In 1953 L P Hartley wrote The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, something doubly so when dealing with two quite different and alien cultures – Tsarist Russia and Meiji Japan.

Winston Churchill, always one for a good line, described Russia as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, when talking about the Nazi Soviet pact of 1939. No one really understood the decision making processes that went on in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The same can be said of Tsarist Russia, which was equally an autocracy, and where a ruling court of favourites made decisions without scrutiny.

Nineteenth century novels, such as those of Tolstoy and Chekhov might give us the illusion of understanding Tsarist Russia, but actually we don’t.

Doubly so for Meiji Japan. A ruling court, a set of governing cliques of aristocrats and military men (the two were basically synonymous) and a constitution modelled on that of Prussia with a rubber stamp parliament.

Also, as few westerners spoke or read Japanese what went on in Japan was utterly unknown in the west – in fact I’ve seen it suggested that the Japanese military had no real need of ciphers and codes as no one much outside of Japan could read Japanese.

Not actually true, the Japanese did in fact use codes to encrypt their diplomatic correspondence.

Now, I was looking for some images to illustrate a post about the Russo Japanese war at the start of the twentieth century.

I personally consider the Russo Japanese war an important event as

1) it marked Japan’s rise as a significant military power

2) it was the first time in recent history that a non western army defeated a European army

3) disillusion with Russia’s military failures in the East led to the 1905 insurrections throughout Russia

Japanese artists produced a number of woodblock prints depicting the war. They also produced a number of shunga. Shunga is a style of Japanese erotic art printed on woodblock and typically depicting two people copulating.

I’m not prudish about sexual matters, but because some people might find some of the images disturbing I’ve put together a little Google Docs file that describes the images and includes links to the wikimedia commons images. If you don’t want to look at the images, don’t click on the links.

The first image shows a Japanese officer copulating with a woman of European origin. There’s no way to tell from the image whether the sex is consensual or not. However, when I found a second image showing a Japanese soldier penetrating a Russian soldier I began to wonder if the first image had also been drawn to express Japanese dominance over Russia.

But then, I found another two equally explicit images of Japanese officers having sex with Japanese nurses, I began to question my initial reaction.

While the second image, that of a Japanese soldier buggering a Russian soldier, is clearly supposed to express dominance, I’m not sure about the first image, it could be consensual or non consensual, and given the other images I simply don’t know if it was normal in Meiji Japan to express dominance via sexual acts, it could simply be a bit of exotic erotica.

I’m also aware that I have some of my own baggage here. Some of my family were imprisoned by the Japanese when they occupied Singapore. The men and women were separated, and one of my aunts who survived the war was never right in the head afterwards. Bad, traumatising things had obviously happened to her, but what I don’t know.

And because of this, I don’t know how to process the image. Equally, I’m sure that had Russian soldiers captured Japanese nurses, they would have treated them brutally…