Empire of Japan

• 1. Introduction

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  The Empire of Japan lasted 79 years, beginning with the Meiji Restoration on the 3rd of January 1868 and ending with the ratification of the Constitution of Japan on the 3rd of May 1947. Albrecht Furst von Urach, writing in a 1942 booklet called The Secret of Japan's Strength, called its rise the greatest miracle in world history. He noted that the Spanish Empire and the British Empire each needed centuries to reach full strength. Japan, he wrote, became one of the few great powers in only 80 years. The historian Saburo Ienaga described the new judicial system and constitution, modeled on Prussia, as an attempt to control popular thought with a blend of Confucianism and German conservatism. How does a secluded feudal realm become a great power that fast? How does a country that abolished its own samurai class also commit the atrocities of the Nanjing Massacre? And what made a constitution call the Emperor sacred and inviolable, head of an empire reigned over by a line unbroken for ages eternal? The answers run from a murdered Englishman near Kagoshima to two atomic bombs.

• 2. Forced Open

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  American commander Matthew C. Perry arrived in Japan in 1854, ending more than two centuries of the seclusion policy known as sakoku under the shoguns of the Edo period. The Convention of Kanagawa opened the country to trade and began the period called Bakumatsu. The name Empire of Japan first appeared in that 1854 agreement between the United States and the Tokugawa shogunate. Commercial treaties followed with Western countries, and their humiliating terms bred internal hostility. That anger crystallized into a radical, xenophobic movement called sonno joi, meaning Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians. In March 1863, the Emperor issued the order to expel barbarians. The shogunate had no intention of enforcing it, yet the order inspired attacks on foreigners and on the shogunate itself. The Namamugi Incident of 1862 had already turned violent. A party of samurai from Satsuma murdered an Englishman named Charles Lennox Richardson. The British demanded reparations and were refused. When the Royal Navy tried to exact payment, coastal batteries near Kagoshima fired on it, and the British bombarded the port in 1863. The Tokugawa government later agreed to pay an indemnity for Richardson's death. A multinational force bombarded Shimonoseki in 1864 after attacks on foreign shipping and property there.

• 3. Restoration By Force

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  On the 9th of November 1867, Tokugawa Yoshinobu resigned his post and authority to the emperor, agreeing to be the instrument for carrying out imperial orders. His resignation created a void at the top, but his apparatus of state continued to exist, and the Tokugawa family kept many executive powers. Hard-liners from Satsuma and Choshu found this intolerable. On the 3rd of January 1868, Satsuma-Choshu forces seized the imperial palace in Kyoto. The next day they had the fifteen-year-old Emperor Meiji declare his own restoration to full power. Saigo Takamori, leader of the Satsuma clan, threatened the imperial consultative assembly into abolishing the title of shogun and ordered the confiscation of Yoshinobu's lands. On the 17th of January 1868, Yoshinobu declared he would not be bound by the proclamation of the Restoration and called on the court to rescind it. The Boshin War was fought between January 1868 and May 1869. The Battle of Toba-Fushimi was a decisive victory, where a combined army from Choshu, Tosa, and Satsuma defeated the Tokugawa army. Edo surrendered, and Yoshinobu personally surrendered after it. Pro-Tokugawa remnants retreated to northern Honshu and then to Ezo, present-day Hokkaido, where they founded the breakaway Republic of Ezo. The siege of Hakodate ended in May 1869, and the last forces surrendered. Emperor Komei had died of smallpox in early 1867, replaced by his son, the new emperor.

• 4. Engineering A Modern State

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  The Charter Oath was made public at the enthronement of Emperor Meiji on the 7th of April 1868, setting the legal stage for Japan's modernization. The policy was captured in the slogan fukoku kyohei, Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces. Japan dispatched the Iwakura Mission in 1871 to renegotiate the unequal treaties and to study Western social and economic systems. Renegotiation failed everywhere, but close observation of American and European systems inspired reforms on the members' return. The government paid foreign advisors, the o-yatoi gaikokujin, to come and educate the populace, and recruited more than 3,000 Westerners to teach science, mathematics, technology, and languages. In 1871, the New Currency Act established the yen as a new decimal currency, at parity with the Mexican silver dollar. The writer Fukuzawa Yukichi worked under constant threat of assassination to win support for westernization. His works included Conditions in the West, Leaving Asia, and An Outline of a Theory of Civilization. He praised Western civilization and argued that association with a resisting Qing China and Joseon Korea would lead the West to view Japan as equally backwards. The government outlawed feudal customs, including the public wearing of the katana and the top knot. The Dampatsurei Edict of 1871 forced men of the samurai classes to cut their hair short and abandon the chonmage. The feudal caste system formally ended in 1869, and the samurai class itself was abolished, a step that would later bring the government into conflict with the samurai.

• 5. Tearing Down The Past

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  In 1871 the Meiji government issued the Senmin Haishirei, an edict abolishing ignoble classes, now better known as the Kaihorei, the Emancipation Edict. It gave burakumin equal legal status, yet ending their economic monopolies lowered their living standards while social discrimination continued. The ban on eating meat from livestock was lifted that same year, and many former burakumin took work in abattoirs and as butchers. In the blood tax riots, the government brutally put down samurai revolts over the revocation of the burakumin's untouchable status. Freedom of religion was introduced in 1871, lifting a 250-year ban on Christianity and granting Christian communities the right to legal existence. Eastern Orthodoxy had been brought by St. Nicholas, baptized Ivan Dmitrievich Kasatkin, sent in 1861 by the Russian Orthodox Church to Hakodate. He translated the New Testament and other books into Japanese and was canonized by the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1970. Divie Bethune McCartee was the first ordained Presbyterian minister missionary to visit Japan, in 1861 to 1862. Castles were a different casualty. The majority of Japanese castles were smashed and destroyed in the late 19th century to break from the feudal era. During Shinbutsu bunri, tens of thousands of Buddhist idols and temples were destroyed, and many statues still lie in ruins. It was only because of the 1964 Summer Olympics that cheap concrete replicas of those castles were built for tourists. A concrete keep was built for Nagoya Castle in 1959, and concrete was used in 1934 to rebuild the Togetsukyo Bridge, replacing a wooden original from 836.

