Sun Yat-sen's 1911 Revolution had Its Seeds in Tokyo

Extract

In four years, China will be celebrating the centenary of the 1911 Revolution which toppled not only the Qing dynasty but imperial rule itself, a system that can be traced back 2,132 years when “China” was a much smaller place. In order to understand the central role played by a handful of extremely energetic (and in some cases equally eccentric) Japanese, it is helpful to consciously try to forget much of what has occurred in the intervening century, especially the two decades leading up to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 and commencement of the Sino-Japanese War. A motley group of activist Japanese, men whose activities were not necessarily coordinated, but who felt impelled to risk their lives for the Chinese cause, early on identified Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) as the leader to bank on and offered him their wholehearted support. Native Anglophones have for the past half-century been in the unusually lucky position of having the best book on this subject in their native tongue. This is Marius Jansen's The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen, a book that can be read today with the same freshness as when it was first published.