Introduction Ë 11
the time Japan and Britain were drawn increasingly closer against their common foe
of Russia, culminating in the 1902 Anglo-Japanese alliance.
The career of Motojiro Akashi (1864–1919), a central gure in the initial phase of ̄
the Caucasian-Japanese nexus, is instructive of the speed with which Japan renounced
isolationism and came to envision its place in the world. In the decades after Japan was
forced by external powers (the United States in particular) to open its doors widely
to the world, it made tremendous eorts to adapt to the modern age and cope with
the advanced foreign powers by learning from them. Akashi was one of the Japanese
elite of the time who became an internationalist. After graduating from the Imperial
Japanese Military Academy and Army University, Akashi was sent to the Imperial Gen-
eral Sta, from which in 1894 he was dispatched to Germany, whose Prussian military
models Japan was following. Soon, however, the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) forced
him back to Japan. A sta o cer of the elite Imperial Guards, he served at this time
in China (Taiwan). Afterwards, he observed the Spanish-American War in the Philip-
pines in 1898, and in 1900 he was sent to China for negotiations with Russia regarding
the settlement of the Boxer Rebellion by the Chinese. In 1901 he was appointed Japan’s
military attaché in Paris and in 1902 in St. Petersburg, where he became acquainted
with the British spy Sidney Reilly (1873–1925), said to be the model for Ian Fleming’s
James Bond. (It appears that Akashi managed to convince Reilly to work for Japan as
well. Reilly indeed opened a front business rm in Port Arthur in 1903, and provided
to Britain and Japan valuable information on Russia’s fortress there.) Akashi, uent
in both French and German (and Russian and English, according to some accounts),
worked energetically in Europe until the end of the Russo-Japanese War. After a short
stay in Tokyo, he returned to Berlin and later served in Korea (which Japan annexed in
1910), where he repressed Korean resistance to Japanese domination. In 1918 Akashi
was appointed governor (viceroy) of Taiwan (which Japan had acquired from China as
a result of its victory in the Sino-Japanese War).²⁹In a word, he personally represented
the ambitious new imperialist power of modern Japan.
Thus, in the increasingly mobile, imperialist, and contentious world of the early
twentieth century, the Caucasus and Japan came to nd each other. The following
chapters discuss this unknown history.
The signi cance of this story is much more than episodic, however: it is an in-
tegral part of twentieth-century international history. In this era Poland, Germany,
Japan, Britain, and other countries devised strategies to contain rst the Russian Em-
pire and then the Soviet Union and Communism on the Eurasian continent. It is our
contention that of them, Japan’s secret wars against its northern neighbor were the
most comprehensive: whereas Japan envisioned these wars on a truly Eurasian scale,
the European powers generally lacked an eective strategy in the vast Asian land-
29 See Tokuji Komori,Akashi Motojir ̄o, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Hara Shob ̄o, 1968) and Chiharu Inaba,Akashi
kosaku: b ̄ oryaku no nichiro sens ̄ o ̄(Tokyo: Maruzen, 1995).