Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · 1910
How successful was Meiji Japan by 1912, and for whom?
The seminar question: “To what extent was Japan’s transition a success by 1912, and for whom?”
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.
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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 short answer
- 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.
The full answer, argued
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.
This is the study layer of Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, chapter 6 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000; the full index of the atlas is here.
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