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War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914-1919. By FREDERICK R. DICKINSON. Harvard East Asia Monographs, No. 177. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. xviii, 363 pp. $40.00 (cloth).
Historians of World War I cannot fail to note how seldom "the world" actually figures in its historiography. Much more so than the even bloodier and more unambiguously global conflict that succeeded it, the "Great War" really seems a European conflict in its origins and even its outcome. Yet "the world" was very much there at the time. Countries as diverse as Japan and Brazil joined the Allied cause, though even many specialists in the Great War would be hard-pressed to explain why or to what effect. Frederick R. Dickinson provides a fascinating example of how different the Great War looks once a non-Western protagonist such as Japan becomes part of the story.
In most respects, Japan had a splendid war of it. Dutifully following its British ally into war in August 1914, Japan bested Germany in what was surely one of the strangest military engagements of the Great War, the siege in November 1914 of the German enclave in Qingdao, China. Japanese officers had sent messages of good will to their opponents during the siege, and the arrival of German prisoners in Japan brought crowds into the streets, who waved German as well as Japanese flags and shouted friendly greetings of...