Season 13, Episode 18: The Long Road of Peace
When they initiated the Russo-Japanese War on a cold night in February of 1904, Japan was hoping for a quick, decisive war which would end with Russia’s effective withdrawal from Manchuria and allow the Japanese Empire to once more assert political domination over Korea. The words of Niccolo Macchiavelli come to mind: (quote) “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.” (end quote) A long war was not part of the plan, but victory was upheld as the only acceptable outcome as the winter of 1904 stretched into the summer of 1905.
Financing a long, bloody war did not come cheap. All of those artillery shells, bullet casings, battleships, uniforms, machine guns, barbed wire, recon balloons, horses, field guns, and basic supplies like food and water, needed funding. By the end of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan’s finances were deeply troubled as they had been forced to seek out foreign loans in order to continue the conflict.
The Japanese government had been actively seeking out third parties to help convince Russia to negotiate a peace since July of 1904 -- just six months into the war. At the time, however, Tsar Nicholas II was convinced that Russian triumph over Japan was inevitable. It didn’t help that the reports being sent to Moscow from the Russian front often painted a rosier picture of the war’s progress, with commanders like General Kuropatkin sometimes outright lying about winning battles.
On top of fighting a gruesome war with Japan, the Russian government was also knee-deep in a profoundly discontented populace. Domestic troubles plagued the Russian Empire throughout the war, and patriotic calls to support the state in its conflict with Japan went generally unheeded. Lenin and other revolution-minded critics wrote damning essays against the Tsarist decision to defend their eastward expansion and thus gamble all of Russia’s future security in hopes of defeating a well-prepared and well-armed foe. With hindsight, it’s hard not to see those essays as almost immutable prophecies of the Russian state’s impending transformation.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the war was exceedingly popular among large segments of the population. Nationalists obviously enjoyed the prospect of defeating a European power and getting Korea back into Japan’s orbit, as well as avenging the trickery Japan had suffered when the Triple Intervention powers convinced them to cede Liaodong Province back to the Qing Dynasty only to have Russia immediately establish themselves there through a predatory lease deal.
On the battlefield, however, the war took a terrible toll on its participants, both the surviving and the dead. General Nogi Maresuke, who led the Imperial forces during the five-month siege of Port Arthur, was summoned before Emperor Meiji after the war ended. At his audience with the emperor, he tearfully apologized for the over 50,000 Japanese soldiers who had died during the siege and begged for permission to commit suicide. The emperor denied his request, telling him that he was not responsible for those casualties because he was only following orders from the Imperial government. Shortly after Emperor Meiji died in 1912, General Nogi and his wife both committed seppuku.
In February of 1905, just after the seizure of Port Arthur and the subsequent inconclusive Battle of Sandepu, the Japanese government finally found an intermediary who agreed to help them convince Russia that it was time to negotiate a truce. Hailing from the United States of America, this friend of the Japanese government was none other than President Theodore Roosevelt.
While spending his young life as a sickly child with asthma, Roosevelt enjoyed a privileged, globe-trotting upbringing in which he was constantly trying to improve his health. Possessing a curious mind, he avidly learned about history, science, geography, and spoke French and German. When his father died suddenly during his second year of college, he inherited $60,000, an amount which is nearly equivalent to two million dollars today and which would have provided him sufficient funds to spend the rest of his life doing whatever he pleased. Rather than slink into idleness, he finished college and initially attended law school but soon dropped out and instead gained a following in the Republican Party and won a New York Assembly seat.
Throughout the last decades of the 1800s, he dedicated himself to opposing and dismantling political corruption. He served for a while as Assistant Secretary of the Navy but when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, he resigned from office and formed a volunteer cavalry regiment which the press called the “Rough Riders.” They saw action in Cuba, where the bulk of the Spanish-American War was fought, and Roosevelt himself famously led an uphill assault which proved the decisive stroke in winning The Battle of San Juan Heights. In 1900, he was tapped to become the running mate for President William McKinley, who was running for re-election and whose vice president from the previous term had died. In 1901, four months after McKinley had won re-election, the president was shot and killed by an anarchist assassin. Roosevelt was sworn in as president shortly thereafter.
