The Rise of Empire

On the first day of January 1868, an improbable combination of midranking samurai from Japan’s outer feudal domains and imperial courtiers at the center of society overthrew the 265-year-old Tokugawa bakufu (shogunate) and promulgated what became known as the Meiji Restoration. From the moment they took power, they grappled with the challenge of making a modern nation that could survive in a world dominated by Western imperialist states. The task of forging a new nation, one centered on the young Emperor Mutsuhito, would demand a comprehensive reimagining of the fundamental features of Japanese civilization.

_{Edoardo Chiossone (1833–98), Maruki Riyō (1854–1923), H.I.M. The Emperor of Japan, insert facing page 32 in The War in the Far East, 1904–1905, 1905. Photogravure of a conté drawing. Hoover Institution Library (DS517.13 .R425)}

After seven centuries of feudal rule, the usurpers-cum-oligarchs had to decide just how far they would pursue the process of political centralization, what the future would be of the over two hundred feudal domains that made up the political framework of the country, and whether they should maintain or scrap the social caste system imposed by the Tokugawa that privileged the numerically inferior samurai over all other segments of society. Aside these first-order questions were equally crucial issues of creating a modern military that could defend Japan against the imperial Western nations and building an economy that was both modern and national.

To escape from the danger of Western encroachment— the fate that the Qing dynasty, once the “sleeping lion” in Asia, suffered after the Opium Wars—Japan hurriedly instituted political, economic, and social reforms to turn itself into a unified modern nation-state. The position of the emperor played a pivotal role in creating the new Japan. However, standing in the way of asserting independence were unequal treaties with Western nations. How to improve their international status and convince Western powers that Japan was worthy of equal bilateral treatment was a key question Japan answered with westernization and modernization through a movement known as bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment). The Meiji government also strove to strengthen the imperial military, and to reform economic activities to finance it, under the slogan fukoku kyōhei (Enrich the country, strengthen the armed forces).⁴ Arguably, establishing a new order in Asia  under Japanese hegemony—as epitomized by Fukuzawa Yukichi’s famed call for “de-Asianization,” or for Japan  to “leave Asia”—was one way of distancing Japan from the “uncivilized” realm and elevating its status to join the “civilized.”⁵

Japan in the latter third of the nineteenth century was one of the more literate countries on earth, an advantage that would become evident as the Meiji government began creating a modern nation-state. Samurai, who had long given up active use of the sword in favor of the pen, had served for centuries as administrators, bureaucrats, and clerks, all using the written word to produce untold thousands of official documents. Merchants, who during the long Tokugawa peace had begun creating a national economy linked by coastal shipping and credit mechanisms, were similarly dependent on written accounting methods. Urban booksellers did a brisk trade, as did early lending libraries, providing often lavishly illustrated volumes of vernacular fiction, domestic travel guidebooks, and descriptions of urban life in Edo and other major cities. Meanwhile, news sellers catered to patrons eagerly awaiting penny broadsheets that combined often-sensationalized imagery—such as depictions of Commodore Perry’s fire-breathing steam vessels that arrived in 1853—with pithy news accounts. Even rural peasants gathered in reading groups, their children taught in local Buddhist temple schools.

Ironically, Japanese could not carry out its modernization without help from North Americans and Europeans. Western ideas, systems, customs, and technologies made significant inroads into Japanese life: railroads, telegrams, the postal service, education systems, military service, large-scale agriculture, gas lighting, hairstyles, and even Western trousers and dresses, to name a few. Many were American contributions.

The relatively bloodless Meiji Restoration, and subsequent Boshin Civil War in 1868–69, propelled Japan’s expansionist interests. Even though it had been an emerging nation at the brink of Western encroachment, Japan’s interest in appropriating Western-style imperialism to its agenda was evident from the early Meiji era. Somewhat ironically, Japanese use of gunboat diplomacy in the vein of Commodore Perry led to its treaty with Korea in 1876 and the opening of that country to Japan without Qing Chinese intermediaries. As its influence spread on the Korean peninsula, Japan strategically used events such as the Imo Incident of 1882 to enhance its strength in the region.

Then, barely forty years after the arrival of Perry in the archipelago, Japan launched its first overseas military campaign against Qing China over interests on the Korean peninsula. The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) marks a turning point for Japan from cautiously navigating through the currents of Western colonialism in Asia to being an imperialist itself. Japan was looking for a pretext to expand its national interests on the Korean peninsula, but Qing China, which had already enjoyed a military presence there, stood in its way. Released from its long-term isolationist policy, Japan transformed the humiliation inflicted by Western nations into overseas expansion and experimented with its own version of imperialism in Asia.