Russia and Its Northeast Asian Neighbors

China, Japan, and Korea, 18581945

Contributions by Masafumi Asada, Shinichi Fumoto, Yoshiro Ikeda, Michiko Ikuta, Catherine Ladds, Kimitaka Matsuzato, Dmitrii B. Pavlov, Andreas Renner, Yukimura Sakon, Yaroslav Shulatov, Susumu Tsukase Edited by Kimitaka Matsuzato

Publication date:

07 December 2016

Length of book:

222 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498537049

As a result of the Aigun (1858) and Beijing Treaties (1860) Russia had become a participant in international relations of Northeast Asia, but historiography has underestimated the presence of Russia and the USSR in this region. This collection elucidates how Russia's expansion affected early Meiji Japan's policy towards Korea and the late Qing Empire's Manchurian reform. Russia participated in the mega-imperial system of transportation and customs control in Northern China and created a transnational community around the Chinese Eastern Railway and Harbin City. The collection vividly describes daily life of the emigre Russians' community in Harbin after 1917. The collection investigates mutual images between the Russians and Japanese through the prism of the descriptions of the Japanese Imperial House in Russian newspapers and memoirs written by Russian POWs in and after the Russo-Japanese War and war journalism during this war. The first Soviet ambassador in Japan, V. Kopp, proposed to restore the division of spheres of interest between Russia and Japan during the tsarist era and thus conflicted People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, G. Chicherin, the Soviet ambassador in Beijing, L. Karakhan, and Stalin, since the latter group was more loyal to the cause of China's national liberation. As a whole, the collection argues that it is difficult to understand the modern history of Northeast Asia without taking the Russian factor seriously.

Introduction, Kimitaka Matsuzato
Explanatory Notes
Map
Chapter 1: Russia’s Expansion to the Far East and Its Impact on Early Meiji Japan’s Korea Policy, Shinichi Fumoto
Chapter 2: The Russian Factor Facilitating the Administrative Reform in Qing Manchuria in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Susumu Tsukase
Chapter 3: Imperial Ambitions: Russians, Britons and the Politics of Nationality in the Chinese Customs Service, 1890–1937, Catherine Ladds
Chapter 4: Development of Trade on the Amur and the Sungari and the Customs Problem in the Last Years of the Russian Empire, Yukimura Sakon
Chapter 5: Making a Vancouver in the Far East: “The Trinity Transportation System” of the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1896–1917, Masafumi Asada
Chapter 6: Japanese–Russian Kulturkampf in the Far East, 1904–5: Organization, Methods, Ideas, Dmitrii B. Pavlov
Chapter 7: Captured or Captivated? The War against Japan (1904–5) in the Memories of Russian POWs, Andreas Renner
Chapter 8: From the Meiji Emperor's Funeral to the Taisho Emperor's Coronation: Reporting the Japanese Imperial System in the Russian Press, Yoshiro Ikeda
Chapter 9: Two Russias in Harbin: The Émigré Community and the Soviet Colony, Michiko Ikuta
Chapter 10: V. L. Kopp and Soviet Policy towards Japan after the Basic Convention of 1925:
Moscow and Tokyo’s Failed “Honeymoon”?, Yaroslav Shulatov

. . . . this edited volume is a valuable contribution to the academic endeavor of writing an integrated history of Northeast Asia and highlighting the interplay between the three main actors in the Far East. It presents “a genuine macro-regional history,” not a “medley of national histories” (ix).