As the editors and authors keenly re-iterate throughout the volume, Japan’s role in the cataclysm of 1914 and beyond—even in academia—is omitted or overshadowed. Thus, the primary purpose of this work is to bring a variety of topics to the attention of scholars of the Great War, conveniently bound in a single work. The first part of the work offers a variety of lenses to interrogate the international position of East Asia during the war and its ultimate ramifications for Great Power politics. Xu Guoqi leads with a history of Sino-Japanese relations and how the Great War served as a turning point for both China and Japan, focusing mostly on how Japan’s diplomatic bullying opened Chinese nationalists’ eyes to the world they now lived in. Similarly, Naraoka Sochi examines the ramifications these same policies had on shaping Japanese discourse and how the (in)famous Twenty One Demands came to be as part of public pressure and a variety of interest group desires (44). Taken together, these two vantages offer the reader insight into the competing visions that are still waged against each other a century after the fact.

Antony Best proposes that 1914 resulted in the paradoxical rise of Japan but its fall from international grace as its janus-faced diplomacy offended its greatest ally: Great Britain. While it’s questionable as to whether 1914 was the turning point for Anglo-Japanese relations and a pivot towards conflict with the United States, Best’s analysis is entirely reasonable, if lackluster. Finally Kevin Doak explores the way that changing perceptions of national self influenced international diplomacy in the interwar. Religion was utilized to poke holes through ethnic national self-determination while individuals like Arikawa Jisuke looked at realpolitik questions centered around the Schleswig-Holstein problem. Pragmatically Arikawa accused “German capitalists ‘with ships’ living in Flensborg, the largest city in the region, [of being] in favour of ethnic separation from Germany as a means of avoiding responsibility for paying German reparations” (81).

The final four sections cover a variety of interesting long-term consequences of the Great War. Keishi Ono looks at the disastrous Siberian Intervention and its implications for the Imperial Japanese Army moving into the era known as “Taisho Democracy.” While those familiar with events will find little out of the ordinary, Ono offers a fairly comprehensive review of the economic, social, and political fallout that resulted from the collapse of the Siberian gamble. For those more interested in the arguments of Modernity, Oliviero Frattolillo delves into those heady waters arguing that there was a cognitive split between modernizing and westernizing (144). While interesting in its premise, I am not sure if the separation between the two terms was as clear as she implies, or that the structures of the two concepts can be dis-intwined in the methods she suggests. That being said, it was the more interesting accounts of Japanese philosophical thoughts since the Meiji Restoration. 

Finally, Frederick Dickinson tries to demonstrate history looking forward, the idea that bringing contemporary bias to historical events leads to deterministic history. Through his chapter, we witness the possibilities that Japan emerged on both in financial and material power at the end of the war that turned the world’s economic system on its head (165-6). Dickinson provides a unique rethinking of what could have been for Imperial Japan, in the same way scholars of Weimar Germany offer glimmers of hope that began to emerge at the end of the 1920s. 

In general, scholars who are unfamiliar with Taisho Japan will find Japan and the Great War to be a useful introduction to many of the social, political, and economic issues that faced Japanese statesmen of the time. Of course politics and such are only one part, as the hints of the public sphere and lower-class pressure implies. But ultimately, to understand the events of the 1930s, one must be well acquainted with the history before it.