Between 1894 and 1945 Japan built an empire, flirted with democracy at home, and then followed its army into a war that ended in catastrophe. Each of these stories shaped the others.

Wars with China and Russia

Japan and Qing China both sought influence over Korea. In the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to 1895, Japan's modernized forces won quickly. The Treaty of Shimonoseki gave Japan the island of Taiwan and a large indemnity. Russia, France and Germany forced Japan to give back the Liaodong peninsula it had also won, and Russia soon leased it for itself, a humiliation Japanese leaders never forgot. Japan signed an alliance with Britain in 1902, then attacked Russian forces in Manchuria in 1904. Admiral Togo Heihachiro destroyed Russia's Baltic fleet in the Tsushima Strait in May 1905, and the American president Theodore Roosevelt mediated the peace. The war shocked the world because an Asian power beat a European one for the first time in modern warfare, inspiring nationalists from Egypt to India. Yet the peace brought no cash indemnity, and crowds in Tokyo rioted.

Colonial rule in Korea

Japan made Korea a protectorate in 1905 and annexed it outright in 1910. Colonial rule built railways and factories but suppressed Korean political life, took land and later tried to erase Korean identity, pushing Japanese names and language. On 1 March 1919 Koreans read a declaration of independence in Seoul, and the March First Movement, a Korean campaign for independence, spread across the peninsula through peaceful demonstrations. Japanese forces crushed it, killing thousands, though totals are disputed. The movement reshaped Korean nationalism and pushed Tokyo to soften its methods for a time.

Taisho democracy

At home, political parties gained ground during the reign of the Taisho emperor (1912 to 1926). In 1918 Hara Takashi formed a party cabinet; he was the first commoner to serve as prime minister, lacking any noble title. The political thinker Yoshino Sakuzo argued that government should serve the people's welfare and follow their will, even under a sovereign emperor. Women's magazines such as Seito, founded in 1911, demanded new freedoms. Then in 1925 the Diet passed two laws together: male suffrage, which gave the vote to all men aged 25 and older, and the Peace Preservation Law, which punished anyone organizing to change the national polity or abolish private property. The second law became a tool for arresting socialists, communists and later almost any dissenter. Women did not gain the vote until 1945.

A darker episode had already revealed how fragile tolerance was. On 1 September 1923 the Great Kanto earthquake and the fires that followed killed more than 100,000 people in Tokyo and Yokohama. Rumors spread that Koreans were poisoning wells and setting fires. Vigilantes, sometimes with police and soldiers, killed thousands of Korean residents, along with some Chinese and Japanese mistaken for Koreans. Military police also murdered the anarchist Osugi Sakae and his partner Ito Noe.

The army takes control

The Great Depression crushed silk prices and drove farm families into misery, and many blamed party politicians and big business. Radical army officers and nationalist groups turned to violence. Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was shot in his residence in 1932. The February 26 Incident of 1936 was a failed coup by young army officers who killed several senior statesmen; it was put down, but the army emerged with more leverage over cabinets. Japan left the League of Nations in 1933 and went to full war with China in 1937. When Japanese troops took Nanjing in December 1937, they killed huge numbers of prisoners and civilians and raped many women; estimates range from tens of thousands to over 200,000 dead, and the scale is still bitterly disputed. On 7 December 1941 Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor and moved into Southeast Asia. The war ended after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet attack in August 1945. On 15 August, people across Japan gathered at radios to hear the emperor announce surrender, and most listeners had never before heard his voice.

Worked example: the two laws of 1925

Why would the same Diet widen the vote and pass a law against dangerous thought in a single session? Defenders of the package saw a balance: millions of new voters would join politics, and the security law would keep revolutionary movements, inspired by the Russian Revolution, from exploiting the change. Critics saw a trap. The law's vague phrase about changing the "national polity" let police decide which ideas threatened the state, and in 1928 it was amended to allow the death penalty. Over the following decade thousands were arrested, and fear silenced many who disagreed with the drift toward war. Elections continued and the Diet was never abolished, yet by 1940 the parties had dissolved themselves into a single patriotic association. The case shows that democracy can be emptied out while its forms remain. A vote matters most when people can also speak, organize and dissent without fear.