The series to this point has attempted to “paint a picture” of the nation of Japan at the doorstep of the 20th century. In one way it can be viewed as Japan’s experience and reaction to the western world. There was a point in time when Japan, as the apprentice, looked to China as the master of knowledge, spirituality, statecraft, governance, and the model of Japan’s aspirations. But by the late 9th century AD, the apprentice had matured and the master diminished. Japan stopped official missions to China. For the next 800 years or so, until the late 16th or early 17th centuries, the relationship was largely trade with occasional moments of diplomacy when one side or the other wanted something. As Japan entered the Edo Period, as mentioned in an earlier post, Korea became a point of contention between China and Japan with a series of wars in the 1590s fought on the Korean peninsula. It was at this point that Japan entered the Tokugawa Shogunate period and the nation of Japan implemented severe maritime policies that isolated the nation and the people from outside contact – which at this point meant the western powers and proselytizing Christian denominations. When Japan emerged from isolation with the fall of Tokugawa and the rise of the Meiji era, the world of Asia was radically changed. The once great China had been humbled and reduced to a near vassal state under the power of western commerce supported by its military.

This is when the theory of social darwinism left its mark on Japan. The leaders of Japan concluded that nations are competing organisms with only two outcomes: domination or eradication. China was the proof. Japan’s national strategies began to coalesce around this idea, especially buffer zones and strategic depth. Korea was described as “a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” And since conflict was inevitable, preemptive expansion was critical and the first goal was Korea. Leadership and thinkers concluded that if Japan did not dominate Korea, another power would. Japan rapidly modernized along Western military, industrial, and administrative lines. The most recent posts outlined the transformation of Japan’s military in support of these conclusions.

Meanwhile, China was a shell of its former self but Korea was still a tribute state dependent upon them.

Korea would be the flash point. The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) did not arise from a single crisis but from the collision of long-term structural change and immediate political triggers, centered above all on Korea.

Changes in Asian Dynamics

For centuries China presided over a tributary system in which Korea was a loyal client. By the late 19th century Western imperialism shattered this system and Japan has evolved into a nation ready to resist that same Western force to maintain its sovereignty even as China was losing theirs. Critical to Japan’s sovereignty was control of the “dagger pointed at the heart of Japan” – Korea. Japanese elites concluded that China was structurally incapable of defending Korea and that delay would allow Western powers or Russia to intervene. If Korea fell under hostile control, Japan would be exposed. Control of Korea, not its independence or vassalage to China was acceptable. Control of Korea was non-negotiable to Japan. Under such assumptions, diplomacy would fail and war was inevitable.

During the late 19th century, Korean society faced various social problems such as inequality, corruption, and excessive taxation. These problems later sparked a series of peasant-led rebellions culminating in the 1894 Donghak Peasant Rebellion. In the decade before this uprising, China and Japan signed the Tientsin Convention (1885) agreeing to withdraw their troops from Korea and agreed to notify each other before future deployments. During the rebellion, the Korean government requested troop support from China, who did not notify Japan. Soon enough Japan deployed army and navy assets to Korea – in far greater numbers than China’s deployment. Japan quickly captured and occupied Seoul and installed a pro-Japanese government.

Japan demanded joint Sino-Japanese reform of Korea and an end to Chinese vassalage. China rejected these terms and insisted on traditional authority. With terms and conditions far apart, Japan feared that further delay would give Western powers space to insert themselves into the problem. China feared humiliation. Negotiation collapsed, military incidents happened, fighting intensified and eventually war was formally declared. The First Sino-Japanese War resulted from the collision of Japan’s modern, survival-oriented strategy and China’s declining tributary authority, with Korea’s instability transforming long-term rivalry into unavoidable armed conflict (1894-95)

One step forward, one step back

I leave the details of the fighting to others. Japan won and extracted major concessions from China (Treaty of Shimonoseki):

• China transferred full sovereignty of Taiwan (then called Formosa), the Pescadores (Penghu Islands) and the Liaodong Peninsula including Port Arthur, a warm water port.
• China agreed to pay 200 million taels of silver which was about twice Japan’s annual budget.
• Opening of ports to Japan with the same favored-nation status as the western powers. In addition Japan could operate factories and industries in treaty ports meaning they could engage in manufacturing, not just trade
• For the first time in history, the two nations exchanged ambassadors – Japan was now one of the great powers.

This was a great step forward for Japan.

