Michiko Suzuki’s book, Humanitarian Internationalism Under Empire: The Global Evolution of the Japanese Red Cross Movement, 1877–1945, is the first research monograph in English on the history of the Japanese Red Cross movement grounded in multiarchival research and both Japanese-language and English-language sources. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship on humanitarian ideologies and organizations outside the West that revises the literature on modern humanitarianism, narrowly based on the Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross and Christian movements to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and African slavery in the Americas. Suzuki recovers the indigenous Japanese humanitarian movement and its core concept of jindō (人道) and explores the Japanese Red Cross Society’s (JRCS) transnational activities in the age of Great Power imperialism, which included international disaster relief and the founding of the League of Red Cross Societies, currently the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. In addition to decentering the modern humanitarian movement, the book shows the strength and resilience of internationalism in prewar Japan as a grassroots movement. Above all, it reveals how in Japan, as elsewhere outside the West, the humanitarian impulse to ameliorate human suffering transcends national and civilizational boundaries.

Q. What motivated you to write this book?

Michiko Suzuki: This book represents the completion of a nearly twenty-year journey that began when I chanced upon the testimony of a Japanese Red Cross medical doctor, Shigetō Fumio (1903-1982), stationed at the Japanese Red Cross Society’s (JRCS) Hiroshima Hospital in the aftermath of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing in Nobel Prize-winning author ­Ōe Kenzaburō’s book Hiroshima Notes. I was profoundly struck by Shigetō’s ceaseless dedication to medical treatment of hibakusha, the survivors of the initial blast afflicted with radiation sickness, which continued into the postwar period. His story filled me with admiration and piqued my intellectual curiosity. In 2007, as a student at SOAS University of London, I completed my MA dissertation on Japanese narratives of the atomic bomb experience. After returning to Japan, I joined the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Japan Delegation. When the 2011 great earthquake and tsunami struck the Tohoku region in northern Japan, I hosted ICRC delegates who were experts on nuclear disasters. Even while stationed in Tokyo, I was required to take daily radiation readings and doses of stable iodine. The great tsunami triggered by the earthquake instantly wiped away everything and killed more than 15,000 people. Invisible and odorless radiation poisoning caused great fear. The lives of those who survived were upended. This made me see how vulnerable human beings are in the face of the great power of nature.

While many international organizations and foreign embassies closed their offices, the JRCS immediately mobilized to cope with the emergency, and Red Cross aid workers were thrown into action. Their bravery and devotion to duty at great personal risk prompted me to ask a fundamental question: What motivates Red Cross workers to save lives and provide relief to victims amid extreme risk? This became the central research question when I decided to write my dissertation on the history of the Japanese Red Cross movement. My writing became catharsis to heal my experiences in my service for the Red Cross.

Q. What was the surprising finding of this book?

Suzuki: What I found is that modern humanitarianism in Japan, represented in the Red Cross, has roots in indigenous humanitarianism. The Japanese term for humanitarianism, jindō (人道), translates literally as “the way of humanity.” In the Japanese notion, humanitarianism is not so much an ideology; rather, it has overtones of pacifism and nonviolence and commitment to unceasing humane and pragmatic action to save people in need. In order to cope with social dislocations following the Meiji Restoration, huge numbers of ordinary Japanese joined the Red Cross. By the 1920s, the JRCS was the world’s largest secular humanitarian organization and a pioneer in natural disaster relief.

Q. How does this book relate to current events?

Suzuki: Today the news is filled with the tragedy of civilian war victims in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and many other places. The Japanese Red Cross movement hosted the Fifteenth International Conference of the Red Cross in Tokyo in 1934. That was the largest international humanitarian congress of the interwar period; invited guests came from five continents. At the end of the conference, it unanimously adopted the Tokyo Declaration, in which Resolution Thirty-nine advocated comprehensive legal protection of civilians in wartime. This resolution was anticipating civilian victims during future armed conflicts. Although none of the Great Powers accepted the Tokyo Declaration before World War II, Resolution Thirty-nine laid the foundation for the Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949. The Tokyo Declaration was the first articulation of comprehensive measures to protect civilians in wartime, and the need to protect civilians is still urgent.

Q. Tell me about the cover of the book. What’s the story behind the picture?

Suzuki: The cover photo was taken by Domon Ken (1909-1990) in 1938. It depicts a young Red Cross nurse during the training ceremony before deployment to the battlefield. Her gaze encapsulates the resolution of JRCS nurses to endure extreme risk and their dedication to saving people’s lives. Domon distilled this ethos into his photograph. From the moment I saw it, I have been dreaming of having it on the cover of my first book. Miraculously, my dream came true.

Domon Ken was the most celebrated photographer and photojournalist in twentieth-century Japan and is well known internationally for his publications, A Pilgrimage Through Old Temples, Hiroshima, The Children in Chikuho, and Features. Domon described his photographs as “absolute snapshots of absolute unstagedness,” zettai hi-enshutsu no zettai sunappu (絶対非演出の絶対スナップ). The Ken Domon Museum of Photography is located in Sakata City in Yamagata, northern Japan.

Q. What do you hope Japanese readers will learn about prewar Japan?

Suzuki: I would like to emphasize the hopeful aspects of humanity represented by internationalists and humanitarians who have stood by people in need without discrimination as to race or nationality, whether in natural disasters or the horrors of modern warfare such as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These people are often invisible in standard narratives of the Pacific War, but I hope that the Japanese will learn from the examples of the characters in my book, whatever their nationality and whether ordinary people or leading public figures. To be more precise, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet, my book aims to illustrate the antinomy of the human condition that encompasses both angels and demons. Ultimately, I would like people to understand that Japan’s postwar pacifism was not just a reaction to the horrors of World War II but can be seen as the renewal of timeless native traditions of community self-help and the practice of jindō, the way of humanity. Humanitarianism goes beyond modernity.