‘For the Wounded and Belgian Refugees’: The Agency of Wives of Belgian Diplomats in the Belgian Relief Fund in Tokyo (1914–1919)

Abstract

Less than a month after the German army invaded Belgium in August 1914, Japan declared war on Germany, joining the First World War on the side of the Entente Powers. Similarly to the West, Japanese humanitarian organisations and charity initiatives actively tried to relieve the damage of the war. Although the activities of the Japanese Red Cross Society in this period have received scholarly attention, little is known about wartime charities in Japan. This article focuses on the Belgian Relief Fund (BRF) in Tokyo, which was managed by three wives of Belgian diplomats: Baroness d’Anethan, Baroness de Warzée and Countess della Faille. From autumn 1914 until the end of the war, they organised multiple activities with the support of elite Japanese women. I argue that the BRF was used by the Belgian diplomats in Belgium’s existential struggle, when the country was almost completely occupied, to gather international support for its cause, and by Japan as a means to further elevate its international position, while providing a possibility for agency for the Belgian diplomats’ wives involved. By combining sources from the Belgian Diplomatic Archive and the Belgian Royal Archive, as well as Japanese and Belgian newspapers, this article contributes to scholarship on the position of wives of diplomats as informal diplomatic actors within the field of ‘New Diplomatic History’. It furthermore adds to the debate on the use of humanitarian aid and charity campaigns in Japan during the First World War as a method to influence its international standing.