Immediately after the terms of the treaty became public, Russia, with its own designs and sphere of influence in China, expressed concern about the Japanese acquisition of the Liaodong Peninsula and the possible impact of the terms of the treaty on the stability of China. Russia persuaded France and Germany to apply diplomatic pressure on Japan for the return of the territory to China in exchange for a larger indemnity. 

At the end of 1895 Russia, France, and Germany (the Triple Intervention) pressured Japan to return Liaodong to China. Russia had the most to gain from the Triple Intervention. In the preceding years, Russia had been slowly increasing its influence in the Far East and had built a warm water port in the Russian east, Vladivostok. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the acquisition of another warm-water port on the China Seas would enable Russia to consolidate her presence in the region and further expand into Asia and the Pacific. Port Arthur falling into Japanese hands undermined its own need for the additional warm-water port in Asia. France and Russia agreed to help for their own reasons.

Japan complied but felt humiliated calculating it would not be able to resist a military takeover. The Liaodong episode radicalized Japanese attitudes toward Western powers and China. The Japanese public was outraged, especially after Russia obtained a 25-year lease on the peninsula in 1898. The reaction against the Triple Intervention was one of ongoing diplomatic conflicts with Russia.

One step back.

Implications and observations

The Treaty of Shimonoseki marked China’s transition from being the regional power broker to that of a  semi-colonial state. At the same time, it confirmed Japan as a modern imperial power and set the stage for Japan’s later continental expansion outlined in its “strategic buffer” policy.

The First Sino-Japanese war marked Japan as a military power – but was Japan capable of engaging a western military power? That question would be put to the test in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.

One of Japan’s conclusions about western powers is the pattern of unequal treaties that were forced upon China. Ironically, when one considers the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the terms heavily borrowed the mechanisms of Western unequal treaties but applied them with greater strategic finality. Where Western powers sought access and influence, Japan sought territory, hierarchy, and regional leadership. For China, this made the treaty uniquely traumatic: it confirmed not only military defeat but the collapse of an entire worldview in which China stood at Asia’s center.

In their treaties with China, western powers sought territorial concessions that were limited (e.g., Hong Kong) and strategic enclaves rather than full provinces. Japan demanded entire territories that were permanently transferred and then governed directly as colonies. Japan replicated Western economic imperialism but compressed its demands into a single treaty having learned all the lessons that came before. The treaty directly dismantled China’s tributary system, its regional leadership and removed Korea from China’s orbit. Where the western treaties weakened China globally; Japan destroyed China’s East Asian order.

The Treaty of Shimonoseki borrowed the mechanisms of Western unequal treaties but applied them with greater strategic finality. Where Western powers sought access and influence, Japan sought territory, hierarchy, and regional leadership. For China, this made the treaty uniquely traumatic: it confirmed not only military defeat but the collapse of an entire worldview in which China stood at Asia’s center.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives. 

When the Meiji era began in 1868, just as the nation was in transition from the Shogunate to a Constitutional Monarch, the Japanese military was undergoing a similar radical transformation. The underlying impetus was national survival. Having witnessed the fate of China in the face of more modern and powerful western militaries, Japan concluded that they too required a modern, Western-style military. They dismantled the Tokugawa samurai-based system and built a centralized national force modeled on European powers. 

At the beginning of the Meiji period the army was a fragmented, transitional force composed largely of former samurai from the victorious domains that had initiated the downfall of the Shogunate. It was not yet a national army as the soldiers’ loyalty was often domain-based. Training was uneven and nascent and not anywhere near the standards required to face western military power. There was a limited amount of modern rifles, some firearms left over from the previous age, but a wealth of samurai weaponry. But even if there were adequate manpower and suitable training, there was no professional officer corps with an understanding of modern warfare, tactics such as combined arms combat (soldiers and artillery support), and the necessary general staff to wage and support an army in the field under combat. All semblance of modern western military capability was lacking.

The Navy was a small, underdeveloped fleet inherited from the late Tokugawa period. There were sailing vessels and a handful of modern steamships, many purchased from abroad. While they possessed good seamanship and ship-to-ship engagements, fleet engagements were foreign to them, and even then lack the capital ships common to the western fleets, namely, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, auxiliary ships, and logistics capability to be a “blue water” navy. In the beginning they are best described as a coastal-defense force.

Twenty years later the army was fully centralized, conscription was in place, training was based on the ideal of Bushidō and Prussian organization and tactics. The army possessed a professional officer corps and general staff (logistics, intelligence, planning, medical services and more). Weaponry was modern in terms of rifles and artillery. Command and control functions were Prussian: centralized, disciplined and bureaucratic. It was a modern national army, capable of coordinated large-scale operations overseas.

