5 Renewal
Among the signi cant consequences of World War I is that Japan now grew into an
international power. Its victory in the Russo-Japanese War fteen years earlier had al-
ready made it a formidable power in Asia. Even though Japan’s participation in ac-
tual battles was limited during World War I, it diligently assisted the Entente on a
Eurasian scale. As discussed earlier, Japan rendered a great deal of material assistance
to Russia; it also “ejected German forces from Qingdao, China, and German Microne-
sia, protected convoys of Australian and New Zealand troops from the Paci c to Aden,
hunted German submarines in the Mediterranean, and provided desperately needed
shipping, copper, munitions, and almost¥640 million in loans to its allies.”¹Japan
took part in the Paris Peace Conference at Versaille in 1919 as one of the “Big Five”
and acquired from Germany rights to Shandong province in China and Paci c islands
north of the equator. (The conference, however, rejected Japan’s proposal for includ-
ing a “racial equality clause” in the charter for the League of Nations.) Along with
Great Britain, France, and Italy, Japan also became one of the original four permanent
members of the Council of the League of Nations.
Meanwhile, the establishment of the Soviet regime produced large numbers, an
estimated two million or more, of political émigrés in Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia, Germany, France, Britain, Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, China, Japan,
and elsewhere. Foreign countries, including France, Poland, and Japan, took note of
these people as being potentially useful in politically subverting and even ultimately
destroying the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s fear of external and internal subver-
sion and Stalin’s use of it for political purposes became a consistent theme in Soviet
foreign and domestic policy. As described by one historian regarding the war, revolu-
tion, and civil war of 1914–21: “For both Soviet o cial historians and the Russian émi-
gré movement the belief that tsarist Russia had been fatally undermined by German
espionage formed a central bastion of their ideological thought.”²The Soviet govern-
ment was thus obsessed with the “myth of all-encompassing enemy espionage” and
“internal betrayal.”³Once again Russia came to deeply fear Japan as an espionage
super power.
1 Frederick R. Dickinson, “Toward a Global Perspective of the Great War: Japan and the Foundations
of a Twentieth-Century World.”The American Historical Review119, no. 4 (2014), 1160–1161.
2 Alex Marshall, “Russian Military Intelligence, 1905–1917: The Untold Story behind Tsarist Russia in
the First World War.”War in History11, no. 4 (2004), 421.
3 Marshall, “Russian Military Intelligence,” 421.
©2016 Hiroaki Kuromiya and Georges Mamoulia
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