Research seminar: The Lessons of the Russo-Japanese War 1904-05: Learned or Ignored?

In recent years, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 has sometimes been referred to as 'World War Zero'. Indeed, this war has attracted a great deal of attention around the world. For the first time, an Asian country, Japan, defeated a major European power and secured hegemony in East Asia. This first 'modern war' of the 20th century also saw the use of new weapons such as the machine gun. To see for themselves the changes in warfare, almost all Western countries sent military observers to the theatres of war in Korea and Manchuria. After the end of the war, these observers published numerous reports on the course of the war. In addition, the collections of photographs, memoirs and diaries of foreign observers provide a multifaceted picture of the war.

The lecture will first look at the historical background and the course of the war, before examining the conclusions that military observers drew from their experiences. Special attention will be paid to the assessments of military doctors and medical personnel, which so far have received little scholarly attention.

Wolfgang Schwentker is a Professor Emeritus at Osaka University, where he taught comparative cultural and intellectual history between 2002 and 2019. He studied history, German literature and philosophy at Düsseldorf University and Bonn University. Subsequent to his graduation in modern history, he was a research fellow at the Max Weber Institute in Düsseldorf (1979-84) and held visiting fellowships at the German Historical Institute in London (1985), Rikkyō University, Tokyo (1989-91), St Antony's College, Oxford (1991/92), and the University of Vienna (2002). He was a visiting professor at Charles University in Prague (1996) and the University of Regensburg (2018) where he taught Modern Social Thought and Modern History, respectively. His published works include the following books: Max Weber in Japan. Eine Untersuchung zur Wirkungsgeschichte, 1905-1995 (1998; Japanese edition, 2013), Die Samurai (2002, fifth edition, 2023), The Power of Memory in Modern Japan (2008, as co-editor with Sven Saaler), and Geschichte Japans (2022).