Yi Jie Teng
BA History
January 2023
The Rise and Fall of Imperial Japan
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains sensitive content pertaining to atrocities committed by the Japanese Empire, though not at great length or detail.
The legacy of Japanese imperialism in East Asia remains a contentious issue to the present day. At its greatest extent, the Empire of Japan spanned across the Asian continent, from the tropical jungles of Burma to the frigid steppe of Northeast China. Although nationalists in Japan, Korea and China hold opposing attitudes towards the interpretation of Japan’s imperialist history, it nevertheless occupies an important place in the histories and contemporary politics of each nation. Furthermore, its impact is complicated by the effect it had on fostering nationalist independent movements throughout Southeast Asia, much of which had fallen under Western colonial empires by the 20th Century. Virtually every nation in East and Southeast Asia was affected either directly or indirectly by Japanese military expansion. Why Japan sought to expand its territorial borders, and the ways in which it subsumed the European model of imperialism as a core aspect of its state ideology can be traced back to the inception of the modern Japanese state as a political entity.
The Tokugawa Shogunate
Japan’s late-19th century transition from the feudal government of the Tokugawa Shogunate to a European-inspired constitutional monarchy remains one of the most rapid and drastic transformations in the history of of nation states. Amidst the backdrop of renewed European imperialism in Asia, Japanese nationalists foresaw the urgent need to industrialize and achieve social, military and economic modernity along western lines. However, within this process laid seeds which would eventually bear fruit to the militaristic and imperialistic tendencies that saw Japan, along with much of Asia, plunged into war and devastation. In order to comprehend the origins of the totalitarian military dictatorship which seized control of the Japanese state by the 1930s, the process of Japan’s emergence from its centuries long isolation must be understood.
By 1854, Japan had been under the rule of the Tokugawa family for over two and half centuries. Centuries of civil war and a failed invasion of China through the Korean peninsula had culminated in the consolidation of the country in 1603 under the military junta known as the Tokugawa Shogunate. Although a military dictatorship in practice, the dictator, or Shogun, was de jure subordinate to the Japanese Emperor, whose name the Shogun officially ruled in. Under the leadership of the new Shogun, Japan as a whole would soon adopt the policy of 'Sakoku'. Save for limited trade at designated treaty ports, Japan would remain virtually isolated from all foreign relations for the next two centuries; subjects of the Shogunate were banned from leaving the country on pain of death, whilst foreigners who attempted to enter the country faced the same penalty.
Japan was in for a rude awakening on the 8th of July, 1853. A fleet of US Navy ships led by Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay, the archaic name for modern-day Tokyo Bay, and refused orders by the Japanese to leave for the treaty ports. The technological superiority of the American ships and the threat of violence by Commodore Perry should he be refused eventually intimidated Japanese authorities into permitting a landing party to submit the fleet’s demands to the Shogunate. The Americans put forth a simple ultimatum, yet it was one which threatened to upend a centuries-old order which had governed Japan. Within a year, Commodore Perry would return and expect the Shogun and his government to open Japan to commercial activity with the United States and establish diplomatic relations. At a glance, these demands may not haveappeared excessive, but were significant in paving the way for subsequent unequal treaties to be forced upon Japan; extraterritorial rights for foreigners and a loss of autonomy over trade policy appeared almost as preludes to further incursions into the sovereignty of Japan. European powers soon followed suit, arriving en masse to sign treaties of commerce with the Shogun’s government.
For decades leading into the 19th century, the Tokugawa family’s grip on power was becoming ever more tenuous. Social discontent amongst the peasantry and samurai classes, in addition to mounting debt crises threatened the legitimacy of the ruling establishment. Furthermore, Japan’s economy was ill-equipped to deal with the sudden influx of foreign trade. Inexpensive foreign manufactures flooded into Japan’s economy, overrunning domestic producers, whilst foreign traders exploited the price differential of gold between Japan and China for easy profit, causing a large outflow of the gold supply and wreaking havoc on the domestic currency.
Imperial Restoration
Amidst this instability, ambitious upstarts from the feudal domains of Choshu and Satsuma, motivated by nationalism and the perceived weakness of the Shogunate, plotted to overthrow the existing regime. In 1868, civil war began between the rebellious lords and the Shogunate’s loyalists. Unlike prior spats between feuding lords, the rebels had this time managed to gain the direct and overt support of the emperor in Kyoto, promising to restore him to direct authority over the entire country in exchange for his blessing. Victory came quickly for the imperial faction, with the imperial rule restored to the country after just over a year of fighting.
