Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · CHAPTER 6 ·
Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars
Chapter 6 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000: “A Great Power”
Japan used war to become a great power. It defeated Qing China in 1894–95 and gained Taiwan by the Treaty of Shimonoseki, then, allied with Britain from 1902, fought Russia and won the naval battle of Tsushima in May 1905. Korea and Taiwan stayed under Japanese colonial rule until 1945.
Chapter 6 is part of membership. WW2 is free — every chapter. Try chapters 1–2 of any 2 other atlases (3 with a free account). Opening a new atlas uses one of them. Membership opens all 21 — Join.
Free printable Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia study guide, sent by email ↓
The map above is the world of Japan, August 1910 — Korea annexed.
Part of IB History: Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Japan’s leaders used war to complete the transition they had begun, because victory abroad was the fastest way to end the unequal treaties and to secure the country against Russia. In July 1894 Britain agreed to give up extraterritoriality, the right of its citizens in Japan to be tried only in British consular courts, much as if each carried a diplomat’s immunity, and within weeks Japan went to war over Korea with Qing China, the empire ruled by the Manchu Qing dynasty. Its army won at Pyongyang and its navy off the Yalu, and the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 gave Japan Taiwan and an indemnity, a cash payment forced on the loser much like the reparations later imposed on Germany. Russia, Germany and France then made Japan hand back the Liaodong peninsula, and in 1898 Russia leased its tip for itself, the blue patch at Port Arthur. Japan allied with Britain in 1902 and fought Russia in 1904–05, capturing Port Arthur and destroying the Russian fleet at Tsushima, which made Japan the first Asian state in modern times to defeat a European great power.
The wars turned Japan into a colonial empire, which is why the map of 1910 shows in red Taiwan, southern Sakhalin, the Kwantung lease (the tip of Liaodong, taken over from Russia) and, from August 1910, all of Korea. In 1905 Japan imposed a protectorate on Korea, an arrangement in which a stronger power controls a state’s foreign policy and government while its own ruler stays on the throne, and five years later it annexed the country outright. Koreans and Taiwanese resisted, and the cost of empire fell heavily on them. By Japan’s own records about 14,000 Taiwanese were killed in the conquest of 1895, and more than 17,000 fighters of Korea’s “righteous armies”, volunteer guerrilla bands of soldiers, peasants and scholars, died after 1907. Japanese taxpayers paid as well, for wars costing several times the national budget, and their anger erupted in the Hibiya riots of 1905. By 1911 Japan controlled its own tariffs and stood among the great powers. It had escaped its unequal treaties partly by imposing unequal treaties on its neighbours.
The full story
Korea was the strategic centre of Japan’s foreign policy, and the war of 1894–95 decided who would dominate it. Japanese leaders saw the peninsula as a dagger pointed at Japan, in a phrase later attributed to the Prussian adviser Jakob Meckel. When a peasant rebellion led by the Donghak religious movement made Korea ask China for troops in 1894, Japan sent a larger force, seized the royal palace in Seoul and declared war on Qing China in August. It won at Pyongyang and off the Yalu in September, and in November its troops took Port Arthur and massacred prisoners and many civilians, marked on the map. The Treaty of Shimonoseki in April 1895 gave Japan Taiwan, the Pescadores and Liaodong, ended China’s claim over Korea and imposed an indemnity, a forced payment like war reparations, of 200 million taels of silver. Within a week Russia, Germany and France made Japan return Liaodong. Japan had learned the rules of imperialism, the scramble among strong states for colonies, and those rules favoured the larger fleet.
The war with Russia, fought over the prize Japan had been made to surrender, showed how far the Meiji state had come. Taiwan was conquered against five months of resistance in 1895, and Japanese agents murdered Korea’s Queen Min that October. After the Boxer rising of 1900, an anti-foreign revolt in northern China, Russian troops occupied Manchuria while Russian railways crept towards Korea, so Japan allied with Britain in 1902 and attacked Port Arthur in February 1904. The siege of Port Arthur cost General Nogi’s army nearly 60,000 killed and wounded; at Mukden in March 1905, the arrow north of the peninsula, Japan won the war’s largest land battle; and at Tsushima in May Admiral Tōgō destroyed the Russian Baltic fleet. The peace signed at Portsmouth gave Japan southern Sakhalin, the Kwantung lease and the South Manchuria Railway, but no indemnity, so Tokyo crowds rioted in Hibiya. A non-Western state had beaten a European great power, at the price of some 80,000 to 90,000 Japanese dead and heavy foreign debt.
