50 Ë The Russo-Japanese War
In 1906, soon after the war ended, Japan’s consulate reopened in Odesa. Likewise,
Japan used Istanbul, where many people from the Caucasus took refuge, for opera-
tions against Russia. The Ottoman Empire and Japan did not have o cial diplomatic
relations at the time. Yet, with the support of the sultan (according to Russian au-
thorities), a Japanese businessman (“K. Nakamura”) acted as a “secret” consul and
intelligence o cer under whom a reserve military o cer (“T. Yamada”) worked with
two Japanese assistants, Japanese newspaper correspondents (“Ito” and “Tar ̄o Mat-
sumoto”), to develop an “extensive network.”¹²⁸Although there is no evidence that
the reserve o cer (Torajir ̄o Yamada) had anything to do with the Japanese military
forces, during the war he conducted intelligence work for Japan at the request of the
Japanese ambassador in Vienna. It is also known that another Japanese working with
him at the time, Kenjiro Nakamura (probably the “K. Nakamura” referred to in Russian ̄
documents), had traveled to Istanbul as a naval o cer as early as 1897.¹²⁹More signif-
icantly, the journalist “Matsumoto” was in fact the former consul in Odesa, Kametar ̄o
Iijima working under cover. In Istanbul Iijima employed a Swiss and a Greek as infor-
mants, followed the movement of Russian vessels through the Turkish Straits, and ac-
quired valuable information from the local British legation.¹³⁰In 1907, although Japan
and Turkey still lacked o cial diplomatic relations, Japan even managed to station a
“military attaché” in Istanbul!
Japan’s extensive operations in Eurasia, however, proved costly. Almost certainly
Japan spent much more on intelligence than did Russia. as noted earlier, Japan ear-
marked 1 million yen in 1905 for Akashi’s operations. According to Russian estimates,
in the years leading up to the war Japan expended 12 million rubles, whereas Russia
spent annually a little more than 100,000 rubles on military intelligence.¹³¹It is un-
clear whether the gure for Japan is cumulative or annual,¹³²and the gures for both
Japan and Russia do not appear to include expenditures on counterintelligence. Rus-
128 “Tainaia voina protiv Rossii,” 41–42. See also Osmanov,Iz istorii russko-iaponskoi voiny, 446-9,
455-56.
129 See Selçuk Esenbel, “Seiki matsu Isutanburu no nihonjin,” in ̄ Kindai nihon to toruko sekai, edited
by Masaru Ikei and Tsutomu Sakamoto (Tokyo: Keis ̄o shobo, 1999), 80 and 96, Kuniki Yamada and ̄
Toshio Sakamoto,Meiji no kaidanji toruko e tobu: Yamada Torajiro den ̄ (Tokyo: Gendai shokan, 2009),
155–60, and Dündar and Misawa, “Isutanburu no nakamura sh ̄ oten,” 189, 191. See also “Tainaia voina ̄
protiv Rossii,” 160.
130 Chiharu Inaba, “The Question of the Bosphorous and Dardanelles during the Russo-Japanese
War: The Struggle between Japan and Russia over the Passage of the Russian Volunteer Fleet in 1904,”
Selçuk Esenbel and Chiharu Inaba, eds,The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on
the History of Japanese-Turkish Relations(Istanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 2003), 127–30.
131 I.V. Derevianko, “Russkaia agenturnaia razvedka v 1902–1905 gg.”Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal
1989, no. 5, 76.
132 A. Votinov,Iaponskii shpionazh v russko-iaponskuiu voinu 1904–1905 gg.(Moscow: Voenizdat,
1939), 4 states that espionage and diversion accounted for 10 percent of Japan’s war expenditure in
1904.