How Japanese military officers freely scouted colonial India without raising British suspicion

While travelling aboard a “little coasting steamer” from Colombo to Tuticorin in 1908, Count Hans von Königsmarck met a Japanese army officer who was undertaking his own voyage of discovery across India. The officer, whom von Königsmarck referred to only as Mr Kaito, apparently intended to study the subcontinent systematically and thoroughly. In his book A German Staff Officer in India, von Königsmarck wrote that “the Japanese warrior” resented the extent of European power in Asia, particularly in India.

“Asia for the Asiatics,” von Königsmarck quoted Kaito as saying. “Why indeed should Europe grab everything?”

As the pair travelled through Sind, the German military officer noted that his companion spent much of his time writing and sketching. “What on earth can he find to engage in this dirty scrub?” von Königsmarck wondered.

The intrigue deepened as their train crossed the railway bridge in Rohri on the east bank of the Indus. Von Königsmarck observed: “The eyes of the little Japanese gentleman are growing larger every minute – he takes up his stand at the window, runs from one side of the carriage to the other and back again, raises himself on tiptoe, talks to himself and then makes notes busily.”

In colonial India, such obsessive documentation by a foreign military...

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