Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese War was fought from February 1904 to September 1905 between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan. The two powers were competing for control of Manchuria, the northeastern region of Qing China, and of Korea, which in 1897 had become the Korean Empire (Daehan Jeguk).

The war was fought almost entirely outside the two combatants’ home territories: in Korea, in Manchuria, and in the seas around them. Korea and China both declared themselves neutral, but their lands became the battlefield and their peoples bore much of the cost.

Japan won a series of costly victories on land and a crushing victory at sea at Tsushima in May 1905. Both sides were exhausted, and the United States President Theodore Roosevelt mediated a peace signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The result made Japan a great power and cleared the way for its domination of Korea.

Because it involved trenches, machine guns, quick-firing artillery, barbed wire, mines and modern battleships, and because it drew in the diplomacy and finance of many countries, some historians have called it “World War Zero”, a preview of the First World War.

After Japan defeated China in 1894–95, Russia, France and Germany forced Japan to give back the Liaodong Peninsula in the Triple Intervention. Russia then expanded into the same region. It gained the right to build the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria as a shortcut for the Trans-Siberian Railway, and in 1898 leased Port Arthur (Lüshun) and Dalian at the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, the very place Japan had been forced to give up.

During the Boxer Uprising of 1900, Russia sent large forces into Manchuria and was slow to withdraw them afterwards. In Korea, Russian influence had grown after King Gojong took refuge in the Russian legation in 1896, following the murder of Queen Min by Japanese agents. In 1903 Russian activity at Yongampo, at the mouth of the Yalu River on the Korean side, alarmed Japan further.

Japan sought security in diplomacy. In 1902 it signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, under which Britain would stay neutral if Japan fought one power, and join if a second power entered. Japanese leaders proposed dividing influence, Manchuria for Russia and Korea for Japan, but negotiations in 1903 failed. Some Russian leaders underestimated Japan, and some scholars have argued that circles around Nicholas II hoped a short victorious war would strengthen the regime at home, though this is debated.

Korea tried to stay out. In January 1904 the Korean Empire declared its neutrality in any conflict between Russia and Japan. The declaration was ignored.

Opening moves (February–May 1904). On the night of 8–9 February 1904 Japanese torpedo boats attacked the Russian Pacific Squadron at Port Arthur, damaging several ships; war was formally declared on 10 February. At almost the same time Japanese troops landed at Incheon (Chemulpo), and on 9 February Japanese ships attacked two Russian vessels in the harbour, the cruiser Varyag and gunboat Koreets, which were scuttled by their crews. Japanese troops occupied Seoul and marched north through Korea. At the Battle of the Yalu River (30 April–1 May), Japan defeated Russian forces and crossed into Manchuria.

Manchuria and Port Arthur (May 1904–January 1905). Japanese armies landed on the Liaodong Peninsula, won at Nanshan, and besieged Port Arthur. The Japanese Third Army under General Nogi Maresuke launched repeated frontal assaults on the fortress’s hills and forts, suffering enormous losses to machine guns and artillery. After the capture of 203 Metre Hill in December, Japanese siege guns could shell the Russian fleet in the harbour, and Port Arthur surrendered on 2 January 1905. Meanwhile the main Japanese armies under Marshal Ōyama Iwao fought the Russian army of General Aleksei Kuropatkin at Liaoyang (August–September 1904) and the Shaho River (October 1904). The Japanese won, but could not destroy the Russian army, which retreated in good order.

Mukden (February–March 1905). The Battle of Mukden (Shenyang) involved more than half a million soldiers along a front about 150 km long, making it one of the largest battles in history up to that time. After weeks of fighting the Russians retreated north. Japan had won, but it was running out of men and money.

Tsushima (May 1905). Russia sent its Baltic Fleet under Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky on an 18,000-mile voyage around Africa and across the Indian Ocean. Early in the voyage, in October 1904, Russian ships mistakenly fired on British fishing boats in the North Sea (the Dogger Bank incident), nearly causing war with Britain. On 27–28 May 1905 Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō’s Combined Fleet met the Russian fleet in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan and destroyed or captured most of it, with thousands of Russian sailors killed or taken prisoner; Japan lost only three torpedo boats.

