Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Three years later, starting in 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. The ensuing conflict cost an estimated 110,000 Japanese lives and ended with a brokered peace, no indemnities, riots in the capital, and the prospect that someday Russia would seek revenge. Emperor Meiji played no role in the fighting but nonetheless again added luster to his image. Japan gained the unexpired Russian leasehold rights to the Liaotung Peninsula, a seven-hundred-mile-long railway running through southern Manchuria, and southern half of Karafuto (Sakhalin Island) in the Sea of Okhotsk, and these were praised as his epochal achievements. Hirohito entered the world right at the dawn of this new era of imperial rivalry in Asia and the Pacific, and under him the drama of Japanese politics reached its disastrous conclusion in war and defeat." [Hirohito, p. 9] "The Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), for example, whereby Teddy Roosevelt brokered an end to the Russo-Japanese War, seemed more an affirmation of the old order than a harbinger of any new way of dealing with such matters, despite the award to him, as a result, of the Nobel Peace Prize." [Parliament of Man, Location 175]