The Navy had been reorganized and closely modeled the Royal Navy. Ships were constructed of steel and consisted of a range of large and small capital ships. A professionalized officer corps was in place, well versed in modern navigation, gunnery, and signaling. Even more, their role was integrated into a larger national planning to support Army operations with control of the sea, troop transport and blockade capabilities. In the Asia-Pacific region, apart from western fleets, they were the premier naval force.

At the start of hostilities, the IJN Combined Fleet composition was :

• 12 modern warships (primarily cruisers),
• 8 corvettes,
• 1 ironclad warship,
• 26 torpedo boats, and
• Numerous auxiliaries, armed merchant cruisers, and converted liners used for transport and support

There was a similar buildup and expansion of the Army. All of this came at a cost, but also with benefits. Among the benefits of the military buildup in the late-19th century was the acceleration of Japan’s industrial economy. The state invested heavily in shipyards, arsenals, steelworks, railways, and telegraph lines all of which helped create the foundations for heavy industries which were later transferred to private firms. The build up also stimulated existing sectors such as coal mining, metallurgy, engineering, and shipbuilding. The military buildup acted as a state-led industrial catalyst.

All of this needed to be funded, financed and paid for. To this end the government implemented the land tax reform, creating a stable, cash-based tax system. Revenue became more predictable and as a result enabled long-term military and infrastructure planning. This radical shift in central planning and finance strengthened the modern fiscal state but increased pressure on rural society where the land tax burden landed.

Military expansion was expensive, leading the early Meiji governments to run budget deficits. This problem was compounded by issuing paper currency accelerating inflation throughout the 1870s into the early 1880s. Military spending diverted resources from social welfare, rural investment, and development of the consumer sector of the economy. As a result, the citizens, especially the peasants bore much of the cost through taxes, while economic benefits were unevenly distributed. The social unrest came to a head in the Satsuma Rebellion, a revolt of disaffected samurai against the central government. The rebellion was very expensive for the government, which forced it to make additional monetary reforms including leaving the gold standard. The conflict effectively ended the samurai class. Economic discipline only stabilized in the early 1890s.

Military procurement fostered close ties between the state and emerging industrial conglomerates (zaibatsu such as Mitsubishi). These firms benefited from government contracts, subsidies and technology transfers, and access to capital and overseas markets. This helped create a modern capitalist elite aligned with state goals. Overall, military expansion stimulated economic modernization, but it did so through top-down coercive extraction, embedding a long-term pattern in which economic growth was closely tied to military and imperial priorities.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

It would not be accurate to describe the evolution of the Japanese military in the latter half of the 19th century. It was a radical revolution. After the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japan’s leaders concluded that national survival required a modern, Western-style military. They dismantled the Tokugawa samurai-based system and built a centralized national force modeled on European powers. This was made possible by Universal male conscription (1873) replacing hereditary samurai service, creating a national military loyal to the emperor rather than to domains or lords.

In order to accomplish this radical change, Japan looked to the nations it considered threats to Japan’s independence. This was accomplished by adopting foreign military models under the tutelage of foreign advisors. The army was modeled on Prussian doctrine that emphasized discipline, general staff organization, and state-controlled command. The navy was modeled on the British Royal Navy, adopting British ship designs, training methods, and naval strategy. At the same time, Japan imported modern rifles, artillery, and warships, then rapidly developed domestic arms industries, arsenals, and shipyards to ensure self-sufficiency.

Essential to the development of a modern military was formation and education. To this end, western-style military academies, staff colleges, and technical schools were established, professionalizing the officer corps and emphasizing science, engineering, and modern tactics. Western techniques were combined with emperor-centered loyalty, making the military both modern in form and uniquely Japanese in spirit. In addition, the spirit and lessons of the samurai were not lost. Japan did not simply preserve samurai tradition; it selectively reconstructed it.

Bushidō and the Meiji Military

Under Tokugawa Shogunate rule, “samurai spirit” referred to class-based ideals: loyalty to one’s lord, honor, discipline, and readiness to die. After 1868, the Meiji state detached these values from the samurai class and recast them as virtues for all citizens, especially soldiers. This recasting of the “samurai spirit” became known as Bushidō, and was a national moral code, not a code restricted to the military. But it did serve as a bridge between Japan’s past and its modern conscript army. No longer was there feudal loyalty to a daimyō; loyalty was now absolute and directed to the emperor. The Meiji Constitution made the emperor the “command-in-chief” of the army and navy. Bushidō preserved the form of samurai loyalty while transforming its object.

