Part 7

Summary: In the first six episodes of this series we reviewed the causes of the 1903 Russo-Japanese War; the circumstances leading up to the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Japan; the initial Russian thrust into Korea and the Japanese counterattack; the costly Russian victory at Chongjin; the beginning of the Russian drive on Wonsan and the assassination attempt on Japan’s Emperor Meiji-tenno; the Japanese victory at Sanpo; the Imperial Russian Navy’s campaign to choke off the shipping lanes between Japan’s home islands and the Japanese forces on the Korean Peninsula; the Potemkin mutiny; the turning of the tide of the ground war against Japan in the late spring and early summer of 1903; the offensive that enabled the Russians to finally capture Wonsan; the August 1903 anti-Japanese riots in Seoul;  and the start of cease-fire negotiations between Russia and Japan at the urging of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. In this final chapter of the series we’ll look back at the last battles of the war, the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco, and the postwar social and political upheavals which affected the belligerents and the world as a whole during the latter part of the 20^th century.

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The Imperial Russian Army, for all its shortcomings at the time the Russo-Japanese War had first broken out in February of 1903, was showing itself to be a formidable combat force as the war was nearing its end. At the time the San Francisco cease-fire talks began, Czar Nicholas II’s troops were in effective control of most of northern Korea and had also made considerable inroads into the southern half of the peninsula. At the main Japanese colonial administrative offices in Seoul maps showed flag pins representing the Czar’s regiments getting dangerously closer to the ancient Korean capital with every passing hour. Incidents of suicide in the ranks of front-line Japanese troops in Korea were becoming an almost hourly event; even the Japanese navy, a model of near-Prussian discipline for most of the war, was finally beginning to show signs of internal unrest.

One of the surest indicators of just how far things had gone wrong for the Japanese military was the abrupt resignation of Japan’s war minister on September 10^th, three days into the San Francisco peace talks. In spite of the minister’s best efforts to save the Japanese Empire from defeat at the hands of the Russians, the Czar’s regiments unquestionably had the upper hand in this war and were very likely to  keep it right up to the bitter end. The same was also largely true of the Russian navy, which was continuing to maintain its blockade of the shipping routes between Korea and the Japanese home islands and at the same time was becoming increasingly bolder about challenging what was left of Japan’s battleship fleet on the high seas.

Indeed, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s surface squadrons were in such dire shape Japan’s naval minister tendered his own resignation scarcely twelve hours after the war minister stepped down. Their twin departures created, or at least reflected, a crisis of confidence in  the ranks of Emperor Meiji’s cabinet; some people within the Emperor’s court feared his very throne might end up becoming an exhibit in some Moscow or St. Petersburg museum hall the way things were going. Even as the San Francisco peace conference was getting underway a deputy to the Emperor’s foreign minister committed suicide in despair at the way things were turning out for his country.

To use a modern phrase, the "facts on the ground" painted a depressing picture of imminent defeat for Japan. The portents of doom became even starker on September 14^th, 1903 when Russian cavalry troops launched a three-pronged attack on Japanese defenses near the town of Wonju; since Wonju was located in what had previously been viewed by the general staff in Tokyo to be a quiet sector of the Korean front, the new offensive came as a terrible shock to the Emperor’s court. It didn’t help their morale much that Wonju happened to be located near one of the possible routes the Imperial Russian Army might use to get to Seoul.

And it was certainly not conducive to good fighting morale for the Japanese soldiers on the front lines on Wonju that the main thrust against their positions was being conducted by a regiment of Siberian cavalry. The reputation for ferociousness and endurance the Siberians had established at the beginning of the war had only grown as the conflict progressed; the regiment the Japanese defenders at Wonju were being pitted against were a particularly resilient example of the Czar’s Siberian troops. Morale in the Japanese lines at Wonju swiftly broke, and within just three days the town was completely in Russian hands.

When news of Wonju’s fall reached the Japanese colonial administration offices in Seoul, the impact of that defeat hit the colonial leadership like a tidal wave. It seemed like just a matter of time before Seoul itself was overrun by the Czar’s regiments, and the powers that be could think of little else besides getting out of Dodge as fast as possible. At least that was the case with the leading civilian officials. The commanders of the city’s Japanese military  garrison were a somewhat different story: they pledged themselves to defend the ancient Korean capital to the last man, or at minimum the the last bullet. The leading Japanese general in the city declared it a "fortress of the Emperor", hoping such a pronouncement would rally his men to hold fast against the Russians.

For a short time, it did. But as the Czar’s regiments continued to bear down on Seoul Japanese morale inevitably went into decline once again. It collapsed altogether on September 22^nd when an advance detachment of Russian cavalry seized the town of Hanam and Russian infantry crossed the Han River to capture the nearby village of Guri. The news of Guri’s fall in particular left the troops of the Seoul garrison utterly shell-shocked; two Imperial Army battalion  commanders posted to the Korean capital’s western perimeter committed ritual suicide within minutes after learning of the Russian victory.

