Welche Rolle spielte Ostasien im Ersten Weltkrieg? Wie sahen und bewerteten ostasiatische Beobachter den 'totalen Krieg' in Europa, welche Lehren zogen sie daraus für ihre Gesellschaften? Wie verschoben sich wirtschaftliche Netzwerke durch den Krieg? Welchen Einfluss hatte er auf Ordnungsvorstellungen und Weltbilder in Ostasien? Das Ziel der neueren Geschichtsschreibung, die Globalität des Ersten Weltkriegs stärker zu erfassen, ohne seine lokalen Rückwirkungen aus dem Blick zu verlieren, verfolgt dieser Band gut 100 Jahre nach dem Beginn des Krieges am Beispiel Chinas, Japans und Koreas.

Jan Schmidt ist Associate Professor für Neuere und Neueste Geschichte Japans am Department for Japanese Studies an der Katholischen Universität Leuven. Katja Schmidtpott ist Professorin für Geschichte Japans an der Universität Bochum.

Acknowledgements For this edited volume we would, of course, first and foremost like to give thanks to our authors. This publication is the result of the international symposium The East Asian Dimension of the First World War: The German-Japanese War and China, 1914-1919, which was held at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2014 and was attended by more than 100 historians from Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Japan, the Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan. Most of the authors featured in this book gave presentations at the symposium. We furthermore invested considerable time in trying to secure the participation of a small number of additional authors as this would enable us to consider the topic from further, important angles. To all of the authors we owe thanks for their trust and their endless patience, with which they dealt with our frequent queries and requests during the extended period it took for this book to take shape. Some contributions needed to be translated from Japanese into English, which was executed by Angelika Koch (Ghent) and David de Cooman (Leuven) with great linguistic and subject-specific competence. Maren Barton was in charge of the copy editing and completed a number of translations from German into English, with Iain Sinclair also contributing translations. At the KU Leuven the doctoral candidates Maj Hartmann, Eline Mennens and Lieven Sommen as well as the student assistant Bert Colin contributed considerably to the completion of this volume. Our colleagues from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Rüdiger Breuer (Sinology) and Thorsten Traulsen (Korean Studies) were always available with help and advice when we needed to solve problems with the transcription from Chinese and Korean. Should there be any errors in this regard, however, they are ours alone. Furthermore we would like to express our gratitude to everyone who enabled our project financially: the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Japan Foundation - Japanisches Kulturinstitut, the Stiftung zur Förderung japanisch-deutscher Wissenschafts- und Kulturbeziehungen (JaDe-Stiftung), the Deutsche Gesellschaft der JSPS-Stipendiaten e.V. (JSPS-Club) and the National Museum of Japanese History. Without their support the symposium, from which this volume of articles eventually grew, would not have been able to happen. The Freie Universität Berlin and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where we were working at the time, supported the symposium in many ways, both financially and in terms of staffing resources. Our special thanks go to Regine Mathias, the then professor of Japanese History at the Department of East Asian Studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, who became the patron-in-chief of the symposium, as well as our then research assistants Juliane Böhm (Berlin) and Teelka Groeneveld (Bochum), who took on most of the organisational duties. The team of interpreters around Yoko Shinohe produced outstanding work covering German, English, Japanese and Chinese. We also would like to thank Susanne Formanek, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Oliver Janz, Kataoka Ichiro, Hans-Joachim Schmidt, Tajima Nobuo and Matthias Zachmann for their contributions to the conference. Last but not least we would like to thank Jürgen Hotz, who oversaw the publication of this volume at Campus patiently and enthusiastically and always gave us valuable advice, and the editors of the series Eigene und Fremde Welten for including this volume. The East Asian Dimension of the First World War: An Introduction Jan Schmidt and Katja Schmidtpott In December 1914, about three months after the start of the First World War, the new Tokyo central railway station opened. Just a few weeks later it was the scene of a triumphal welcoming celebration for the Japanese troops that were returning from the German-leased area around the Chinese port of Qingdao on the Shandong peninsula, which the Japanese army had managed to take following several weeks of besieging the city and heavy fighting. Then, in the summer of 1918, the square in front of the station served as the site for exhibiting a British tank, as can be seen on the cover of this volume. This tank was a wooden model of a slightly smaller scale than the real early tanks that had been used in increasing numbers on the European Western front. Just like gas masks, submarines and fighter planes, the tanks had long since become a familiar sight even in East Asia due to their manifold re­presentations in the media. The wooden tank, as the Japanese daily newspaper Tokyo Asahi Shinbun reported, formed part of a so-called tank week, a global publicity campaign by the allied power Great Britain for the purchase of British government bonds. The tank therefore was exhibited in a variety of public places throughout Tokyo and Yokohama from July 1, 1918 onwards. Over the course of just six days almost 3,000,000 Yens worth of bonds were sold, which at the time was a huge sum. During the spring of the same year a similar tank week had taken place in Shanghai. The previous year, on February 25, 1917, the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun had run a report on the sinking of the French troop carrier Athos, which had been torpedoed by a German submarine in the Mediterranean a few days earlier. The ship had been on its way back from East Asia to Europe after carrying 40 Japanese war volunteers in the opposite direction, from France to Japan, in December 1916. These war volunteersoriginally work migrants from New Caledoniahad been denied permission to participate in the war by the Japanese Foreign Ministry (Gaimusho). On its return journey to Europe the Athos was carrying not just African colonial troops but also hundreds of Chinese workers from Shandong, who formed part of the 145,000 Chinese who had been recruited by France and Great Britain to support the Ententes military machine behind the Western front. The sinking of the Athos cost the lives of 543 Chinese workers, and the news of this event was one of the factors that made China renounce its neutrality and declare war on the Central Powers. Both the wooden tank outside Tokyo train station and the fate of the ship Athos represent aspects of the East Asian dimension of the First World War. Nonetheless, although these individual events seem tiny compared to the large-scale battles raging in Europe, they are not marginalia of history. Ra­ther, they exemplify the manyfold entanglements of East Asia and East Asians with the First World Warwhat we call its East Asian Dimension. Different aspects of this East Asian dimension, which scholarship has often overlooked so far, will be examined in this volume. In so doing, it is a central aim of this volume to include new studies that have been published by historians from the East Asian region over the last decade, largely as part of the global centennial of the First Word War. Most of their work has so far barely been considered in English-language research as it had generally been published in East Asian languages only. To help the reader situate the topics of the 16 contributions of this volume, this introduction will first give a short overview of the East Asian Dimension of the First World War on the basis of the body of already existing scholarship and then discuss problems of historiography, especially in the East Asian countries. Finally all contributions will be briefly introduced, followed by a critical evaluation of the desiderata of current scholarship, including this volume, that might remain with regard to the East Asian dimension of the First World War. The First World War and East Asia East Asia emerged already early on as part of the global dimension of the First World War. On the side of the Entente Powers, the Japanese Empire declared war on the German Empire on August 23, 1914 and subsequently also on Austria-Hungary. This happened only a few weeks after fighting had broken out across large parts of Europe following a whole cascade of declarations of war. Subsequently,...