Peace (June–September 1905). Japan, financially strained, asked Theodore Roosevelt to mediate. Russia, shaken by revolution at home, agreed to talks. While negotiations were being arranged, Japan occupied Sakhalin in July 1905 to strengthen its bargaining position. The Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on 5 September 1905 by Komura Jutarō and Sergei Witte.

For Korea, the war was the decisive step in the loss of sovereignty. Two weeks after landing, on 23 February 1904, Japan forced the Korean government to sign the Japan–Korea Protocol, which allowed Japan to occupy any strategic places it needed in Korea and required Korea to accept Japanese “advice” on administration. Korea’s declaration of neutrality became meaningless.

In August 1904 the First Japan–Korea Agreement required Korea to employ a Japanese financial adviser (Megata Tanetarō) and a foreign diplomatic adviser recommended by Japan (the American Durham Stevens). Japan also demanded rights to reclaim so-called wasteland across Korea, a demand that provoked widespread Korean protest and was withdrawn. Japanese forces requisitioned land for military use and conscripted Korean labourers to build railways such as the Seoul–Uiju (Gyeongui) line for military transport, at great hardship to villagers; Koreans who resisted or sabotaged the lines could be executed under military rule.

In February 1905, during the war, Japan incorporated the islets known in Korea as Dokdo (in Japan as Takeshima) into Shimane Prefecture. South Korea regards this as an illegal act that was part of Japan’s aggression against Korea; Japan maintains that the islets were its territory and that the incorporation was lawful. The dispute continues today.

Japan also secured the approval of the great powers. In the Katsura–Taft memorandum of July 1905, a Japanese and an American leader exchanged views accepting Japanese control of Korea and American control of the Philippines; the second Anglo-Japanese Alliance of August 1905 recognized Japan’s right to control Korea; and at Portsmouth Russia acknowledged Japan’s “paramount political, military and economic interests” in Korea. On 17 November 1905, with Japanese troops surrounding the palace, Itō Hirobumi forced through the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1905 (the Eulsa Treaty), making Korea a Japanese protectorate without the signature of Emperor Gojong.

Casualty figures vary with the source. Common estimates put Russian military deaths at roughly 43,000 to 71,000 and Japanese military deaths at roughly 80,000 to 99,000, including deaths from disease; hundreds of thousands more were wounded. Japan, although victorious, lost more soldiers than Russia, largely because of the costly assaults at Port Arthur and in Manchuria. Japanese medical services, however, reduced deaths from disease compared with earlier wars, which impressed foreign observers.

Civilians suffered heavily, especially in Manchuria. Chinese villages were occupied, looted and destroyed; farmers were forced to work as labourers or lost their crops and homes; and some Chinese were executed by one side or the other as suspected spies. The Qing government, officially neutral, could do little to protect them. No reliable count of Chinese civilian deaths exists.

In Korea, labour conscription, requisition of land, food and animals, and military rule placed heavy burdens on villagers along the invasion routes and railways. Russian prisoners and Japanese soldiers also suffered: the Port Arthur garrison had endured scurvy and bombardment, and thousands of Russian prisoners were held in camps in Japan, where they were generally treated according to international conventions.

Russia. Defeat deepened discontent at home. On 22 January 1905 (9 January in the old Russian calendar), troops fired on peaceful petitioners in St Petersburg (“Bloody Sunday”), setting off the Revolution of 1905: strikes, peasant uprisings and mutinies, including one on the battleship Potemkin. Nicholas II was forced to issue the October Manifesto promising civil liberties and an elected Duma. Russia turned its attention back to Europe and the Balkans, a shift that contributed to the tensions leading to 1914.

Japan. Japan became recognized as a great power. It gained the Kwantung (Guandong) leased territory and the South Manchuria Railway, which became the base for its later expansion into Manchuria. But the war had been financed largely with foreign loans, and the Treaty of Portsmouth gave no indemnity. When the terms were announced, crowds in Tokyo rioted at Hibiya Park and elsewhere, attacking police boxes and pro-government newspapers. Victory also increased the prestige of the army and navy and the belief that sacrifice in battle could win national greatness.

Korea. The protectorate imposed in 1905 led to the establishment of the Residency-General under Itō Hirobumi. Gojong’s attempt to appeal to the Hague Peace Conference in 1907 led to his forced abdication and the disbanding of the Korean army. Righteous army (uibyeong) resistance spread across the country. In 1909 the Korean independence fighter Ahn Jung-geun assassinated Itō at Harbin, and in 1910 Japan annexed Korea.

