The Only One in Asia — Japan's Modernization and Expansion

In the previous chapter, we watched an awakening take root in British India. From the great rebellion to the Indian National Congress, and on to Gandhi — it was a long road along which, in the very midst of colonial rule, the language of resistance grew.

But from the end of that same nineteenth century into the early twentieth, on the eastern edge of Asia, there was a country that took an utterly different path. Rather than submitting to the shock of the West, it rapidly absorbed Western institutions and technology and sought to transform itself into a modern state — that country was Japan.

This chapter deals with Japan’s modernization and the expansion that followed. Let me set out the writer’s position in advance. The course of modern Japan holds within it both a side that gave hope to Asia and a side that left deep wounds upon it. To tell only one of these would fail in honesty toward history. Here, where judgments diverge, I will set out the differing views side by side, avoid firm conclusions, and trace the verified facts with care.

Learning from the West, Remaking the Nation

In the mid-nineteenth century, when the fleets of Europe and America appeared in Asian seas, Japan too was made to stand before that pressure. It watched from afar as its neighbor, the Qing, was defeated in war against the West and made to sign unequal treaties. A sense of crisis — that Japan must not follow the same road — is said to have spread through the upper reaches of society.

In 1868, the long-standing rule of the shogunate came to an end, and under a new government Japan began a great turn. In the course of this transformation, later called the Meiji Restoration, Japan hurried to take in Western institutions. It established a constitution, set up a parliament, built a modern army and schools, laid railways, and raised up industry. It was an attempt, in a short span, to remake the very shape of the nation.

It was also a modernization imposed from above. Amid the rapid change, there were people forced to bear heavy burdens. Yet as a result, by the end of the nineteenth century Japan had become the first country in Asia to take on the form of a modern state. And at the same time, something that modern states of the age took for granted — an inclination toward outward expansion — was also growing within Japan.

Modernization and outward advance were, for the Japan of that time, two faces that could not be separated, it is said. As the slogan ‘enrich the country, strengthen the army’ suggests, enriching the nation and strengthening its military were spoken of as a single goal. Before long, Japan turned that strength toward neighboring regions. The war with the Qing beginning in 1894, and the war with Russia in the early twentieth century, became the great turning points.

The Shock of 1905

In 1904, Japan entered into war with the great power Russia. The conflict between the two nations over the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria had at last reached an armed clash. The Japan of that time was only about fifty years removed from the end of its seclusion. Far from Europe and America, holding no colonies, it was seen as a rising newcomer of Asia. That such a Japan should fight Europe’s great power Russia head-on — many observers, it is said, judged Japan’s chances of victory to be slim.

The war exacted enormous sacrifices from both nations. On land, fierce battles continued and many soldiers fell. Then, in May 1905, Russia’s Baltic Fleet and Japan’s Combined Fleet clashed in the Sea of Japan. In this battle, known as the Battle of Tsushima, the Baltic Fleet, having arrived at the end of a long voyage, suffered a devastating blow. That September, with American mediation, the Treaty of Portsmouth was concluded, and the war ended in the form of a Japanese victory.

This result astonished the world. A rising Asian newcomer holding no colonies had won against a great power of Europe — it was an event that shook the common sense of the people of that age.

Indeed, across Asia after the Russo-Japanese War, movements seeking independence and modernization are said to have gained vigor. There remain records of Indian national activists, Chinese reformers, and intellectuals of Turkey and West Asia receiving Japan’s victory as an encouragement that ‘Asians can do it too.’ To a structure once thought to leave no choice but submission to the West, it seemed a single breach had been opened.

But we cannot let the story stop here. For the same Japan that gave hope would afterward turn into a presence that held a different meaning for Asia.

The Ideal of Liberation and the Reality of Aggression

Victory in the Russo-Japanese War gave Japan a new pride. The consciousness of having joined the ranks of the Western great powers, it is said, came in time to feed a sense of superiority toward the other regions of Asia. Japan extended its rule over the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria, and through the first half of the twentieth century it too expanded onto the continent as an empire.

How to judge this Japanese advance onto the continent is a matter on which views diverge greatly. The writer takes neither side, and will go no further than setting out both arguments together.

On one side, there is the view that Japan held up the ideal of halting the eastward advance of the Western powers and liberating Asia from the colonial rule of Europe and America. This is the position that values the thought ‘Asia is one,’ and the later conception of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ as aiming at an order of Asians’ own, in place of Western domination. It is also pointed out that Japan’s advance did, as a result, have a side that stimulated independence movements in various lands.

On the other side, there is the view that those ideals were mere pretexts, and that in reality Japan’s own territorial and economic ambitions lay bared. From this position, the ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ is judged severely as an aggression unrelated to liberation, a mechanism for mobilizing the peoples and resources of Asia for Japan’s wars. The fact that Japan’s advance brought immense sacrifice and suffering to peoples across many lands must be received with gravity.

What matters, perhaps, is to view these two faces without separating them. It is a fact that the Russo-Japanese War gave hope to a colonized Asia, and it is also a fact that the advance which followed brought harm and sacrifice to many lands. To speak of one side while erasing the other — that is no longer history. Light and shadow were not separate events but lay on the two sides of a single course; to receive it so becomes the starting point for facing this complex age.

Modern Japan is remembered as the only country in Asia to have won head-on against a Western great power, and at the same time as an empire that left deep wounds upon Asia. Those two memories, still unreconciled, coexist even now within the hearts of the peoples of Asia.

The two world wars brought an end to this age of empires. After the swollen empires collapsed, the peoples of a colonized Asia would at last reach the hour of seizing independence with their own hands. In the next chapter, I would like to gaze upon that storm of independence.