After American Commodore Matthew Perry opened Japan in 1854, several years of unrest in Japan followed, erupting in civil conflict in 1868. It was a rebellion led by the southern clans of Satsuma and Choshu (and their smaller allies, Tosa and Hizen), who declared war on the Shogun while claiming loyalty to the emperor after 250 years of rule by Shoguns. The Satsuma and Choshu clans were on the wrong side of the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and had held onto their grievances against the Shogunate ever since. After winning the dramatic Battle of Ueno, the new government set about colonizing Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost big island, and the government of the Meiji Restoration abolished the old samurai domains, stripping clans of their authorities. They replaced hereditary, feudal lordships by reappointing the same lords to non-hereditary gubernatorial positions and gave them noble titles instead. Clements called it a second coup d'état, in which the clans that won their war pulled up the ladder behind them to abolish the system that allowed their coup.
Shortly after taking over, the new government became aggressive, setting its sites on Taiwan in February 1874 after some persuasion by an American named Charles Le Gendre who served as a military advisor. Despite protests from the US ambassador to Japan (upset at the act and an American's involvement), Japanese forces attacked Taiwan in May. It was a huge success. While Japan couldn't hold the island, it did succeed in getting China to pay them to go away, essentially paying for the cost of the invasion, and the Chinese admitted that they had little control over eastern Taiwan. Japan also succeeded in getting China to admit to Japanese claims over the Ryukyu Islands, which Japan incorporated in 1880. Next, Japan set its sights on Korea, provoking a clash in September 1875 when Japanese surveyors illegally went ashore near the mouth of the Han River, by Seoul. They were following an American playbook of "gunboat diplomacy," as they did almost exactly what Commodore Perry had done to open up Japan two decades earlier. Japan and Korea signed a treaty that exempted Japanese imports and exports from tariffs and made it possible to buy Japanese goods in Korea with Japanese currency.
In Japan itself, more reforms were underway to modernize the state. In 1876, the government banned samurai from wearing their swords in public, a traditional right, and the samurai caste was officially abolished. Samurai found themselves outside the new order. While some joined the ranks of the officers in the army and navy, others joined a rebellion led by Saigo Takamori called the Satsuma Rebellion. Saigo had been a part of the original war against the Shogun and served in the Meiji government, even leading it from 1871-73. But he resigned from government after the government rejected his plan to send him to Korea, where he would behave in an offensive manner to provoke Koreans into killing him to create a casus belli. Once he retired, he plotted rebellion, but his army of samurai was defeated by the conscript army he had created. His goals were vague, but he was largely against many forms of modernization, and he was beheaded by one of his lieutenants in a seppuku ceremony, befitting a samurai. In 1889, Saigo was pardoned for his crimes and lauded as "the last true samurai." They put up a statue of him in Ueno Park, the site of his great victory, but they didn't have a reference for what he looked like since he refused photography during his life as a western influence. They ended up sculpting him in civilian attire using references from his relatives' appearance.
Meanwhile, Korea was in a state of flux where a father, Daewongun, was ousted by his son, King Gojong, and plotted to get back into power against his son and his son's pro-Chinese wife. Technically, Korea was a Chinese vassal and the traditional establishment favored close ties with China. However, reformers sought to bring Korea closer to Japan or Russia. When King Gojong paid soldiers in rotten, fermenting rice in 1882, the soldiers rioted and attacked some Japanese businesses, giving Japanese leaders an excuse to intervene. King Gojong granted concessions to Japan after the appearance of some Japanese warships off the coast, but remained loyal to China, which stationed soldiers in Korea and imprisoned Daewongun. This would set the stage for later conflict with China over Korea.
In 1890, Japan launched its new constitution that was modeled it after those of Britain and Prussia. It extended the right to vote to 5% of the population (landowning males) and was somewhat against ideas of democracy and liberalism, banning discussion of foreign ideas. Japan was led by Yamagata Aritomo, who conflicted with the liberal majority in parliament when he demanded more military appropriations. Elections were not entirely free or fair, since military supporters tried to purge anti-militarists from government positions and armed toughs went to candidates' homes and polling places to intimidate candidates and voters. Japan still returned a liberal majority that was tight on military spending despite the irregularities.
