Japanese Empire

12 Key excerpts on "Japanese Empire"

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  A Companion to Japanese History

  • William M. Tsutsui(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The armed occupation of this region in 1931 pushed Japanese power across that threshold, but in the place of conventional colonial arrangements, Japan-ese authorities established a nominally independent and purportedly allied state known as Manchukuo. Japan’s imperial power in Asia reached its zenith during World War II with the occupation of much of the Chinese heartland and the incorporation of Manchukuo, occupied China, and Western colonial territory in Southeast Asia into a formation known as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Strict constructionists might object to the inclusion within the Japanese Empire of areas of East Asia not under direct colonial rule. 3 Although the distinction between formal and informal patterns of control is important, too analytically energetic a separation between the two may exaggerate the differences, a perspective reflected in recent trends in research. There is good reason to believe, indeed, that the heterogeneous, malleable, and loosely organized structure of the Japanese Empire was intimately related to the nature of the imperial project. Moreover, as will be THE Japanese Empire 225 discussed subsequently, many of the analytical approaches and concerns of colonial history, which emphasize structures of power and relationships on the ground, are indispensable to an understanding of non-colonial parts of the empire. Most historians of Japan today would agree that the nation’s drive toward expan-sion stemmed from multiple sources: economic, strategic, geopolitical, and social-imperialist or otherwise domestically political. 4 Moreover, a variety of interested parties, from soldiers and bureaucrats to private individuals pursuing wealth and opportunity, pushed and pulled the project in directions they favored. It is also commonly understood that the impulses driving expansion changed in character and varied in intensity over time.

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  Japan

  History and Culture from Classical to Cool

  • Nancy K. Stalker(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  276 The reign of Emperor Hirohito ( 1926–89 ), known as the Sho – wa era, wit-nessed the dramatic rise and fall of Japanese military power. The nation achieved success in joining the ranks of the great powers as a colonizing nation just as the territorial grabs of nineteenth-century imperialism were coming to an end. In pursuing expansion, Japan entered a collision course with the other powers. Like earlier imperialists, Japan administered its colo-nies in a manner that left a mixed legacy of development and repression, uplift and brutality. Imperialism deeply shaped not just the occupied territories but the metropole itself; the colonizer was as affected by the experience as the colo-nized. The territories of the empire transformed the Japanese economy and quickly became an important part of Japan’s national pride and imagination of self. The empire animated popular culture, with depictions of life and adventure in the colonies in film, literature, and media that prompted tour-ism in Japanese-held territories. Control of new lands also enabled mass migration, with Japanese agents traveling to labor in all corners of the empire, while subject populations moved to fulfill the home country’s labor needs under both voluntary and coercive conditions. political and social developments The European and American imperial powers lauded Japan’s unexpected victory in the First Sino-Japanese War ( 1894–95 ), which catapulted Japan from semicolonial status to an imperialist nation with its first major colony, Taiwan. The war was fought in Korea. Japanese leaders had long been con-cerned over the fate of Korea; they called it “a dagger pointing at the heart of Japan,” because its proximity to Kyushu meant that if Russia or another 10 Cultures of Empire and War 1900s–1940s Cultures of Empire and War / 277 power gained control of Korea, it was then but a small step to attack Japan.

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  Does Conquest Pay?

  The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies

  • Peter Liberman(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 6 The Japanese Empire, 1910–1945 T HE J APANESE E MPIRE differs from previously analyzed episodes of con-quest in both duration and level of development. Japan built it up over a half century by conquering and then developing backward, agrarian soci-eties. When first seized—Taiwan in 1895, Korea in 1905, and Manchuria in 1931—they contained virtually no industrial development. If resources were to be mobilized from these conquered regions, they first had to be developed. But Japan managed to create an economically booming and politically submissive empire, and thus greatly increased the economic resources available for wartime mobilization. Although further expan-sion, into China and Southeast Asia, ultimately plunged Japan into an unwinnable and devastating war, the Japanese Empire supports the cu-mulativity-of-resources thesis in three ways. First, Japan demonstrated that it is possible to achieve high rates of industrial development in con-quered nations. Second, despite Japan’s haste and concern for autarky, much of this development appeared quite efficient. Third, although Japan’s conquests were initially agrarian societies, their rapid moderniza-tion did not result in effective political or economic resistance. This chapter first shows how Japanese imperialism came to focus on economic goals. Japan’s success in developing Taiwan, Korea, and Man-churia and then in mobilizing them for World War II are discussed next, followed by an analysis of the profitability and opportunity costs of Japa-nese investments. The final section documents the Japanese use of repres-sion and economic incentives to eliminate resistance and encourage col-laboration, and analyzes the effects of modernization on the profitability of the empire. JAPANESE IMPERIALISM Japanese imperialism was initially motivated by a quest for territorial bulwarks against foreign invasion.

