What Sparked Japan's Aggression During World War II?
Courtesy of Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons
This question originally appeared on Quora.
Answer by Harold Kingsberg:
The short version: Japan's actions from 1852 to 1945 were motivated by a deep desire to avoid the fate of 19th-century China and to become a great power.
For Japan, World War II grew from a conflict historians call the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Second Sino-Japanese War began in earnest in 1937 with a battle called the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. However, before this, there had been years of border clashes between the Japanese and the Chinese, having started with the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. So, to explain Japan's behavior in the years from 1941 to 1945, we have to explain why Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and in order to do this, we have to go back to 1853.
Before 1852, Japan was isolationist. Contact with the West was limited to trade with the Dutch in the city of Nagasaki—Westerners otherwise weren't allowed in the country, and Western influences were strongly discouraged. In 1853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States Navy steamed into what we now call Tokyo Bay. The Japanese told him to leave and go to Nagasaki. He ignored the directive and was surrounded by the Japanese fleet. He presented a counterdemand to have a letter from U.S. President Millard Fillmore presented to the de facto ruler of Japan at the time, the shogun. When this demand was not met, he shelled a few buildings in the harbor. The letter was presented. Perry returned a year later to sign the Convention of Kanagawa, a treaty that opened the Japanese ports of Shimoda (a city between Kyoto and what we now call Tokyo and was then called Edo) and Hakodate (located on the northern island of Hokkaido) to U.S. trade. The terms were dictated by the Americans, and the Japanese had little choice but to agree, seeing that they were seriously technologically outmatched.
This is where modern Japanese history begins. The importance of Perry's missions to Japan in the 1850s really can't be overstated. While Japan had previously thought itself to be a strong country, Perry's actions and the signing of treaties widely viewed in Japan as unequal destroyed this image. While Japan's isolation had allowed the Japanese to think that they might escape the fate the Chinese were suffering, the end of this isolation gave lie to that idea.
The Japanese were petrified that they'd go the same way China did, and it wasn't very long before a reform movement got started. In 1868, this reform movement led to what we now call the Meiji Restoration. The shogun was stripped of his power, which was then nominally placed back in the hands of the emperor but really into the hands of his advisers. In a very brief span of time, the feudal system that had governed Japanese society for centuries was abolished, the military was reformed, and the country was put on the path to industrialization.
The Japanese knew they had to catch up to the Western powers or else risk getting stomped flat by them, which is what had happened to China, so they did a lot of imitation. Western-style dress was widely adopted among the elites of the new society, the military was recreated along Clausewitzian lines, the parliament was something of a ripoff of the Prussian one, and so on.
The thing is that if you're trying to imitate a 19th-century European power, you have to engage in imperialism—not engaging in colonialism made a country at the time look weak. In the case of 19th-century Japan, the obvious target for imperialism was just across the Sea of Japan: Korea. By the 1890s, Korea was actually seen as a massive liability for Japan: It had not reformed as Japan had, and unlike China, it could feasibly be conquered by an interested Western nation, which would have given an excellent staging ground for an invasion of Japan. Additionally, the Korean peninsula is rich in iron and coal, which you need if you're a rapidly industrializing country in the 19th-century. Because Japan is not particularly rich in natural resources, it was advantageous for it to have colonies. It wasn't so advantageous for the colonized, but then again, colonialism isn't designed for that anyway.
The problem was that Korea was a Chinese tributary state: The Korean king paid tribute to the Chinese emperor. While the Japanese could, and did, force the Koreans to sign some unequal treaties, the peninsula remained free of the Japanese. However, in 1894, China sent troops into Korea to help put down a rebellion, not notifying the Japanese before it did so. This was against a previous treaty, so the Japanese also sent in troops. Unsurprisingly, fighting broke out, leading to the First Sino-Japanese War from 1894-1895.