Meanwhile, the standoff in Korea escalated. There was a peasant rebellion and King Gojong appealed for the Chinese to help. The Japanese certainly didn't like the idea of an increased Chinese presence in Korea, and they send a "matching force," permitted under the Treaty of Ganghwa, signed after the last Korean crisis. Funny enough, the rebellion was put down before any foreign forces arrived, but now they were there to stay. The Japanese Foreign Minister Mutsu Munemitsu specifically advised his underlings in July 1894 that, "You will commence active movement on some pretext, taking care to do what is least liable to criticism in the eyes of the world." He neglected to tell the Prime Minister Ito Hirobuni that the rebellion had been quelled, and sent 7,000 men instead of 2,000 to the Korean peninsula. When the Chinese matched this force, he had civilian transports bring even more reinforcements, which the Chinese thought was a bluff. It wasn't. And the Japanese quickly attacked the palace and deposed King Gojong, installing his father once again. Whereas the Korean intervention began with little support at home, its success met with an outpouring of support and excitement in Japan by August 1894. Japan was overrun with pro-war groups, and school put pro-war songs in songbooks for children. New youth groups began collecting money and donations for a war with China, and schoolchildren drilled on wooden rifles. The excitement spread across political lines. War began with China immediately and Japan steamrolled them. On taking Port Arthur, Japanese troops, outraged by seeing Japanese placed on pikes by Chinese and Chinese attacks on Red Cross tents, began the historic Port Arthur Massacre, killing over 2,000 civilians. But upon taking Port Arthur, Russia, Britain, and France all sent messages "strongly encouraging" Japan to stop and give it back, fearing Japan's very real capacity to march on Beijing and depose the Qing government that allowed Europeans to colonize it. Japan was resentful of this, but realized that they had spent two years' worth of their national budget on the war and could barely afford to continue. China and Japan signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which made Korea autonomous (but in Japanese orbit), granted a large indemnity to Japan so China paid for its own invasion, granted Taiwan and some other islands to Japan, and gave Japan "most favored nation" status in trade with China.
Japan was building to another conflict not too many years after ending the Korean conflict in 1895. In 1903, Russian forces sent to China to deal with the Boxer Rebellion still had not left Manchuria, and became a large force threatening the Korean border. Meanwhile, Russia was constructing the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which threatened to bring Moscow to Tokyo's doorstep. Japan decided to strike at the harbor in Port Arthur, locking Russian ships in the harbor while they hit them with the big guns. The Japanese took immense losses, however, on land during the war. They were using frontal assaults without nearly enough dispersion, attacking in blocks more like Napoleonic soldiers than those of the twentieth century. Men volunteered for suicide missions as "human bullets," by strapping explosives to themselves and charging into enemy lines. The war did not receive universal support at home, and in one famous poem published in September 1904, Yosano Akiko wrote to her brother at the front, "Oh, my brother, I weep for you/ Do not lay down your life/ You are out last-born/ Most dear to our parents/ But did they teach you to wield a sword/ To take a life/ To kill or be killed/ At twenty-four?" She also mentions that not even the Emperor would go into battle, an invocation of the popular and enduring theme of Japanese politics that the Emperor cannot be wrong, but only poorly advised or misled. The war accounted for 53% of the country's annual budget and also brought Japan to the brink of bankruptcy, but after the defeat of Russia's naval reinforcements at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, Russia sued for peace. Japan gained little from the war since it was known at peace negotiations that the victory was not total and Japan could not afford to continue. So, Japan got two-fifths of the northerly Sakhalin Island, which enraged the people, causing the Hibiya Riots in which 350 buildings were wrecked or burned down. Despite the riots, tax hikes still came, and there were sharp increases in prices of everything, with food costs rising 30%. More and more Japanese left rural areas and sought their fortunes in the cities or in the frontier lands of Hokkaido, Taiwan, or Korea, where Japan then deposed Gojong and took over Korean government in 1907. By 1910. Korea was completely annexed, and remained the same color on the map for 35 years.
