196 Ë Conclusion
casian émigré groups, including the Caucasus group with which Japan worked in the
1930s, were penetrated by Soviet agents. Moreover, having learned a bitter lesson from
Japan’s “total espionage,” Moscow re ned its own version and matched it with “total
counter-espionage” in the form of the Great Terror in the 1930s. Japan and the Cauca-
sus group could do little more than maintain very tenuous links with the Caucasus.
Although Japan ultimately decided not to ght against the Soviet Union, choosing to
challenge the United States and other Western powers instead, Japan continued to
consider the Soviet Union a potential foe and so maintained relations with the Cauca-
sus group.
Even though their alliance was not constant (notably during World War I) and
their collaboration failed to achieve its goal, relations between Japan and the Cauca-
sus left no bitter taste. This, too, is very similar to the relationship between Japan and
Poland from 1904 to 1945. Giorgi Dekanozishvili and Motojiro Akashi maintained cor- ̄
dial relations to the end, even though Japan’s support was cut o halfway through
their common struggle. Remarkably, both Haidar Bammat and Alikhan Kantemir had
very fond memories of their work with the Japanese (especially Shigeki Usui), as the
photograph of them taken in August 1945 in Lausanne, Switzerland, suggests (see Fig-
ure 7.4 on p. 192 with a photograph of Usui in the background). By then, Usui was dead
(killed in action in December 1941 in Rangoon or Yangon, Burma).
There are paradoxes, however. The Caucasians must have been aware that Japan
was at the same time a liberator and an oppressor. Japan’s anticolonial, anti-Western
rhetoric and its victory over Russia in 1905 galvanized those suering under Russian
and Western colonialism. Euphoria spread over Eurasia, including the Caucasus and
the Balkans. The Ottomans were invigorated by the events of 1904–05, but so were
those peoples living under the Ottoman Empire! What Dekanozishvili, had he lived
long enough to observe Akashi’s brutal role in Korea, might have thought is anyone’s
guess. As Japan found itself increasingly cornered politically by Western imperial pow-
ers in the wake of its invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Its imperialist ambitions came into
clearer focus. In the name of uniting Asians against Western colonialism, Japan pro-
moted its own imperialist agenda. This should have been clear to anyone after Japan
annexed Korea in 1910 and exacted humiliating concessions from China during World
War I (in both cases with Russia’s implicit consent). Like Western colonial powers,
Japan maintained extraterritoriality in China. In fact, Japan’s colonial arrogance be-
came abundantly clear to Turkey soon after the Russo-Japanese War, when there was
much admiration for Japan’s victory in the Sublime Porte: Japan demanded the same
unequal status from the Ottomans as that enjoyed by Western colonial powers. Yet,
in the 1930s, while Asians turned increasingly against the Japanese, the Caucasians,
and the Caucasus group in particular, worked with them amicably. Why?
Here distance certainly mattered. Unlike Asia, where Japan had colonial ambi-
tions, Japan was too far from the Caucasus to assert such claims. This proved both
a strength and weakness in the Caucasian-Japanese nexus. Japan’s support in 1905
was critical to the events of that year in the Caucasus. Yet Japan withdrew when it