Japan: history 1912-41

For the earlier history of Japan, see Japan: prehistoric and ancient history to AD 400, Japan: early feudal history 400-1192, Japan: shogunate and restoration history 1192-1869, and Japan: history 1869-1912.

Japan in World War I The emperor Meiji's third son, Harunomiya Yoshihito, succeeded him in 1912, his reign name being Taisho (‘great righteousness’). On the outbreak of World War I, Japan - which had earlier made defence alliances with Britain - declared war on Germany (23 August 1914). On 2 September the Japanese army landed in Jiaozhou, an area leased to the Germans in China. Having been joined by a small Anglo-Indian force, the Japanese began the siege of the forts, which by 7 November surrendered. On 16 November the Allies occupied Qingdao, another German possession. Meanwhile the Japanese fleet was active in the Pacific, destroying the prestige there of the German navy and capturing the Caroline, Marshall, and Mariana islands - all German possessions in the western Pacific.

The Twenty-one Demands On 18 January 1915 Japan issued to China the notorious Twenty-one demands. These were divided into five groups of which the last aroused the most bitter controversy. Among other things it demanded that the Chinese should employ Japanese advisers in their affairs, that the Japanese should have the right to build hospitals and schools in the Chinese interior, that a jointly administered Japanese and Chinese arsenal should be set up, and that the control of certain Chinese railways, together with the right of construction, should be in the hands of the Japanese. Under protest this group was omitted, but a revised list, together with an ultimatum of acceptance, was presented to China in May.

Bitter resentment against Japan prevailed in China for some years over the ‘Twenty-one Demands’. They also brought Japan into difficulties with the USA, which were only ended by an agreement between the two countries signed on 2 November 1917. The Demands in part reflected Japanese impatience with China's apparent inability to modernize by itself, but were also a foretaste of future Japanese designs on Chinese sovereignty.

Post-war agreements By the Treaty of Versailles, 1919, Japan received, under mandate from the League of Nations, the former German colonies of the Caroline, Marshall, Mariana, and Palau islands, together with Jiaozhou. The difficulty with China, resulting from this latter award, was the subject of the Pacific section of the Washington Conference of 1921-22. Jiaozhou, together with other former German territory in Shandong province, was returned to China, while a treaty of naval disarmament between Japan, Britain, France, Italy, and the USA was concluded. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was merged in and replaced by a four-power treaty concluded between Japan, Britain, France, and the USA, aiming at the maintenance of the status quo in the Pacific.

Economic and social developments in the 1920s In domestic affairs, both during and after World War I, Japan underwent extremely rapid industrial development, but had not escaped war profiteering, and this, coupled with the increased cost of living, caused resentment and rioting. The growth of rudimentary trade unions influenced successive governments to pass badly needed factory legislation, but Japanese living standards still remained low in comparison with those of Western Europe and the USA.

Japan's rapidly increasing population caused serious pressures on the economy. In 1924 the new US Immigration Law forbade Asians to enter the USA, which was deeply resented in Japan as racist legislation. Henceforward Japanese designs on the comparatively empty spaces of the Chinese mainland, originally the views of a limited military clique, gained increasing popular approval, although the Japanese proved in reality to be reluctant emigrants.

On 25 December 1926 the emperor Taisho died, and was succeeded by the crown prince, who had acted as prince regent since 1921 and who now became the emperor Hirohito (reign name Shōwa, meaning ‘bright peace’).

In the next few years Japan was mainly occupied with reconstruction at home and the rebuilding of Tokyo, which had suffered devastation in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and in foreign affairs with the problem of naval security. The 1920s are also known, however, as the era of ‘Taisho Democracy’, for they were years of social and intellectual emancipation. A vigorous, if small, women's movement grew up, and there seemed a possibility that women would be given the vote after all adult males over the age of 25 had gained this right in 1925. Liberal ideas and information about foreign countries reached a wider public through mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, and through the radio.

Japanese democracy under threat In 1929 Yuko Hamaguchi was appointed prime minister and tried to maintain friendly relations with other powers. His foreign minister, Baron Kijuro Shidehara, adopted a policy of non-aggression towards China and consented to the limitation of naval power by the London Conference of 1930. This caused a strong protest by the navy, army, and nationalists. Hamaguchi tried to establish civilian rule over the military caste, but was fatally wounded by a young civilian ultranationalist.

