Human Bullets : A Soldier's Story of Port title: Arthur Sakurai, Tadayoshi.; åOkuma, Shigenobu; author: Honda, Masujiro.; Bacon, Alice Mabel; Spiller, Roger J. publisher: University of Nebraska Press isbn10 | asin: 080329266X print isbn13: 9780803292666 ebook isbn13: 9780585266534 language: English Lüshun (China)--History--Siege, 1904- subject 1905. publication date: 1999 lcc: DS517.3.S24 1999eb ddc: 952.03/1 Lüshun (China)--History--Siege, 1904- subject: 1905. Page i Page ii Page iii Human Bullets A Soldier's Story of Port Arthur By Tadayoshi Sakurai Lieutenant I. J. A. With an Introduction by Count Okuma Translated by Masujiro Honda Edited by Alice Mabel Bacon Introduction to the Bison Books Edition by Roger Spiller Disclaimer: This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 8859-1 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 8859-1 list will be represented without their diacritical marks. Introduction to the Bison Books Edition © 1999 by the University of Nebraska Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First Bison Books printing: 1999 Most recent printing indicated by the last digit below: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sakurai, Tadayoshi, 1879-1965. [Nikudan. English] Human bullets: a soldier's story of Port Arthur / by Tadayoshi Sakurai; with an introduction by Count Okuma; translated by Masujiro Honda; edited by Alice Mabel Bacon; introduction to the Bison books edition by Roger Spiller. p. cm. ISBN 0-8032-9266-X (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Port Arthur (China)HistorySiege, 1904-1905. I. Okuma, Shigenobu, 1838-1922. II. Honda, Masujiro. III. Bacon, Alice Mabel, 1858 1918. IV. Spiller, Roger J. V. Title. DS517.3.S24 1999 952.03'1dc21 99-10482 CIP Reprinted from the original 1907 edition by Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston. Page v Introduction to the Bison Books Edition Roger Spiller The war that cost the author of this book his right arm began in the early hours of February 8, 1904. A Japanese fleet commanded by Admiral Heihachiro Togo launched a torpedo attack on the main body of the Russian Far East fleet, which was laying at anchor in the harbor at Port Arthur at the tip of Manchuria's Liaotung peninsula. The Russians were surprised, certainly. In the days that followed, as news of the Russian declaration of war flashed to world capitals by wireless telegraphy. Official communiqués issuing from St. Petersburg sounded notes of genteel disappointment as if Japan had committed a breach of propriety. An Asiatic nation had presumed to challenge one of the world's Great Powers. But behind the professions of injury, one detects an overweening confidence: Japan may have stolen a march, but Imperial Russia would make short work of these curious upstarts. General Aleksei Kuropatkin, Czar Nicholas II's Minister of War since 1897, elected to take command of the army in the field himself. Kuropatkin sent a public word to those of his generals who were already in Manchuria, "Be patient, leave a little glory for the rest of us." This much was true: Japan was an upstart in the society of nations. After several hundred years of determined isolation from the world beyond its shores, in the Meiji Restora- Page vi tion of 1868 Japan had inaugurated sweeping political and social reforms aimed at preparing itself for a new role in the international world. Outside, imperialism was running at high tide. Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, even the Americansupstarts themselvesincreasingly saw the world as theirs to apportion between them, and all the Great Powers looked to Asia as the most promising of imperial frontiers. In a seemingly perpetual state of political disarray, China was especially attractive to Imperial Russia, whose Czarist government saw in the ports of China and Manchuria natural extensions of its Far East empire. Just as the century was about to turn, Japan's ambitions pointed toward the same regions. Ten years before Togo's attack at Port Arthur, Imperial Japan had its first outing in a war against China to press a claim for hegemony over Korea and the Manchurian ports. Utterly incapable of resisting, China had capitulated promptly. But at Japan's moment of triumph, a coalition of Great Powers led by Russia intervened with diplomatic pressure and poorly disguised threats. Japan relinquished its newly won territory but not its memory. After a decade of nursing its resentments against Russia, Japan meant to renew its campaign for a colonial foothold on the Asian mainland. By 1904, Port Arthur had become the most distant, and the most important outpost of Russia's imperial ambitions, a symbol of its power in the Far East. The harbor was Russia's only door to the warmer waters of the Pacific. Hundreds of miles to the north lay Vladivostok, Russia's other major port, but it was closed for much of the year by Admiral Winter. And while Vladivostok was barely accessible from either sea or land, Port Arthur was quickly developed as the terminus of Russia's grandest imperial project of all, the Trans- Siberian Railroad. As a mark of its importance, Port Arthur was defended not only by the fleet, but by thousands of garrison troops as well.