Russo-Japanese War

A Japanese battleship during the Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese War was a conflict which was fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan between February 1904 and September 1905. The war came about owing to growing rivalry between Russia and Japan for influence in the region around Manchuria in north-eastern China and the Korean Peninsula. Japan was seeking to acquire influence on the Asian mainland, while Russia was in search of a warm-water port in the Pacific, its more northerly ports such as Vladivostok being ice-impeded for several months of every year. Diplomatic negotiations about respective spheres of influence broke down in late 1903/early 1904 and war followed in February. The war was a catastrophe for Russia. Its Pacific forces were quickly defeated by the Japanese and when its fleet arrived from Europe after a voyage half way around the world it too was defeated at the Battle of Tsushima. The humiliating Treaty of Portsmouth was then brokered by the United States ensuring Japanese control over Korea and half of Sakhalin Island. Japanese migration to both regions increased in the decades that followed.

Russo-Japanese War chronology of events

In the second half of the nineteenth century and into the first years of the twentieth, Russia and Japan were the two dominant powers in the Far East. Korea was a minnow militarily which was open to intervention by its more powerful neighbors. China was also in a state of disarray owing to its own tumultuous internal politics. Conversely, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan entered into a period of remarkable modernization along western lines. It turned Korea into a semi-protectorate in the 1890s and was looking to expand its influence in Manchuria as well, the extensive part of China in the northeast of the country, directly north of Korea and also bordering on the south-eastern corner of Russia. At the same time, Russia sought a warm water port in the same vicinity, as its main Pacific port, Vladivostok, was ice-logged for several months of the year. To this end they had acquired a lease of Port Arthur in 1895, a move which saw growing tensions emerge with the Japanese as their spheres of influence grew ever closer to each other. Diplomatic negotiations to resolve some of these tensions were entered into in the early 1900s, though these eventually broke down and led to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904.

The Battle of Tsushima (1905)

Japan was at a strategic advantage from the initiation of the conflict. The fighting was taking place very near to the Home Islands and it was able to deploy its resources far more quickly, whereas the more powerful elements of the Russian navy and military were far away in Europe. They also had the element of surprise, beginning the war by launching an unprovoked attack on the Russian naval forces at Port Arthur on the 8th of February 1904. A more prolonged siege of Port Arthur was initiated in August and the port fell to the Japanese in the first days of 1905. By that time Russia had dispatched a huge number of ships comprising much of its Atlantic Ocean and Black Sea fleets eastwards from Europe to Asia. After a voyage of many months the fleet finally arrived to the Far East in the late spring of 1905. Yet its arrival soon turned to disaster as well as the Russians were heavily defeated at the Battle of Tsushima on the 27th and 28th of May 1905.

Theodore Roosevelt

With defeat at Tsushima peace negotiations accelerated. They were largely brokered by the President of the United States of the day, Theodore Roosevelt. A conference was convened at Portsmouth in the state of Maine and there the Treaty of Portsmouth was agreed on the 5th of September 1905. Russia agreed to leave Port Arthur and to abandon efforts to encroach into Manchuria. Conversely, the Japanese were recognized as having a sphere of influence over Korea, a dispensation which allowed them to effectively annex the peninsula in 1910. The southern half of Sakhalin Island, which till then had been an exclusively Russian sphere of control, was ceded to Japan. As such, Japan was the clear victor in the peace negotiations and even the term of the treaty which directed that it would also stay out of Manchuria was eventually abandoned when the Japanese invaded that region in 1931 and turned it into the puppet-state of Manchukuo. Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his role in brokering the peace.

Extent of migration after the Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese War and the Treaty of Portsmouth led to migration in some regions. On a rather small scale, it saw Russian naval officers and staff removed from Port Arthur. More substantial was the increased Japanese migration to Sakhalin and settlement there from 1905 onwards as the southern half of this long, thin island came under Japanese rule. Finally, the acknowledgement of Korea as being a sphere of Japanese influence led to increased Japanese settlement on the Korean Peninsula in the decades that followed. More controversially, Japanese imperial rule saw intermixing of Koreans and Japanese in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s.

Demographic impact of the Russo-Japanese War

The long term demographic impact of the war needs to be assessed somewhat tangentially. For instance, during the early 1940s, at the height of the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of Koreans were brought to the Japanese Home Islands to work as laborers, in a major episode in the formation of what is today the sizeable Korean community in Japan. This would not have occurred in the 1940s had it not been for Japan’s control over Korea since the early twentieth century, which was augmented as a result of the Russo-Japanese War. By the time of the Second World War the Japanese had colonized Sakhalin Island to such an extent that there were about 400,000 Japanese and Koreans here. These were evacuated in advance of an Allied invasion in 1945, though many returned after the war. Peculiarly, their legal status remains unclear over three-quarters of a century later as the island is ostensibly fully under Russian control now, but Russia and Japan have never fully agreed peace terms since 1945.

See also

• Japan
• Russia
• Korean War

Explore more about the Russo-Japanese War

• The Russo-Japanese War at Association for Asian Studies
• The Treaty of Portsmouth at US Office of the Historian
• Russo-Japanese Relations in the Far East at Library of Congress

References

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