,
France, Germany, Russia, even the Americansupstarts
themselvesincreasingly saw the world as theirs to apportion between
them, and all the Great Powers looked to Asia as the most promising
of imperial frontiers. In a seemingly perpetual state of political
disarray, China was especially attractive to Imperial Russia, whose
Czarist government saw in the ports of China and Manchuria natural
extensions of its Far East empire. Just as the century was about to
turn, Japan's ambitions pointed toward the same regions.
Ten years before Togo's attack at Port Arthur, Imperial Japan had its
first outing in a war against China to press a claim for hegemony over
Korea and the Manchurian ports. Utterly incapable of resisting, China
had capitulated promptly. But at Japan's moment of triumph, a
coalition of Great Powers led by Russia intervened with diplomatic
pressure and poorly disguised threats. Japan relinquished its newly
won territory but not its memory. After a decade of nursing its
resentments against Russia, Japan meant to renew its campaign for a
colonial foothold on the Asian mainland.
By 1904, Port Arthur had become the most distant, and the most
important outpost of Russia's imperial ambitions, a symbol of its
power in the Far East. The harbor was Russia's only door to the
warmer waters of the Pacific. Hundreds of miles to the north lay
Vladivostok, Russia's other major port, but it was closed for much of
the year by Admiral Winter. And while Vladivostok was barely
accessible from either sea or land, Port Arthur was quickly developed
as the terminus of Russia's grandest imperial project of all, the Trans-
Siberian Railroad. As a mark of its importance, Port Arthur was
defended not only by the fleet, but by thousands of garrison troops as
well.
Description:The impact of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 was incalculable. It was the first victory by an Asian power over a European one since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Japanese victory was ascribed to the "spirit" of the Japanese people, which helped their soldiers to overcome superi
