The Russo-Japanese War

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.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Simon Dixon 6 episodes
  The Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at University College London
• Naoko Shimazu No other episodes
  Professor of Humanities at Yale NUS College, Singapore
• Oleg Benesch No other episodes
  Reader in Modern History at the University of York

Reading list

• Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan
  Oleg Benesch (Oxford University Press, 2014) Google Books →
• The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905
  Geoffrey Jukes (Osprey, 2002) Google Books →
• A Soldier Shot to Death
  Tayama Katai (Yamaguchi Shoten, 1982)
• The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War
  Rotem Kowner (ed.) (Routledge, 2007) Google Books →
• World War Zero? Re-Assessing the Global Impact of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-05
  Gerhard Krebs
• The Origins of the Russo-Japanese War
  Ian Nish (Longman, 1985) Google Books →
• Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War
  Betsy C. Perabo (Bloomsbury, 2017) Google Books →
• Human Bullets: A Soldier's Story of Port Arthur
  Tadayoshi Sakurai (University of Nebraska Press, 1999) Google Books →
• A Much Recorded War: The Russo--Japanese War in History and Imagery
  Frederic A. Sharf, Anne Nishimura Morse and Sebastian Dobson (MFA Publications, 2005) Google Books →
• Clouds above the Hill: A Historical Novel of the Russo-Japanese War
  Ryotaro Shiba (Routledge, 2015) Google Books →
• Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War
  Naoko Shimazu (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero
  John W. Steinberg, Bruce W. Menning, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David Wolff, Steven G. Marks and Shinji Yokote (Brill, 2005-7) Google Books →
• The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904-05
  David Wells and Sandra Wilson (eds.) (Macmillan, 1999) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m000tnq3

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tnq3

Auto-category: 952 (History of Japan)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, in February 1904, Japanese destroyers made a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur on the Yellow Sea.