(4) JAPANESE EMPIRE

 

One of the oldest empires but also one of the newest – which, among other things, makes it one of the oddest.

There were older empires than Japan, whose mythology traces its imperial line to legendary founder Jimmo in 660 BC, although more conventional history tends to trace its origins “in the late Kofun period of the 3rd-6th centuries AD”. However, it is the oldest empire still existing, at least in retaining an emperor, the last state to do so, albeit as ceremonial head of state.

Which brings us to the one of many oddities of Japan’s empire – that for the vast majority of its history, Japan had an emperor without an empire.

Firstly, in the sense that Japan was a homogenous polity that mostly kept to itself, apart from importing cultural influences, mostly from China – contrary to how empire is typically defined as one nation or people ruling over another. In that sense, the Japanese emperor was a somewhat inflated term for monarch, albeit a cult figure in the native Japanese religion of Shinto.

Secondly, in the sense that for a substantial part of its history, the emperor wasn’t even that, but a lame-duck monarch where de facto power was held by military aristocrats in what is generally known as the shogunate. Ironically, it is during one of these periods that Japan actually embarked on empire in the conventional definition of the term – its invasions of Korea in 1592-1598.

Japan was also one of the newest empires, a latecomer in the Age of Imperialism – and as the only Asian imperial power of that otherwise exclusive club of European empires, seen as somewhat of a gate crasher or interloper, although ironically its primary crash course was for collision with the other non-European imperial power, the United States.

Japan narrowly escaped being the subject of an imperial power or powers that was the fate of the rest of Asia. When European imperialism first tentatively reached east Asia about three centuries before in the Age of Discovery, Japan decided it was having none of that and famously sealed itself off in isolationism.

That couldn’t last forever, as European imperialism had bigger guns in the Age of Imperialism – and the United States forced Japan to open up with classic gunboat diplomacy (in the literal form of a fleet commanded by Commodore Perry), starting Japan’s love-hate relationship with the United States as an object of admiration and awe but also potential hostility and rivalry.

That saw Japan revive its emperor within a new centralized government in the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and adapt all those features of European nations that led to their imperial power – in the smartest possible way by following world leaders in their fields, notably building their navy on expertise from Britain and their army on expertise from France, before swapping out the latter for Germany after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

And what more distinctive European feature was there than an empire? So Japan set about acquiring that too – modestly at first, from its immediate neighbors, starting with the Ryukuan island kingdom in 1879. By 1894, it was powerful enough to join in that other distinctive European feature in the nineteenth century – pawning Qing China, which it did in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, acquiring Taiwan, and continuing to use China as its punching bag thereafter.

However, its victory and claims against China saw it clash with European imperial powers keen to maintain the balance of power and their spheres of influence there – foremost among them Russia, looming largest against Japan in north-east Asia. That aligned Japan with Britain, which was similarly concerned with Russia, and they sealed their alignment with a formal alliance in 1902 – which allowed Japan to take on Russia directly and win in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.

The spoils of victory in that war saw Japan revisit its ambitions in Korea, but this time successfully annexing it – where they were notoriously brutal ruling over it. Not Belgium-brutal, but still up there even on the scale of brutality in the Age of Imperialism.

Japan made more gains at the expense of Germany in and after the First World War – and at the expense of increasing hostility with the United States, prompting Britain to abandon the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.

Which brings us perhaps to most of the oddities of the Japanese Empire, as it sowed the seeds of its rise to one of the largest territorial empires in history at the same time as the seeds of its decline as one of the shortest-lived empires in history. All the while on the path of evil empire, ultimately one that was dying and insane.

Yet on that path and even before, certainly from the Russo-Japanese War, Japan styled itself as anti-imperialist, in the tradition of those two other states that styled themselves as anti-imperialist while engaging in imperialism of their own, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Of course, for Japan this was against European imperialism – propagandizing their own imperialism with slogans such as “Asia for the Asians” and as the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, although they weren’t too big on the co- part of that title, more their own prosperity sphere. Those claims were not without some justice, but they were also with brutality and violence that eclipsed those of European imperialism as well as making their previous occupation of Korea seem like a picnic

Ultimately the Japanese Empire fell to defeat, primarily by the United States in the Pacific War – and Japan was not only shorn of its empire, but itself occupied by an American shogunate, albeit one that proved extraordinarily and unexpectedly enlightened in its role in the equally extraordinary and unexpected revival of Japan as an economic superpower, for a period second only to the United States itself. Which of course has seen Japan also accused of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, substituting economic power for military victory in controlling other nations.