The Real “Great Game”

With today’s podcast we complete our mini-unit on Japan, by jumping back to its rise to power. Most of today’s episode is drawn from “The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia” by Sheila Miyoshi Jager.

The author is too modest in the framing of her book. She calls her chronicle of the conflict between China, Japan, and Russia over Korea, with Britain and the US manipulating things behind the scenes, “The Other Great Game”. This is meant to be in contrast to the more famous “Great Game” between Britain and Russia for West Asia, India and Pakistan. I think a better title would “The Real Great Game”.

The conflict Jager recounts in phenomenal detail was much, much more important that the more famous “Great Game” in Central and South Asia, both at the time, and in its long term ramifications. You can listen to Ruairi & my conversation here, or read on to hear me sing Jager’s praises and complain about the historiography of the Great Game.

“The Great Game” has always been a pet peeve of mine. Supposedly Russia and Britain were competing, but if you look at the fine print, military forces never met, and Britain always vastly outclassed whatever Russia was doing. In fact, the couple thousand troops Russia had poking around Central Asia never posed any kind of serious threat to British India with its railroads and its hundreds of thousands of troops. The Russian boogey man was a convenient excuse the British could use to take more territory and push people around.

The controversy Jager recounts in this book was not propaganda. It was deadly serious, it involved territory in Korea and Chinese Manchuria changing hands multiple times, and it cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Russia never posed a threat to British India, but it posed a massive threat to Korea and China, and was much more of a peer competitor to Japan than potted history of the Russo-Japanese war usually acknowledges. The Russo-Japanese war is the culmination of the narrative of this book, and Jager more than justifies her description of the conflict as World War Zero. It was an awful fight, with machine guns and barbed wire taking a terrible toll on both sides.

Jager recounts about four decades of history fairly comprehensively in this volume, from the 1870s until Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. It was a tragic set of decades for all involved. Korea was formally tributary to China for centuries, but mostly isolated. What set the tragedy in motion was the British defeat of China in the 2nd Opium War (1856-1860). Russia took advantage of a prostrate China to take a whole bunch of territory, all the way up to the Korean border. The Chinese started to get worried about growing Russian influence in Korea, but the concern of the Japanese was more important. The Japanese had just come roaring back out of centuries of isolation themselves, and they were (rightly) tremendously paranoid about Russian influence. The Japanese didn’t want the Russians in Korea, and they didn’t believe the Chinese could keep that influence out.

So both of Japan’s big “coming out” wars were about Korea, which is something I had not put together earlier, but makes a lot of sense. The first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) are both covered in detail in Jager’s book. The diplomatic wrangling in between is also heavily covered. I was able to get a real sense of some of these historic characters. The Korean King Kojong, who came to power as a child in 1864 before Japan had begun its ascent, and ended up losing his country to Japanese annexation as an old man in 1910. King Kojong’s father, whose repetitively disruptive politics would be hilarious if they hadn’t cost so many lives, also makes an impression. The omni-competent Japanese diplomats and modernizers who are endlessly frustrated with the stupid decisions the Koreans and the Russians keep making also came off better than I expected.

Jager does not make the British as central as I believe them to be, but I could feel them lurking behind the action of the book. All of the actors seem surprisingly sympathetic, even the all conquering Japanese. Individual Russian actors are probably the dumbest, but all the state actors, including the Japanese seem trapped by the course of events. It’s interesting that the actors that had the most agency here were the British and the Americans.

It’s British-led interventions that allowed Russia to take the most territory, in 1860 and again with the suppression of the Boxer rebellion in 1900. The Japanese of 1904 felt as emboldened to take on Russia as they did because of an alliance they had signed with Britain in 1902. None of this surprised me much, though it was very enriching to get the details. What did surprise me was how much agency the US had. In the US we’re very proud of Roosevelt’s role in settling the Russo-Japanese war. I think I have known about this since grade school. What I did not know, was that US financing was crucial to the Japanese war effort, which is one of the many telling details that Jager finds and highlights.

I’d long been aware that the US was sort of Britain’s “little brother” in 19th century imperialism in Latin America. I hadn’t really figured out that that was the case in Asia as well. Jager points out that the “Open Door Notes” supposedly a great achievement of US diplomacy in 1899, were first drafted by a British diplomat. It’s dispiriting, but clarifying, to realize the extent to which Britain was pulling our strings back then. US bankers may have financed a Japanese war effort, but they almost certainly used British banking networks to do it. Japan was the obvious actor driving events forward, but it was almost as trapped as the Koreans, Chinese, and Russians it was beating up.

This book filled a huge gap in my understanding, and I think it could do the same for most readers. Japan, Korea and China all existed before and after British imperialism, but they were all changed in major ways. Everybody knows the endpoints. Magnificently complex but sclerotic traditional societies in 1800, some of the most modern places on the planet by 2000. Jager fills out a lot of the space in the middle that’s often absent in popular understanding. A really excellent book. Jager presents a “Great Game” where things actually happened, and the consequences for millions were very real.

The Real Great Game.

You can listen to our conversation on Spotify, or watch the YouTube version below…