A Response to Reviews by Frederick Dickinson and Joshua Hotaka Roth

Abstract

Volumes 28-29 carried reviews by Frederick Dickinson and Joshua Hotaka Roth respectively of my most recent books, Army, Empire and Politics in Meiji Japan and The Japanese Community in Brazil 1908-1940. These two reviews demand a response. The comments by Dickinson are heavily characterized by indolence. With blithe indifference, he dismisses out of hand each of the principal sec tions of the study. For example, on my analysis of late Meiji policy toward Korea, his sole comment is to insist that Hilary Conroy over four decades ago proved there was no long-term plan to annex the peninsula. The theme of this section of my book is to show how Japan attempted, and failed, to ap ply the informal model of control then being used by Britain in Egypt. This is a theme entirely ignored by Conroy, whose merits lie elsewhere, and by Dickinson, whose merits remain invisible to me. Dickinson is equally dismissive of my interpretation of the Meiji army. He ignores, for example, my presentation of the events and arguments sur rounding the Getsuy?kai affair of the 1880s and, instead, cites a 1978 work by Kitaoka Shin'ichi to denigrate as outdated my statement that the Meiji army was never a monolith. In this, Dickinson seems to have trouble with the meaning of the word never. Kitaoka's study, as Dickinson notes and as any serious student of Japanese military history well knows, commences from 1906. This, one might aver, is a somewhat late date from which to un derstand an army created more than three decades earlier. Dickinson condemns my presentation of General Katsura Tar? as vir tual hagiography. The three examiners of the thesis on which this book is based are some of the most eminent historians of modern Japan, including one former president of the Association for Asian Studies and one past pres ident of the American Historical Association. They clearly did not share Dickinson's view on this or any other of his criticisms. Perhaps, however, he knows better than all of us. What I do find distasteful is that Dickinson