Haruna Asonuma, Ayako Hotta-Lister, Ian Nish and Naraoka Sochi

Published 28 July 2016

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Professor Naraoka, Associate Professor of Japanese Political and Diplomatic Historty, University of Kyoto, has been visiting Research Fellow in the International History department, LSE. In his researches into the diaries of Horace Rumbold, a senior diplomat in the British Embassy, Tokyo, he has been associated with Dr Asonuma with whom he has written this paper. It presents insights into Japanese politics and diplomacy, 1909-13 as Japan was moving into the Taisho period. One of the important aspects of the Taisho period was the Twenty-one Demands presented to China in January 1915. Here Ian Nish offers a centenary assessment. It is an abbreviated version of a lecture given at the Japan Research Centre, SOAS, on 8 December 2015. Dr Ayako Hotta-Lister, author, has published The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910 (Japan Library, 1999) and Commerce and Culture at the Japan-British Exhibition (Global Oriental, 2013). Her field of interest has moved to Anglo-Japanese relations during the first world war. The present paper deals with British propaganda in Japan together with a topic rarely dealt with: the reactions of Japanese newspapers and politicians to propaganda from her ally.