Military History of Russia

[King Solomon]

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[King Solomon]

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[Tanja]

Russia and Japan Expand to their Pacific Frontiers, 1697-1898
The lessons of history are always uncertain, but they are not always vague. The long-term experience of Russians and Japanese in the Northwestern Pacific basin suggests that the two nations relate best with one another when they concentrate on trade and economic relations rather than geo-political dominance and when they abandon isolationist and narrowly protective policies in favor of open commercial exchange. Commerce and exchange, not control of territory, is the heart of the matter. Several times significant wars have raged between them in regions where neither was strictly at home and where commercial cooperation would have suited them better and might have changed the course of world history. Both have badly needed peace and close economic ties in order to pursue more fundamental national objectives and to benefit from the advantages offered by the other. But no such commerce has ever been established over any long duration of time. The lessons of history further suggest that when third parties intervene in this bilateral relationship, or even when they seek to influence it, they do so with little regard for the best interests of either the Russians or the Japanese.


FNOTW: Other conflicts: The historical background

 

[vostok]

Russia and Japan Expand to their Pacific Frontiers, 1697-1898
The lessons of history are always uncertain, but they are not always vague. The long-term experience of Russians and Japanese in the Northwestern Pacific basin suggests that the two nations relate best with one another when they concentrate on trade and economic relations rather than geo-political dominance and when they abandon isolationist and narrowly protective policies in favor of open commercial exchange. Commerce and exchange, not control of territory, is the heart of the matter. Several times significant wars have raged between them in regions where neither was strictly at home and where commercial cooperation would have suited them better and might have changed the course of world history. Both have badly needed peace and close economic ties in order to pursue more fundamental national objectives and to benefit from the advantages offered by the other. But no such commerce has ever been established over any long duration of time. The lessons of history further suggest that when third parties intervene in this bilateral relationship, or even when they seek to influence it, they do so with little regard for the best interests of either the Russians or the Japanese.


FNOTW: Other conflicts: The historical background

Only few people know the fact that the Ainu - the indigenous people of Hokkaido and other islands - asked Russian Tsar to take them into Russian citizenship. Japanese carried out a very strict policy against the Ainu, until extinction. However, when Russia is firmly entrenched in the Far East, it was too late and Hokkaido become the Japanese island.

 

[Tanja]

Japan - Russia History Cont
First phase to 1972
Years before Vladimir Vasil'evich Atlasov (as he is so primly named in latter-day Russian sources) came across the castaway or shipwrecked Japanese adventurer Dembei on the shores of the Kamchatka Peninsula in 1697, Russians and Japanese had crisscrossed one another's paths and had most likely established frequent contact in these cold northern territories which neither people could rightly call its own.

{_{ Recent Siberian scholarship is beginning to uncover the rich "unofficial" life of Russian/Cossack settlers whose history has been neglected in favor of the johnny-come-lately state servitors whose story has hitherto been taken to be all we need to know about Siberia. See Bitov. By about 1500, Japanese frontiersmen had driven aboriginal peoples from Northern Honshu, and the Japanese Matsumae family ruled in modern-day Oshima, the southern part of Hokkaido. They called this territory "South Ezo" or "Matsumae" and considered it the Northern frontier of Japan. The Matsumae dominated a lively interchange with the Ainu and other peoples inhabiting Ezo and the Okhotsk Sea littoral. On the Russian-Japanese first encounter, see KEJ, 6: 340. SHJ, 3: 201-2. Beasley, MHJ: 39-40. Dembei's was the 1st reported of at least sixteen ships cast upon Russian shores over the next century & half, and a source of quickening contact and understanding between Russia and Japan [Kisaki Tyohei, Eiju-maru Rosia Hyoryu Ki (TOK: 1982): 20-25, cited in Togawa"Russian and Slavic: 4. See Plummer, "Shogun's Reluctant Ambassadors: Castaways", Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 3, 19 (1984): 33-136.}_}


FNOTW: Other conflicts: The historical background