Ostensibly the Sino-Japanese War was a conflict between Japan and China for dominance over China's tributary, Korea. In reality, it was a Japanese attempt to preempt Russian expansion down the Korean Peninsula to threaten Japan. It was also the first of a two limited wars in pursuit of an overarching policy objective: Japanese policymakers believed that dominance over the Korean Peninsula by any great power would directly threaten their national security. They sought to protect Japan first by expelling China in the Sino-Japanese War and, then a decade later, by expelling Russia from both Korea and southern Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). A quarter of a century later, continuing Russian involvement in China and Japanese perceptions of the threat that this entailed culminated in a second and much longer Sino-Japanese War (1932-45). Although the policy of Russian containment is generally associated with U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, in reality, from the first Sino-Japanese War to the end of World War II, Japanese policymakers had consistently applied containment to Russia.
The first Sino-Japanese War had an enormous impact on foreign perceptions of Japan and China. Prior to the war, the popular 1885 British musical, The Mikado, expressed the prevailing European view of Japan. The musical begins with a chorus of samurai singing:
“If you want to know who we are, / We are gentlemen of Japan: / On many a vase and jar - / On many a screen and fan, / We figure in lively paint: / Our attitudes queer and quaint.”
The next verse proceeds,
“If you think we are worked by strings, / Like a Japanese marionette, / You don't understand these things: / It is simply Court etiquette.”