From this point, the rebels were faced with the daunting task of constructing the new Japanese state. A new imperial government with Emperor Mutsuhito at its head was formed, and the start of the new era, Meiji, was proclaimed, which was to herald momentous change for the country. Imperial reformers went to great lengths to adopt what they perceived to be the best institutional practices available abroad. After all, how else could Japan hope to withstand the encroachment of a technologically and materially superior enemy, if it remained poor and unindustrialised? In 1871, a team of Japanese bureaucrats and scholars embarked upon what became dubbed the Iwakura Mission, which saw them travel the world to observe the political, economic, military, and educational systems which existed in the industrialised nations of the west. Simultaneously, thousands of foreign subject matter experts were hired by the Japanese government to aid as advisors in the modernisation drive. These European and North American experts would play a vital role in reshaping the public and private sectors of the Japanese economy, as well as imparting their knowledge in crafting effective state institutions. The rallying cry around which a new era would be built was 'Fukoku Kyohei', or a rich country and a strong military; the latter, desperately needed to fend off western encroachment, could not exist without the former.
Coinciding with the modernisation drive, a more insidious aspect of European modernity had also begun to take hold. Western models of nation-building had invariably imparted upon Japanese reformers a distinct perception of what constituted modernity. In particular, the impression that foreign expansion and the establishment of colonies abroad was of vital importance to achieving the status of 'modernity’ became a major influence on Japanese strategic thinking. Although Japan’s history had shown that it was no stranger to foreign entanglements and incursions into its neighbouring countries, the total economic, political, and cultural subjugation of a colonialized periphery in order to fuel the economic and industrial development of the imperial metropole was a relatively novel concept. An 1885 article published in the newspaper Jiji Shimpo, commonly attributed to Keio University founder Fukuzawa Yukichi, argued that Japan needed to 'leave Asia’ and embrace Europe. China and Korea were languishing and suffering in the face of foreign aggression due to their refusal to relinquish their traditions and outmoded ways of governance; only through embracing the customs and behaviours of the west could Japan save itself from being relegated to a semi-peripheral status as China had been.
The Empire Expands
The nascent Imperial Japanese military had by this point already undertaken tentative expeditions to the Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan, annexing the former into its empire and gaining financial concessions from Qing China in exchange for its withdrawal from the latter. Such military adventurism abroad proved only the beginnings of a greater project by Japan to carve up a sphere of influence of its own within East Asia. Long coveting Korea as a foothold into the Asian mainland, Japan had been drawn into a power struggle with China to exert its influence over the peninsula. Tensions between the two Asian giants came to a head in 1894, when a dispute over troop deployment by Chinese troops to put down a peasant rebellion at the behest of the Korean government led to the eruption of hostilities.
By all metrics, the Chinese possessed the superior military force, and most western observers expected Japan to be crushed swiftly by the Qing Empire’s newly modernised navy and army. In defiance of all expectations, the as-of-yet untested Imperial Japanese Navy inflicted a decisive defeat upon Chinese forces in the Battle of the Yalu River, sinking multiple Chinese ships and forcing the survivors to beat a hasty retreat. Chinese defeat at sea opened the way for an incursion on land; Japanese troops began simultaneous offensives onto Chinese soil, advancing north from Korea into Manchuria, while also landing forces in the Shandong peninsula. By early 1895, Japanese forces appeared poised for an attack on the Chinese capital of Beijing, forcing the Qing court to sue for peace. The subsequent peace treaty saw significant financial and territorial concessions from China. Qing China was to give financial reparations to Japan to cover the costs of the war, provide special commercial privileges to Japan, and cede the territories of Liaodong and Taiwan. For the first time in recent history, an Asian power was imposing unequal treaties upon another, and the role of China as the regional hegemon had been usurped.
The Imperial Japanese Army had taken significant casualties in their battles with Russian troops in Manchuria, and the cost of funding war had thrown placed severe strain on Japanese finances. At this point, though severely wounded, the Russia Empire had yet to call upon its military reserves, and was well positioned to fight out a land war of attrition with the Japanese, which would surely spell doom for the exhausted Japanese Army. This reality was conveniently concealed from the Japanese public, fostering a widespread perception that Japan had been cheated out of its rightful spoils.
What I have illustrated thus far was the emergence of a trend which would characterise much of Imperial Japan’s later interactions with the western world. As a participant to the First World War on the side of the victorious Entente, Japan was afforded a seat at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, presiding over the formation of the League of Nations. Former German colonies in China were handed over the Japan, much to the fury of Chinese nationalists, who had expected their return to China in exchange for its assistance in the conflict. In spite of these apparent victories for the Japanese, several developments would further drive a wedge between Japan and the west. The Japanese delegation insisted that the new League of Nations include a racial equality clause, enshrining equality between all ethnicities of the world as one of its founding values. This proposal was vetoed by the Australian delegation, while the Americans, led by US president Woodrow Wilson, refused to intervene on Japan’s behalf. In 1921, the Anglo-Japanese alliance signed in 1902 was due to be renewed, but Britain’s newfound reliance on its erstwhile North American colony saw it hesitant to continue the alliance, fearing that such a move would damage relations with the United States. Instead, the Four-Power Treaty, alongside the Washington Naval Treaty would be signed that year, assigning limits to the construction of warships between the participating nations. The Japanese delegation would again leave negotiations with the other great powers with the perception of having been snubbed due to its racial differences with the west.
