| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Barbara J. Brooks. Japan's Imperial Diplomacy: Consuls, Treaty Ports, and War in China 1895–1938. (Studies of East Asian Institute, Columbia University.) Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 296. Cloth $55.00, paper $27.95.

This is a splendid study with the wrong title: it is much more about Japan's "China hands" and their ultimately unsuccessful struggle to fashion a not-so-imperial diplomacy toward China. In that struggle they had unsympathetic superiors in the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and outright (and outrageous) adversaries in the Imperial Army throughout China. But they used what tools they had, including, somewhat ironically, a Chinese treaty system that many of them wished to revise. 1

Barbara J. Brooks's story begins with the rise of the Foreign Ministry as a professional, and therefore autonomous, bureaucracy within the Japanese government. This is not a novel story, but it is an important one that reminds us that the Foreign Ministry did not enjoy an easy path. The army contested control of the conduct of Japan's foreign relations from the beginning of the Meiji years. The South Manchurian Railway, a much later creation, proved to be a formidable competitor in its base region. Nor were the rising political parties themselves naturally allies of the Foreign Ministry, although on this intriguing and important score Brooks's account suffers from lack of reference to Frederick R. Dickinson's War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (1999). . . .

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