Formation and indoctrination of Bushidō was incorporated into every level of military training. While Japan adopted western drill, weapons, and organization, it paired them with ethical and spiritual instruction drawn from samurai ideals. Soldiers were taught: endurance, self-control, obedience, and acceptance of death as honorable if done in imperial service. These ideals were reinforced from the oath of service and in every course of education and training. Bushidō was simplified from is historical samurai basis and then standarized for modern instruction.

Bushidō was also incorporated in symbolic practices and rituals. Ceremonial language was ripe with honor and shame, casting failure as disloyalty to comrades and especially to the Emperor. Rituals reinforcing collective identity, willingness to endure hardship, and death as preferable to dishonor. The officer corp carried swords as symbols of moral authority and leadership. Clearly in modern warfare, the use of the sword was limited, but at the end of World War II photographs of kamikaze pilots before their final mission showed the officers with their swords which were carried in the cockpit on the one-way flight. All of this was an effort to link the modern military psychologically to the samurai past. 

Key writers and thinkers such as Nitobe Inazō positioned bushidō as Japan’s equivalent to Western chivalry, and proof Japan possessed a moral civilization worthy of great-power status. This intellectualization helped justify both military discipline at home and imperial mission abroad.

The fusion of western military structure, samurai-derived moral absolutism, and emperor-centered ideology produced a military culture that valued spirit (seishin) over material limits, encouraged endurance and sacrifice, and discouraged surrender and compromise. These traits became especially pronounced in the early 20th century. It is noteworthy that during World War II, less than 3% of imperial Japanese soldiers surrendered – and most of these were extremely sick, starving or critically wounded. In many instances, there were no Japanese survivors.

The effects of bushidō formation was strikingly evident in 20th century combat behavior.

• preference for death over surrender
• emphasis on spirit over material reality – commanders often stressed seishin (spiritual strength) to compensate for shortages in equipment or supplies, encouraging frontal assaults and last-stand defenses even when strategically unsound.
• fanatical defensive tactics where soldiers fought to the last man in Biak, Pelilui, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa reflecting the belief that total sacrifice was the highest form of loyalty.
• Banzai charges and later kamikaze missions were framed as noble offerings to the emperor, transforming death into a sanctioned military tactic.
• harsh treatment of prisoners and civilians since their surrender was and thus the prisoners were viewed with contempt, brutalized and executed in violation of the Law of War to which Japan was a signatory.

It also led to actions and campaigns that were strategically and tactically questionable supported by the guise that the bushidō spirit would compensate for all the evident shortcomings.

At the advent of the 20th century

By the late 19th century, Japan possessed a modern, disciplined, and industrialized military, capable of defeating China (1894–95) and Russia (1904–05), demonstrating that Japan had successfully adapted Western military systems to its own political and ideological framework.

When Japan adopted a Social Darwinist lens, East Asia ceased to be a shared moral world and became a competitive ecological system. Bushidō was the ideological element needed to form the military and the citizenry to not simply remain competitive but to become the apex nation in the Asia-Pacific sphere.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

In the previous post we considered the late 19th-century events in Hawaii that led to the overthrow of the Hawaiian constitutional monarchy and eventually the annexation of Hawaii as a U.S. territory. The post ended with the Japanese reaction to these events. This post explores the lens through which the Hawaii events were seen and the rationale for the coming wars with China (1894-1895) and Russia (1904-1905). It also forms the basis on how the United States will be increasingly seen from Japan’s point of view.

If you ask most people who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” the most probable reply is Charles Darwin. But the correct answer is Herbert Spenser, a 19th century English philosopher. He is best known for his theory that, much to his chagrin, came to be known as Social Darwinism. Spenser’s work was based on the evolutionary theory of Lamarck, who posited that organs are developed or diminished by use or disuse and that the resulting changes may be transmitted to future generations.  Spenser applied this view of evolution to society, proposing that societies, like organisms, evolve from simple to complex, and individuals/groups best adapted to competition thrive (“survival of the fittest”). He might be thought of as sociological “libertarian” as he advocated for minimal government interference (laissez-faire) to allow natural progress through specialization and adaptation, viewing society as an evolving organism. He argued for individual liberty and believed societal advancement comes from the “fittest” succeeding, leading to a more complex, efficient world.