By 1905, Roosevelt’s progressive domestic policies and assertive foreign policies proved so popular that he was elected to a second term of office. It is because of him that the United States has National Parks, as well as many rudimentary food safety regulations. He also continued the trend of rooting out corruption, including ordering the prosecution of agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs when it was revealed that they were stealing land which rightfully belonged to Native Americans.
The negotiation process began on August 9, 1905 and would take the remainder of that month before everything was settled. Because the US President was acting as a neutral intermediary, the entire process would take place at the Portsmouth Naval Base in Kittery, Maine, on the northeast coast of the United States. The first eight meetings were very productive and the majority of peace conditions decided in short order. These were: immediate ceasefire, recognition of Japan’s claim to special political and strategic interest in Korea, evacuation of Russian troops from Manchuria, and Japan would inherit the mineral rights in southern Manchuria as well as the operation of the South Manchuria Railway.
However, the issues of territory and war indemnity proved to be far more contentious and heated. Japan had seized Sakhalin island just the month before and was hoping that Russia would take it back and pay Japan a large indemnity. However, the Russian envoys refused any deal which included paying an indemnity. By the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Empire was, to put it mildly, extremely broke. Domestic unrest was growing daily and the expenditure of the war itself had set their financial security back by several decades at best. Agreeing to pay a war indemnity would only add decades to their debt. Instead, they proposed acknowledging Japan as the rightful owner of Sakhalin and calling the whole thing even.
The Japanese negotiators strongly rejected this proposal, demanding an indemnity instead. The Russian negotiators curtly informed their Japanese counterparts that they were under strict orders that if an indemnity was demanded, they were to pack their bags and depart immediately for Russia and that the war would continue. Both sides knew, by this point, that four fresh divisions of the Russian army had just arrived in Manchuria thanks to the now-completed Trans-Siberian Railway. If the Japanese wanted a longer war, it appeared as though the Russian Empire was prepared to oblige.
This was a gamble on the part of the Russian envoys but it was a smart one; they knew that the Japanese had almost certainly matched, if not exceeded, their own vast expenditure on this war and were just as eager to bring it to a conclusion. It had been the Japanese who had reached out to them, after all, through their intermediary President Roosevelt. To drive the point home, the Russian representatives made a big show of packing their bags and making practical preparations for departure.
The Japanese envoys, realizing that their bluff had indeed been called, agreed to accept the southern half of Sakhalin Island as a war prize and drop any further discussion of a war indemnity. On September 5, the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed and the Russo-Japanese War was officially ended.
I wish I could tell you that the Treaty of Portsmouth resulted in massive, joyous celebrations throughout the Russian and Japanese Empires, that it was the beginning of friendly relations not only between the Japanese and Russian peoples, but spurred a wave of positive feelings across the globe which resulted in more than a century of peace and goodwill which we still enjoy to this day. Obviously, that was not the case.
The reaction in Russia ranged from outrage among the nationalists to cynical snark from the revolutionaries. Hardships caused by the war had fed popular discontent within Russia and the government hoped that with the end of draft boards and material requisitions, the growing popular unrest would start to wane. However, the revolution which began in January of 1905 had its own momentum by the summer and would not be resolved by something as simple as ending the war with Japan.
But surely, I can hear you thinking, the Japanese people must have been happy with their victory over the Russian Empire? Well, the average Japanese civilian’s understanding of the Russo-Japanese War was, shall we say, far less nuanced than that of their government’s. Japanese newspapers had eagerly followed tactical and strategic developments as the war progressed. National reporters in Japan tended to err on the side of patriotism and certainly painted a heroic picture of the war itself and of Japan’s continued victories. The reality was that these victories came at an enormous cost, both of lives and monetary expenditure. The newspapers, however, generally omitted this second aspect of modern warfare, preferring a romantic and frankly propagandistic image of Japanese superiority over Russian incompetence.
