Japanese Expansion

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Between 1895 and 1945, Japan built a colonial empire in East Asia and the South Pacific, exerted growing political and economic influence over areas of Asia beyond the borders of its formal colonial holdings, and eventually launched a war that extended the area of Japanese control to its greatest limits but ultimately resulted in the complete destruction of the empire.

While Japan's transition from a largely isolated country in 1853 into one of the world's major powers began with fears of being colonized, by 1905 a newly created Japanese state had successfully assumed a place alongside the Western imperialist powers. Japanese expansionism found its ultimate expression in a war to supplant Western colonial influence with a greatly enlarged Japanese colonial empire, defined as a "New Order in Asia."

Following the establishment of the Meiji government in 1868, Japan's new leaders set out to establish formally Japan's boundaries under Western international law. The 1870s and 1880s thus witnessed the integration within Japanese borders of Hokkaido and the Kurile Islands in the north, the Ogasawara Islands off the Pacific coast, and the Ryukyu Islands in the south. Also driving the government's foreign policy was a desire to revise the unequal commercial and diplomatic treaties the old Tokugawa government (1600/1603–1868) had signed under duress during the 1850s. Establishing political and economic institutions patterned on Western practice was viewed as a necessary step toward convincing signatory nations to revise relations on a basis of equality; it was also seen as indispensable to building a Japan capable of guaranteeing its own independence.

Japan's leaders also became convinced that their nation's security would be threatened if any third power gained control of the Korean peninsula. Shortly after receiving British acquiescence to renegotiate the unequal treaties, rivalry with the Chinese Qing dynasty (1644–1912) over control of Korea erupted into the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. A Japanese victory drove the Chinese out of Korea and brought Japan formal possession of Taiwan and participatory status in the unequal-treaty system that governed great-power relations with China.

The Russian presence just north of Korea in Manchuria, however, continued to concern Japanese leaders, and in 1902 Japan entered into an alliance with Great Britain directed at countering Russian influence in Northeast Asia. Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 brought control over what became known as the Guandong Leased Territory on China's Liaodong Peninsula and formal possession of southern Sakhalin. Japan's success also affirmed its status as a regional power and paved the way for the formal annexation of Korea in 1910. When Japan joined World War I as Britain's ally, it took control of Germany's colonial possessions in China and Micronesia. In 1915, the government also took an initiative known as the Twenty-One Demands to gain predominant political and economic influence over China, but this effort to exert influence beyond the formal boundaries of the new empire only provoked Chinese enmity and Western suspicions.

After World War I, international conferences in Paris and Washington set out to revise the diplomatic practices of great-power relations and arms competition, which were viewed as central causes of the war. Open multilateral negotiations, free trade, self-determination, and arms limitation were to be the building blocks of a new order that would prevent a repeat of the Great War. Some Japanese viewed these reforms as an Anglo-American stratagem to perpetuate a status quo favoring their interests, but for the better part of the 1920s Japan was able to expand its interests on the Asian continent within the rules instituted in Paris and Washington.

Although the postwar settlement required that Japan relinquish control over former German concessions in China, the agreement also recognized the legitimacy of Japan's other colonial holdings and its control over the Guandong Leased Territory. Growing economic expansion on the continent during the 1920s further raised Japan's material stake in China's future. Some Japanese believed that the increasingly active Chinese nationalist movement and the prospects of a unified China threatened Japan's continental position. Others, particularly in the armed forces, feared that an invigorated Soviet Union would carry Communism into Northeast Asia. Finally, during the 1930s, the widely accepted belief in Japan's rightful role as the dominant power in East Asia increasingly intertwined with Pan-Asianist ideals postulating a national mission to liberate Asia from the yoke of Western imperialism.

Japan's response to these exigencies focused first on protecting its economic and security interests in Manchuria. By the beginning of the 1930s, many Japanese became convinced that Japan's interests could be better served through direct action than by continued adherence to the precepts of cooperative diplomacy. On 18 September 1931, against a backdrop of economic depression and domestic political uncertainty, Japanese army officers conspired to solve the "Manchurian question" by staging a swift military seizure of Manchuria and presenting their government and the world with their military occupation as a fait accompli. Extremely popular with the Japanese public, the Manchurian Incident strengthened the position of those favoring an independent foreign policy and reform of Japan's domestic political order. Following the army's lead, Japan's government in 1932 established the puppet state of Manchukuo and, in the face of international criticism, withdrew from the League of Nations in February 1933.

Whereas Japan's expansion as a colonial power and pursuit of its interests in East Asia had occurred largely according to the prevailing practices of prewar imperialism and the postwar great-power style of cooperation elucidated in the Paris and Washington treaties, during the 1930s Japan became increasingly committed to establishing hegemony in East Asia. By the end of the decade, a confluence of domestic and international factors placed Japan increasingly at odds with those Western powers concurrently opposing German expansionism in Europe.

A skirmish between Chinese and Japanese troops north of Beijing on 7 July 1937 mushroomed into a general war that thereafter shaped Japanese policy making and eventually led to war with the Anglo-American powers. In 1938, Japanese leaders redefined the war in China as a noble crusade to construct a "New Order for East Asia," thereby placing Japan in direct conflict with the interests of the British and Americans in China. In 1940, Japan joined in the Axis Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and expanded its self-appointed mission to include incorporation of South and Southeast Asia into a Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere. Hostility with the Anglo-American powers grew as a result, and on 7 December 1941 Japan began the war in the Pacific with an air attack on Pearl Harbor and an assault on Western colonial holdings in East and Southeast Asia. Despite stunning initial successes, including the occupation of vast areas of the South Pacific, Japan's offensive soon stalled. The Allies' overwhelming counteroffensive culminated in 1945 with Japan's unconditional surrender and the complete collapse of both formal empire and regional hegemony.

Explanations of Japanese expansion tend to emphasize either the international context or Japan's domestic situation. Scholars who favor the former approach stress the reactive but rational nature of Japan's search for national security during a period of rampant colonization and great-power competition. While not necessarily disputing the importance of Western imperialism, other scholars view Japanese militarism and state economic imperatives as having driven the nation's imperialist expansion. While these two interpretative themes have analogs in broadly general theories of imperialism, Japan's experience as the only Asian country to colonize other Asians is unique. Given the fact that the wars launched by Japan on the continent and in the Pacific hastened the destruction of both Japanese and Western colonialism, Japan's imperial expansion clearly possesses specific and considerable significance for the history of the twentieth century.

Russo-Japanese War; Sino-Japanese Conflict, Second; Sino-Japanese War

Beasley, William G. (1987) Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

Duus, Peter. (1995) The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Duus, Peter, et al., eds. (1989) The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

——. (1996) The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Iriye, Akira. (1965) After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Myers, Ramon H., and Mark R. Peattie, eds. (1984) The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Young, Louise. (1998) Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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