• 6. Power On Paper

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  Article 3 of the constitution declared the Emperor sacred and inviolable, and Article 1 said the Empire would be reigned over by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal. Imperial Japan was founded, de jure, after the 1889 signing of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan. The document gave the Emperor supreme command of the Army and Navy, the power to declare war, make peace, and conclude treaties, and the right to convoke and dissolve the Imperial Diet. The conservative Meiji oligarchy viewed anything resembling democracy or republicanism with suspicion and favored a gradualist approach. The Freedom and People's Rights Movement had demanded the immediate establishment of an elected national assembly and a constitution. In 1890, the Imperial Diet was established in response to the Meiji Constitution, consisting of the House of Representatives and the House of Peers. Both houses opened seats for colonial people as well as Japanese, and the Diet continued until 1947. Economic development brought rapid industrialization and the transformation of feudal workers into wage labor. The foundations of the modern Japanese trade-union movement formed in 1897 with the establishment of a union for metalworkers. Yet social mobility stayed low, because samurai and their descendants were overrepresented in the new elite class.

• 7. Becoming A Great Power

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  The First Sino-Japanese War, fought in 1894 and 1895, revolved around control of Korea under the Joseon dynasty, traditionally a tributary state of China's Qing Empire. On the 4th of June 1894 Korea requested aid from the Qing in suppressing the Donghak Rebellion, and the Qing sent 2,800 troops. Japan countered with an 8,000-troop force, the Oshima Composite Brigade, captured the Korean king Gojong, and by the 25th of June installed a puppet government in Seoul. Japanese troops routed the Chinese on the Liaodong Peninsula and nearly destroyed the Chinese navy at the Battle of the Yalu River. The Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded the Liaodong Peninsula and Taiwan to Japan, though the Triple Intervention by Russia, Germany, and France forced Japan to give up Liaodong. Russia then occupied it and built the Port Arthur fortress. In 1900 Japan joined the international coalition against the Boxer Rebellion, providing the largest contingent, 20,840 troops and 18 warships. By the time the siege of the foreign legations was lifted on the 14th of August 1900, the Japanese force of 13,000 made up about 40 percent of the roughly 33,000-strong allied army. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905 was fought for control of Korea and parts of Manchuria. It opened with a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. Admiral Togo Heihachiro defeated the escaping ships at the Battle of the Yellow Sea, and the Russian Baltic fleet was annihilated at the Battle of Tsushima after a year-long voyage. The Treaty of Portsmouth, negotiated in the United States by President Theodore Roosevelt, gave Japan southern Sakhalin, which became Karafuto Prefecture, and cleared the way for Japan to annex Korea outright in 1910.

• 8. The Slide Into Militarism

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  Japan entered World War I on the side of the Allies in 1914 and declared war on Germany on the 23rd of August. Japanese and British Empire forces seized the Tsingtao fortress and German-leased territories in Shandong, along with the Marianas, Caroline, and Marshall Islands. German colonial troops surrendered on the 7th of November 1914. In 1920 the League of Nations established the South Seas Mandate under Japanese administration. Japan then presented Chinese President Yuan Shikai with the Twenty-One Demands, including a final demand for Japanese advisors who could take effective control of China's government, economy, and military. Yuan accepted the ultimatum on the 9th of May 1915, and China marked the 9th of May as a day of national humiliation. The resentment fed the May Fourth Movement of 1919. At the Paris Peace Conferences, Japan joined the Big Five victorious powers, but its proposed racial equality clause for the League of Nations Covenant was rejected, deepening the belief that respect could only come through military strength. The Siberian Intervention sent more than 70,000 Japanese troops into the Russian Maritime Provinces, and the expedition cost over 900 million yen and 5,000 dead before withdrawal in October 1922. The Washington Naval Conferences of 1921 to 1922 imposed a naval ratio that the Fleet Faction viewed as a national humiliation. The Immigration Act of 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act, banned immigration from Asia and outraged Japan. On the 1st of September 1923 a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck the Kanto Plain, killing an estimated 140,000 people, and the army and nationalists massacred Korean residents after scapegoating them. Universal male suffrage passed in March 1925, raising the electorate from 3.3 million to 12.5 million, while the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 forbade any change to the political structure. Hirohito ascended the throne on the 25th of December 1926. The Mukden Incident of 1931, engineered by the military, opened the invasion of Manchuria, and the May 15 Incident of 1932 killed Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi and effectively ended Taisho democracy. The February 26 Incident of 1936 failed because of the Emperor's intervention, leaving the Toseiha faction dominant. The Imperial Rule Assistance Association launched as a ruling party on the 12th of October 1940 under Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe. Whether to call the resulting system a dictatorship, fascist, para-fascist, totalitarian, or a police state remains debated, in part because Hirohito was a monarch and Hideki Tojo was forced to resign. Robert Paxton judged Japan better understood as a military dictatorship, while Roger Griffin called it para-fascist, a system that emulated fascism without becoming it.