Akashi Motojirō

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Akashi Motojirō

Baron Akashi Motojirō ( Japanese 明石 元 二郎 ; * September 1, 1864 ( traditionally : Genji 1/8/1) in Fukuoka ; † October 26, 1919 ibid) was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army and from June 6, 1918 to his death 7th Governor General of Taiwan .

Early life and career

After graduating from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1889, Akashi joined the Imperial Guard . While he remained nominally subordinate to this, he was assigned to the staff of General Kawakami Sōroku in the First Sino-Japanese War . His main task there was the gathering of information, and for this reason he traveled to the Liaodong peninsula , north Chinese Manchuria , Taiwan and Annam, among others . At the end of the war, he was promoted to major as a reward for his services .

After the war he was sent to the Philippines as a military observer , where he observed the Spanish-American War . He was then sent to Tianjin during the Boxer Rebellion , where he was promoted to lieutenant colonel.

Spy in the Russo-Japanese War

Akashi found his next use as a traveling military attaché in Europe, where he set off in late 1900. He visited Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and France, among others, before he was permanently assigned to the Japanese embassy in Saint Petersburg in Russia in 1902 . As a member of the Japanese military intelligence service Kempeitai , he was heavily involved in building a network of informants in all major European cities. He not only resorted to Japanese immigrants or Europeans who sympathized with Japan, but also used large amounts of money to obtain information.

In the period immediately before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War , when tensions were already rising noticeably, Akashi's budget was around 1 million yen , an enormous sum for the time. He reported detailed reports on the strength and movement of the Russian army and navy. Around this time he also recruited the later famous spy Sidney Reilly and sent him to Port Arthur , where he should scout out the strength of the fortifications there. After the war began, Akashi used his contacts to support various anti-Tsarist resistance groups with money and weapons.

Akashi was also known as a talented poet and painter, a skill he shared with his good friend Fukushima Yasumasa . He is also said to have got Sidney Reilly to work for the Japanese through his artistic activity.

The Russian secret service Ochrana had long suspected Akashi of coordinating a spy ring, and so he had to flee St. Petersburg at the end of 1904 to avoid being arrested. After a stopover in Helsinki , he traveled to many other cities inside and outside Russia, including Stockholm , Warsaw , Geneva , Lisbon , Paris , Rome , Copenhagen , Zurich and even to Irkutsk . He met the leaders of various secessionist and anarchist groups and supported, among other things, the independence movements in Russian Finland and Poland as well as various Islamist groups in the Crimea and in the General Government of Turkestan . During his travels, Akashi also met Lenin in his Swiss exile. In Japan, he is also said to have been involved in coordinating the assassination attempt on Russian interior minister Vyacheslav Konstantinovich von Plehwe , whom many in Japan blamed for the war, the demonstrations on St. Petersburg's Bloody Sunday and the mutiny on Knjas Potjomkin Tavrichesky . This is confirmed by General Yamagata Aritomo's report to the Tennō Meiji that Akashi , who has meanwhile been promoted to colonel , is worth “more than ten divisions in Manchuria”.

Korea and the period between 1905 and 1918

Shortly before the end of the war, in 1905, he was recalled to Japan. After divorcing his first wife and remarrying, he was promoted to major general in 1907 and sent to Korea in 1907 , where he assumed command of the 14th Infantry Division there. There he built up the military police units together with the general and later Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake and took over command of them. The historian Lee Chong-sik suspects that the internationally experienced Akashi was the driving force behind the repressive colonial policy imposed by Terauchi, since the latter was inexperienced in colonial issues.

His duties as military commander included suppressing the continued resistance of the Korean people to the annexation by Japan. While many officials saw the resistance as nothing more than armed bandits and assessed their danger accordingly, Akashi stated in a report from December 1908 “Among the rebels are Confucian scholars, former soldiers, vagabonds, desperate people, bandits, pirates and others. All of these have mixed up and [their composition] is very complicated as the confessions of prisoners show. ”In 1913, he was rewarded with promotion to lieutenant general for his services in building up the military police .

Although he often received the support of the secret society Kokuryūkai and was politically close, especially during this time , he was never an official member or his name was never included in the member lists.

From April 1914 to October 1915 he was Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff . During this time, the outbreak of World War I and Japan's Twenty-One Demands against the Republic of China , with which Japan sought to expand its influence in mainland Asia, fell. Different opinions prevailed within the Japanese military leadership as to how far Japan's influence in China should go. More moderate ones like Yamagata Aritomo advocated close ties at the administrative level, where the Chinese government should seek advice from Japan as a junior partner. Akashi took a more radical view and advocated annexation of southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia . In order to induce China to accept the demands as widely as possible and to strengthen the Japanese power base in China, he proposed a two-stage plan to Terauchi on February 3, 1916 to increase the number of Japanese troops in China and to take action against the capital Beijing . Terauchi endorsed the plans and on February 22nd, the Chief of Army General Staff Hasegawa Yoshimichi forwarded it to the leadership of Japanese troops in Korea as a "plan for operations against China".