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News of the events in Guri and Hanam also had a dramatic effect on the Imperial Court, snuffing out Emperor Meiji’s last  flicker of hope for salvaging the situation on the Korean Peninsula. For several weeks he’d been stalling for time, believing his armies on the Korean Peninsula could still reverse their declining fortunes and turn the tide of the ground war back in Japan’s favor, but now that prospect was utterly gone altogether. On the morning of September 25^th, two days after Guri and Hanam fell to the Russians, the Japanese cease-fire delegation in San Francisco received a cable from Tokyo telling them they must-- as the emperor had said to his diplomatic and military advisors the night before --"bear the unbearable" and accept the Russians’ peace terms, however harsh they might be.

When word of the Japanese capitulation reached Czar Nicholas II at the Winter Palace, he was almost euphoric. He declared a week-  long holiday in Russia to celebrate his armies’ final victory and had a dozen of his top generals and admirals presented with medals as a token of his appreciation for their contributions to the defeat of the Japanese Empire. He also issued a decree calling for victory parades to be held in every major Russian city to salute the returning troops; for those who wouldn’t be coming home, Nicholas II commissioned grand public war memorials, with the largest such shrine to be built in the heart of St. Petersburg’s main square.

On October 7^th, 1903 Russian and Japanese diplomats, with U.S. Secretary of State John Hay in attendance, met to sign the Treaty of San Francisco. This marked the official end of the Russo-Japanese War; unofficially sporadic fighting between small detachments of Japanese and Russian troops would continue until October 12^th, when an Imperial Russian Army cavalry detachment accepted the surrender of the Japanese garrison at Pyongyang.¹

Japan paid a stern price for its defeat by Russia. Under the terms of the Treaty of San Francisco the Japanese were required to end their occupation of Korea within two years and concede many  of their colonial holdings within China and Manchuria as well; other clauses of the treaty mandated substantial cuts in the size of the Japanese army and navy and the payment of reparations to the Russian government. Rumors that Japan would be forced to cede control of the island of Formosa(present-day Taiwan) back to China, however, turned out to have been greatly exaggerated; the Russians had never even considered making Formosa an issue either during the war itself or in the negotiations to bring about its end.

Russia, under the Treaty of San Francisco, agreed to the  swift release of all remaining Japanese POWs in Russian custody and the formation of a board of inquiry to assist Japan in learning what had happened to its MIAs. Much of what we now know about Japanese ground operations during the 1903 war first came to light during the course of the board’s investigations. Although political circumstances in Japan hampered much of the board’s work after the April Revolution of 1916, it nonetheless provided a valuable service in lifting the fog of war where hundred of missing Japanese soldiers were concerned; by the time the board disbanded in 1928, it had also cataloged and sent home the remains of some 500-plus Russian soldiers previously listed as missing.

One of the ironic consequences of the war fought in defense of Czar Nicholas II’s regime was that it led many of the soldiers in his army to begin advocating political changes to that regime. If they  were good enough to fight and sometimes die in their nation’s service, reasoned some of the returning Imperial Russian Army veterans, surely  they ought to have some sort of voice in how the nation was run. These men found a staunch backer for their cause in St. Petersburg attorney Alexander Kerensky, a secondary school principal’s son who had gained national prominence during the war after he successfully defended two Russian navy ensigns accused of mutiny for expressing political views their superiors regarded as bordering on sedition.

At first Kerensky’s principal value to the democratization movement in Russia was as a courtroom advocate for people the Czar’s security forces had detained for protesting the Romanov autocracy, but by 1905 he had also established himself as one of the movement’s  greatest public speakers. When pressure from Nicholas II’s own nobles finally compelled him to permit the formation of a national parliament in 1911, the new legislature chose Kerensky as its first chairman; by  1920 he would be prime minister of a Russia which was evolving into a  constitutional monarch where much of the powers once belonging to the czars now rested in the hands of an elected government.

For all the grumbling Nicholas might have done about losing many of the privileges he’d once taken for granted, he was grateful to Kerensky for helping to defuse an ideological minefield that under a different set of circumstances might have led to violent rebellion or  even civil war.² He also counted himself extremely fortunate he hadn’t met the gruesome fate of his grandfather Alexander II...

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....or the one that was about to befall Emperor Meiji’s  successor in Japan, Emperor Taishō. Japan’s loss to Russia in the 1903 war had severely damaged the Japanese people’s faith in their emperor, and as a weakened nation tried to pull itself out of the ashes of defeat a militant leftist association called the Liberation Society began agitating for the abolition of the Imperial throne and the establishment of a "people’s republic". Founded in Yokohama in 1904 by a coalition of radical college students and former National  Redemption Movement partisans, the Society gradually spread across the rest of Japan; by the time World War I began in 1914 the group had an official membership roster of 800,000³-- and as the Imperial government’s heavy-handed tactics against political dissidents kept alienating Japanese citizens, the Society’s enrollment would swell accordingly.

