Despite the growing number of publications on the Russo-Japanese War, an abundance of questions and issues related to this topic remain unsolved, or call for a reexamination. This 30-chapter volume, the first in the two-volume project Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, provides a comprehensive reexamination of the origins of the conflict, the various dimensions of the nineteen-month conflagration, the legacy of the war, and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Such an enterprise is not only timely but unique. It has benefited from a multinational team of thirty-two scholars from twelve nations representing a broad disciplinary background. The majority of them focus on topics never researched before and without exception provide a novel and critical view of the war. This reexamination is, of course, facilitated by a century-long perspective as well as an impressive assortment of primary and secondary sources, many of them unexplored and, in a number of cases, unavailable earlier.

This second volume in the two-volume series Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5, comprises nineteen chapters and is largely based on the papers presented at a special conference convened at Nichinan, Kyushu, Japan, in 2005. Importantly, it brings together a set of original essays by Japanese, Korean and Chinese scholars, together with analyses by Russian, US and European specialists, thereby reflecting the multinational mix of contemporary influences forming the international vortex of the war. The contributions are thematically structured into six topics: The Force of Personality, Facets of Neutrality, The Power of Intelligence, Interior Lines, Gender and Race, and Global Repercussions. Above all, through the use of primary sources which could not be readily accessed by contemporaries, the contributors have sought to highlight the setting of the conflict in the development of international politics and strategic thinking in the twentieth century, but at the same time eliciting fresh perspectives on the human experiences and dilemmas which impacted on different individuals and groups during the course of the war.

Forfatteren, der er professor i japansk historie, har her udarbejdet et omfattende to-bindsværk baseret på en fornyet og omfattende kildeindsamling om den russiske-japanske krig i 1904 - 05. Der er således her, hjulpet af et århundredes perspektiv, skabt en ny og kritisk vinkel på bl.a. den bemærkelsesværdige søkrig under denne konflikt.