Peter Berton. Russo-Japanese Relations, 1905-1917

Together with renowned contemporaries Hilary Conroy, Marius Jansen, and Otis Cary, Peter Berton represents an earlier era of scholarship on Japan, when association with the archipelago promised rich rewards and Japan-related research touched upon the most important issues of life and death. Relocating from Poland to Harbin in his infancy, Berton, like Cary, grew up in the Japanese Empire. As with Conroy and Jansen, the Pacific War ignited a passion for learning that placed him in an exalted cohort of academics who nurtured American scholarship on Japan in its golden years through the early 1970s. For anyone with a passing interest in the history of Japanese diplomacy, Berton's monograph is already a minor classic. In an earlier incarnation as a 1957 doctoral dissertation for Columbia University (“The Secret Russo-Japanese Alliance of 1916”), Berton's study attained quick celebrity as one of the first in-depth analyses of prewar Japanese policymaking based on a meticulous survey of newly available records in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs archive. The most celebrated early postwar Japanese examination of Russo-Japanese relations (Yoshimura Michio, Nihon to Roshia [1968]) was written by Berton's research assistant in Japan and based upon much of the same material originally introduced by Berton a decade earlier.

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