Empire of Japan: A Visual History

The Empire of Japan is the state that existed from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to the postwar constitution of 1947. Determined not to be colonised like China, Japan's new leaders copied Western armies, factories, schools and law at breakneck speed, then joined the imperial club: Taiwan in 1895, Korea in 1910, Manchuria in 1931. Military dominance of politics in the 1930s led to full-scale war with China in 1937 and, after Pearl Harbor in 1941, with the United States and the British Empire. Japan's empire briefly stretched from Burma to the central Pacific before collapsing in 1945 after the atomic bombings and Soviet entry into the war.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Empire of Japan. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Territory controlled by Japan

Home islands plus colonies, then occupied territory in China and Southeast Asia at the 1942 peak.

Timeline of the Empire of Japan

1. 1853
   Perry's black shipsAmerican warships force Japan to open.
2. 1868
   Meiji RestorationThe shogunate falls; imperial rule restored.
3. 1877
   Satsuma RebellionThe last samurai uprising is crushed.
4. 1889
   Meiji ConstitutionA parliament under a sovereign emperor.
5. 1895
   Taiwan annexedAfter victory over Qing China.
6. 1905
   TsushimaRussian fleet destroyed; Russo-Japanese War won.
7. 1910
   Korea annexedColonial rule until 1945.
8. 1923
   Great Kanto earthquakeTokyo and Yokohama devastated.
9. 1931
   Manchuria seizedThe Mukden Incident and Manchukuo.
10. 1937
    War with ChinaMarco Polo Bridge; Nanjing Massacre in December.
11. 1941
    Pearl HarborWar with the United States and Britain.
12. 1942
    Peak and MidwayEmpire at its greatest extent; carrier defeat at Midway.
13. 1945
    Hiroshima, Nagasaki, surrenderThe emperor announces defeat on 15 August.
14. 1947
    New constitutionThe Empire of Japan becomes the State of Japan.

Meiji: modernise or be colonised

Commodore Perry's American warships forced Japan open in 1853-1854 after two centuries of near-isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate. Humiliating unequal treaties followed. In 1868 a coalition of samurai from the Satsuma and Choshu domains overthrew the shogun in the name of the teenage Emperor Meiji and moved the court to Edo, renamed Tokyo.

The Meiji leaders abolished the samurai class, introduced conscription, built railways and telegraphs, sent students abroad and hired foreign experts. The 1889 constitution, modelled on Prussia's, created a parliament while keeping the emperor sovereign and the military answerable to him alone, a flaw that would prove fatal.

Joining the imperial club

Victory over China in 1894-1895 won Taiwan and a huge indemnity, and revealed the Qing dynasty's weakness to the world. Victory over Russia in 1904-1905, including the annihilation of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, was the first defeat of a European great power by an Asian one in modern times. Korea became a protectorate in 1905 and was annexed outright in 1910.

Japan joined the Allies in World War I, seized German possessions in China and the Pacific, and sat at Versailles as one of the five great powers. But its request for a racial equality clause in the League of Nations covenant was rejected, and Western immigration restrictions and naval treaties left many Japanese feeling the club would never fully admit them.

Militarism and the road to Pearl Harbor

The Great Depression, rural poverty and political assassinations discredited party politics. In September 1931 officers of the Kwantung Army staged an explosion on the South Manchuria Railway and used it as a pretext to seize all of Manchuria, creating the puppet state of Manchukuo. When the League of Nations objected, Japan walked out. Full war with China began at the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937; the Nanjing Massacre followed in December.

Bogged down in China and cut off from American oil and steel by embargoes in 1941, Japan's leaders gambled on a knockout blow. The attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was followed within months by the conquest of Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and Burma, framed as a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Defeat and transformation

Midway in June 1942 turned the naval war; the island campaigns of 1943-1945 and the firebombing of Japanese cities followed. On 6 and 9 August 1945 atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria on 9 August. Emperor Hirohito broadcast the surrender on 15 August, the first time most Japanese had heard his voice.

The American occupation under General MacArthur kept the emperor as a symbol, disbanded the military, broke up the great business combines and land estates, gave women the vote and wrote a new constitution whose Article 9 renounces war. When it took effect on 3 May 1947 the Empire of Japan formally became the State of Japan.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Qing dynasty (1636 to 1912)
• Russian Empire (1721 to 1917)
• United States (1776 to present)
• British Empire (1583 to 1997)
• Second French colonial empire (1830 to 1980)
• German colonial empire (1884 to 1919)

Wars of the same era and region

• World War II (1939 to 1945)
• Russo-Japanese War (1904 to 1905)
• World War I (1914 to 1918)
• Chinese Civil War (1927 to 1949)
• Korean War (1950 to 1953)
• Philippine-American War (1899 to 1902)

10 surprising things about the Empire of Japan

1. Japan's first modern navy was largely built in British shipyards, and the battleship Mikasa, flagship at Tsushima, was made in Barrow-in-Furness.
2. In 1876 the Meiji government banned samurai from wearing swords in public, ending a thousand-year privilege by decree.
3. The Meiji Emperor's era name means 'enlightened rule'. Under the system Japan still uses, 2026 is Reiwa 8.
4. Japan and Britain were formal allies from 1902 to 1923, and Japanese destroyers escorted Allied convoys in the Mediterranean in World War I.
5. The Kwantung Army staged the 1931 Mukden explosion so badly that a train ran over the 'damaged' track minutes later without trouble.
6. Manchukuo's puppet ruler was Puyi, the last emperor of China, who had been deposed as a child in 1912.
7. The Zero fighter's designer had studied Western designs, and its lightweight airframe made it deadly in 1941 but a death trap by 1944.
8. Emperor Hirohito's surrender broadcast was in such formal court Japanese that many listeners did not understand what he had said.
9. Some Japanese soldiers refused to believe the war had ended; Hiroo Onoda kept fighting in the Philippine jungle until 1974.
10. Article 9 of the postwar constitution renounces war, yet Japan's Self-Defense Forces are one of the best funded militaries on earth.

Sources

• Empire of Japan Wikipedia
• Meiji Restoration Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Japan's Quest for Power and World War II in Asia Asia for Educators, Columbia University
• Occupation and Reconstruction of Japan, 1945-52 US Department of State, Office of the Historian
• Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (2000) HarperCollins
• Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (2000) Harvard University Press

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