Japan To some extent Japan's position, first as paragon of modernity in Asia at the beginning of the century, then as regional bully, and, after 1945, as a model of industrial development, has been determined by the country's desire to seek a secure place in a rapidly shifting world. While the collective sense of insecurity no longer verges on feelings of alarm or national hysteria, the Japan of today still occasionally reflects upon its vulnerability even though it is proclaimed as an economic superpower.
In 1902, only half a century since Japan had been a largely feudal country in the most part isolated from the outside world, its government succeeded in cementing an alliance on equal terms with Great Britain. Victory in the
Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) confirmed Japan's position as Asia's only modern power. The territorial concessions in southern Manchuria which she was able to win from Russia, Britain, France, and the USA allowed her to obtain colonial possessions on the continent and to begin to pursue her ambitions there with some confidence. Korea was formally annexed in 1910 and the development of the South Manchurian Railway Company ensured Japan's growing involvement in the region.
Also at this time emerged the first worrying signs of flaws within Japan's constitutional system. Because the architects of its modern governmental structures had understood that existing institutions and public opinion would not keep pace with Japan's rapid social and economic change, they had designed a system of government in the late nineteenth century in which power was exercised by the small clique of oligarchs who ruled Japan. Accordingly, power was not concentrated in the formal structures and branches of the state, which instead owed responsibility to the ‘transcendental’ authority of the Emperor, through whom Japan was governed. With the death of the Meiji Emperor (r. 1866–1912) and the inevitable demise of the politicians who had led the modernization of the country, a vacuum was created within the political system which competing groups sought to fill. Already by the turn of the century, the importance of the Imperial Diet and its control over the national budget was such that Japan's rulers were forced to establish their own political party, the
Seiyûkai, in order to bring the legislature under their control. The coming catastrophe was foreshadowed by the political crisis of late 1912, in which the army boycotted its Cabinet post in a disagreement over policy, with the threat of governmental paralysis.
Nevertheless, the years that followed were relatively prosperous and peaceful, particularly while World War I occupied the European powers and left their markets in Asia open to Japanese competition. At the end of the war, economic uncertainty brought social unrest. In response, one form of party government was achieved in the 1920s, beginning with
Hara Takashi's cabinets (1918–22), although international and domestic pressures ensured that democratic practice had only the most tenuous of footholds during the Taishô era (1912–26). During these years there was a blossoming of intellectual and artistic life, as well as a more vigorous and popular political scene known as ‘Taishô democracy’.
At the same time, nearly a decade of slow economic growth was capped by the international economic collapse of 1929. Years of deflation in agricultural prices, and the destruction of the market in traded commodities such as silk, imposed severe hardship, especially on Japan's rural population. Moreover, an unprecedented number of banking collapses put the financial system under strain. The economic crisis combined with political controversy. Abroad, Japan was forced to accept an inferior position for her navy in the Pacific at the
Washington Conference, which was confirmed and extended a decade later by the London Naval Treaty (1930). To many in the Japanese military, at a time when the security of Japanese resources and personnel in her overseas possessions was paramount, these crucial interests seemed to be sacrificed to Western diplomatic sophistry.
To such groups, politicians appeared to put the interests of their
zaibatsu sponsors above those of the Japanese people. The rash of political assassinations and intrigues during these years had little in common except that the conspiracies involving young political officers, gangsters, and idealistic youths made common cause with the interests of the rural poor and viewed the political class as their natural enemy. Far from the control of Tokyo, Japan's military adventurers took over Manchuria in an aggressive action (
Manchukuo), and the international opprobrium that followed encouraged Japan to leave the
League of Nations in March 1933. Late the following year, Japan also withdrew from the Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty, deepening confrontation with the USA. At home, the febrile political climate of the 1930s climaxed in 1936 with the so-called ‘26 February Incident’, in which young officers attempted to assassinate the entire cabinet and seize control of the government. The incident and its suppression allowed a hardline grouping including
Ishiwara Kanji and
Tôjô Hideki to consoldiate a power base within the military high command. It was these individuals who, with support from business interests, the mass media, and the bureaucracy, pursued their policies for preparation for a total war with the West and the aggressive expansion of the Japanese presence in Asia.
