Sarah Paine

It is a sign of weakness, not strength.

The Japanese are looking at the Russians who are procrastinating.

The Japanese are telling them, hey, we will trade recognition of your dominance of Manchuria if you'll recognize our dominance in Korea.

The Russians didn't want to do anything.

They're procrastinating and trying to go beyond this window.

And the Japanese are thinking, we got to sort it out before that happens.

So...

Another element of national power are psyops, as the U.S.

military likes to call them, psychological operations.

And the Japanese were engaged in a really wide array of them, both at the front in Russia and across the Russian Empire.

At the front, the Japanese were secreting in all kinds of postcards for the Russian recruits there, showing the great life of the POW and rather posh Japanese accommodations, as opposed to the really bad life of getting disabled or killed in the front.

Meanwhile,

Russia was the only, I think there are only three European countries, including Russia, that lacked a legislature in this period.

I think Montenegro is one of them, and maybe the Ottoman Empire might be the other one.

Japan had a legislature.

Russian population's sick of it.

The war wasn't going well, and they start hitting the streets in the Russian Revolution, and Japan wants to advertise that to the troops.

You want things to be stirred up in Russia so that Russia has to pull troops back into European Russia.

So they're doing all of that.

And then this gentleman, he was a colonel back in the day, Colonel Akashi, but he's a general by the time this picture is taken of him.