The Rise of Asia

In Calcutta the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, said that “the reverberations of that victory have gone like a thunderclap through the whispering galleries of the East.”

What victory was he alluding to? This was the same, infamous Lord Curzon who made the decision to  Partition Bengal along communal lines,a few months later, sowing the seeds for the future Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The Battle of Tsushima was a major naval battle fought between Russia and Japan. It represents a great many first's and was naval history's only decisive sea battle fought by modern steel battleship fleets,  and the first naval battle in which wireless telegraphy (radio) played a critically important role.

It was fought on May 27–28, 1905 in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and southern Japan. In this battle the Japanese fleet under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō destroyed two-thirds of the Russian fleet and forced the Russian Admiral to an inglorious surrender. Sailing under Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, the Russian's had traveled over 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) to reach the Far East and were utterly caught by surprise and out classed by a superior Japanese fleet and naval tactics.

In London in 1906, Sir George Sydenham Clarke wrote, "The battle of Tsu-shima is by far the greatest and the most important naval event since Trafalgar". The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a naval engagement fought by the Royal Navy ( Great Britain ) against the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies, where French and Spanish Navies were totally annihilated, ending Napoleon’s dreams of world conquest.

What was this just a naval battle on the high seas or did it represent something far more important and was it a precursor of things to come? The sea battle in reality was a desperate battle between a European power (Russia) and a rising Asian one (Japan). The 20th century had belonged to Europe. Driven by science and technology and centralized decision making European powers had carved the world out between them and ruthlessly exploited colonies thus established, if it was Spain in South America, it was the British in Asia and French in Indo-China.Asia had been at the receiving end of insatiable greed. Ruthlessly exploited, both India and China had suffered innumerable indignities both by the fact that their respective economies were destroyed but also that European behaviour in colonies was brazen and unprincipled. Europe justified its presence in Asia on the ground that ‘natives’ needed to be ‘civilized’ and further extended this argument by propaganda wherein they belittled Asian civilization and it’s culture – psychological blows that still echo in this part of the world.

Japan was an exception and decided that Europe had many things of importance to offer. In 1868 the Tokugawa shogun ("great general"), who ruled Japan in the feudal period, lost his power and the emperor was restored to the supreme position. The emperor took the name Meiji ("enlightened rule") as his reign name; this event was known as the Meiji Restoration.

When the Meiji emperor was restored as head of Japan in 1868, the nation was a militarily weak country, was primarily agricultural, and had little technological development. It was controlled by hundreds of semi-independent feudal lords. The Western powers — Europe and the United States — had forced Japan to sign unfair treaties that limited its control over its own foreign trade and required that crimes concerning foreigners in Japan be tried not in Japanese but in Western courts. When the Meiji period ended, with the death of the emperor in 1912, Japan had established a highly centralized, bureaucratic government with a constitution and an elected parliament. The transport and communication system was superb and established by a highly educated population free of feudal class restrictions; an established and rapidly growing industrial sector based on the latest technology and most importantly a powerful army and navy.

Japan had regained complete control of its foreign trade and legal system, and, by fighting and winning two wars (one of them against a major European power, Russia), it had established full independence and equality in international affairs. In a little more than a generation, Japan had exceeded its goals, and in the process had changed its whole society. Japan's success in modernization has created great interest in why and how it was able to adopt Western political, social, and economic institutions in so short a time.

Asian nations were absolutely gung-ho at this seeming rise of an Asian power in a world where colonialism and the racist ideology that accompanied it, were too entrenched in Western countries. Mohandas Gandhi, then a young lawyer in South Africa predicted “so far and wide have the roots of Japanese victory spread that we cannot now visualize all the fruit it will put forth.” In rural Bengal, clearly understandable fervour seized the pacifist poet (and future Nobel laureate) Rabindranath Tagore, who on receiving the news from Tsushima led his students in an impromptu victory march around a little school compound. Asians were ecstatic that a major European nation was decisively beaten at their own game.

In 1905 the rise of Asia would seem to have been an impossible dream. Today it is a reality with a struggling Europe and resurgent China and India. Colonies have gone and much of the world has the Battle of Tsushima to thank for giving Asia the faintest of hopes that it would be free one day.

Further to this Japan played an important role in the military venture of Indian nationalist Subhash Bose, but then that is a story for another time.