The Eurasian Triangle. Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904-1945

1 Introduction

The Caucasus lies far from Japan. The distance from Tokyo to Tbilisi, capital of Georgia,

for example, is almost 8,000 kilometers or 5000 miles. It is dicult to see any imme-

diate historical or cultural links. Oddly, however, from the beginning of the twentieth

century, an area of mutual concern developed between them. Just as Poland and Japan

found mutual benet in their resistance to the Russian Empire and Soviet expansion,¹

so did Japan and the Caucasus. Relations began during the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese

War and continued into the period of World War II. The former marked the rst defeat

in the modern era of a European power by a non-European power, followed by Rus-

sia’s rapid decline and Japan’s spectacular rise on the international scene. The latter

marked the Soviet Union’s rise to a world superpower and Japan’s decisive defeat at the

hands of the United States and Britain (and, at the very end, the Soviet Union). Three

relative latecomers – Germany, Russia (later the Soviet Union), and Japan – dened

much of the fate of Eurasia in the rst half of the twentieth century. In the geopolitical

scheme of these three countries, the Caucasus played a strategic role. Because Japan’s

role in this area is the least known and least studied,²most works on the modern his-

tory of the Caucasus do not even mention the remote Asian country.³Nor is Japan’s

Caucasian nexus well known in Japan itself. For example, the activity of Lieutenant

Colonel Shigeki Usui of the Imperial Japanese Army, one of the major Japanese g-

ures who worked closely with the Caucasian émigrés in the 1930s, is utterly unknown

there. Even his son knew nothing about his work until one of the authors found and

contacted him in Tokyo in 2010.

The present book, a vastly expanded version of our short essay published in 2009,⁴

focuses on secret wars the Caucasus and Japan jointly fought against the Russian Em-

pire and the Soviet Union. Although, unfortunately, many relevant Japanese docu-

ments were destroyed during World War II, existing pieces of information allow us to

1 See Hiroaki Kuromiya and Andrzej Pepłoński,Między Warszawą a Tokio: Polsko-Japońska współ-

praca wywiadowcza 1904–1944(Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2009).

2 Jonathan Haslam has written a short yet pioneering work on the enigmatic relations between

Moscow and Tokyo in the 1930s:The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East, 1933–41: Moscow,

Tokyo and the Prelude to the Pacic War(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). It does

not, however, discuss the Caucasus factor.

3 See, for example, Charles King,The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus(Oxford-New York:

Oxford University Press, 2008), Donald Rayeld,Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia(London: Reak-

tion Books, 2012), and James Forsyth,The Caucasus: A History(New York: Cambridge University Press,

2013). An exception is Alex Marshall,The Russian General Sta and Asia, 1800–1917(London-New

York: Routledge, 2006), whose discussion of the Japanese nexus is based largely on an earlier work by

one of the authors of the present book: Georges Mamoulia, “L’histoire du groupe Caucase (1934–1939).”

Cahiers du monde Russe48, no. 1 (January-March 2007), 45–86.

4 Hiroaki Kuromiya and Georges Mamoulia, “Anti-Russian and Anti-Soviet Subversion: The

Caucasian-Japanese Nexus.”Europe-Asia Studies61, no. 8 (October 2009), pp. 1415–1440.

©2016 Hiroaki Kuromiya and Georges Mamoulia
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