After the war, Manchuria remained, officially, part of China, but Japan was now stationing troops along the Beijin-Mukden railway with the Kwantung Army, a group of the Imperial Japanese Army, stationed in the area. By this point, war heroes were multiplying like rabbits. The Navy and the Army ended up in a race to produce the most war hero propaganda, placing statues in train stations and anywhere else with heavy through-traffic that commemorated the dead heroes. When World War One came, Japan seized German colonies to the south in the Pacific and expanded their merchant fleet, accounting for 55% of merchant shipping in the Pacific by 1917. However, Japan had become reliant on trade with the United States, importing 90% of steel for ship-building from America, which President Woodrow Wilson suddenly shut down in 1917 due to the need to increase American production. The long-term and immediate results of this were to stimulate Japanese policymakers to find new sources of steel, and within six weeks, Japan sent an expedition into the Chinese hinterland to find local supplies of iron ore in Shandong. Japan passed the Munitions Mobilization Law, which allowed the government to commandeer vital industries in time of war, a law that would become much more important in 1938.
World War One had a relatively minor impact on Japan, although the author does stress that Japan had done more than is often recognized, sending ships to protect others in the Mediterranean for the Allies. Whereas WWI should have been the moment that changed Japanese military tactics, it didn't. Post-WWI, it was clear that portable machine guns were part of the future, but Japan still focused too much afterwards on bayonet attacks. The high command felt like Japan just kept on winning wars, so why stop now?
The politics of Japan were not uniformly militarist yet. In 1918, Japan elected Hara Kei as Prime Minister, a Christian, with the slogan "Militarism Is Dead." Hara extended the right to vote to men who could pay a poll tax, so still a minority of the population, and he also tried to remove militarist appointees. However, he was stabbed to death in a train station by an assassin who proclaimed that Hara had no military backbone. The assassination found support among militarists as punishment for his positions. And more assassinations would follow. In February 1932 young navy officers killed Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi and accomplices failed to assassinate Charlie Chaplin, who they thought was American. There would be a militarist coup attempt in 1936. Japan was becoming more militarist and more nationalist when America passed its 1924 Immigration Law that disproportionately excluded Japanese immigrants. Japanese women boycotted American haircare products and stores refused to buy US cameras and toothpaste. It was across the board, as there were thugs who even intimidated those who went to see American movies. Simultaneously, the 1920s saw the Ministry of Education create a Students Division that policed dissidents on university campuses to police un-Japanese ideas.
In the summer of 1931, soldiers of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang captured, tortured and executed five Japanese soldiers who were surveying likely areas for invasion routes into the area. This was a mistake. Whatever they were doing, their deaths incited Japanese popular opinion against Manchuria and for a war. Further, in September, Japanese conspirators dressed in Chinese uniforms and blew up a miniscule portion of the Mukden railway, not doing enough to actually damage the tracks for train usage, but causing enough superficial damage to justify calls for war. The Kwantung Army attacked and had won the war in a matter of months. Harbin fell in February 1932 and Manchuria was proclaimed as independent "Manchukuo." Puyi, the last Qing Emperor, was named ruler of Manchukuo. In 1933, the League of Nations condemned Japan as the aggressor and Japan walked out of the League, declaring itself diplomatically autonomous. The path of aggression seems unending by this point, as by late 1933 the military was receiving 45% of the national budget.
In February 1936, 1,500 men from the Imperial Japanese Army proclaimed the slogan, "Revere the Emperor, Destroy the Traitors," and led armed assaults in the capital against the residences of the Prime Minister, the Finance Minister, and other key advisors to the Emperor. 500 men seized the police headquarters of Tokyo and 160 occupied the Ministry of War building, making demands that the War Minister assent to the Showa Restoration, no force be used against them, and a number of arrests be made against those hostile to them. But they failed in six of nine of their planned assassinations. And their successes were even worse for them. All three who were killed were associated with the Navy, making this seem like a coup from the Army against the Navy, and one dead admiral happened to be married to the former babysitter of the Emperor. She called the Emperor directly, who was heard to mutter that she "was like a mother to me." The Emperor signed a declaration of martial law and the rebels were then easily defeated, as most of them never imagined that they were doing anything outside of what the Emperor had ordered.
And while Japan dealt with that coup attempt, the Kwantung Army was busy in Mongolia, where is supported a Mongol prince named Demchugdongrub in forming the state of Mengjiang just to the northwest of Beijing. By the end of 1937, Japan would break off one more piece of China, a state controlled by Shanghai stretching all the way to Beijing. And in 1938 it would prop up a puppet government in Nanjing.c In these wars in China, the Japanese committed countless atrocities, most famously at the Rape of Nanjing, and when two Japanese soldiers competed in a killing contest to see who could kill 100 Chinese people first. The only defense offered of them at the 1945 Tokyo Tribunal was that this was part of a strategy to psychologically demoralize the Chinese, in other words, terrorism. Moreover, the Japanese created "comfort stations," which were just brothels, where over 400,000 women were recruited. However, they were viewed as a failure in the high command, since many soldiers preferred not to pay 2-yen when they could take what they wanted for free on the street.