When Japan chose to attack the USA at
Pearl Harbor in December 1941 it was already involved in the
Sino-Japanese War. The decision to take on the colonial powers of Asia, was, therefore, a military gamble, the risks of which were well understood from the beginning. Initially, however, the gamble seemed to pay off, as the Japanese armed forces outmanoeuvred and outfought their opponents in campaigns which brought victories in
Hong Kong,
Singapore,
Malaya,
Burma, and the Philippines. But with Japanese control extending across most of the Pacific, the USA and the
British Empire were able slowly to push back Japan's armed forces in some of the most determined fighting of World War II. With Okinawa already under the control of the Allies by the spring of 1945 and Manchuria lost to the
Red Army in a matter of days, the USA dropped atomic devices on
Nagasaki and
Hiroshima, bringing the conflict to a close by the unconditional ceasefire of Japan on 15 August 1945, with unconditional surrender formally coming into effect on 2 September 1945. The arrival of Japan's American conquerors coincided with a widespread feeling of revulsion against the leaders who had allowed Japan to embark on its self-destructive spiral of war. Although the precise meaning of this foreign occupation has become a matter of debate since, it is certain that many of the reforms and innovations of the period between 1945 and 1952 had a positive and profound impact. Although the Allies had intended a punitive mission to demilitarize Japan and punish those it viewed as responsible (
Tokyo Trials), the American military administration, officially known as the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (
SCAP) was also highly reformist in character. Economic, political, and social rights and freedoms were introduced and guaranteed by a new Constitution. Moreover, a health and welfare system and massive land reform sought to address social injustice and poverty. With the occupiers gone in the early 1950s, Japan's conservative establishment set about revising those reforms which they did not care for. The legislation of more centralized controls over the police and education systems by the governments of
Hatoyama Ichirô and
Kishi Nobusuke, however, provoked mass popular protests on the streets of Tokyo and in the Diet. The late 1950s were a fevered time, and for many opposition leaders the use of police against protesting crowds and in the Diet, as well as the return of political assassinations, evoked dark memories of the 1930s. In the workplace, during the same period, Japanese business leaders sought to counter the militant unions that dominated key industries, such as in automobile manufacturing and electronics, by establishing secondary unions which were much more conciliatory towards the management.
Japan's factories were also at the centre of the economic and social transformation of Japan during the 1960s. For those employed in Japan's larger enterprises in particular, new practices emerged which lessened the differences between workers and involved them more closely in the manufacturing process. Staffed with flexible and increasingly better-educated staff, Japanese businesses recorded unprecedented high economic growth from the 1950s until the early 1970s. This industrial expansion brought with it new wealth to salaried workers, who began to experience the joys and drawbacks of a mass consumer society for the first time. Underlining Japan's status as a leading economic power, in the
Japan–United States Security Treaty Prime Minister Satô Eisaku was able to negotiate the return of a nuclear-free Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty at this time (Okinawa was officially handed over on 15 May 1972).
The story of Japan's economic miracle has been so remarkable as to be overwhelming in most historical accounts, but there was a darker side. A combination of the relatively rapid expansion of heavy and chemical industries, along with urban growth far in excess of demographic changes and a boom in mass consumer markets, especially cars, wrecked the quality of the environment. Under these circumstances, pollution became an issue of such enormity that opposition became a burgeoning political movement. The energy crisis of the 1970s (
oil price shocks) imposed inflationary pressures on Japan, as it did on the rest of the industrialized world. For the Japanese, 1974 was the first year since 1945 that economic growth had been negative. Also during this period Japan suffered a sharp revaluation of its currency against the dollar, and the shock of having one of the main planks of its foreign policy undermined when President Nixon announced the surprise rapprochement of the USA with China. In characteristic style, the government of
Tanaka Kakuei responded by negotiating its own diplomatic settlement with the mainland Chinese.
Despite the second energy crisis and worldwide recession of the early 1980s, Japanese industry showed a remarkable ability to absorb the increased costs of raw materials. By the middle of the decade, a new confidence was evident in the country's prosperity and place in the world. At the Group of Five Plaza Accords in September 1985 it was decided to strengthen the yen against the dollar, in an attempt to resolve the trade imbalances caused by the success of Japanese export industries. This, in combination with structural reforms of the Japanese economy, which had the objective of transforming industrial demand from being export-led to being domestically driven, had the result of producing unprecedented asset inflation. The bubble economy, as it came to be known, finally burst in the early 1990s, causing a slump in Japan's property values and wiping out more than half of the Tokyo stock exchange's share value. While much of Japan's economy remained relatively stagnant during the mid-1990s, economic depression commenced in 1997, the first year of negative growth since 1974. This was triggered by the government's deflationary policies, and led to the collapse of a number of prominent banks and companies which had come to rely on cheap credit for survival. An inability to effect fundamental structural reform and change the nature of industrial relations led to a continued decline in Japan's GDP through 1998 and 1999. By 2002, estimates by private investment banks put the size of bad loans at over 20 per cent of GDP. Domestic demand was depressed, which in turn caused, and was affected by, relatively high rates of unemployment. The consequent deflation increased the real size of public and private debt still further. Economic decline also reflected an inability of the political establishment, led by the LDP, to respond effectively. Instead, the LDP was concerned with its own corruption scandals and the continued survival of its entrenched elites, while the
Socialist Party and the
Communist Party suffered from the challenges of political powerlessness and ideological renewal. This led to a reformation of the party system, and the formation of the New
Kômeitô and the
Democratic Party. The Democratic Party developed into a strong opposition party, obtaining 177 out of 480 seats in the 2003 elections to the House of Representatives. The LDP was revived by
Koizumi, whose coalition won a reduced majority in the 2003 elections.
