Emergent Nippon
Japanese torpedo boats move in for the kill at Tsushima.
Like Prussia, Japan underwent a traumatic event that would stimulate its own scientific renaissance. It was not a military defeat, such as the disaster inflicted by Napoleon upon Prussia, but something that to the insular Japanese was even more shocking: one day in the spring of 1854, four U.S. Navy warships commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay on what Perry described as a “visit.” It was nothing of the kind; in fact Perry was playing gunboat diplomacy, arriving in Japan uninvited with a stark reminder of the superiority of Western science and technology, as exemplified by the big warships with their bristling cannons—all the better to get Japan to sign favorable treaties granting a monopoly to American and European traders.
The Japanese realized at once how far behind they were scientifically. They still lived in a quasifeudal society, where the code of the samurai prevailed; the grip of religious orthodoxy was strong; and science had barely advanced beyond the metallurgy necessary to produce strong swords. The shock of Perry’s visit led to the decision by Emperor Meiji (“the Enlightened One”) to make Japan a modern nation virtually overnight. First he created the Iwakura Mission, which sent representatives all over the world to examine science and technology—the keys to Western domination, the mission concluded. The mission’s members went on to tell the emperor that unless Japan became at least the scientific equal of Western nations and built a modern military, it would soon go the way of China: an insular nation whose failure to develop science and technology led to weakness, the kind of impotence that was allowing the Western powers to carve up the nation like a turkey. Japan would suffer the same fate, the emperor was warned, without a major effort by Japan to leapfrog centuries of insularity and disinterest in science.
The emperor agreed, and initiated what still ranks as the most dramatically rapid transformation of a society in all history. He sent thousands of promising students to study abroad (75 percent of them enrolled in science courses), and enlisted hundreds of translators in a crash program to translate every Western science text that could be obtained into Japanese. Japan’s representatives abroad were ordered to collect and send back home every scrap of scientific information they encountered. The best talent from the Prussian Kriegsakademie was hired to overhaul and modernize the Japanese military structure. He also hired battalions of foreign science teachers and lured them to Japan with very high salaries to teach science in Japanese schools. In 1894 the foreign teachers, no longer needed, were sent home; incredibly, in only forty years, Japan had become scientifically literate and now had a first-class military armed with the most modern weapons. That year, the rest of the world suddenly became aware of this remarkable transformation when the Japanese pounced on China, achieving a total victory that gained them Formosa (now Taiwan) and Korea. And eleven years later, there was an -144- even greater shock: The Japanese took on a major Western power, Russia, in a war that featured the naval battle of Tsushima, when a Japanese fleet destroyed twenty-six of twenty-nine Russian warships. Significantly, the Japanese victory was achieved by superior technology, including long-range naval guns and the first use of radio in naval warfare. Those radios were aboard Japanese ships, giving their commander a huge advantage; he could deploy and maneuver his ships rapidly while his radioless Russian counterpart, relying on the traditional flag signaling system (which was slow and could be obscured by bad weather or the smoke of battle), found it impossible to react quickly to the maneuvers of the Japanese fleet.
The sounds of battle at Tsushima echoed around the world like the clanging of an alarm bell. David had slain Goliath, the world’s largest military power, an achievement due almost exclusively to Japan’s mastery of science and technology. One of the world’s largest navies had been humbled by a smaller navy equipped with superior technology, and Japanese armies, armed with the most advanced rapid-firing artillery, had defeated the “Russian steamroller, ” the great infantry mass that had torn apart Napoleon’s army and had ever since dominated the Eurasian landmass.
The shocking Japanese victory provided further proof, if any was needed, that science and technology determined success in war. Like the Japanese, the Russians many years before had bootstrapped themselves into a world power. In the eighteenth century, Czar Peter the Great realized Russia had fallen behind scientifically and technologically, and conducted a crash program to catch up. To that end, he set up the St. Petersburg Academy, a government-funded scientific research center, paid some of Europe’s top scientists to work there, and applied them to the task of training a whole generation of Russian scientists and updating Russia’s creaky military machine. Peter himself often toured Western Europe in disguise, visiting naval shipyards and military installations to observe the latest developments in weaponry. What he could not buy he obtained by theft; a secret police force was assigned the job of stealing blueprints, plans, technical specifications, and formulas for technology, to be duplicated in Russia. But after Peter’s death, Russia was racked by internal divisions and political unrest; gradually the huge military machine Peter built began to rust. By the time of the Russo Japanese War in 1905, it had fallen into serious disrepair.
The Russian disaster in the Far East took place at the high point of the greatest arms race in history, a race that was fundamentally a scientific-technical competition to develop bigger and greater weapons, a relentless (and by now institutionalized) drive to find the magical silver bullet that would instantly confer military invulnerability or superpower status. The race had been set off by the age of Napoleon, the advent of true total war. The scale of Napoleonic war was unprecedented: three hundred thousand men locked in mortal combat at Austerlitz, a million troops fighting in Russia, more than six hundred thousand at Waterloo. Entire populations had become swept up in war—as in Spain, where civilians were forced to choose between the French and British forces occupying their homeland. Those Spaniards who chose to fight against the French (and contributed the word guerrilla to the lexicon of war) found themselves in a war of no quarter where an unarmed civilian was just as likely to be shot as an armed soldier.
In 1816, as the Napoleonic era was drawing to a close, the novel Frankenstein was published. Above all, the book was intended as a clear warning about the evils of science run amok, but no one appeared to be listening. Science, now harnessed more firmly than ever to the needs of the state, was busy providing ever greater tools of war—bigger guns, more powerful gunpowder, mightier warships, deadlier infantry weapons. Any political power that could afford the cost was building mass armies and huge fleets, mostly on the perception that if they didn’t make the investment, a rival power would, with possible consequences that were unthinkable. Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, major powers found that they had to run furiously merely to stay in place.