The 1920s would prove to be a tumultuous period for Japanese relations with the western powers. In 1924, the United States passed the National Origins Act in an attempt to stem immigration from non-white countries through the assignment of annual quotas on immigration from countries around the world. The treaty was particularly harsh in staunching the influx of migrants from Asia, and Japan was no exception to this. The move further antagonized relations with Japan, where it was seen it as a flagrant insult to the nation's international standing. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 saw further deterioration of relations with the west, and particularly the United States. In an attempt to insulate its struggling domestic industries from foreign competition, the US government passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff act of 1930. The ensuing trade war devastated Japanese exports, which had been heavily reliant on the sales of silk manufactures abroad prior to the Depression. The Great War had proven that modern wars were fought as much on the production line as they were on the battlefield; if Japan’s economic life was at the mercy of foreign developments, militarists argued, then it might as well be hostage to the whims of the global economy, which was in turn dominated by the machinations of the west. If Japan was to survive in what was seen to be an inimically hostile world, it was necessary to seize the means to economic self-sufficiency, first from its neighbour China, and then from the Southeast Asian colonies.
Nevertheless, Japan would continue to face hurdles against its colonial ambitions. Anxious over the growing influence of Japan in what it hoped would be its future colonial frontier, Imperial Russia convinced Germany and France to mount a diplomatic intervention in April of 1895 to prevent the handover of the Liaodong peninsula to Japan. Wary of gaining the ire of three European empires simultaneously and short on diplomatic allies, Japan was forced to concede to their will. Shortly after forcing Japan out of the vicinity of Manchuria and Northern China, Russia moved in to occupy the Liaodong Peninsula, while Germany gained territorial and commercial concessions in nearby Shandong. To Japanese leaders, the intervention had been nothing more than a cynical attempt by the European powers to pre-empt the rise of Japan, utilizing the pretext of protecting Chinese sovereignty to advance their own colonial ambitions.
Resentment towards real and perceived western condescension would only continue to fester amongst the Japanese elite for decades to come. Although Japan would continue to forge alliances with western powers, signing a military alliance with Great Britain in 1902, and joining the First World War on the side of the Entente, the sense that Japan was barred from being treated as a first-rate nation would be a constant source of irritation and humiliation for Japanese nationalists. In 1904, existing tensions between Japan and Russia over influence in Manchuria escalated into full-scale war. Japan would once more shock the world by soundly defeating the Russian Empire, destroying both the Pacific and Baltic Fleets of the Imperial Russian Navy. For some pan-Asianists and anti-colonial resistance movements, this victory was seen as a blow to the perception of European invincibility and white superiority. Sun Yat-Sen, a leading Chinese revolutionary and future founder of the Republic of China, proclaimed the result of the war as a victory not merely for Japan but of all Asians.
Japan would once more encounter resistance to its aims at the negotiating table. Keen to avoid a total humiliation for the Russians, US President Theodore Roosevelt, who played the role of mediator between Russia and Japan, supported the Russians in their refusal to pay financial indemnities. This incensed the Japanese delegation, but they were eventually compelled to accept the terms of the treaty regardless, as Japan was in a more precarious position than would appear at a glance.
Ultranationalism, Militarism and the Demise of Empire
At this point, the civilian government, which had long existed under the auspices of the military, lost much of its credibility in the eyes of the Japanese public. Seen as having failed to stand up against the west’s intimidation and associated with the corruption of large capitalist oligopolies, the government was unable to rein in the expansionary impulses of the military any longer. The subsequent years of the 1930s saw the increasing exertion of military influence on the civilian cabinet. Politicians who were seen as too weak to fight for Japan’s interests on the international stage were often assassinated, most frequently by sympathizers of the radical 'Imperial Way’ faction of the Imperial Japanese Army.
Given the autonomy to essentially execute a foreign policy independent of the government, the Imperial Japanese military saw itself embroiled in ever more frequent foreign excursions. Resentment against European and American global hegemony boiled over into a zealous hatred and a self-righteous conviction that Japan’s destiny was to fight a holy war for against the western world. Japan seized Manchuria in 1931, starting a low intensity conflict with China which broke out into a full-scale invasion of China proper in 1937, finally declaring war on the United States its western allies in 1941.
