page_title: Russo-Japanese War
section_title: Fiction
hierarchical_section_title: Russo-Japanese War / Cultural legacy / Fiction
caption_attribution_description: English: Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō on the bridge of the Battleship Mikasa. Left to right: messenger Yamazaki Genki, navigator Second Lieutenant Edahara Yurikazu, staff Major Iida Hisatsune, chief navigator Lieutenant Colonel Nunome Mitsuzō, aide-de-camp of gunnery officer Lieutenant Imamura Nobujirō, captain of Mikasa Captain Ijichi Hikojirō, gunnery officer Major Abo Kiyokazu, 4th grade sailor Noguchi Shinzō, chief of staff Rear-Admiral Katō Tomosaburō, measurement officer Cadet Lieutenant Hasegawa Kiyoshi, Commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet Tōgō Heihachirō, staff Lieutenant Colonel Akiyama Saneyuki, 1st grade sailor Miura Tadashi, cadet Tamaki Shinsuke日本語: 東城鉦太郎『三笠艦橋之圖』 右から左へ：伝令・玉木信助少尉候補生、伝令・三浦忠一等信号兵、参謀・秋山真之中佐、連合艦隊司令長官・東郷平八郎大将、測的係・長谷川清少尉、参謀長・加藤友三郎少将、伝令・野口新蔵四等水兵、砲術長・安保清種少佐、艦長・伊地知彦次郎大佐、砲術長附・今村信次郎中尉、航海長・布目満造中佐、参謀・飯田久恒少佐、航海士・枝原百合一少尉、伝令・山崎厳亀少尉候補生
context_page_description: The Russo-Japanese War was fought during 1904 and 1905 between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. The major theatres of operations were the Liaodong Peninsula and Mukden in Southern Manchuria and the seas around Korea, Japan and the Yellow Sea.
  Russia sought a warm-water port on the Pacific Ocean for its navy and for maritime trade. Vladivostok was operational only during the summer, whereas Port Arthur, a naval base in Liaodong Province leased to Russia by the Qing dynasty of China, was operational all year. Since the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Japan feared Russian encroachment on its plans to create a sphere of influence in Korea and Manchuria. Russia had demonstrated an expansionist policy in the Siberian Far East from the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century.
  Seeing Russia as a rival, Japan offered to recognize Russian dominance in Manchuria in exchange for recognition of Korea as being within the Japanese sphere of influence. Russia refused and demanded Korea north of the 39th parallel to be a neutral buffer zone between Russia and Japan.
context_section_description: Fictional coverage of the war in English began even before it was over. An early example was Allen Upward's The International Spy. Set in both Russia and Japan, it ends with the Dogger Bank incident involving the Baltic Fleet. The political thinking displayed there is typical of the time. There is great admiration for the Japanese, who were British allies. Russia is in turmoil, but the main impetus towards war is not imperialism as such but commercial forces. "Every student of modern history has remarked the fact that all recent wars have been promoted by great combinations of capitalists. The causes which formerly led to war between nation and nation have ceased to operate" (p. 40). The true villain plotting in the background, however, is the German Emperor, seeking to destabilise the European balance of power in his country's favour. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator steals a German submarine and successfully foils a plot to involve the British in the war. The submarine motif reappeared in George Griffith's science fiction novel, The Stolen Submarine (1904), although in this case it is a French super-submarine which its developer sells to the Russians for use against the Japanese in another tale of international intrigue.
  Though most English-language fiction of the period took the Japanese side, the Rev. W. W. Walker's Canadian novella, Alter Ego, is an exception. It features a Canadian volunteer in the Russian army who, on his return, agrees to talk about his experiences to an isolated upcountry community and relates his part in the Battle of Mukden. Though this incident only occupies two of the book's six chapters, it is used to illustrate the main message there, that war is "anti-Christian and barbarous, except in a defensive sense" (Ch.3).
  Various aspects of the war were also common in contemporary children's fiction. Categorised as Boys' Own adventure stories, they offer few insights into the conflict, being generally based on news articles and sharing without any reflection in the contemporary culture of imperialism. Among these, Herbert Strang was responsible for two novels: Kobo told from the Japanese side, and Brown of Moukden viewed from the Russian side. Three more were written by the prolific American author, Edward Stratemeyer: Under the Mikado's Flag, At the Fall of Port Arthur, and Under Togo for Japan, or Three Young Americans on Land and Sea (1906). Two other English-language stories begin with the action at Port Arthur and follow the events thereafter: A Soldier of Japan: a tale of the Russo-Japanese War by Captain Frederick Sadleir Brereton, and The North Pacific by Willis Boyd Allen (1855–1938). Two more also involve young men fighting in the Japanese navy: Americans in For the Mikado by Kirk Munroe, and a temporarily disgraced English officer in Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun by Harry Collingwood, the pen-name of William Joseph Cosens Lancaster (1851–1922), whose speciality was naval fiction.
  Another literary genre affected by the outcome of the war was invasion literature, either fuelled by racialist fears or generated by the international power struggle. Shunrō Oshikawa's novel The Submarine Battleship (Kaitei Gunkan) was published in 1900 before the actual fighting began but shared the imperial tensions that produced it. It is the story of an armoured ram-armed submarine involved in a Russo-Japanese conflict. Three other novels appeared in 1908 and are thought of as significant now because of their prophetic dimension. American author Arthur Wellesley Kipling (1885–1947) prefaced his The New Dominion – A Tale of Tomorrow's Wars with a note counselling future vigilance. The scenario there is an attack by German and Japanese allies which the US and British navies victoriously fend off. In Germany itself an air attack on the American fleet is described by Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff (1871–1935), writing under the name Parabellum, in his novel Banzai!. Published in Berlin in 1908, it was translated into English the following year. An Australian author using the pseudonym Charles H. Kirm
caption: Painting of Admiral Heihachirō Tōgō on the bridge of the Japanese battleship Mikasa, before the Battle of Tsushima in 1905
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