Restoration of the Meiji

The Japan of the 1920s and early 1930s was a nation at war with itself. There was not an actual civil war but the nation was being pulled in different directions by the various political factions and cultural undercurrents. To make matters worse, the islands of Japan have virtually no coal and oil reserves, the two necessities vital for a modern nation.

Japan won its first war with the Chinese in 1896. It was victorious against Russia in 1905. In World War I, Japan joined the Allies (Great Britain, France, the USA, and Italy). Japan joined the Allies because it realized that Germany possessed some vital territories in the Pacific, as well as concessions in China, and without their navy in Asia to defend them, these territories were ripe for the picking. The Western powers were more than happy to let the Japanese handle the small German forces in Asia so as not to have to divert theirs from Europe.

From 1600 to 1868, Japan had been governed by the Tokugawa family. As with most dynasties, this one became weaker and more corrupt with time. By the 1860s, many in Japan saw their nation at risk of being weakened by foreign influence as the Chinese were, and they were disgusted at the wide-spread corruption in their government. On top of this, the leaders within the Tokugawa shogunate (so named for its top official, the shogun) were keen to keep things as they were-to put it simply, in a samurai world, with limited use of modern technology. In the 1860s, civil war erupted within Japan. By 1868, the forces who believed in restoring the emperor to his full power (rather than as the figurehead the emperor had been for centuries) won the war. Emperor Meiji (b.1852-d. 1912), while ruling with the advice of a parliament, had full and complete power. This period in Japanese history is known as the Meiji Restoration.

During this period, great changes had taken place in Japan. The restoration of the Meiji had ended the age of feudalism, at least on the surface. Japan rapidly became Westernized, and at the same time entered on an imperialist policy. Her aims from 1868 onward were clear, and remained unaltered until the end of the second World War: she was to be surrounded by a wide girdle of territories under Japanese domination, in order to prevent the approach of any enemy to the Japanese homeland. This girdle was divided into several zones:

  1. the inner zone with the Kurile Islands, Sakhalin, Korea, the Ryukyu archipelago, and Taiwan;
  2. the outer zone with the Marianne, Philippine, and Caroline Islands, eastern China, Manchuria, and eastern Siberia;
  3. the third zone, not clearly defined, including especially the Netherlands Indies, Indo-China, and the whole of China, a zone of undefined extent.

Meiji's son, Emperor Taisho, was not anywhere the equal of his father.