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The Russo-Japanese War

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Japan's unexpected victory over Russia in 1904-5 which gave Japan a new status in the world and pushed Russia into revolution.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the conflict between Russia and Japan from February 1904 to September 1905, which gripped the world and had a profound impact on both countries. Wary of Russian domination of Korea, Japan attacked the Russian Fleet at Port Arthur and the ensuing war gave Russia a series of shocks, including the loss of their Baltic Fleet after a seven month voyage, which reverberated in the 1905 Revolution. Meanwhile Japan, victorious, advanced its goal of making Europe and America more wary in East Asia, combining rapid military modernisation and Samurai traditions when training its new peasant conscripts. The US-brokered peace failed to require Russia to make reparations, which became a cause of Japanese resentment towards the US.

With

Simon Dixon
The Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at University College London

Naoko Shimazu
Professor of Humanities at Yale NUS College, Singapore

And

Oleg Benesch
Reader in Modern History at the University of York

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

49 minutes

Last on

Thu 1 Apr 2021 21:30
±«Óãtv Radio 4

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LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS








READING LIST

Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Geoffrey Jukes, The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905 (Osprey, 2002)

Tayama Katai (trans. Kenshiro Homma), A Soldier Shot to Death (Yamaguchi Shoten, 1982)

Rotem Kowner (ed.), The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War (Routledge, 2007)

Gerhard Krebs, ‘World War Zero? Re-Assessing the Global Impact of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-05’ (The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol 10, issue 21, May 19th 2012)

Ian Nish, The Origins of the Russo-Japanese War (Longman, 1985)

Betsy C. Perabo, Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Tadayoshi Sakurai, Human Bullets: A Soldier’s Story of Port Arthur (University of Nebraska Press, 1999)

Frederic A. Sharf, Anne Nishimura Morse and Sebastian Dobson, A Much Recorded War: The Russo--Japanese War in History and Imagery (MFA Publications, 2005)

Ryotaro Shiba (ed. Phyllis Birnbaum), Clouds above the Hill: A Historical Novel of the Russo-Japanese War (4 vols, Routledge, 2015)

Naoko Shimazu. Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

John W. Steinberg, Bruce W. Menning, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David Wolff, Steven G. Marks and Shinji Yokote (eds.), The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero (2 vols, Brill, 2005-7)

David Wells and Sandra Wilson (eds.), The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904-05 (Macmillan, 1999)


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  • Thu 1 Apr 2021 09:00
    ±«Óãtv Radio 4
  • Thu 1 Apr 2021 21:30
    ±«Óãtv Radio 4

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