The Russo-Japanese War was a conflict between Russia and Japan that grew out of competing imperialistic designs on Manchuria and Korea. In the late 1890s, the Russians had negotiated with China for the right to extend the TransSiberian Railway across Manchuria and thus secure a strategic base at Port Arthur. This base was designed to be the headquarters of Russian naval power in the Pacific. Russia had stationed troops in Manchuria during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, but it had promised to remove them, a promise it broke. The Japanese, who also had expansionist plans in the region, went to war with Russia before the railway was completed.
Japan tried to negotiate a division of Manchuria into “spheres of influence,” but Russia was unwilling, blinded by the belief that Japan would be defeated and a looming internal Russian revolution could be averted by a Russian victory. For Japan, Manchuria and Korea in Czarist Russian hands was like a gun pointed at its strategic heart.
In early 1904, Japan broke off negotiations, and on February 6, it severed diplomatic relations with Russia. Two days later, Japan attacked Port Arthur and bottled up the Russian fleet. Port Arthur fell in January 1905. Japanese troops had a series of victories under General Oyama at Shenyang in February and March 1905, and the destruction of the Russian fleet by Admiral Togo’s fleet in May 1905 astounded the world. It was the first time an Asian power had defeated a European power in modern times. It established Japan from that time on as a major player in world affairs.
As the war went on, Japan began to run short of both men and money. Japanese officials approached President Theodore Roosevelt secretly and requested that he sponsor peace negotiations. He agreed and gathered the two sides together at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1905. The Japanese demanded a large indemnity and the island of Sakhalin, considered a strategic location. The Russians, for their part, refused to concede. Roosevelt was frustrated, admitting that he wanted to “give utterance to whoops of rage,” but instead he pushed through an agreement in which the Japanese received no indemnity and only the southern half of Sakhalin.
For his efforts, Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906. The cost was that America’s relations with Russia were now in danger. Japan also felt wrongfully deprived of an indemnity by the agreement, and Japan and America soon became rivals in Asia. The Russo-Japanese War also produced a migration of Japanese laborers into California as dislocations and the tax burden of the war in Japan made America more appealing. By 1906, almost
70,000 Japanese lived along the Pacific Coast.
People in California became afraid of the “yellow peril.” An international crisis was created when local San Francisco school authorities declared that Asian children had to attend a special school. The Japanese saw this as blatant discrimination, and they were deeply offended. Theodore Roosevelt took matters into his own hands and invited the school board to the White House to convince them to repeal the measure to avert an international conflict. An agreement was then worked out between Japan and America to stem the tide of emigrants from Japan. Lest Japan think that America was afraid of it, Roosevelt ordered the Great White Fleet on a voyage around the world. When the fleet was met by cheering Japanese school children, it allowed for a diplomatic atmosphere necessary to carry out the Root-Takahira Agreement, in which the United States and Japan pledged to respect each other’s territorial possessions in the Pacific and uphold the Open Door Policy in China.
Further reading: Tyler Dennett, Theodore Roosevelt and the Russo-Japanese War (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959); Geoffrey Jukes, The Russo-Japanese War of 19041905 (Oxford, U. K.: Osprey Publishing, 2002).
—Annamarie Edelen
World History