The wider world. The victory of an Asian nation over a European empire electrified nationalists in Asia and beyond. Sun Yat-sen in China and the young Jawaharlal Nehru in India later recalled the excitement, and the war is often connected with a wave of constitutional revolutions in Iran (1905–06) and the Ottoman Empire (1908). At the same time Japan itself was becoming a colonial power, so for Koreans and later for Chinese the “Asian victory” meant new domination rather than liberation.

Japan. The war became a national epic in Japan. Admiral Tōgō and General Nogi were revered; Nogi’s suicide after the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912 made him a symbol of loyalty. Shiba Ryōtarō’s historical novel Saka no ue no kumo (Clouds Above the Hill), serialized in 1968–72 and later adapted for television, portrayed Meiji Japan’s struggle as a heroic, defensive effort by a small nation. Critics in Japan and abroad argue that such narratives leave out Korea and China, and make it harder to see the continuity between the Meiji wars and later aggression.

Russia. In Russia the war was remembered as a humiliation caused by incompetent leadership and a distant, unpopular cause, though individual acts of courage, such as the crew of the Varyag, were celebrated in song. Soviet writers used the defeat to condemn tsarism; Aleksei Novikov-Priboy’s novel Tsushima, based on his own experience as a sailor, was widely read. When the Soviet Union took southern Sakhalin and Port Arthur in 1945, Stalin publicly presented this as wiping out the stain of 1904–05.

Korea. Korean narratives see the war as the stage on which Korea’s sovereignty was taken away: neutrality ignored, land and labour requisitioned, Dokdo incorporated, and the protectorate imposed. The Eulsa Treaty is often called the Eulsa neugyak (“forced treaty”), and many Korean scholars argue that it was legally invalid because it was imposed by coercion and never signed by the emperor. Figures of resistance, from the journalist Jang Ji-yeon, whose editorial “Today We Cry Out in Lamentation” denounced the treaty, to Ahn Jung-geun, are central to Korean memory. Ahn’s unfinished essay On Peace in East Asia argued that Japan had betrayed its promise that the war was fought for the peace of East Asia.

China. For China, the war was fought on Chinese soil between two foreign powers while the government stood by. The writer Lu Xun, then a medical student in Japan, later recalled seeing a lantern slide of a Chinese man about to be executed by Japanese soldiers as a Russian spy, while Chinese onlookers watched passively; he wrote that this experience turned him from medicine to literature. The episode has become a famous symbol of Chinese national awakening. Elsewhere, from Turkey to Southeast Asia, the war was long remembered as proof that European power was not invincible.

Official and military sources. Both the Japanese General Staff and a Russian military-historical commission produced multi-volume official histories, and the British, German, American and other armies sent observers who wrote detailed reports; the British officer Ian Hamilton published his observations with the Japanese army. General Kuropatkin wrote a defence of his conduct, published in English as The Russian Army and the Japanese War. These sources are rich on operations but often shaped by institutional self-justification; Japanese official histories, for instance, tended to conceal failures and disputes among commanders.

Journalism and images. The war was one of the most intensively reported of its time: war correspondents, including the American writer Jack London, reported from Korea and Manchuria, and photographs, newsreels and illustrated magazines reached mass audiences. Korean newspapers such as the Hwangseong Sinmun and the Daehan Maeil Sinbo, the latter published under the protection of a British owner, Ernest Bethell, recorded Korean reactions despite Japanese censorship.

Diplomatic and Korean sources. Diplomatic archives in Tokyo, St Petersburg, London and Washington document the road to war and the peace negotiations. Korean government records, the Veritable Records of Emperor Gojong, and the documents surrounding the 1904–05 agreements are central to the long-running debate on the legality of the protectorate.

Historiography. Older military histories focused on strategy and leadership. More recent work places the war in global perspective: the multi-author volumes The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero (2005–07), edited by John W. Steinberg and others, examine its diplomatic, social, cultural and colonial dimensions, and scholars such as Rotem Kowner have studied its impact on racial ideas and on the peoples of Asia. Korean and Japanese historians continue to debate the legal status of the 1904–1910 treaties, and Chinese historians emphasize the war’s impact on Manchuria. Open questions include how far each government wanted war in 1903–04, how close Japan came to military and financial exhaustion, and how the war shaped the arms race before 1914.