While it is easy to blame the press for giving the public false expectations based on propaganda and bloody-minded patriotism, the government itself certainly bears part of the blame. Publications in Japan which were critical of the government or which engaged in the simple question of whether such imperial ventures were worth their cost had been routinely censored and even banned outright throughout the Meiji Period. That tendency toward punishing criticism and suppressing dissent was about to blow up in the imperial government's face, quite literally.
When the Japanese people read reports detailing the Treaty of Portsmouth, their reactions generally ranged from incredulous to violently outraged. Their understanding of the war was that the Russians had been outmaneuvered at every corner, outwitted at every turn, and outmatched at every battle. In a year and a half, the Imperial Japanese Army had effectively seized all of southern Liaodong Province and, for good measure, taken Sakhalin Island as well. The public believed that this was practically a total victory and did not understand why, when facing such catastrophic defeat, the Russian Empire was not forced to pay an indemnity, nor to hand over more than the lease for southern Liaodong. The fact that the imperial government had also handed back the northern half of Sakhalin island was, to the inflamed populace, just salt in the wound.
Another factor to consider when pondering the Japanese public’s outrage is the result of the First Sino-Japanese War, which had been fought about ten years prior. The Japanese army and navy had defeated their Chinese counterparts and the end result was the possession of Taiwan, recognition of Korean independence, and a massive indemnity which boosted the Japanese economy. It would have been only natural to compare the two and easily conclude that something must have gone awry during the negotiations in America.
Patriotic activist groups were quick to seize on the furor surrounding the unacceptable peace deal reached at Portsmouth. Several such groups organized a mass protest in the center of Tokyo at Hibiya Park on the evening of September 5, 1905. When they arrived, they found that the park gates were locked because the Tokyo Metropolitan Police banned the gathering. This only served to fuel the anger of the crowd, which was rapidly growing and soon reached a total of thirty thousand people. In spite of their demands, the police refused to open the park and ordered everyone to disperse. Instead, the crowd began moving toward the Imperial Palace and along the way began engaging in widespread property damage.
Efforts by Tokyo Police to contain what came to be called the Hibiya Riots were utterly ineffective. The crowd frequently assaulted police officers who attempted to stop their activities and seem to have had little respect for state authority. This is not to say, however, that any of their anger was directed at the emperor himself. Over the next three days, as the violence, looting, and general destruction continued apace, the signs which the crowd chose to create and carry expressed sympathy for the emperor. The blame, as they saw it, lay primarily with the emperor’s bureaucrats and advisors.
The property destruction was generally not random, but targeted toward some of the usual scapegoats of Japanese politics. Missionary churches were vandalized, along with the US Embassy. The Holy Resurrection Cathedral, the headquarters of the Japanese Eastern Orthodox Church, was targeted by arsonists but its destruction was narrowly prevented by volunteer guards. Rioters targeted and often destroyed buildings of groups associated with Russia, the imperial government, the United States, and the police.
Martial law was declared the day following the Hibiya Park incident which had sparked the capital-wide riot but two more days of vicious destruction and xenophobic vandalism would pass before order was finally restored by the military. By the time the riot finally ended, more than three hundred fifty buildings were damaged, seventeen people were killed, over four hundred fifty policemen injured, nearly fifty firefighters likewise injured, and dozens if not hundreds of civilians injured as well. A full seventy percent of the police emergency call boxes throughout Tokyo had been destroyed, and more than a few police stations burnt to cinders as well.
When news spread of the Hibiya Riots, the cities of Kobe and Yokohama likewise experienced their own civil disturbances, albeit on a much smaller scale. For months that followed, patriotic civilian groups would gather for large public rallies featuring fiery speeches and also gathered in secret, smaller groups to plan more political actions. Over 2,000 people were arrested for participating in the Hibiya Riots, though only a little over a hundred were brought to trial and eighty-seven later found guilty.