Tsuyoshi Inukai, leader of the Seiyukai party, won an absolute majority in the Lower House in 1932, but was assassinated by nationalist army officers. After Inukai's death succeeding cabinets were controlled by a military bureaucracy. In 1934 Japan gave notice of termination of the Washington Treaty of 1922, a step that - coupled with Japan's policy in Manchuria - excited grave apprehension abroad.

Aggression in Manchuria Japan openly abandoned any pretence of a policy of conciliation towards China in 1931 when the military party prevented a Minseito Party cabinet from checking the escalation of the Ryujoko Jiken-Liutiaogou Incident, known as the ‘Mukden Incident’, a Japanese attack on the Chinese garrison of Mukden (Shenyang) in Manchuria (18 September 1931). The incident was planned and executed by two Japanese colonels, Kanji Ishiwara and Seishiro Itagaki. Japan's intervention in Manchuria was an almost inevitable result of a fundamental conflict between the economic and strategic interests of Japan and China, set against a background of the contraction of world trade between 1929 and 1932, which had a catastrophic impact on Japan. Japan realized that Chinese development of railways and ports threatened its hard-won rights in the South Manchurian Railway. Relying on its privileged position in Manchuria, Japan had invested great sums in the mineral and other primary resources of Manchuria - enterprises of vital importance to Japan's great home population.

Attempts to negotiate a settlement with China proved abortive and Japanese military leaders, without even consulting the Tokyo government, hurled their forces against the whole zone of the railway. After the disarming of the garrison at Mukden and the capture of the Manchurian province of Jilin, the Japanese authorities held their hand, and the dispute was referred to the League of Nations. The League called on both sides to return to the status quo, but Japan insisted on direct Sino-Japanese negotiations. When these proved impossible, Japanese forces in Manchuria soon found pretexts to advance again. By the end of 1931 they had overrun 518,000 sq km/200,000 sq mi, with no more than 20,000 troops against 20 times that number of Chinese troops. Later a large Japanese force was landed in Shanghai, where heavy fighting began early in 1932.

In December 1931 the League appointed a commission of inquiry in Manchuria under Lord Lytton, whose report (October 1932) made suggestions for setting up a special regime in Manchuria, recognizing Chinese sovereignty and at the same time safeguarding Japan's rights. But Japan had already set up a puppet government and created a new state, which was called Manchukuo, and its reply to the League was that it was acting in self-defence and that in any event there was no central government in China able to carry out a settlement. Japan organized larger expeditionary forces and, having withdrawn from the League of Nations, its troops advanced into Jehol and soon flung the Chinese forces out of the whole of that province and south of the Great Wall.

Military control of government The Ryujoko Jiken-Liutiaogou Incident, or Mukden Incident, also marked a turning point in Japan's internal politics. In December 1931 the Minseito cabinet of Reijiro Wakatsuki and Kijuro Shidehara collapsed, and party cabinets were soon brought to an end when Prime Minister Inukai was assassinated on 15 May 1932. The assassins were given light sentences, because the public generally felt that they were sincere and that political parties had no answer to Japan's problems.

The policy of international cooperation followed since 1868 now seemed bankrupt to many. The world depression had hit Japan's silk producers badly, most of them peasants who needed this subsidiary source of income desperately. In north Japan there was also a succession of bad harvests, which forced a significant number of tenants to leave their homes or to sell their daughters into prostitution. Many starved.

Their distress was reflected in the anger of the young officers who had contact with peasant conscripts. Already indignant with party cabinets for pursuing a ‘weak’ policy - which in their view encouraged rather than contained Chinese nationalism and the ambitions of Soviet Russia - they believed that Japan was facing a crisis that could only be solved by a ‘ Shōwa Restoration’, an institutional and policy revolution as radical as the one which had been initiated by the Meiji restoration of 1868.

On 26 February 1936 one group attempted a military coup in Tokyo, hoping to have the sympathetic Gen Jinzaburo Mazaki (1876-1956) made prime minister. Although they killed several members of the government and establishment, their plan failed because of the opposition of another army faction, the Tosei-ha, and the firmness of the emperor. However, the fear of another incident paved the way for the army to encroach further on government, and thereafter cabinets were headed either by military officers or by persons they favoured.