The Chinese lost the war, and they lost it badly. With the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Korea stopped paying tribute to China and effectively became a Japanese tributary state. The Japanese also gained the island of Taiwan as a colony, along with reparations and trading rights in several Chinese cities, the likes of which had really only been previously extended to Western nations. Additionally, the Japanese gained the Liaodong Peninsula, from which several Western powers forced it to withdraw. Not that the Chinese were allowed to hold onto the Liaodong Peninsula either—the Russians leased it. This was the start of Japan's colonial empire, along with a rivalry with the Russians for influence in Korea and Manchuria.
This rivalry ended up leading to the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese emerged victorious from this conflict and were consequently seen as a great power. The Japanese walked away with the Liaodong Peninsula lease—formally, the Kwantung Leased Territory—along with substantial rights in Manchuria, most notably control over Manchuria's railroads. After the war, Japan officially made Korea a protectorate in 1905—Russia was in no position to contest that action—and subsequently annexed Korea in 1910.
In World War I, Japan entered on the side of the Allied Powers and picked off Germany's colonial empire in the Pacific Ocean. This was probably the high-water mark of Japan's acceptance by the Western powers prior to 1945. And to this point, Japan had really acted exactly as the various European colonial powers had.
However, during the interwar period, aggressively expansionist moves, though far from unheard of, started leaving sour tastes in the mouths of many nations. It wasn't simply a matter of geopolitics, either—most people in Europe really did not want another war, and those countries that seemed to be provoking said wars were given the stink eye. Because Japan hadn't suffered in the war the way that, say, France and Belgium had, the reluctance to engage in brinkmanship simply wasn't instilled the same way.
Also in the interwar period, the Republic of China started getting it together. While the country had effectively collapsed into a patchwork of feuding warlords in the 1910s, the Kuomintang managed to get most of the south unified under its government before embarking on what is now called the Northern Expedition from 1926 to 1928. This also brought the north of the country under the control of the Nationalist government, which was set up in the city of Nanjing. Nationalist China still had issues, warlords among them, but by 1928 it was a much stronger state.
Japan viewed China's steps toward reversing the damage of the previous century as a threat to its control of Manchuria's railroads and of the Kwantung Leased Territory. Losing anything to China was seen as unacceptable, because of course the Japanese had spent the last 50 years desperately trying to avoid being China. To that end, in 1931, the Japanese invaded Manchuria to protect their interests in the railroad and the Kwantung Leased Territory. Japan subsequently set up a puppet state, Manchukuo, which nobody else recognized as a legitimate state. This isolated Japan, and it also meant a continuing series of border clashes with the Chinese. Eventually, in 1937, the Japanese provoked the Chinese into full-scale war with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident.
Had the Second Sino-Japanese War been a short one, the Japanese might have walked away with a result similar to the First Sino-Japanese War: a hugely favorable treaty and some land cessions. However, the Nationalist government didn't give in so quick and would not agree to a negotiated peace with the sort of terms the Japanese government required to stave off a revolution.
To put it simply, the war pushed the Japanese economy and military to the limit. Japan's supplies of rubber, iron, and oil were pushed to the breaking point, and it didn't have any allies in the region. Increasingly, the view in the international community was that it was a rogue state, which did not help it procure the materials needed to keep prosecuting the war in China. An attack on a U.S. gunboat on the Yangtze River alienated the U.S., as did widespread Japanese atrocities against the Chinese civilian population. Eventually, this led to embargoes on trade with Japan.
At which point, Japan was in a fix. It had assembled a colonial empire both to enable Western-style industrialization and also to establish credibility as a great power. However, because World War I hadn't affected Japan in anything approximating the same way it had Europe, its continued actions in what would in the U.S. and Europe be considered the prewar vein actually started making the country lose the respect it had overhauled itself to gain. A Japanese diplomat put it as follows: "The West taught Japan poker, but after winning all the chips, declared the game immoral." And while it's true that the Western powers hadn't perpetrated anything along the lines of the Rape of Nanking, well, look up Congo Free State, and you'll find their hands were far from clean.
