Japan's surprise harbor strike humbled a European empire
The Russo-Japanese War lasted from 8 February 1904 to 5 September 1905 as Russia and Japan fought over Manchuria and Korea. After Shimonoseki in 1895 briefly gave Japan Liaodong and Port Arthur, Triple Intervention pressure forced a hand-back that Tokyo never forgave.
Japan's appetite had been growing since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which set out to modernise the country without simply Westernising it and produced an industrial state eager to be treated as an equal and to expand abroad. Between 1869 and 1873 the elite split bitterly over whether to conquer Korea at once or later; nobody disputed that it should be done. Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru said in 1887 that Japan must become like a European empire. Social Darwinism spread from the 1880s, taxpayers wanted a colony in return for their sacrifices, and schools steeped boys in Bushidō until diplomacy itself looked weak.
Russia stood in the way. After France, Germany and Russia made Japan give back the Liaodong Peninsula, Russia built the Trans-Siberian Railroad, pushed into Korea and leased Port Arthur from China itself in 1898. Tokyo signed an alliance with Britain in 1902 and proposed trading Manchuria for Korea; St Petersburg said no.
When talks collapsed, Japan hit the Russian Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur without warning in February 1904. Its troops landed in Korea, crossed the Yalu into Manchuria in May, and besieged Port Arthur from August until it fell in January 1905. Mukden, the Manchurian capital, was taken after heavy fighting that March. Russia's Baltic Fleet sailed for more than seven months and some 18,000 nautical miles to the Far East, only to be annihilated at Tsushima in May.
Theodore Roosevelt brokered the Treaty of Portsmouth, which acknowledged Japan's interests in Korea and gave it the Liaodong lease, the South Manchuria Railway and southern Sakhalin. An Asian country's outright defeat of a European power stunned observers, raised Japan to great-power rank and dented Western prestige across Asia. At home, Russia's costly humiliation fed the unrest of the 1905 revolution, forcing the autocracy into concessions.
Source: Russo-Japanese War