Not all of the actions taken by angry nationalists during the three-day Hibiya Riots were violent. Many engaged in non-violent actions in which they would break the law en masse and essentially dare the police to try and stop them. These included “lie-ins” wherein participants would lounge around public parks reading or napping in violation of loitering laws. Protesting fishermen cast their lines into the moat of the Imperial Palace, which was also illegal.
Martial Law was officially lifted on November 29, but the existing political order would not survive the fallout. While most of Imperial Japan’s early prime ministers enjoyed relatively short tenures of about six months to a year, in 1901 Katsura Taro began what would be the longest term of any Japanese prime minister-- a record which was only broken in 2019. A longtime cabinet member and division commander during the First Sino-Japanese War, Katsura Taro was a conservative politician who had been responsible for Japan’s international strengthening just before the Russo-Japanese War. He had helped finalize the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902 and, just before peace negotiations with Russia began, he had managed to conclude a new treaty with the United States.
While the US had happily hosted the Portsmouth conference to flex its international diplomatic muscles, they were also growing nervous about Japanese expansion in the far east. Taiwan is not terribly far from the Philippine Islands, which the US had acquired as territory after the Spanish-American War. In the resulting treaty, Japan claimed that it had no interest in expanding into the Philippines and the US acknowledged Japan’s rightful claim as hegemon over Korea. The “Taft-Katsura” agreement, so-called, was not marked secret but was also not actively made public. It amounted to a gentleman’s agreement between Prime Minister Katsura Taro and President Theodore Roosevelt, and it was not until 1924 that a scholar performing archive research stumbled upon it and publicized its contents.
Prime Minister Katsura Taro led Japan through the Russo-Japanese War to victory, secured Korea as Japan’s strategic interest, allied the Japanese to the British, and was, for much of his tenure, a very popular prime minister. However, the unpopularity of the Treaty of Portsmouth proved ultimately to be his undoing. As part of a back-room deal brokered by leaders of the two leading political parties, he resigned as prime minister on January 7, 1906. Taking his place as the new prime minister was Saionji Kinmochi, one of Katsura Taro’s archrivals.
The Hibiya Riots marked a milestone in Japanese history and the Meiji Period especially. You may recall that it was hardly the first Meiji Era riot to take place, but those earlier riots had generally been inspired by visceral responses to unpopular innovations like public schooling and individual property taxation. The Hibiya Riots were different because they were motivated by grassroots political organization - a kind of primordial democracy.
Cultivating patriotism and principles of citizenship among the Japanese people had been one of the Meiji government’s objectives since taking power in 1868. The Hibiya Riots were a sign that the populace had, at last, been politically activated, for better or worse. The protesters were careful to delineate between their dislike of the national government and their absolute support for the emperor. This relatively universal support for the sovereign was yet another characteristic which the Meiji government had been trying to promote.
Photos and artist depictions of the crowds that participated in the riots reveal some surprising trends. Most of the rioters were either artisans, factory workers, or tradespeople. There was also a smattering of white collar professionals and a healthy slice of unemployed people and students. While some of the lower-middle class was present, this riot was largely led by the working class, a factor which alarmed some in the imperial government as the philosophies of socialism and communism were starting to make headway into Japanese society.
The Hibiya Riot may have been the first of its kind, but it would not be the last. It is usually marked as the beginning of a period known as Minshu Sojo Ki, or “The Era of Popular Violence.” The public was now fully politically activated and there was no way to de-activate them. The policy decisions made by the government throughout the final years of the Meiji Period and even the first years of the following Taisho Period would sometimes result in massive, violent actions like the ones seen at Hibiya park in the fall of 1905.
Next time, we will see Katsura Taro triumphantly return to the position of prime minister as Japan would decide how best to proceed with Korea now that the Russians had relinquished their claims.