Japan desperately needed resources, and there were only two places to get them: Siberia and the South Pacific. The Imperial Japanese Army favored going after Siberia but were forced to abandon that strategy after the disastrous 1939 Battle of Khalkhin Gol. The Imperial Japanese Navy got its way, but it had to deal the fact that the South Pacific had already been colonized. Hence the simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Malaya: The Japanese didn't want the Americans or the British to resist the Japanese scramble for rubber and oil. This turned out to be suicidal and a complete misreading of how the Americans would react to Pearl Harbor, but it was about 90 years in the making.
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A compelling expanation for Japan's attack on Pearl Habor can be found in OPERATIN SNOW, by John Koster (Regnery, 2012). He explains how a Soviet mole, Harry Dexter White (Weis) in FDR's White House triggered Pearl Harbor by forcing Japan in to a situation where it was the only way out of their dilemma, This kept it out of war with the Soviet Union, eventually helping Stalin to conquer Eastern Europe, advance the cause of Marxism-Leninism totalitarianism and enslave millions and millions of people. Read the book and come to your own conclusions. If you haven't read it, keep your mouth shut until you have.
You didn't mention the economic war on Japan,
The USA had effectively declared an embargo on all sorts of essential supplies
In most of European history such an embargo was a hostile act - equivalent to a deceleration of war
You left out a lot, most notably the period of "government by assassination," the rise of racist right-wing militarism, and the utter dominance of the military over Japanese society.
My one quibble is that they seem to dance around "the fate of China" without really laying out what was so bad about it. Imperial England wrecked the cultures of India and China, functionally enslaving them in their own lands and flooding them with opium to prevent more organized uprisings.
"Japan subsequently set up a puppet state, Manchukuo, which nobody else recognized as a legitimate state."
This blatant falsehood undoes the otherwise well worded synopsis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchukuo#mediaviewer/File:Manchukuo%27s_foreign_recognition.png
Unqualified words like nobody should be avoided in discussing historical matters.
@Potomacker Fair point, but I would call it an exaggeration or mistake rather than a "blatant falsehood".
What was included in the article was well written, but it's surprising no mention is made about Japan's exclusion from any meaningful role during the Treaty of Versailles. If anything showed Japan that the West didn't take it seriously, it was those negotiations. Strangle Germany, ignore Japan... didn't work out so well.
It's still puzzling to me why Imperial Japan didn't attack Siberia when the USSR was on the ropes with the Germans at the gates of Moscow in late 1941. Twentieth century history could have turned out quite differently...
It's still puzzling to me why Japan didn't attack Siberia when the USSR was on the ropes with the Germans at the gates of Moscow in 1941.
Until 1858 "Contact with the West was limited to trade with the Dutch in the city of Nagasaki—Westerners otherwise weren't allowed in the country, and Western influences were strongly discouraged," it sez here.
Sorry, no.
The idea that Commodore Perry opened up Japan to the world is an American fairy tale as infantile as the idea that China was "isolated" until Richard Nixon somehow managed to find it. Strictly American superstition for American consumption.
Japan was as connected to the rest of the world as any place else in Asia for the couple of thousand years up to the mid-eighteenth century. Then the feudal lords' administration in Edo, today's Tokyo, took on an isolationist sentiment, and passed laws trying but failing to restrict outside contact to regulated trade through the Dutch on their island base off Nagasaki.
During this period the north coast of Honshu continued to trade with China as usual, trade with the Korean peninsular states continued unhampered, and the British traded without regard to the Edo-based "laws." The Kyoto Sassoon family continued to send out to India for Jewish wives, as they had for centuries.
Once the American Navy arrived, tiny, isolated Atlantic America was discovered by the folks in Edo.
This made it possible for the, uh, yellow press to start writing its version of history. A fine rehearsal for Nixon and Company a hundred years later in China.
