Naoki FUJIMOTO
Digital Information Services Division
Digital Information Department

This is a translation of the article of the same title in the NDL monthly Bulletin No. 604/605
(July/August 2011).

Today, the class of entertainment fiction called Kaso Senki or Kaku Senki (lit. speculative war chronicle), depicting military actions which did not take place in reality, has firmly entrenched itself as a popular, if often dismissively treated, genre in Japanese publishing. Most of them deal with past historical events with several twists of fate thrown in (plausibility ranging from, say, a fully-armed, state-of-the-art military unit conveniently time-leaped to a centuries-past warzone to a war leader making a different and critical decision at a historically pivotal moment): the fun lies in speculatively experimenting with a divergence from the known course of history. However, the alternate history aspect of the genre is a relatively new phenomenon. Before the past 30 years, the majority of the speculative war chronicles were “future war novels”, which predicted the modus operandi of future conflicts and warned readers of such eventualities. Since Japan was thrown into turbulent international politics after renouncing its national isolation policy, such a class of novels, first imported from the West, were not simply entertainment but a blueprint of possible wars which merited serious reading and examination.

One such novel is The Russia’s hope (1888), an English translation of a Russian anonymous publication Крейсер “Русская Надежда” depicting the successful raiding missions of a Russian cruiser with the conflict of Britain and Russia as a background. It was first translated into Japanese and published as an article in the popular magazine Kokumin-no-Tomo (lit. The Nation’s Friend) under the title of Junyo-kan Hoyoku-go (lit. Cruiser Peng’s Wing) and later reprinted in the Suiko-sha Kiji (magazine of a naval officers’ association) as Sekai Shorai no Kai-o (lit. Future Naval Hegemon of the World) and also by the Shun-yo-do Publishing Company.
The Kokumin-no-Tomo also carried the future war novel Blake of the Rattlesnake (1895) under the title of Suirai-tei no Sento (lit. Torpedo Boat in Action), penned by F. T. Jane, the founder of Jane's Fighting Ships annual reference book. It was later reprinted in the general magazine Taiyo (lit. Sun) under the title of Ei-Ro-Futsu no Shototsu (lit. Clash of Britain, Russia and France.)
Homer Lea’s The Valour of Ignorance (1909) stands out as the most influential of the books predicting the Japanese-U.S. War. It was printed by Suiko-sha and subsequently translated by Eibun-tsushin-sha under the title of Nichibei-Hissen-ron (lit. The Inevitable War between Japan and the U.S.). Since the latter came out with a note “handle with care” undersigned by the Army Minister’s Office, it is clear that publication was in keeping with the intention of the military. Naturally, the Navy Library and General Staff Office catalogued several of such future war novels.

Likewise, the fact that the Imperial Library, the predecessor of the NDL, did have a large collection of such class of novels, despite its apparent lack of effort to purchase foreign novels aside from classics, tells us that they were regarded as important, albeit novelized, issues which needed immediate attention. Though gradually the works with “naked intention to incite hatred against supposed enemies, appealing simplistic heroism and depicting cliched war actions”¹ became all too common.

As of now, there is a trend to re-examine such dated works as the other side of cross-cultural exchange instigating the fear of otherness; it intends to find out the deeply-embedded perceived identity of “us and them.” In the U.K., the end-of-19th-century future war novels are reprinted under the title of Sources of Science Fiction: Future War Novels of the 1890s and also in Japan, there are reprints intended for researchers such as Eikoku Koka-ron Shosetsu Shusei (Yellow Peril, Collection of British Novels 1895-1913) and Amerika Kin-mirai Senso Shosetsu-shu (American Future War Fiction : China and Japan, 1880-1930) .

Those innocuous-looking, out of date novels are peepholes through which we can glimpse the zeitgeist of a distinctly turbulent and uncertain age rocked by war and strife.

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¹Akikazu Saeki, Soto Kara Mita Kindai Nihon-shi (Early Modern Japan Seen from Outside), Kodansha Gakujutsu-bunko, 1984, pp.93-94.