In June 1940, Army representatives made Lieutenant General Tojo Hideki the Prime Minister. The Emperor was not thrilled since he believed Tojo had been instrumental in the 1936 coup attempt, and harangued Tojo at their first meeting. The new Foreign Minister, Matsuoka Tosuke, forged an alliance with Nazi Germany, and mistakenly believed that since half the American people are of German descent, German-Americans will oppose any war. He later called it the biggest mistake of his lifetime, one which would bother him "even after I die." Of course, it ended up being Japan and Germany that declared war on the United States no more than two years later. He was aggressive towards the US, which mistakenly believed that Japanese foreign reserves were much lower than they were, stoking American overconfidence. While the US was reliant on Japanese silk, Japan was reliant on the US for half its annual copper supply, 60% of machine tools, 80% of oil, and more industrial goods. In July 1941, the US announced the oil embargo and sanctions on Japan, and Japanese leadership determined that war was inevitable. Their options were between writing off all the sacrifices they had made on the Asian mainland or continue to rely on American oil, and they made their fateful choice.
In the 1942 elections, there was no liberal party, as any left-wing ideology was made illegal in 1940. In fact, the only opposition party held just 7 of 466 seats and was even more right-wing than the government party. In World War Two, Japan quickly ended up on the backfoot, winning only the gyokusai, or "shattered jewel" victories, in which Japanese soldiers showed that they would break instead of bend to the enemy onslaught. After the war, the Tokyo Tribunals sentenced Japanese war criminals based on conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity as well as Class-A crimes against peace. One jdge, Radhabinod Pal, issued an dissent against the idea of crimes against peace, arguing that the Allies had provoked Japan into war and that there was no agreed-upon conspiracy in Japanese government to drag the country into war. But nevertheless, those responsible were executed.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Tokyo means "eastern capital," renamed from Edo.
- In 1873, Japan sent envoys as part of the Iwakura Mission to the United States and Europe for several months to learn about the west.
- In 1880, Japan dismissed its French military advisors in a belated response to the Franco-Prussian War (a French defeat in 1870), and became closer with Prussian militarists.
- In 1889, Prince Nicholas, the future Czar Nicholas II of Russia, toured Japan and got a big dragon tattoo on his arm. One of his Japanese bodyguards also attempted to assassinate him on that trip.
- US Open Door Policy insisted that China not be broken up into colonies, but maintained as a single state to which all interested parties had equal and free access. This is so interesting as I never quite understood the significance of it, but the policy was critical in maintaining China as a single political unit when it may have been divided like Africa.
- Some historians refer to the Russo-Japanese War as World War Zero since it was the testing ground for many of the new tactics that would be used in the First World War
- The Japanese silk trade was so big in the 1920s that 10% of Japan's arable land was used for mulberry orchards for silk worms, and by 1929, the USA was receiving 95% of Japan's silk.
- Japan signed a similar treaty with the USSR like Germany did, guaranteeing it free room to attack others in the prelude to WWII.
- Hawaii was the US state with the most Japanese people, making it impossible to intern such a large population, only rounding up 1,200 of 158,000 in Hawaii compared to 112,000 out of 127,000 on the mainland. There is strength in numbers.
- The Japanese gains in the early days of WWII were so fast and unexpected that Japan couldn't process all 290,00 prisoners.
- 83% of POWs taken by Japan were taken in the first six months of WWII.
- In the Dolittle Raid, one bomber landed in Vladivostok where it and its crew were impounded by the Soviets, and eight were captured by the Japanese, with three executed because their bombs landed on a school. Japan launched a retaliatory campaign in China for aiding the raiders that killed 250,000 Chinese.
- In 1992,a farmer in Henan, China, was discovered to actually be a Japanese spy after he died and was DNA tested. He had been shot in the head during the war and lost his hearing and memory. He was taken in by local villagers and lived the rest of his life not knowing who he was.
- Abe Shinzo's grandfather had been Tojo's Minister of Munitions.
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