-dlj.
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I cannot find any support for the claim that Perry fired any shots in Tokyo Bay. All other sources I have found have said that he threatened to fire the guns if he saw the ships surrounding him as a threat - and that he refused to leave. This certainly created an atmosphere in which the Japanese might expect that Perry could perceive a threat at any moment. However, no other source that I could find mentioned shots actually being fired.
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Superb article. Very clear writing and explanation. Wish all articles could be this logical.
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People need to realize that the US military is still raping women overseas and in the last year Japan has asked several times that the US military use prostitutes instead of raping women!
You must read Noel Perrin's "Giving up the Gun." While it concentrates on Japan's adoption of firearms in the 1500's and subsequent abandonment of them, it incidentally tells a tale of Japanese technology that will spin your head around.
Stereotype: Japan develops a high feudal society, encounters the West, closes itself off, is forcibly re-acquainted and rapidly grows into a technological powerhouse. True as far as it goes, but...
Reality: Japan, for at least the last 2000 years, has always been among the most advanced countries in the world. The only thing that differed was how much the rest of the world knew about it. Even during their isolationist period, Japan continued to advance. Japanese mathematicians solved cubic equations using a purely indigenous approach. Japanese cities were cleaner and better organized than anything in the West. When we were selling things out of flour barrels, the Japanese had pre-packaged, pre-priced goods.
The Japanese adopted firearms in the 1500's, and soon were producing the best firearms in the world. By the time they cut off contact, there were more and better firearms in Japan than the rest of the world combined. During the Shimabara Rebellion, when some Japanese attempted to stop the isolation, Japanese armies on both sides used tactics like trenches that the West wouldn't use for centuries.
[To finish the story, guns weren't as classy or status rich as samurai swords. The Japanese made the gunsmiths samurai, centralized production, paid the gunsmiths off, and scaled back production to zero.]
Seriously, read this book. I was like Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon: "Everything we know about you is wrong."
@Steve D 2000 years? When do you date the first written history in Japan? I have not been able to find mention of writing before the 700s AD.
Thanks
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"To finish the story, guns weren't as classy or status rich as samurai swords."
Class was definitely the controlling factor. That a yokel with a gun could kill a swordsman (who had been practicing his art for decades) from a safe distance did not sit well with the swordsmen.
Excellent summation but left out the social climate and factors in Japan which promoted the militaristic state, and which still exist (similar to the super nationalistic xenophobic fragments of parties that still exist in Europe). Fear is one motivator as noted in the article, but nationally promoted exceptionalism is too.
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"Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States Navy steamed into what we now call Tokyo Bay. The Japanese told him to leave and go to Nagasaki. He ignored the directive and was surrounded by the Japanese fleet."
Could he BE any more imperialist?
I don't think Perry got up in the morning and said, "Today I'm going to try to be more imperialist." I think Perry got up in the morning and said, "Today we demonstrate our overwhelming superiority."
A typical U.S. bias here. The author undermines Russia's role. The U.S. was a rogue imperialist state that imposed an unequal treaty but its home was far away from Japan. By contrast Russia, which contacted Japan half a century earlier, was so close to Japan that the shogunate considered it as a critical security threat. The perception lasted well after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. And what happened after World War I was the spread of communism from Russia. The Americans think that the Cold War started sometime after World War II, but for Japan it immediately followed World War I. The U.S. did not understand Japan's position and allied with the communists. Several years after World War II, the U.S. found itself assume the role of pre-WWII Japan in East Asia concerning communism, albeit in much worsened situation.
What? What communists did the US ally with?
The US did not ally with the Soviet Union until after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
The book "Imperial Voyage" details how TR sent Sec State Taft to the east to anoint Japan as the racially superior natural dominant power in the east, especially over what they considered decadent China.