When Spenser’s work reached late-19th-century Japan it reshaped elite thinking leading to a re-evaluation and view of China and East Asia after the Meiji Reforms. The core assumptions absorbed in Japan was that the nations compete like organisms in which there will always be a struggle for the resources that make life flourish and history will be governed by conflict in which weak states are absorbed or eliminated. Moral intention will not stave off extinction. For a nation that had long been invested in Confucian life where virtue and moral order are essential elements, the shift away from moral intentions to survival of the fittest, the natural pathway was imperialism and permanent competition for local, regional and global dominance.

It was a rapid shift away from traditional and classic ways of understanding the world order because they watched it unfold in the living laboratory called China. For Japanese elites and leaders social darwinism was evident in the Opium Wars, the Unequal Treaties, loss of economic control, and disintegration of internal cohesion. China became the empirical proof that moral civilization without power equals extinction.

Even before Spenser’s work reached Japan in 1870, Fukuzawa Yukichi published “Conditions in the West,” a meditation based on his observations in Europe and America. He introduced the concept that international relations operate by power, not morality and as a result weak nations are exploited regardless of virtue. He pointed out that China, while being morally refined, is politically helpless, no nation at all and is subjugated to the economic interest of the non-Asian world powers.

Among Japanese elites the dialogue asserted that Asia was collectively at risk, only strength and modernization could prevent subjugation, and equality would be granted only to those who could enforce it. Thus national survival required military parity, industrial capacity and territorial buffers

In 1882 Katō Hiroyuki published “A New Theory of Human Rights,” work in which Katō explicitly rejected natural rights, arguing that rights arise from power. He applied what was essentially evolutionary logic to politics: “The strong rule; the weak are destroyed—this is the law of nature.” Why this is significant is that his work marks the moment when evolutionary struggle became normative political theory. And then Spenser’ s work was translated by Katō and was propagated throughout academic journals tied to Tokyo Imperial University. Spencer’s philosophy opposed imperial aggression, but the Japanese elite emphasized struggle and survival.

In 1886, Tokutomi Sohō moved social darwinism to general readership with his work “The Future Japan.” In the popular work he combined social darwinism, national destiny, and historical inevitability. He argued that nations are competing organisms with only two outcomes: domination or eradication. He used China as the proof. This text popularized elite theory for mass readership, turning Darwinism into common sense.

In 1890 social darwinism was explicitly militarized as state strategy in the writings of Yamagata Aritomo. He was not translating western works, but synthesized western military theory to highlight key elements of national strategy: buffer zones and strategic depth. His famous idea was describing Korea as “a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” Yamagata asserted that since conflict was inevitable, preemptive expansion was critical and the first goal was Korea. If Japan did not dominate Korea, another power would. 

The ideas of Yamagata pointed to zones of survival that were more than geography. Given Japan’s lack of many natural resources, Manchuria became seen as a repository of needed resources and a buffer against Imperial Russia. Zones of survival were never neutral. It was in this view that imperialism was not aggression but was defensive in nature. The implications are that the “empire” was inevitable and forced by global conditions. This allowed Japanese leaders to claim: “We do not seek conquest; we seek existence.” It is a logic that removes ethical restraint.

Another important work was “Leaving Asia (1985) by Fukuzawa Yukichi. It was an essay that argued that Japan must separate from backward Asia (pointedly referring to China and Korea).  Strategically this transformed these two nations to “zones of survival” for their resources and to position to serve as a buffer against major powers.

The evolving integration of social darwinism into national polity and strategy began to transform Pan-Asianism. Early Pan-Asian thought was focused on solidarity among Asian nations in order to form a mutual defense in terms of culture, economy and border integrity. But under the concepts of social darwinism, Asia needed a leader.  Japan’s view was that they were the only viable candidate. Solidarity was replaced by the architecture of hierarchy within Asia.

This thinking was not uniform across the range of Japanese elites. Some Pan-Asian thinkers opposed the imperialism embedded in the fusion of the two forms of strategy. At the same time, business leaders worried about economic stability and national budgets being redirected to military expansion. But military and bureaucratic elites set the national policy

What this means is that, depending on who governed, international relationships would be increasingly less reliant on the role of diplomacy as international relations became zero-sum, evolutionary and amoral. This logic carries will become evident in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the Russian-Japanese War (1904–05), the aftermath of the Mukdan Incident (1931) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945; the opening action the the Asia-Pacific War) and in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

When Japan adopted a Social Darwinist lens, East Asia ceased to be a shared moral world and became a competitive ecological system. China was re-imagined not as a fallen elder brother but as an endangered species whose weakness threatened Japan’s own survival. Russia, Britain, France, Holland, Germany, and the United States were existential threats to Japan’s independence.

From this perspective, imperial expansion was a necessity for the very sake and survival of the nation.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.