Japanese ‘fascism’ Among the latter was Prince Fumimaro Konoe, a court noble, who was prime minister in 1937 when the Marco Polo Bridge Incident escalated into all-out war with China (see below). Under Konoe's leadership a National Spiritual Mobilization Movement was launched, many aspects of Western culture rejected, and a stricter control of thought introduced.

Many of Japan's political and social characteristics in the 1930s bore a similarity to developments in Germany and Italy, although the term ‘fascism’ was not officially adopted, partly because official propaganda focused on the emperor and Japan's uniqueness, partly because there were real differences - there was no demagogic leader in Japan, and no mass movement.

Although there were some revolutionary tendencies, Japanese ‘fascism’ essentially amounted to a revival of conservative authoritarianism, with the military and the bureaucracy reasserting control. Their final triumph came in 1940 with the amalgamation of political parties into the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.

Expansionism in northern China Meanwhile every succeeding year saw a further milestone on Japan's road to empire. Thus, in 1933, it was the final lopping of Jehol, with its old Chinese imperial palaces, its coal, and strategic mountain passes, from the main body of China and its incorporation into Manchukuo. In 1935 came the elimination of the last vestige of the traditional Russian influence in northern Manchuria, through the transfer to Manchukuo by purchase of the Soviet share of ownership of the Chinese Eastern Railway.

The same year was also marked by manoeuvres on the part of the Japanese military authorities in China, intended to sap the authority of the central government at Nanjing over 75 million people in northern China. These tactics culminated in the setting up, with the connivance of the Japanese military authorities, of a puppet regime under Yin Rugeng in the eastern areas of northern China. Early in 1936 irregular forces, issuing from Manchukuo, drove the Chinese forces out of the province of Chahar (in Inner Mongolia), and established a pro-Japanese regime in that sparsely populated territory.

Preparations for war In line with the policy of expansion on land was the denunciation by the Japanese government of the Washington Naval Treaty and its refusal to conclude any new naval agreement except on the basis of parity with Britain and the USA. Japan regarded itself, along with Germany and Italy at this time, as one of the three major dissatisfied powers in the world. Japan's sweep towards imperial expansion was by no means purely military and territorial in character. Goods with the ‘made in Japan’ mark won their victories and made their enemies, just as the Japanese soldiers on the battlefields of Manchuria and Jehol.

However, by 1936 the Japanese general staff had reached the conclusion that Japan had achieved its main aims in China and that in order, to prepare for what seemed an inevitable war with the USSR, a five-year period of non-belligerence was needed in which the mineral resources of Manchukuo could be exploited and the Japanese economy geared for war. In the event, there were large-scale frontier clashes with Soviet forces in 1938 and 1939 rather than full-scale war. During the second conflict 17,450 Japanese were killed or went missing, and the Japanese willingly accepted Soviet neutrality, through German mediation.

The Sino-Japanese War begins Whilst the Japanese were anticipating a war with the USSR, a confused episode in July 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge, on the Chinese-Manchukuo border near Beijing, led to full-scale war with China. The Chinese Guomindang (nationalist) government of Jiang Jie Shi (Chiang Kai-shek), strengthened and encouraged by German military aid and Western economic assistance, refused to make the concessions demanded by Japan, and the Konoe cabinet, overruling the general staff, gambled that a quick military campaign would bring China to its knees. German mediation got nowhere, because Japan increased its demands as it won more victories. But despite the unprecedented brutality of the capture of the Chinese capital, Nanjing, in December 1937, and Japan's expansion along the Chinese coast, the Chinese fought on. The Japanese set up a new puppet government in Nanjing in April 1940, under the ex-Guomindang leader, Wang Jingwei, but many Japanese leaders were becoming reconciled to the idea of negotiating with the arch-enemy, Jiang Jie Shi, when in the spring of 1940 the sudden changes in the European war opened up new opportunities for Japan. (For more details of the Sino-Japanese War from the Chinese perspective, see China: history 1900-49.)

Pressure on European colonies Following the outbreak of World War II in Europe, the collapse of the Netherlands and France in 1940 at once led to extremist demands for Japanese intervention in the European war and for the occupation of the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. To that end the very phrase ‘East Asia’, coined by the Japanese with the political implications of an eastern Monroe Doctrine (by which the USA had declared its hegemony in the Americas in the 19th century), carried its obvious menace. Japan now demanded that all supplies passing through French Indochina to the Chinese government at Chongqing should cease and that all supplies going to Jiang Jie Shi through Burma and Hong Kong (both British colonies) should also cease. At the same time Japanese troops were moved to the 40-km/25-mi frontier of Kowloon (part of Hong Kong) and a land blockade of the British concession there was begun.