Look at the beginning and end of the Shogunate. Before, Japan was riven by conflicts between territorial warlords, Japan was unified by the victor of the conquest of Korea, After him, it was again divided by warring lords, who used western influence, guns, and training in their conflicts. Shogun abolished guns and western involvement, mainly to end these regional conflicts. When the west became involved again, regional warlords used western power and weapons in their conflicts. Japanese imperialism merely exported these territorial ambitions outside of a unified nation. It is understandable that westerners feel the need to project their motives onto the Japanese as though they were not motivated by Japanese motives.
It is time Americans getting rid of their last myth that at least the WWII was a just war for them.
Contrarily, the Pacific version of that war was the most inglorious and sinful one.
By cornering the liberal democratic Japan, who had been pursuing aconsistentstrategy since the Meiji Restorationof containing despotic Russia(Imperial & Red), into the war with America, collaborating with the Fascist Chinese Nationalists, and by defeating Japan,America assisted the power grabbing of Asia by the communists, including that of China by the Chinese Communists, who brought about the tragic deaths of tens of millions of Chinese under the terror of Mao, andalso Communist invoked/involved conflicts such as Korean War and Vietnam Wars.
Summing up, racist
imperialist America directly or indirectly killed something like 10 million
Asians (Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans/Chinese, and Vietnamese etc.), many of
them civilians, since the end of the 19th century, absolutely in vain.
(It was something of the culmination of
the 'rational economic' persecution of Indians and slaving of Africans by the
American settlers, to whom they owe their prosperity.)
This horrendous atrocity surpasses both in size and criminality of those conducted respectively by Russian communists and Nazis during the 20th century.
They lost in Siberia in 1939 because they were taking on the Soviet Union one-on-one.
By December 1941, the Soviets had their hands full with the Germans but repelled them from Moscow because they were able to bring in reinforcements from Siberia. What would have happened if the Japanese had invaded Siberia again instead of taking on the West?
It's an interesting what-if (and certainly a better idea than attacking the USA), but they would not have gotten very far. The Japanese war machine was already starved of raw materials and stretched to the limit in China.
Yes, there were more raw materials in Siberia and the Russians had thrown everything against the Nazis, but (just like in the West) Russia still had 2 huge and powerful weapons: Russian weather and Russian space.
And the Japanese wanted the Pacific, not Siberia. They had a naval fleet that was pretty sophisticated with carrier based airplanes that were the best fighter planes at the beginning of the war, submarines that were sophisticated, while their tanks and artillery and ground based military was....limited.
They were ready for conquering the ocean, not the wastelands of Northern Russia.
The rejection of Japan's racial equality proposal (and general second class treatment) at Versailles was also a factor in turning the country against the West.
@Crusader79 I am surprised that this was not mentioned in the article. I recall reading that the Japanese diplomats were initially dumbfounded that they were effectively ignored at the Treaty of Versailles. This provided some fuel to the "Japan against the World" and "Asia for Asians" attitudes.
@SPA @Crusader79 Not as "ignored" as China. Japan was given the German controlled territories in China. And China was among the winners who had supplied human support in France...
That was a nice payoff to Japan which encouraged its subsequent ambitions.
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Good article, one of the first time's I've said that about Slate.
The American public, for the most part (I think) knows a lot more about the history of the US. That's natural... except most American's bother to even accept there's a whole lot of world that isn't within the US boundaries. Bet this bit about Japan's history is all brand new to the majority of Yanks.
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One thing Yanks understand about World History, without us, Australia would now be South Japan.
@Break even One thing Yanks fail to acknowledge about World History, without them, Australia would not have needed to worry about Japan. It was the Yanks that started the dance in 1852. As those who read this article know.
@Break even As if you had anything to do with it. Just because blind chance gave you the same travel document 70 years later means nothing.
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@Crusader79 Let's argue the personal impact and responsibility on us of events of the last 150 years, events which we had no say or participation in. Arguments about these kind of assumptions are never fruitful, they can be fun one-up-manship though.