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  The Great Empires of Asia

  • Jim Masselos, Jonathan Fenby(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Thames and Hudson Ltd

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Japan: The Meiji Restoration 1868–1945

  ELISE KURASHIGE TIPTON

  T he Japanese Empire was short-lived, in comparison with the other Asian empires in this book. It lasted only fifty years, from its first territorial acquisitions in 1895 to its unconditional surrender in 1945. Nevertheless, at its height during the Second World War the empire spread across most of North-East and South-East Asia – occupying Korea, Taiwan, Micronesia, and the former British and Dutch colonies in South-East Asia and wielding de facto control over Manchuria, central and eastern China, and French Indochina. Most tellingly, the Japanese Empire was the only non-Western empire of modern times. This significance was not lost on contemporaries in the West or in other parts of Asia, and memories of the more brutal aspects of Japanese imperialism linger even into the 21st century.

  Before 1895, Westerners had seen Japan simply as the producer of beautiful, but strange and exotic, arts and crafts, which were displayed at world’s fairs and expositions such as the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. However, Japan’s military defeat of China in 1895, and the consequent expansion of its influence over Korea, focused Western attention. The victory over China demonstrated that Japan had come a long way since the early 1860s. Now Western governments and commentators praised Japan’s military accomplishments, representing Japan as civilized and progressive. American foreign service official Harold Martin’s assessment of the war between China and Japan was typical:

  …the success of Japan in Korea means reform and progress – government, social and commercial – in that unhappy country.…The success of the Chinese means the forcing back of the Koreans to Oriental sluggishness, superstition, ignorance, and anti-foreign sentiment. It is a conflict between modern civilization, as represented by Japan, and barbarism, or a hopelessly antiquated civilization, by China.1

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  An Empire in Eclipse

  Japan in the Post-war American Alliance System: A Study in the Interraction of Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy

  • John Welfield(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Japanese approaches to foreign policy: the legacy of history, 239—1945 5 shogunate through commerce and access to advanced technology, would undoubt-edly have destabilized the nation's delicate internal balance. The Tokugawas, there-fore, retreated into watchful isolationism. II The impact of the imperial West The intrusion of Great Britain, imperial Russia, the United States, France and Ger-many into East Asia during the nineteenth century swept the Japanese Empire into the vortex of Western superpower rivalries, destroyed the Tokugawa shogunate, accelerated the pace of domestic political and economic change and forced the Japanese people to re-examine their traditional concepts of world order. The new imperial powers of Europe and North America were highly civilized, prosperous, technologically advanced and, above all else, disposed of formidable military resources. Their ability to influence events in distant parts of the globe, to impose their own state system, their own diplomatic traditions, their own forms of economic organization and their own ideologies on the non-European world was far greater than that of sixteenth-century Portugal and Spain. This second encounter with the West thus had a profound impact on Japan's political institutions, military organiz-ation, economic development, cultural and intellectual life. It was European state-craft, European military technology and the development of a European-style heavy industrial base that enabled the Meiji government, dominated by samurai from the western clans of Satsuma and Choshu, the old antagonists of the Tokugawas, to defeat the conservative feudal opposition, crush several large-scale peasant uprisings, contain urban working-class dissent and embark on an ambitious programme of domestic reconstruction.

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  Placing Empire

  • Kate McDonald(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  3 Te “externalization of empire,” the idea that nation-state and empire comprise two entirely diferent spaces and histories, is best considered a political narrative that arose afer World War II than an accurate representation of the rela-tionship between empires and nation-states. 4 Introduction 3 Te early twentieth century was a time of global transition. Between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, the emergence of the modern system of international relations, with its commitment to the territorial nation-state as the basis for human social and political organization, and the shif from mercantile to monopoly capitalism produced contradictory spatial forma-tions within which imperialist and anti-imperial nationalists struggled to claim a place in the world. Like other new empires, such as the United States and Ger-many, the Japanese Empire faced these tensions by creating a regional empire that could be used as a resource base for capitalist expansion. In this context, imperial-ism mediated between the territorializing impulses of the modern state and the de-territorializing impulses of capitalism. 5 Rather than drawing frm boundaries between empire and nation, Japan and other new empires were what we might consider “imperial nation-states.” 6 Te result was a hybrid form of empire in which the state territorialized a sphere of infuence that exceeded the boundaries of the nation but could nevertheless be made available for capitalist exploitation. On the one hand, the idea that the territory of the state was the patrimony of the nation legitimated the state’s sovereignty over colonized land. On the other, the need to maintain colonized lands as territories to be exploited in the name of national strength authorized the creation of uneven forms of citizenship and the treatment of the colonies as spaces of exception to national norms.

