FROM THEIR FIRST days in power, the leaders of Japan's Meiji government (1868–1912) understood the importance of capturing the minds of their Western counterparts through the use of “standard” – i.e. European – diplomatic rules and vocabulary. Indeed, says Alexis Dudden, language was nearly (although not quite) as important as actions in winning international support for Japan's colonial takeover of Korea between 1873 and 1910.

In a short work that is sometimes meandering, often polemical, and always provocative, Dudden argues not only that Japan mastered that era's “vocabulary of power” (p. 1) and of “enlightened exploitation” (p. 8) but that the colonial nations of the West cooperated wholly – and willfully – in what was, in effect, the “legal erasure of a country” (p. 12). While Japan's activities in Korea have been described quite fully by other scholars, most recently in Peter Duus's The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea (1995), Dudden is the first to analyze their “discursive aspects” (p. 2). Drawing on a rich menu of diplomatic treatises (French, English, and Japanese), journalistic accounts (including Korean newspapers), missionary archives, and government documents, she discusses both the importance of rhetoric in shaping international relationships and the need to incorporate Japan's experience into the broader theories of imperialism, most of which have either ignored Japan's case or glibly labeled it “late” or “different” (p. 24).

Dudden's dominant point is that Japan showed a brilliant, if hypocritical and inhumane, capacity for using Western legal discourse to justify each step toward its 1910 annexation of Korea. She shows how Japanese diplomats replaced the centuries-old, Chinese-dominated “kanji order” with English-based diplomacy, insisting early on that English be used as the mediating language in negotiations with the Chinese over Korea, first at Tianjin in 1885 and then in ending the Sino-Japanese War at Shimonoseki in 1895. She also describes Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi's astute understanding of Western rhetorical nuances when he labeled the Sino-Japanese War a “Korean War of Independence” and called Japan a “victorious liberator and benevolent protector” (p. 48).