A victory never anticipated

Japan's spectacular victory over Russia in the war of 1904–05 stunned the world, in part because it was unexpected. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his friend, English diplomat Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, in June 1904, explaining that he had ‘never anticipated in the least a rise as this of Japan’. The implications were global. In a letter to the British politician Lord Roseberry, Goldwin Smith, now settled in Canada, asked:

In London, Valentine Chirol, the foreign editor of The Times, observed that Japan's triumph had brought the problems of the relations between all the races of the East and the West ‘to our very doors’. The American missionary and Japan expert, S. L. Gulick, agreed, believing that it opened up a new era in the history of the world, promising to halt ‘the territorial expansion of the white races and to check their racial pride’. At Oxford, Alfred Zimmern, a young lecturer in ancient history, was greatly impressed by the Japanese victory. He told his class he was setting Greek history aside for the morning, explaining: