The Emergence of an International Humanitarian Organization in Japan: The Tokugawa Origins of the Japanese Red Cross

Extract

Founded in 1887, the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS) was already the largest and among the most active and emulated national Red Cross societies in the world by the early twentieth century. The level of popular participation in the organization was unusually high by global standards. The French branch of the movement was the first national Red Cross Society in the world, and historians consider it to have been very successful in attracting volunteers for the patriotic defense of the nation.¹ However, whereas the French society had 55,000 members in 1907, membership in the JRCS had already reached 900,000 four years earlier, in 1903. The success of the Japanese Red Cross led King Edward VII to personally send his head surgeon to Japan in the early twentieth century to study the organization so that the British society could be modeled after it.² The American Red Cross, headed by Henry Davison, a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company, was regarded as a perfect example of the successes of American mass philanthropy, driven as a capitalist venture in social betterment by wealthy U.S. industrialists, and supported by the mass donations of millions of Americans of modest means. Yet in 1916, the American Red Cross was dismayed to learn that membership in Japan's Red Cross was 1.8 million, while its own organization had only 31,000 members. While the European societies saw severe declines in membership outside wartime, the JRCS maintained its membership even in times of peace.³