| tion of 1868 Japan had inaugurated sweeping political and social reforms aimed at preparing itself for a new role in the international world. Outside, imperialism was running at high tide. Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, even the Americansupstarts themselvesincreasingly saw the world as theirs to apportion between them, and all the Great Powers looked to Asia as the most promising of imperial frontiers. In a seemingly perpetual state of political disarray, China was especially attractive to Imperial Russia, whose Czarist government saw in the ports of China and Manchuria natural extensions of its Far East empire. Just as the century was about to turn, Japan's ambitions pointed toward the same regions. |
| Ten years before Togo's attack at Port Arthur, Imperial Japan had its first outing in a war against China to press a claim for hegemony over Korea and the Manchurian ports. Utterly incapable of resisting, China had capitulated promptly. But at Japan's moment of triumph, a coalition of Great Powers led by Russia intervened with diplomatic pressure and poorly disguised threats. Japan relinquished its newly won territory but not its memory. After a decade of nursing its resentments against Russia, Japan meant to renew its campaign for a colonial foothold on the Asian mainland. |
| By 1904, Port Arthur had become the most distant, and the most important outpost of Russia's imperial ambitions, a symbol of its power in the Far East. The harbor was Russia's only door to the warmer waters of the Pacific. Hundreds of miles to the north lay Vladivostok, Russia's other major port, but it was closed for much of the year by Admiral Winter. And while Vladivostok was barely accessible from either sea or land, Port Arthur was quickly developed as the terminus of Russia's grandest imperial project of all, the Trans-Siberian Railroad. As a mark of its importance, Port Arthur was defended not only by the fleet, but by thousands of garrison troops as well. |
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