These moves had their impulse in Japan's intense desire to settle the ‘China Incident’, which every statement of Japanese policy admitted to be the government's first preoccupation. Japan's foreign minister, Hachiro Arita (1884-1965), outlined Japan's conception of a new order ‘united under a single sphere’ of Japanese hegemony that would cover ‘East Asia’ and the western Pacific. Japan's interference with French Indochina, which was to be extended as far as occupation by July 1941, while intended to Jiang Jie Shi to come to terms, was also designed to put pressure on the vulnerable European colonial territories in southeast Asia.

Japan develops its war aims As yet Japan's leaders were unwilling to risk war with the Western powers, but in July 1940 army pressure brought about the resignation of the relatively moderate cabinet of Prime Minister Mitsumasa Yonai (1880-1948) and its replacement by the second Konoe cabinet, with the ambitious American-educated Yosuke Matsuoka as foreign minister. Under Matsuoka's urging, Japan pressed ahead with a plan for creating a new order in Asia that sought to eliminate the colonial presence and economic dominance of Britain, the USA, and other Western powers in that region. In their place, Japan aimed at establishing a ‘benevolent’ political domination over China, the Philippines, Indochina, Thailand, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia), Burma (Myanmar), India, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

This project, which was largely responsible for Japan's partnership with the Axis powers (Germany and Italy), was accompanied by the assertion that Japan desired to see Asiatic peoples ruled by themselves; but it also included a scheme of economic ‘co-prosperity’, which really meant that Japan hoped to secure vast resources of raw materials in exchange for goods of its own manufacture. Outwardly the Japanese aim was to prove that the Western powers had no right to influence Asiatic life and culture; actually the intention was to enable Japan to become the overlord of eastern Asia under an economic policy that would have no place for the Western powers, including even its own Axis partners.

The road to war In July 1941, against Matsuoka's pleas, the Japanese government took the fateful decision to occupy southern French Indochina instead of joining in the German attack on the USSR as requested by Hitler. The US government had already imposed a series of economic restrictions on Japan, and on 26 July, supported by the British and Dutch East Indies governments, froze all Japanese assets in the USA.

In effect, this meant the cessation of trade. Japan was now faced with the prospect of seeing its military adventures come to nothing - with a trade embargo in place its oil reserves would run out within two years, crippling its forces. Konoe recognized the danger and sought a meeting with the US president Franklin D Roosevelt, hoping for an agreement that would restore trade and preserve Japanese control of north China. But the US secretary of state Cordell Hull distrusted Japan and refused to compromise on America's demands that Japan should withdraw from China completely and renounce the pact with Germany and Italy. An Imperial Conference on 6 September decided that war was preferable to the acceptance of US demands, and when Konoe failed to secure any breakthrough in the negotiations that had been going on in Washington since April, he resigned.

It was evident, when Gen Hideki Tōjō, a professional soldier, replaced Prince Konoe as premier (October 1941), that Japan was contemplating further military activities on a scale in proportion to its ambitions in the eastern Asian and Pacific regions. Tojo's government secretly began to make naval and military dispositions with a view to attacking British and US Far Eastern possessions simultaneously, at a moment most convenient for ensuring at least initial success. The Japanese hoped that by crippling the US Pacific fleet they would gain 18 months in which to secure the conquest of East Asia and its resources. Tojo sent a special envoy to Washington to join Admiral Nomura, the Japanese ambassador, in order to conduct negotiations for a settlement of outstanding differences with the USA if possible. In the course of these negotiations President Roosevelt sent a personal message to the emperor of Japan in the vain hope of effecting an understanding. However, while negotiations were still being conducted, on 7 December 1941 the Japanese suddenly attacked Pearl Harbor and other US and British bases in the Pacific and east Asia, and after this outrage on conventional diplomatic procedure, announced that Japan was at war with both Great Britain and the USA.

For the history of Japan during World War II, see Japan: history 1941-45, and for developments after 1945 see Japan.