The unrest in Japan finally hit critical mass on March 22^nd, 1916 when Imperial troops used deadly force to break up a rally sponsored by the Liberation Society’s Osaka branch; 47 people were killed and 129 others injured in what still ranks as one of the worst incidents of political violence in Japan’s modern history. In sanctioning this brutal act the Chrysanthemum Throne effectively signed its own death warrant; three days after the Osaka tragedy, the Liberation Society’s executive committee voted unanimously to approve a resolution decreeing that an armed uprising should be launched against Emperor Taishō at the first possible opportunity.

That opportunity arrived on April 4^th when a series of tightly coordinated local insurrections seized control of the telegraph and telephone offices in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto and Sapporo. This marked the first blow in what would later become known as the April Revolution, the first major rebellion in Japan against Imperial rule since the late 1860s. To Taishō’s dismay, many of the very police  and military forces he had counted on to suppress this new uprising instead decided to join it; embittered by poor pay, and blaming both Taishō and Meiji for the hard times which had fallen on their country since the end of the Russo-Japanese War, these disaffected men played a crucial part in turning the tide of the April Revolution in favor of the anti-Imperial forces. Less than two weeks after the revolt began, it ended with the rebels storming the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and  savagely executing Emperor Taishō along with his wife, Empress Teimei, along with three of Taishō and Teimei’s four sons.⁴

The newly christened People’s Republic of Japan wasted little time in setting to work remolding itself in its new masters’ image. By 1920, barely four years after the Liberation Society had toppled the Imperial government, the Shinto Buddhist religion that had been Japan’s spiritual foundation for centuries had been outlawed and at least half of its followers were either dead or in hiding. Japan’s national parliament, the Diet, was reduced to a rubber stamp for whatever edicts the Society wanted to impose on the masses; its army and navy embarked on one of the most massive expansion programs any nation has ever seen as the new regime in Tokyo sought to make Japan the dominant power in Asia. Under the cloak of secrecy agents of the country’s new counterintelligence bureau, the People’s Committee for State Defense, waged a campaign of terror and sabotage to undermine the Society’s perceived foreign enemies.

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In the 1930s, shortly after Alexander Kerensky retired from politics at the end of his second term as Russia’s prime minister, the Liberation dictatorship in Japan stunned the world by making an economic and military alliance with its ideological opposite, Adolf  Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The Society’s primary goal in forming this awkward marriage of convenience was to obtain Germany’s assistance in dealing with Japan’s two greatest enemies: Russia, with whom Tokyo  was once again at odds after a short spell of peaceful co-existence following the Treaty of San Francisco, and the United States, a nation that the People’s Republic general staff regarded as a grave threat to Japanese ambitions in the Far East. It was hoped that the Third Reich could keep Moscow and Washington preoccupied with Europe long enough for the Liberation regime to unleash the full strength of its armed forces in an unstoppable campaign of conquest throughout the Asian mainland and the islands of the South Pacific.

But things didn’t quite work out that way; even with the Nazi menace to be resisted, the United States and Russia still had vast amounts of troops and equipment to spare for defending their interests in the Far East, and by 1943 the Liberation Society’s hopes for a new order in Asia had come to grief with the Japanese People’s Army bogged down in simultaneous losing land wars in Manchuria and the Philippines and the bulk of the People’s Navy shattered in a failed strike on the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In the late autumn of 1944 the Japanese People’s Republic sued for peace, leaving Hitler to confront alone the combined strength of Russia, the United States, and Hitler’s main Western European foe Great Britain.

Stung by the pain of losing a major war for the second time in four decades, the Japanese masses started to become as disenchanted with the Liberation Society as they had once been with the Imperial Court; by 1950 that disenchantment had advanced to the point where the earliest outlines of an anti-Society underground were starting to take shape. This underground’s philosophy was strongly influenced by Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese nationalist whose guerrilla campaign against the Japanese People’s Army in the Tonkin region of Vietnam had played a major role in frustrating Tokyo’s ambitions on the Asian mainland; to stay active in the face of the Liberation tyranny’s efforts to crush it, the underground structured itself as a series of modest three-man  cells and maintained the loosest possible command structure so that even if one cell were broken up others could continue operating and spreading the message of resistance to the Japanese masses. For almost forty years they waged what one American diplomat would refer to as "a cold war" against the leftist oligarchy in Tokyo, sometimes with help from foreign intelligence agents who regarded the movement  as a valuable asset in neutralizing the Society’s expansionist plots against its neighbors or other world powers.

By the mid-1980s the anti-Society underground, combined with a weak economy and unrelenting diplomatic pressure from the rest of the world community, had pushed the Liberation tyranny to the brink of collapse; in 1992 the last traces of the People’s Republic were consigned to history as a new democratic government assumed power in Japan. Among the first foreign states to establish diplomatic ties with the post-Liberation Society administration in Tokyo was Japan’s old wartime adversary Russia.

The 1903 Russo-Japanese War’s aftereffects are still being felt even today, and likely will be for decades to come. Sometimes those aftereffects are experienced in the least likely of places: the late Osama bin Laden, killed just as the final draft of this article was being completed, is said to have been an admirer of the Liberation Society’s philosophy and methods, and the protest movement responsible for toppling Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak has cited the Japanese anti-Society underground as one of its earliest influences.