Why Did Japan Walk the Road to War — The Light and Shadow of Modernization

‘Why did Japan press on toward that war?’ When we try to answer this question, we tend to look only at the dozen-odd years of the Showa era. Yet the road to war began in a far older place. The sense of crisis in the late Edo period, when the Black Ships arrived and the powers loomed over Japan. Taking that as its starting point, Japan remade itself into a modern state at a furious pace. That process was, to be sure, a story of remarkable success. But at the same time, the very structures that would prepare the later runaway course were quietly embedded within this modernization. In Episode 1, we look at where that ‘light’ and ‘shadow’ parted ways.

A Modernization That Began in Humiliation

At the starting point of modern Japan lay a single humiliation: the unequal treaties.

In 1858, the Edo shogunate concluded the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States. It went on to sign similar treaties with the Netherlands, Russia, Britain, and France. At a glance this looked like joining international society, but the substance was greatly disadvantageous to Japan. The central problems were two. One was extraterritoriality, an arrangement whereby foreigners who committed crimes within Japan could not be tried under Japanese law. The other was the loss of tariff autonomy: Japan could not freely set the duties on imported goods and could only fix them by agreement with the other country.

What did these two things mean? Extraterritoriality was a symbol that ‘Japan is not treated as an equal modern state,’ and the loss of tariff autonomy was a practical blow, meaning that even if cheap foreign products flooded in, Japan could not protect its own industries. For the leaders of the late Edo and Meiji periods, these treaties were a humiliation in which the very sovereignty of the nation was being appraised and priced. That is precisely why modern Japan’s foreign policy would long move with ‘treaty revision’ as its greatest cherished goal.

What deserves emphasis here is that modernization did not begin purely out of a desire for self-improvement. Rather, at its root lay a fear of being swallowed by the strong powers, and a pressing anxiety that ‘unless we catch up, we cannot survive.’ This fear and anxiety were the driving force that accelerated modernization, and at the same time they cast a peculiar shadow over Japan’s decision-making for a long time to come.

A Rich Nation and a Strong Army — A Modernization Full of Light

Taking its sense of crisis as a starting point, the Meiji government remade the country at astonishing speed. The phrase that sums up its direction in a word is ‘a rich nation and a strong army.’

From 1871 to 1873, the government sent a large-scale mission to Europe and the Americas led by Iwakura Tomomi. The Iwakura Mission initially counted negotiations to revise the unequal treaties among its aims, but this did not bear fruit. On the other hand, what they brought home was great. They confirmed with their own eyes what institutions, industries, and military a modern state was built upon. The leaders who returned poured those lessons into nation-building.

At home, the policy of promoting industry advanced through the building of state-run factories. In 1873 the Conscription Ordinance was promulgated, and a modern army that gathered soldiers broadly from the populace, not only from the samurai, was built. Railways were laid, postal and school systems were put in order, and people’s lives changed rapidly. And in 1889 the Constitution of the Empire of Japan was proclaimed, giving Japan the form of a modern constitutional state ahead of others in Asia. Examples of reshaping a country to this extent in such a short period are rare even worldwide, and this was unmistakably the ‘light’ of modernization.

That said, there is something we must not forget. The ‘strong army’ of ‘a rich nation and a strong army’ — that is, the strengthening of armaments — was set up from the very beginning as a central goal of the state. Possessing a strong army was thought to be the means to be regarded as an equal by the powers and to push back the unequal treaties. Modernization and military expansion were not separate things; they set out as two wheels of the same single goal. Here lay the seed of the later shadow.

The ‘Shadow’ Embedded in the Institutions

The stronger the light of modernization, the deeper the shadow stretching behind it. In Japan’s case, that shadow was embedded less in the ambitions of individuals than in the design of the institutions themselves.

Emblematic is the mechanism of the supreme command authority laid down in the 1889 Constitution of the Empire of Japan. The supreme command authority, the power to move the military, was made to report directly to the Emperor rather than to the cabinet. In principle it was an authority held by the Emperor, but in practice the military organs that assisted him held great power, and the government, which handled the budget and diplomacy, was structurally unable to readily intervene there. This arose from the idea of separating the military from the partisan strife of politics and making it independent. The intent itself was not necessarily a bad one.

Yet this ‘dual structure of government and military’ turns over into danger depending on how it is operated. When the military acted on its own judgment, the circuits to restrain it from the political side were weak. Everyone thought ‘that is outside my authority,’ and as a result there was nowhere any center bearing responsibility for the whole. This flaw, inconspicuous in peacetime, would first surface as a great calamity in moments of crisis such as the later Manchurian Incident. This hole in the structure, which we examine in detail in Episode 3, had in fact already been laid in the very earliest stages of this modernization.

Another shadow lay within people’s hearts. The ‘catch up and overtake’ modernization gradually nurtured a pride in a ‘Japan that had grown strong’ and an impulse to secure surrounding regions for one’s own safety. Becoming a strong power in order to survive became smoothly continuous with a desire to expand outward. Light and shadow were not separate stories but the front and back of the single road called modernization.

Anxiety, an Invisible Rudder

Looking at it this way, we see that the road to war did not begin suddenly one day. Its root lay in the fear and anxiety that modern Japan bore as it set out.

A nation threatened by the powers and forced to accept humiliating treaties tries desperately to catch up. That effort deserves praise, but the obsessive sense that ‘unless we catch up we will be destroyed’ sometimes nurtures a psychology that prioritizes face and momentum over cool calculation. The idea that one must be strong, that one must not show weakness, tends to make one grasp diplomacy as confrontation rather than negotiation. And that idea was technically underpinned by an institution in which the military could run out of control while half-independent from politics.

Modernization itself was not a mistake. The problem is that when the fear and anxiety that were its driving force somewhere outran the sense of self-restraint, they swept the whole nation in a direction hard to turn back from. The nation called Japan tried to grow strong in order to protect itself, and in the process of growing strong, it somewhere let the logic of defense slide into the logic of expansion — that branching point we can find in the very midst of this modernization.

And then comes the moment when this fear and anxiety finally bear fruit as a visible achievement: victory in modern Japan’s first full-scale war against a foreign power, against the great nation of Russia. Yet it is said that this very glittering victory would leave an unexpected side effect deep inside the nation. Next time, we follow what that Russo-Japanese War brought to Japan, and what it took away.