As a result of its victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Japan secured interests in South Manchuria from Russia, but the leases on which those interests were based were due to expire around 1923. However, Foreign Minister Kato Takaaki (1860-1926) favored entering the war to pursue Japan’s national interests. At the time, Japan was allied with Great Britain (the Anglo-Japanese Alliance), but the operative scope of the alliance was limited to East Asia, so Japan was not obligated to enter the war. On 7 August 1914, the British government asked Japan to help destroy German armored cruisers in Chinese waters. Moreover, Japan was far from the European front, so the general thinking in Japan was how to obtain the maximum benefit from being involved in what was sure to be brief war in Europe. When World War I began with the assassination in Sarajevo, draftees and volunteers famously remarked that the war would end soon after their arrival and that they would be home by Christmas time.
Using excerpts from several papers that have recently been published, the current work surveys how Japanese made sense of the war. Inoue Toshikazu has tied the war to the rise of mass culture in Japan. Shin’ichi Yamamuro has described the conflagration as a “complex war”, requiring skillful Japanese diplomatic maneuvering between Britain, China, and the United States (U.S.). As the centennial anniversary of World War I approached, however, growing numbers of Japanese historians turned to World War I. Thus, how Japanese society and Japanese at the time made sense of World War I has not been systematically and comprehensively examined. With the exception of Frederick Dickinson, few historians have attempted a comprehensive analysis of Japan in the First World War. As is often remarked, Japan suffered fewer war dead during World War I than it did during the Sino-Japanese War. In Japan, research on World War I was limited until a few years ago.
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