At the beginning of June 1874, Saigō Tsugumichi wrote a letter from southern Taiwan to his superiors in Tokyo asking for permission to proceed with plans for colonizing the indigenous territory of the island. Saigō commanded an army the Japanese government sent to southern Taiwan to punish indigenous villagers there who had massacred dozens of people from the Ryūkyū Kingdom (present-day Okinawa), and in his letter he indicated that since he had finished pacifying the south he now looked forward to establishing a permanent presence in Taiwan. China’s reaction to the Japanese expedition concerned him, however, and his orders made it clear that the plans for colonization would be cancelled if the threat of war was too great. To address that concern he wrote another letter to an American advisor who he hoped would help overcome Chinese resistance to the expedition. ¹ We can see in Saigō’s letters hints of several issues that dominated the history of Japan in the 1870s: questions of domestic political control, diplomatic relations with China, the prospect of war, Western influence on Japanese foreign policy, colonialism, and abstract notions of territorial authority. Given the unsettled nature of Japan in the 1870s, it is remarkable that the massacre of the Ryūkyūans could spawn a plan for Japan to colonize half of Taiwan and nearly provoke a war with China, but while the plan was not an inevitable result of the massacre neither was it an accident. By chance, the massacre happened only a few years after the Meiji Restoration , a major revolution in 1868 that changed the nature of governance in Japan and decisively pushed the country toward a new diplomatic alignment with the West . Those political changes, due in part to the influence of Western imperialism, produced repeated confrontations between China and Japan during the final three decades of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Taiwan Expedition. To explain the expedition, it is therefore necessary to place it in the context of Western imperialism, revolutionary changes in Japan, and Chinese diplomatic dominance in East Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The diplomatic conflict between China and Japan over Taiwan ended with a negotiated settlement and for most Japanese the expedition to Taiwan soon faded from memory. The expedition was eventful but not particularly consequential, and for that reason its historical importance lies less in the modest results it produced than in the substantial historical circumstances it reveals. Most importantly, the conflict exposed a broad strategic competition between China and Japan over Taiwan, Ryūkyū, and Korea that continued at least until the end of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), ² and the early contours of the strategic competition can be seen in the issues that prolonged the disagreement between the two governments in 1874. In abstract terms, the conflict over Taiwan unfolded as a border dispute where China and Japan disagreed not simply about where Japan’s southern border should be located but also about what constituted the political authority of the state and how that authority should be inscribed onto territory. More concretely, the two governments disagreed about whether the idea of sovereignty , understood according to the norms of Western diplomacy, applied to China’s claim to the indigenous territory of Taiwan, whether China had an obligation to exercise civil administration there, and whether Japan could legitimately annex the territory. In their disagreement, the two governments found themselves on opposite sides of the question of whether Western norms of sovereignty applied to territorial claims in East Asia, and the disagreement extended beyond Taiwan, with the Japanese government simultaneously challenging China’s claims to suzerain authority over Ryūkyū and Korea . The dispute over Taiwan in 1874 thus constituted one part of a systematic Japanese challenge to Chinese territorial authority that extended across multiple areas in East Asia, and that systematic challenge gave rise to the long-term strategic competition between the countries. A specific problem of sovereignty lay at the heart of the dispute in 1874 but the long-term competition was rooted in broad-based changes in the diplomatic status quo in East Asia. In the decade before the Meiji Restoration, Japan took its first steps toward aligning its diplomatic stance with the norms of Western diplomacy, and after the Restoration it completed that alignment and began to adopt some of the practices of Western imperialism . The disruptive effects of these changes became fully visible at the time of the expedition.

The Restoration also had a disruptive effect on Japan domestically, and the expedition took place against a backdrop of the confusion and turmoil that it caused. Japan experienced profound political, economic, social, and cultural changes between the conclusion of the first treaties of amity and commerce with Western powers in 1858 and the promulgation of a constitution in 1889 that instituted a constitutional monarchy . The first decade of the Meiji period, from the ostensible restoration of imperial authority in 1868 to the last samurai rebellion against the new government in 1877, was particularly turbulent and the government obtained a measure of stability only in the 1880s. ³ It took decades for the new Meiji government to consolidate its power and to clarify what its new authority meant in practice, a process that involved considerable contention and negotiation. ⁴ The expedition took place in the early years of that process, and many signs of confusion and disagreement about domestic political authority can be seen in its planning and implementation.

The Meiji government also faced multiple urgent border problems during those years. In the north, Japanese and Russians had been skirmishing in Sakhalin for decades and the new government recognized an urgent need to stabilize that border, in the west the Korean government refused to accept the legitimacy of the new Japanese government because it would overturn the precedents of early modern diplomacy, and in the south the government sought to establish a clear claim to sovereignty over Ryūkyū at the risk of provoking China, which had a competing claim to suzerainty there. ⁵ When plans for the expedition first took shape, however, the government had not yet begun to address these territorial problems in a comprehensive manner, nor had it clarified the order in which it would deal with them; those changes happened concurrently with the planning of the expedition. In addition to the border problems, the new government also faced a threat posed by Western imperialism . In the 1850s, the Tokugawa bakufu , the old regime that had governed Japan for more than two and a half centuries and that had enjoyed a nominal monopoly over diplomatic relations, was drawn unwillingly into a system of unequal treaties with Western powers. The Tokugawa regime’s reluctant entry into treaty relations destabilized the government and contributed to its collapse in 1868. The new Meiji government inherited the treaty obligations of the bakufu and soon embarked on a decades-long quest to eliminate the treaties. ⁶ The attempted colonization of Taiwan took place at a time when Japan was still subordinated politically to Western imperialist powers under the unequal treaties, when it had only just begun its efforts to end that political subordination, and when perceptions of the threat from Western powers had not yet receded. ⁷ In retrospect, the first decade of the Meiji period would hardly seem a propitious time for the attempted colonization of eastern Taiwan.

The attempted colonization did happen, however, and for multiple reasons, ranging from narrow and particular to broad and general. Repeated massacres of foreigners in southern Taiwan created the perception of a shared need among Japan and Western powers to reduce violence in that area . Attempts by Western powers to establish the dominance of their diplomatic norms in East Asia provided a shared conceptual language that informed not just the revolutionary changes of the Meiji Restoration but also the specific justification for colonizing eastern Taiwan that the Japanese government appropriated from an American diplomat. Perhaps most importantly, Japanese people realized they could appropriate methods and ideas from Western imperialism and use them preemptively to exploit the indigenous territory of Taiwan. These and other conditions influenced the Japanese government’s decision to colonize eastern Taiwan in 1874. At the same time, the attempted colonization was closely related to the long-term competition for influence in East Asia between China and Japan. Indeed, both arose from a differential response in China and Japan to Western imperialism. Dynastic power collapsed earlier in Japan, with the fall of the Tokugawa house, and decades later in China, with the fall of the Qing dynasty. Western imperialism contributed to the collapse in both cases, but Japanese imperialism in only one, and that difference exemplifies an asymmetrical response to imperialism in China and Japan. The asymmetrical response was a fundamental condition of the Japanese attempt to colonize eastern Taiwan in 1874, it influenced Sino-Japanese relations well into the twentieth century, and it helped to define the nature of Japanese imperialism.