The consequences of Japanese militarism and ultranationalism were to be devastating not only for Japan itself, but for its East and Southeast Asian neighbours. Odd Arne Westad estimates that between 15 to 20 million Chinese died as a result of the Japanese invasion (Westad, 2003), while Andrew Gordon puts the Japanese death toll at approximately 2.5 million (Gordon, 2003). Numerous atrocities and war crimes were committed by Japanese forces, including but not limited to the mass rape and murder of civilians following the Battle of Nanking in 1937, torture, mistreatment, and execution of Prisoners of War, the industrial scale of sexual slavery inflicted upon women that came under Japanese rule throughout Asia, and the use of civilians as human shields against advancing Allied troops towards the war’s end. The horrors inflicted by the Japanese military were so of such magnitude and cruelty that they continued to shape the collective memories of societies for generations to come.
Imperial Legacy and Contemporary Perceptions
Why is the legacy of Japan’s decades of imperialism so significant? Most crucially, the lack of a genuine attempt at reconciliation with its neighbours and wartime foes continues to be a source of friction in the international relations of Japan. Although a post-war purge of ultranationalists and militarists deemed guilty of perpetration wars of aggression was conducted by the occupying American authorities during the immediate aftermath of the war, the victory of Chinese Communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, as well as the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, heightened fears about the spread of Communism in East Asia put a quick stop to this process. Raising Japan as a bulwark against Communism took precedence as war criminals were given blanket pardons in exchange for their cooperation with the new American-backed regime, and infamous figures who played a direct role in the execution of atrocities throughout Japan’s empire were given positions of governance. The late Japanese ex-prime minister, Abe Shinzo, was a particularly controversial figure outside of Japan for his ties to far-right Japanese groups who deny the perpetration of atrocities by the Japanese Empire, whilst his grandfather Kishi Nobusuke, dubbed the 'Monster of Manchuria’, faced little repercussion for his crimes, returning to politics in the 1950s to serve as Japan’s prime minister from 1957 to 1960.
Japanese memory of the war is not a positive one, but it nevertheless continues to be depicted from a position of victimhood; the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were undoubtedly horrific atrocities committed by the Allied Forces, but in no way exonerate nor absolve Japanese nationalists of the barbarism committed in the name of imperial expansion. Similarly, Japan’s gradual transition from the conservative nationalism of the Meiji era to the fanatical ultranationalism of the 1930s and 40s was in part driven by its perceived grievances with regard to the failure of western nations to treat it as an equal on the international stage. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that the treatment of Japan by European and North American countries was driven in large part by anti-Asian racism and notions of racial hierarchy, this was merely exploited as a convenient pretext for furthering the aims of the Japanese military and industrial elite to subjugate Asia in the interests of Japanese racial and economic supremacism. The Pacific War was and continues to be extolled by Japanese nationalists as a war of liberation for Asia against European colonialism; the grip of European colonial empires over Southeast Asia was indeed fatally crippled by the Second World War, but it had only accelerated what was an emerging trend of anti-colonial resistance movements in Southeast Asia (Loh Wei Leng, 2007). That there was a correlation between Japanese military involvement in the region and the demise of European empire must not be misconstrued for any altruistic motive on the part of the ultranationalist leaders in Japan.
On a more personal note, during a trip to Osaka in 2019, I happened to visit the Osaka International Peace Center, a museum dedicated to the remembrance and commiseration of the Second World War. As I toured the exhibits, I couldn’t help but notice that there was no mention of the role played by the militaristic ideology in driving Japan towards total war. Instead, the bulk of the signboards were devoted to covering the extent in which the war had devastated the Japanese home islands, as well as the number of Japanese civilians and troops who had perished.
A quick search of the museum’s controversial history online would reveal that it was embroiled in criticism from right-wing nationalists who saw the original exhibits' depiction of Japanese aggression as a fabrication meant to smear Japan's national reputation. Under pressure from nationalist political groups, the museum was forced to remove the offending elements in favour of a narrative which was deemed to be more palatable. Although Japan has since the war’s end seemingly embraced a diplomatic outlook based upon liberal internationalism and peaceful cooperation, persistent undercurrents of ultranationalist proclivities in Japanese politics nevertheless continue to be troubling. The potential for the fomenting of misunderstandings and conflict remains, and the multigenerational trauma arising from its wartime acts will remain unresolved without an earnest drive from Japanese political elites to confront this history with a genuine desire for reconciliation with its neighbours.
Editor's note: This article was written by Second Year historian Yi Jie Teng, as part of our 'Empire and Race' issue in January 2023. Click here to read the full issue!
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