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  Japan 1868-1945

  From Isolation to Occupation

  • Takao Matsumura, John Benson(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is exceptionally difficult to approach Japan’s international relations and imperial expansion from the 1930s onwards with anything like an open mind. Many in Japan are reluctant even to discuss this period of their nation’s past, few of Japan’s neighbours will ever forget what was done in her name and much of the rest of the world remains bewildered by what it regards as Japanese contempt, cruelty and inhumanity. How then should the balance be struck? How is one to explain the course of Japanese foreign policy during the 1930s and early 1940s?

  It is always tempting to look deep into the past for the origins of developments which can be seen, with hindsight, to be important or controversial. It is a temptation which is sometimes best avoided, but not when seeking to understand the growth of Japanese militarism and the emergence of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It has been seen that the expansion of formal and informal empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was followed during the 1920s by a renewed emphasis upon informal methods of influence and control. The two forms of imperialism came together during the 1930s, as Japanese policy-makers attempted to reconcile the competing pressures with which they found themselves confronted. Economic realities jostled with diplomatic demands, national self-interest with a growing assertion of Asian solidarity46

  Economic, demographic and political pressures

  Economic considerations remained very powerful. Japan, like Germany, believed that it was essential to have guaranteed access to the raw materials and markets necessary for industrial success and military vitality. And it was formal political control, it seemed to many, that still promised the best way of securing such access on a permanent and unhindered basis. When Japanese policy-makers looked abroad in the 1930s, they saw Russia weakened by famine and forcible collectivisation, and China divided by the struggle between Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) and the Communists. The key to Japan’s policy in China, explained the Japan Times Weekly in 1939, was ‘the fact that she wants to gain access to the raw materials there available, to secure a ready market for her goods, and to ensure that the resources of that country are attuned to her economic and strategic needs’ in the event of war against Russia.47

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  Instrumentalizing the Past

  The Impact of History on Contemporary International Conflicts

  • Jan Rydel, Stefan Troebst, Jan Rydel, Stefan Troebst(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Oldenbourg

    (Publisher)

  3 Moreover, research about the impact of historical memory on politics is difficult to isolate and understand. However, the past still appears in the political life of many nations. History and historical memory are used as a tool to mobilise people, distinguish friend from foe, and as an instrument of legitimacy of power and a tool in domestic or foreign policy. Political elites have a tendency to instrumentalise historical memory to achieve their own goals or interests. While Japan is not an exception, in the case of this country, history became a serious troublemaker in domestic and foreign policy.

  Japanese problems with history and historical memory are connected with the period of Japan’s imperialism and colonial policy, especially from 1910 (annexation of Korea) to 1945 (Japanese unconditional surrender). The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) brought a “kill all, burn all, loot all” scorched earth policy, which resulted in the immense suffering of the Chinese people. After Pearl Harbor (December 1941), the Empire of Japan was able to conquer huge territories in South East Asia and Pacific, and, despite its name and intent, the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere actually promoted exclusively Japanese goals and interests. Forced labour, forced prostitution (the Japanese used the euphemism “comfort women”), economic exploitation, rapes, war crimes, repression and massacres were a sad reality of Japanese colonial rule, especially during the Asia-Pacific War.

  The memory of the past still knocks on the Japanese door and creates problems and tensions in domestic and foreign policy. Issues like the controversies about the Yasukuni Shrine, Japanese textbooks, apologies for expansionism and war still shape relations between Japan and some Asian countries (especially PRC and ROK) and have an impact on Japanese domestic policy. History haunts debates about remilitarisation of Japan and drives discussions on how to evaluate the heritage of the Japanese imperial policy or how to teach about it. There are many controversies, both amongst Japanese society and Japan’s political elites, about the past, including whether Japan should apologise for the Asia-Pacific War, or if it has done so already.

