The role of the First World War in creating the conditions for Internationalism to ourish is the central paradox running through the period roughly corresponding to Japan’s Taisho Era. This talk will examine, through the lens of Japan, the transformation of attitudes towards war and peace during this period. The First World War resulted in a redistribution of power in the wake of imperial collapse, creating changes in the normative environment, and in the principles and ideas that underpinned international politics. Rather than merely a transformation as a result of shifts in material power, new behavioural norms also shaped the emerging international order. While not overlooking an emergent militarism, this talk will highlight Japan’s engagement with internationalism in the context of Japan’s rise as a Great Power. Crown Prince Hirohito’s visit to Europe, the Peace Exposition held in Ueno Park and Japan’s withdrawal from Shandong all pointed toward an ocial endorsement of peace and the new brand of liberal internationalism that shaped the immediate post-war order.

Mahon Murphy is presently a JSPS Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Law, Kyoto University. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics, with a thesis on Britain’s takeover of Germany’s colonies during the First World War and the internment of Germans from these theatres. This thesis was awarded the Annual Thesis Prize of the German Historical Institute, London. He is currently working on Japanese attitudes towards internationalism and peace during the period 1914-1924. His rst book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) has just been published.

Around the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan developed a tea export industry, shipping large volumes of green tea to the United States, then a predominately green-tea consuming nation.  This presentation will use a socio-economic lens to outline the making of export tea, highlighting the perspectives of farmers, workers in refining factories, as well as the craftsmen who made the chests and the artists who created the labels adorning the tea packages shipped to the United States.  It will also consider how the export trade influenced tea drinking practices in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, creating trends that continue to shape Japanese tea consumption today.

Robert Hellyer (Ph.D. Stanford), a historian of early modern and modern Japan, is associate professor at Wake Forest University since 2005. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he is a Visiting Research Scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto. His previous research on Edo period foreign relations was presented in a monograph, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009).  He has also published on the socio-economic integration of the Pacific Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is now completing an international history of Japan’s export of green tea to the United States from circa 1850 to 1950.