Korea paid the heaviest price for Japan’s rise, and its resistance shows that annexation was imposed on a people who fought it. In November 1905 Japan forced Korea’s ministers to accept a protectorate, under which a stronger state runs a weaker one’s foreign policy, and Itō Hirobumi became resident-general, in effect Korea’s governor. Because Emperor Gojong sent envoys to protest at the Hague peace conference in 1907, Japan made him abdicate and disbanded the Korean army. Soldiers, peasants and scholars then fought as “righteous armies”, and Japanese records count more than 17,000 Korean fighters killed by 1911, many in the 1909 sweep through Jeolla province marked on the map. Tokyo had decided on annexation in July 1909, and when the nationalist An Jung-geun shot Itō dead at Harbin that October, the killing gave Japan a pretext to move faster. In August 1910 Japan annexed Korea, which it ruled as the colony of Chōsen until 1945. The state that had escaped unequal treaties at home now ruled two colonies by force.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Security, prestige or profit? Why Japan built an empire
Historians agree that Japan expanded and disagree about which motive weighed most. The strategic argument was stated openly by Yamagata Aritomo in 1890, when he told the first Diet that Japan must defend a “line of sovereignty”, its own borders, and a “line of advantage” that ran through Korea. Peter Duus, in The Abacus and the Sword, shows how strategy and business moved together: Japanese merchants, railway builders and rice traders pushed into Korea before annexation, and the state protected them. National prestige mattered to leaders and public alike. Public intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, whose newspaper had once urged Japan to “leave Asia”, celebrated the war of 1894 as a contest between civilisation and backwardness, and crowds cheered every victory. Most historians conclude that security fears drove the decisions, that economic interests followed and deepened them, and that a newly nationalist public made retreat politically costly. Japan’s leaders also believed, with some evidence, that in their world a state that did not take colonies risked becoming one.
The colonisation of Korea and its historians
Japan presented its takeover of Korea as a lawful process, and that presentation is itself part of the history. Alexis Dudden’s study shows how Japanese officials used the vocabulary of international law, treaties and protectorates, to persuade the Western powers that annexation was legitimate, which is why the Western reaction in 1910 was so muted. Korean sources tell a story of coercion: the 1905 treaty was signed under armed pressure, Gojong’s envoys at the Hague were refused a hearing, and the righteous armies fought a guerrilla war for four years. An Jung-geun, executed in 1910, wrote an unfinished essay, “On Peace in East Asia”, arguing for cooperation among Japan, China and Korea against Western domination. Later scholars have debated whether colonial rule after 1910 modernised Korea’s economy or simply exploited it; Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson describe a “colonial modernity” that brought railways, schools and factories while subordinating Koreans to Japanese settlers and needs. Because Japan’s case for legality and Korea’s case for coercion rest on the same documents, the argument over 1905–10 has never closed, and it still shapes relations between the two countries.
Paying for victory: debt, taxes and the Hibiya riots
Victory over Russia left Japan with debts its public expected Russia to repay, and when no payment came the anger turned on the government. The war had cost between about 1.7 and 2 billion yen, several times the government’s annual spending, most of it borrowed. Loans raised in London and New York, arranged with the help of the American banker Jacob Schiff, supplied more than half of the war borrowing, and the national debt rose from about 530 million yen before the war to some 2.4 billion afterwards. Special war taxes on salt, textiles and incomes stayed in place after the peace. The public expected an indemnity to repay these sacrifices, as China had paid in 1895, and the Treaty of Portsmouth brought none. On 5 September 1905 a rally in Hibiya Park turned into three days of rioting in which crowds burned police boxes and attacked a pro-government newspaper; 17 people died and martial law was declared. Andrew Gordon reads the riots as the start of an “imperial democracy” in which urban crowds demanded both a stronger empire and a voice in politics.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Korea sat between three empires. Korea’s kingdom was weak, divided at court and traditionally a tributary of China, while Russia expanded towards it from the north. Japanese strategists believed that whoever controlled Korea could threaten Japan, and since the Treaty of Ganghwa in 1876 Japanese merchants and officials had been building influence there. The peninsula turned rivalry among China, Russia and Japan into two wars within ten years.