  Japanese society is divided, even on the fundamental issue of whether Japan was an aggressor or a victim of the Asia-Pacific War. For countries like PRC and ROK, the answer is simple – Japan conducted an imperial policy, which resulted in unjustifiable war atrocities. In Japan, this case is not so black and white. The Japanese point of view is shaped by Hiroshima, Nagasaki and US air raids on major Japanese cities. In fact, the last months of the Asia-Pacific War were a nightmare for the Japanese society. From June 1944, Japan faced air raids carried out mostly by US heavy bombers (B-29 Superfortress). From March 1945, B-29s made night attacks at low levels, using incendiary bombs. The results of the air attacks were devastating for Japanese society and economy, mostly because Japanese cities and industry were vulnerable to firebombing. But the best known – and the most controversial to this day – were the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In both bombed cities, over 120,000 people were killed, with thousands dying later due to poor medical treatment, severe wounds or radiation sickness.

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  Southeast Asian Minorities in the Wartime Japanese Empire

  • Paul H. Kratoska(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter One The Japanese Imperium and South-East Asia An Overview Gregory Clancey

  South-East Asia is a region of multiple and often complex ethnicities. The simplifying strategies of its European colonizers-their practices of ‘racial’ classification and boundary-drawing-only spawned new and often hybrid identities at every margin. One of colonialism's most visible legacies, however, in this region as in others, was the creation of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ communities within new political collectives. Millions of South-East Asians found themselves (and find themselves still) in the status of ‘minorities’, with the multiple insecurities that designation generally implies. ‘Majority’ status, on the other hand, could be demographically fragile and unreflective of political or economic influence, especially as the colonizers often assigned minorities special and often privileged functions.

  In the course of a few months in 1941–42, all of South-East Asia fell suddenly under the rule of Imperial Japan, a country where the concepts ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ had little official or common meaning. Moulding a hegemonic ‘racial’ identity to overcome deep regional, class and caste divisions, Japan's nineteenth century nation-builders had left the country ill-prepared-arguably less so than the European imperial powers to encounter and conceptualise diverse ethnic identities. The conquering army that sailed south in 1941 under the slogan ‘Asia for the Asians’ was convinced above all of its own ‘racial and cultural’ homogeneity, and of the identity of each of its soldiers as sons in a ‘family state’ under a father-god. It was far less certain, and would remain so, about the meaning of ‘Asia’.

  Accounts of the Japanese occupation of South-East Asia are usually organized around particular colonies, or even post-colonial nation-states. Partly this reflects the brevity of the Japanese presence; the inability of a new Japanese regional map to take lasting cultural hold. Just how ‘new’ the geography of Japanese Empire in South-East Asia actually was, however, remains problematic. While the borders defining European colonies melted with Japan's pan-regional advance, the entities they defined did not simply collapse. The structures of the middling and lower colonial bureaucracies – from administrative systems to indigenous personnel generally survived, as they had to for life to carry on. The bureaucracies, along with a plethora of less formal yet no less tangible structures religious, economic, and social were co-extensive in most cases with distinct ethnic communities, some pre-dating colonialism and others constituted, if not sustained by it. These local infrastructures not only remained the primary interface between the new rulers and the ruled, but also became sites where Japanese and South-East Asians had some of their most intimate, banal, frightening, daily, clarifying, and confused encounters.

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  Japan's Competing Modernities

  Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900-1930

  • Sharon Minichiello(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  The ruling state’s urge to exalt and spread the values of its own “civilization” contended with its desire to maintain the differences that justified unequal access to power. The representation of strength through images of a united colonial citizenry conflicted with the symbolic value of ethnic and cultural diversity as an emblem of imperial might. The homoge-nizing force of civilizing missions coexisted with the creation of new settler cultures, uncomfortably suspended between mother country and colonial territory. Empires were full of overlapping, jostling, discordant “imagined communities,” within which both colonizers and colonized struggled to visualize coherent identities. Colonial citizenship was therefore almost inevi-tably hedged around by a byzantine mass of qualifications, so that (as one study of the British Empire bluntly put it) “in conferring political rights the state may discriminate between various classes of subjects, and in many parts of the Empire it does in fact discriminate, particularly on racial and eco-nomic grounds” (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1937, 309). In the Japanese Empire, this problem had a particular salience for two reasons. First, the nature of the modern Japanese state, and the circum-stances of its creation, produced a vision of citizenship in which the sense of individual autonomy and rights was relatively tenuous and the emphasis on 161 Becoming Japanese duty (particularly on the duty to defend the nation) relatively strong. Second, apart from Russia, Japan was the only major power to create a large and long-lasting contiguous empire: an empire that stretched geographically outward from the “mother country,” rather than being strung in far-flung constellations across the face of the earth. Japan colonized the regions with which it had the deepest and most ancient cultural ties.

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  National Identity and Great-Power Status in Russia and Japan

  Non-Western Challengers to the Liberal International Order

  • Tadashi Anno(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Given that Japan was a “late-comer empire” which had socialized deeply into a world of imperialism, and given that it was widely believed that international status was associated with imperial status and expansive territory, it was not surprising that the Japanese elite found it difficult to manage the transition to a post-imperialist world after the First World War. Japan’s failure to manage this transition cost countless lives both inside and outside Japan, and the transition was only accomplished through Japan’s utter defeat in the war. But the defeat opened up new vistas for Japan. In the context of a reconstructed liberal international order, Japan was allowed to revive as a major economic power, oblivious of prewar fixation on territorial expansion.

  Notes

  1 Europe’s geography facilitated regular interaction of the Europeans with the Muslims, which stimulated the consciousness of Europe as a distinct religious/cultural region (Parker 1960). By contrast, geography made other “great civilizations” a distant presence in the East Asia – the influence of Buddhism being an important exception. Consequently, East Asian peoples, despite shared Chinese influence, had less opportunity to become conscious of East Asia as a distinct cultural region. Although the consciousness of the “zone of Chinese cultural influences” was not absent (Watanabe 2016, ii), the zone was not defined by clear boundaries.

  2 A popular pamphlet from the early Meiji period illustrates this point equally well: “even saints and sages must start by learning from somebody else. Nowadays, we seem to turn to Western Europe for everything, but principles are universal by nature, and they belong to all countries. Therefore, we are learning not about Western Europe, but about the good principles of the Heaven and the Earth… The West learns from the world, and Japan learns from the West.” Matsuda Toshitari, quoted in Watanabe (2016, 257).

  3 Japan sent tributary missions to China intermittently, but the missions were discontinued in 894. Tributary trade was resumed in 1403, only to lapse again in the mid-sixteenth century. During the Tokugawa era, Japan continued to trade with China, but not as a tributary state. The island kingdom of Ryukyu, which sent tributary missions to China regularly between 1372 and 1874, is an exception in this regard.

  4 The first known usages of “Nihon ” and “tennō ” both date from the late seventh century (Amino 1990, 5–21). By associating the eastern location of the country with the rising sun, Japanese rulers probably compensated for the inferiority they must have felt visà-vis China. Japanese rulers until the seventh century referred to themselves as “ōkimi ” or “great ruler,” accepting the precedence of the Chinese Emperor. Implicit in the title tennō

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  The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945

  • Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie, Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  In all three cases, the power of government grew, in no small part, because Japanese society gave it that power. Manchukuo was the first acquisition of the wartime empire, and it remained the centerpiece of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The grandiosity and vaulting ambition that imbued Japan's vi-sion of Manchukuo was typical of the wartime empire in its entirety. The plan to overcome militarily the whole of China and Southeast Asia, not to mention the harnessing of their vast resources, was a leap into the realm of fantasy. Like the visions of Manchukuo, the hubris of Japan's wartime empire was not the isolated expression of a few indi-viduals, but the collective consciousness of an age. CHAPTER 4 Managing Occupied Manchuria, 1931-1934 Y. Tak Matsusaka The occupation of Northeast China in 1931 and the subsequent estab-lishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo presented the Japanese with a host of problems in the management of imperial policy for which there were few meaningful precedents. In theory, the strategy for terri-torial rule was fairly simple. A nominally independent government headed by the former Ch'ing emperor P'u Yi was to be established over the provinces of Fengt'ien, Kirin, Heilungkiang, andjehol. 1 Formal re-lations between Japan and the new state were to be governed by the norms of international diplomacy. Japan would lay no official claim to authority over Manchurian affairs beyond rights and interests protected by bilateral treaties. The founders of Manchukuo, however, never in-tended independence to be anything more than a fictional construct de-signed to mask the reality of Japanese control. For all intents and pur-poses, the territory would be managed as a Japanese possession and would enjoy no more sovereignty than the colonies of Taiwan or Ko-rea. This scheme, however, proved to be far more complex in practice than expected.

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