Empire of Japan

The Empire of Japan, also referred to as the Japanese Empire, Imperial Japan, or simply Japan, was the Japanese nation-state that existed from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 until the enactment of the reformed Constitution of Japan in 1947.

Quotes

• The astonishing modernisation of Japan since she had abandoned her self-imposed isolation from the West in 1868 had left her traditional society and its moral code little changed. She had copied German and American industry, the German army and the English and German navies. She had not copied the liberal assumptions by which English statesmen governed their actions. The Japanese view of international relations owed nothing to Christianity, evangelical or otherwise; and the internationalist moralising and idealism then current in Britain were as foreign and incomprehensible to the Japanese as to thirteenth-century English barons. For Japanese society remained feudal, hierarchical, obedient, each man looking to his patron and so on upwards to the emperor, who was not only the ruler of the country, but divine and therefore an object of worship. The Japanese venerated the ideal of the warrior brave in battle, jealous of honour, loyal unto death and achieving fulfilment in dying by violence. It was not therefore the gentle dreams of League-of-Nations believers in the West, but bloodthirsty reveries of a destiny of conquest which inspired the most powerful groups in Japanese society, the leaderships of the armed forces.
  • Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (1972), p. 250

• The main driving force has been a primitive lust for power and dominion among a powerful section of Japan's warrior caste. Just as in the days of feudalism the warriors—the shoguns, the daimyos and the samurai—dominated the domestic political scene, so the successors of that caste to-day—a section of the military and naval leaders and of the corps of "Younger Officers"—aspired to dominate the world outside Japan. They looked upon war as their chosen instrument. Taken as a whole—there are of course many individual exceptions—these successors of the samurai are arrogant, cruel, conceited and possessed of an overweening ambition to dominate and conquer for the greater "glory" of Japan. I do not suggest that this primitive lust of conquest is confined to the Army; but the Army is unquestionably its spiritual home and, but for Army influence in the State, it would never have played such a part in the shaping of Japan's destinies.
  • Robert Craigie, Behind the Japanese Mask (1946), pp. 162-163

• [Japan is] a restless and aggressive Power, full of energy, somewhat like the Germans in mentality, seeking in every direction to push out and find an outlet for her ambitions.
  • Lord Curzon, statement to the 1921 Imperial Conference, quoted in William Farmer Whyte, William Morris Hughes: His Life and Times (1957), p. 436

• If new warships are considered necessary we must, at any cost, build them: if the organization of our army is inadequate we must start rectifying it from now; if need be, our entire military system must be changed...
  At present Japan must keep calm and sit tight, so as to lull suspicions nurtured against her; during this time the foundations of national power must be consolidated; and we must watch and wait for the opportunity in the Orient that will surely come one day. When this day arrives, Japan will decide her own fate, and she will be able not only to put in their place the powers who seek to meddle in her affairs, she will even be able, should this be necessary, to meddle in their affairs.
  • Hayashi Gonsuke, statement after the end of the First Sino-Japanese War when the Triple Intervention by Russia, France and Germany compelled Japan to surrender its claims to Port Arthur and the Liaotung Peninsula, quoted in Richard Storry, Japan and the Decline of the West in Asia, 1894–1943 (1979), p. 30

• It seems indisputable that the strong Japanese sense of cultural uniqueness, the traditions of emperor worship and veneration of the state, the samurai ethos of military honour and valour, the emphasis upon discipline and fortitude, produced a political culture at once fiercely patriotic and unlikely to be deterred by sacrifices, and reinforced the Japanese impulse to expand into "Greater East Asia", for strategical security as well as markets and raw materials... On land and sea, the better-equipped Japanese forces seemed driven by a will to succeed.
  • Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988; 1989), pp. 267-268

• By 1938, in fact, Japan had not only become much stronger economically than Italy, but had also overtaken France in all of the indices of manufacturing and industrial production. Had its military leaders not gone to war in China in 1937 and, more disastrously, in the Pacific in 1941, one is tempted to conclude that it would also have overtaken British output well before actually doing so, in the mid-1960s.
  • Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988; 1989), p. 387

• Frankly he liked the Japanese. The reasons they gave very often for doing things were quite unintelligible, and they might have no conscience, but they did stand by those who stood by them ... Japan, on the whole, had been faithful to her obligations.
  • David Lloyd George, remarks to the Cabinet on the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (30 May 1921), quoted in Don Dignan, New Perspectives on British Far Eastern Policy 1913–19 (1969), p. 269