A modern state earned treaty revision. The constitution, cabinet and legal codes of the 1880s gave Britain the institutional reasons it had demanded, and on 16 July 1894 it agreed to end extraterritoriality from 1899. The treaty was signed days before war with China began. The foreign minister Mutsu Munemitsu, who negotiated it, saw it as proof that reform at home bought respect abroad. Equality with the West and expansion in Asia advanced together, each strengthening the other.
The Triple Intervention taught that only power counted. In April 1895 Russia, Germany and France advised Japan to return the Liaodong peninsula, and Japan, unable to fight all three, complied for an extra indemnity. In 1898 Russia leased the same peninsula’s tip, including Port Arthur, for itself. The episode convinced Japanese leaders and public alike that international law protected the strong, and it built support for rearmament and for an alliance that could match Russia.
Russia’s railways and Britain’s alliance set the timing. Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway and its branch across Manchuria to Port Arthur threatened to bring Russian armies to Korea’s border within a few years. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of January 1902 guaranteed that no third power would join Russia against Japan. Japanese leaders concluded that they had a narrow window to fight before the railway was finished, and in February 1904 they struck first.
THE TURNING POINT
Tsushima, 27–28 May 1905. The destruction of Russia’s Baltic fleet decided the war, and it is the hinge of Japan’s transition because it proved that the new state could defeat a European great power. After it Russia accepted mediation, the powers recognised Japan’s control of Korea, and Japan entered the circle of empires on equal terms. The victory was read across Asia, from Turkey to India, as evidence that Europe could be beaten. It also persuaded many Japanese that empire was the reward for their transition, a belief that led towards the wars of the twentieth century.
What it changed
Japan joined the great powers. By 1911, when Japan regained full control of its tariffs, every clause of the treaties of 1858 had been undone, and the alliance with Britain was renewed. Japan now negotiated with Western powers as an equal and held colonies like them. The goal set in 1868, a nation “standing with the nations of the world”, had been met within a lifetime.
Korea and Taiwan under colonial rule until 1945. Taiwan was governed from 1895 and Korea from 1910 by governors-general who were usually generals or admirals. Colonial rule brought railways, ports and schools built to serve Japan, and it brought land surveys that transferred land to the state and to Japanese owners, police control and the suppression of resistance. Both colonies were held until Japan’s defeat in 1945.
An expensive empire and a restless public. War debts, special taxes and a large standing army became permanent features of the budget. The Hibiya riots showed a public that wanted both empire and a say in politics, and urban protests helped bring down cabinets in 1913 and 1918. The Meiji state’s greatest success thus created the pressures that its successors would struggle to control.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — To what extent was Japan’s transition a success by 1912, and for whom?
Measured against its founders’ goals, the transition succeeded: Japan had kept its independence, ended the unequal treaties, built industry, railways and schools, created a constitution and defeated China and Russia. Modernisation theorists of the 1960s, such as Edwin Reischauer, presented it as the model of a peaceful, well-managed transformation. Later historians, including John Dower and Carol Gluck, stressed who paid: indebted farmers, girls in textile mills, the Ainu and Ryukyuans, and above all Taiwanese and Koreans, whose lands were taken by force. Some also trace the military’s later independence and the wars of the 1930s back to choices made in this period. A strong answer separates the success of the state from the experience of the people it ruled and conquered, and it judges each against evidence. The transferable insight is that a transition can succeed brilliantly at making a state strong while shifting much of its cost onto people who had no voice in it.
An interesting fact
Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō, the victor of Tsushima, had trained as a young officer in Britain in the 1870s, aboard the training ship HMS Worcester. Before the battle he hoisted a signal that echoed Nelson’s at Trafalgar, telling his crews that the empire’s fate depended on the day and every man must do his utmost. His flagship, the battleship Mikasa, was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness in England and launched in 1900. Weeks after the war she sank at her moorings after a magazine explosion that killed hundreds of her crew, was raised and repaired, was later turned into a memorial ship, and is still preserved in concrete at Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, as one of the last surviving battleships of her era.
Related
THE FREE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
Join the Dispatch — a short welcome series, then a letter when a new atlas opens — and the printable study guide for Remaking the State is yours now, free.
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME