Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the representations of the Russo-Japanese War’s battlefields and soldiers in Mori Ōgai’s Uta nikki (1907), analyzing the indirect or absent representations of the enemy Russia, and the relationship between these depictions and the illustrations included in the published book.

Paper long abstract

This paper will examine the representations of the Russo-Japanese War’s battlefields and soldiers in Mori Ōgai’s Uta nikki (Verse Diary, 1907), analyzing the indirect or absent representations of the enemy Russia, and the relationship between these depictions, and the illustrations and photographs included in the published book. It is well established that Ōgai’s professional and intellectual activities encompassed writing, poetry, translating, criticism, military medicine and bureaucracy. He served in the Russo-Japanese War from February 1904 to January 1906 as Chief Medical Officer of the Second Army, experiencing the battles in Manchuria. During this period, Ōgai diligently composed short poems, long poems, tanka and haiku between the demands of his duties as a doctor. After returning to Japan, in September 1907, he published Uta nikki from the publisher Shunyō-dō, which contained over 400 poems he had written during the Russo-Japanese War alongside translated war poems from German into Japanese. Moreover, this war poetry anthology included 46 illustrations and photographs; the illustrations were drawn by three artists, Ashiwara Ryokushi, Kubota Beisai and Terasaki Kōgyō, who were friends with Ōgai. Previous studies revealed that Uta nikki was an experimental war poetry anthology, which disrupted the boundaries of Japanese poetic genres, expanded Japanese poetic vocabulary and diversified versification. Many scholars also focused on Ashiwara’s life and the characteristics of his illustrations in Uta nikki from the perspective of Japanese Art History. However, considerable scope remains for further research into the representations of war, battlefields, Russia as the enemy, and Japan and its soldiers in Uta nikki, as well as the unique combination of Ōgai’s poetry with illustrations and photographs. In clarifying these points, it is worth paying attention to the indirect representation or even the absence of representation of Russia from both Ōgai’s poetry and the illustrations and photographs that accompany it. This reveals, on the one hand the image of Russia as an enemy nation held by Ōgai, the military doctor, but also his different perspective on Russia and its soldiers as a poet and private individual, a perspective imbued with sympathy and a faint sense of affinity toward them in severe circumstances.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper investigates the rare visual and written records about Japan’s Siberian Intervention produced by rank-and-file soldier Takeuchi Tadao. It draws on his life as a farmer, artist, and soldier to highlight the paradoxes of the presence of Japanese troops in Russia during the Taisho period.

Paper long abstract

The Japanese Intervention in Siberia during the Russian Civil War lasted for over four years, between 1918 and 1922, and involved in aggregate two-hundred and forty thousand soldiers. Yet only a sparse number of individual records remain to document the experience of Japanese servicemen in the Russian Far East during those years. The sketches and notes, together with visual and written narratives, produced by Imperial Japanese Army recruit Takeuchi Tadao in 1920 and 1921, offer therefore a unique insight into the conflict and what it meant to leave the Taisho peace and prosperity at home for the chaos and brutality of a civil war in neighbouring Russia.

The records reflect in diverse and interesting ways Takeuchi’s experience before and during the military operations in which he participated. As a farmer hailing from the mountains of Nagano who ventured outside Japan for the first time, he paid particular attention to the way of life of local peasants, the various cultures he encountered, and the challenges of the Siberian wilderness. As an accomplished draughtsman and amateur poet, he interspersed texts and images in a unique and personal blend of sharpness and melancholy, inspired by the artistic tradition of his place of birth. As a member of the IJA’s Thirteenth Division, he was mindful of his status as a soldier of the Empire, distilling in his work the tropes of military propaganda, ethnic discrimination, and allegiance to the state.

My presentation will examine Takeuchi’s accounts of his experience in Siberia from three combined perspectives – that of a farmer, an artist, and a soldier. It will highlight the poor preparedness of the Imperial Japanese Army, the often-blurry distinction between friend and foe, and the unintelligibility of the conflict to ordinary soldiers. It will conclude that Takeuchi left to posterity a vivid but puzzling account of the presence of Japanese troops in Siberia during the Taisho period.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines early stories by Izumi Kyōka alongside illustrations published in children’s magazines during the Sino-Japanese War and argues that these stories exemplify strategies used to create sympathy for war among readers, while also raising deeper ethical and philosophical questions.

Paper long abstract

Izumi Kyōka, who would go on to become Japan’s most important fantasy writer during the early twentieth century, began his career publishing genre fiction in popular magazines, including war stories in children’s magazines, during the 1890s. After making his debut with a an old-school tale of civil unrest and martial outlaws in 1892 with Kanmuri Yazaemon, followed by an Edgar Allan Poe-style mystery with Iki ningyō (The Living Doll) in 1893, Kyōka published a series of children’s stories centered on themes including expelling foreigners from Japan, military confrontation with China, triumphs of the Japanese military and navy, filial piety, and bravery at sea. Such work has had a troubled reception in studies of Kyōka’s literature, often being interpreted as juvenilia written for profit early in the author’s career, with guidance and prompting from his literary mentor, Ozaki Kōyō. Such work is moreover troubling because of its deeply xenophobic portrayals of non-Japanese, which is a feature of only very few of Kyōka’s earliest stories, written during the Sino-Japanese War, and is nowhere repeated in the many hundreds of stories that he would go on to write over many decades. In my presentation, I argue that the aesthetic and cultural value of such works continues to be severely limited by their propagandistic nature, but that they are useful as documents that illustrate how sympathy for war is generated among young readers by drawing on tropes of traditional warfare, adventure, and fantasy. By examining Kyōka’s early children’s stories, including “Yamato gokoro” (1894), “Kaisen no yoha” (1894), and “Tabisō” (1895), published in children’s magazines and collected volumes, alongside illustrations featured in these publications, I will show how popular media portrayed violent military conflict through the frameworks of traditional stories of heroic bravery and skilled martial combat. Such work depicted war as a kind of adventure that takes place in impossibly distant lands, introducing supernatural figures and fantastic realms in ways that disguise the violence of military conflict. As I will also show, however, Kyōka’s stories also raise important questions about standards, responsibilities, and consequences in warfare.