A History of the World From the 20th to the 21st Century

(Jacob Rumans) #1

The continent of Asia can be divided into three
regions, each in a different relationship to the
West. Southern and south-east Asia was, by the
close of the nineteenth century, partitioned by
the European powers and the US and constituted
the most populous and important parts of the
Western world empires. In eastern Asia, China
had fallen under a different kind of Western
control, remaining semi-independent, but with
large areas under foreign economic control, while
some parts of China had also fallen under foreign
territorial control. Also part of eastern Asia were
the islands of Japan.
Japan’s history is strikingly different from the
rest of Asia. Japan had been forced open by
the American warships of Commodore Perry
in the mid-nineteenth century and exposed to the
pressures of the Western powers backed by guns.
They refused to permit Japan to follow its own
course in isolation and demanded, as a Western
right, that Japan open its markets to trade with
the West. The rulers of Japan, the Tokugawa
shoguns, could not match the military power of
the West and so had to concede. After 200 years
of virtual isolation, imposed by the shoguns to
protect it from Western influence, Japan then lay
exposed and virtually helpless. Like China, it was
forced to accede to ‘unequal treaties’, providing
Western merchants with economic advantages
and special territorial privileges which set aside
Japan’s sovereign rights but, unlike China, was
allowed to ban opium. Half a century later, by the


early twentieth century, the Western powers
agreed to abrogate the ‘unequal treaties’ and
Japan developed a military power not only
capable of defeating its much larger neighbour,
China, but also one of the Western great powers,
Russia. The foundations of a modern state had
been laid and Japan stood on the threshold of
replacing Western dominance in eastern Asia. By
the fourth quarter of the twentieth century,
though its military power was modest and its
Asian territorial empire broken by the West, Japan
had become an industrial power.
Economic and social change from the early
nineteenth century onwards eroded Japan’s
orderly traditional society. To internal strains were
added external ones all pointing to the need for a
stronger state, an ending of the shogunate era
and a centralised nation built around a restored
monarch. The urgent need for such strengthening
was brought home to the Japanese by the forcible
appearance of the West. Japan’s response under
the last of the shoguns was to make an effort to
catch up with Western military technology. The
industrialisation of Japan had its beginning not in
the setting up of a textile mill, but in a shipyard in
1863 capable of building steam warships. The
process was much accelerated after the 1868
revolution known as the Meiji Restoration. The
requirements of armaments and attempts to gain
self-sufficiency created the Osaka Ironworks
(1881) and at about the same time steel-making
by the Krupp method was started. Heavy industry

Chapter 7


THE EMERGENCE OF JAPAN, 1900–29

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