Governor General of Taiwan

In 1918 Akashi was promoted to general and appointed governor general of Taiwan by Prime Minister Terauchi. In addition, he was appointed danshaku (baron). During his brief tenure, Akashi launched many infrastructure and industry improvement projects in Taiwan. He is particularly remembered for his efforts in electrification , the founding of the Taiwan Denryoku (Chinese: Taiwan Dianli ; English Taiwan Power Company ) and the construction of a hydroelectric power station on the Sun Moon Lake . The reservoir, which was originally a swamp, was created through the construction of a dam and the supply of water from nearby rivers into irrigation ditches made of concrete, which Akashi had built. His greatest service to Taiwan, from which the country still benefits today, was the construction of the Ka-Nan irrigation system ( 嘉南大圳 , Chinese Jianan Dazun , Japanese Kanan Taishū ; English Chianan Canal ), whose canals have a total length of have about 26,000 km. The costs exceeded the total annual budget of Taiwan's colonial administration, so that a large part of them had to be covered directly by the Japanese budget. Due to the enormous sum of 26 million yen, in today's value about two billion US dollars, a law had to be passed, which then allowed spending of this amount.

Akashi also promoted the assimilation of the population into the Japanese national body. The aim of this assimilation policy, which was implemented more strongly than before, was to prevent unrest and to strengthen Japan's influence on all regions of the island. The permanent control of Taiwan, which he was trying to achieve, was a core concern of Akashi, who saw the island as essential for the further imperial expansion of the Japanese Empire. In an address to colonial officials subordinate to him, he described the island as "the essential hinge at the southern gate of the empire." However, full assimilation did not affect all strata of the population. Only the elites should become fully fledged Japanese, while the rest of the population should be tied to Japan by improving their living conditions. For example, a school law passed by Akashi in 1919 maintained the separation of ethnic Japanese and Taiwanese, but it significantly improved educational opportunities and opportunities.

Death and burial

General Akashi's original tombstone in Taiwan

After a little over a year in office, Akashi fell ill while visiting Fukuoka and died soon after. He was the only governor-general of Taiwan to die in office. His last will was to be buried in Taiwan to serve as a "guardian spirit for the people of Taiwan". He was buried in a cemetery in Taihoku (Japanese reading of Taipei ) and is thus the only governor-general of Taiwan who is buried on the island itself. Many Taiwanese donated money, so an amount equivalent to almost three million US dollars in today's currency was available to build a memorial to Akashi and to support his family, as he had left nothing to Akashi. In 1999 he was exhumed and reburied in a Christian cemetery in the Fuyin Mountains. Even today, many conspiracy theories surround Akashi's death.

The heroic deeds (both accomplished and fictional) of "Colonel Akashi" have since been the subject of many Japanese novels, mangas , films, and documentaries in which he is often referred to as "Japanese James Bond ".

Current studies on Japanese military policy see Akashi, together with Tanaka Giichi, as a change in the way in which the military represented its wishes and demands. They broke away from the relatively balanced politics of Terauchi and Yamagata and appeared much more aggressive.

See also

literature

  • Akashi Motojirō: Rakka ryusui: Colonel Akashi's Report on His Secret Cooperation with the Russian Revolutionary Parties during the Russo-Japanese War. O. Fält and A. Kujala (eds), Studia Historica 31 (Helsinki, 1988), 202 pp
  • Leo TS Ching: Becoming Japanese. Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. University of California Press, Berkeley, California 2001, ISBN 978-0-520-22551-0 , OCLC 45230397 .
  • Richard Deacon: A History of the Japanese Secret Service. Muller, London 1982, ISBN 978-0-584-10383-0 , OCLC 9732084 .
  • Frederick R. Dickinson: War and National Reinvention. Japan and the Gerat War, 1914-1919. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1999, ISBN 978-0-674-94655-2 , OCLC 41018824 .
  • Chŏng-sik Lee: The Politics of Korean Nationalism. University of California Press, Berkeley, California 1963, OCLC 412823 .
  • Robin Bruce Lockhart: Reilly. Ace of Spies. Penguin Books, New York 1987, ISBN 978-0-14-006895-5 , OCLC 23292492 .
  • Mark R. Peattie: Japanese Attitudes Toward Colonialism. In: Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Eds.): The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1984, ISBN 978-0-691-05398-1 , OCLC 9645037 .
  • Susan C. Townsend: Yanaihara Tadao and Japanese Colonial Policy. Redeeming Empire. Curzon, Richmond 2000, ISBN 978-0-7007-1275-5 , OCLC 43879656 .

Web links

  • National Diet Library: Akashi Motojirō . In: Portraits of Modern Historical Figures . Retrieved January 13, 2011.
  • Japan Center for Asian Historical Records: Akashi Motojirō . In: Clouds over the Hill and Archives . Retrieved January 13, 2011.

Individual evidence

  1. Lockhart, Reilley, Ace of Spies
  2. Chong-sik Lee: The Politics of Korean Nationalism. 1963, p. 90.
  3. Chong-sik Lee: The Politics of Korean Nationalism. 1963, p. 82.
  4. Frederick R. Dickinson: War and National Reinvention. Japan in the Great War, 1914-1919. 1999, p. 92.
  5. Frederick R. Dickinson: War and National Reinvention. Japan in the Great War, 1914-1919. 1999, p. 106.
  6. a b Ching, Becoming Japanese
  7. ^ Mark R. Peattie: Japanese Attitudes Toward Colonialism. 1984, pp. 90-91 and 104.
  8. ^ Susan C. Townsend: Yanaihara Tadao and Japanese Colonial Policy. Redeeming Empire. 2000, pp. 115-116.
  9. Frederick R. Dickinson: War and National Reinvention. Japan and the Gerat War, 1914-1919. 1999, pp. 41 and 55.