For anyone even remotely familiar with the political trends and messaging across Northeast Asia, repeated refrains expressing concern for a re-emergence of Japanese militancy have become a common theme. These voices are strongest in China, but can be found everywhere, to some degree or another, that Imperial Japanese armies trod during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet what lies behind such fears is a more complicated history, one worth examining in order to better understand the social and political dynamics of this prosperous if potentially volatile region.
First, allow me to address the gorilla in the room. The arrival of Commodore Perry’s fleet of modern, steam-driven warships in Tokyo Bay in 1853, initiated the kind of shock that has traditionally driven every major change in Japanese custom, culture, and politics throughout its long history. Japan awoke to the fact that its long period of self-imposed, pseudo-isolation from the rest of the world, had left it far behind. The 19th century was an era of remarkable innovation in Europe and the Americas, but Japan at the time still wore the trappings of the late Medieval period. So, as the huge American vessels tied up beside rickety sailing boats in what would become Yokosuka, the scope of this technological gap was apparent for all to see.
This led to the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate, a government which had ruled Japan peacefully ever since Ieyasu Tokugawa defeated his rivals at the climactic battle of Sekigahara in 1600. The Meiji Restoration which followed—so-called because it placed the Emperor “back” in a position of national leadership—caused bloody turmoil across Japan, but led eventually to the establishment of an outwardly more Western style of government, though ruled from above and within in a traditional Japanese manner. Regardless, fear of Western imperialism had driven the tumultuous change, and that fear would color Japan’s near future. Determined not to fall prey to foreign imperialist designs already evident across China and Southeast Asia, Japan emulated the Western powers, crafting a foreign policy and military designed to give the island nation teeth of its own. Essentially Japan sought to become a predator itself.
What followed is well understood, with Japan’s early—and successful—ventures against China and Imperial Russia paving the way for the more far-reaching campaigns of the 1930s. This period of Japanese aggression was presented as a liberation of Asian peoples from the scourge of Western influence, but was largely always understood for what it was, Japan’s entry into global imperial competition. History podcaster Dan Carlin likens Japan’s sudden lust for empire to an athlete experimenting with steroids, loving the immediate results and ignoring likely side-effects. This provides wonderful imagery and helps to understand how Japan found itself on the wrong side of World War II with consequences that are still evident 74 years later.
This time of Japanese imperialism lasted a mere 51 years in total, from the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894 to Surrender in Tokyo Bay in 1945, but provides all the fuel which powers “Militant Japan” rhetoric today. And yet, as I’ve mentioned a few times before on this blog, the nation-states which occupy this part of the world have histories measured in the thousands of years. Half a century is a mere drop in the proverbial bucket of Asian history. Taking such a myopic view of the region’s geo-politics, limited to such a tiny sliver of time, ignores much of the history that actually lies beneath.
Excepting this period, Japan has actually only invaded two sovereign nations in its entire history, the Kingdom of Ryukyu in 1609, and Joseon Korea in 1592. Japanese pirates raided the coasts of China and Korea for centuries in the first and second millennium A.D.—often penetrating deep into the interior of both countries—but these were never state-sponsored actions. Ironically, it was the experience of these destructive pirate raids along the coasts of Korea that inspired the development of that nation’s cannon-armed navy, an unintended effect that would virtually ruin Japan’s Korean invasion.
On the continent, successive Korean kingdoms fought an incredible number of defensive campaigns—most of them successful—but really only ever conducted short-term raids against three nations: the Jurchen of Manchuria, Sui Dynasty China, and Japan. Korean raids against pirate bases on Tsushima Island in Japan from 1389 to 1419 were short term affairs and varied greatly in the degree of success achieved.
The Jurchen—later known as the Manchus—would, of course, invade many other nations, to include Korea, eventually seizing China from the Ming and establishing the Qing Dynasty. More well-known, however, though emerging from the same womb of nations on the endless steppe, were the Mongols. The empire built by successive khans eventually stretched from the Bering Strait in the east to Romania and Turkey in the west. Yet two attempted invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, failed to gain a foothold, and both fleets ended up being destroyed by powerful storms.
China—arguably the loudest voice in the anti-Japanese choir—has a much more aggressive past than any of its neighbors, to include the Mongols. The latter empire rose and fell in a relatively short historical timeframe, a mere hundred-and-thirty years from prominence to effective disintegration. Yet China had firmly established itself as an expansive power as early as 119 BC when the Han Dynasty invaded neighboring Xiongnu territory.
The Han Dynasty, throughout its various forms, would go on to exert military control over much of Korea and the northern tip of what is today Vietnam. Korea would fight hard to rid itself of Chinese control, resulting in the establishment of three independent kingdoms on the peninsula. As well, the experience would foster an eternal Korean desire to avoid a recurrence of that fate in the future.
Successive Chinese dynasties would conduct no fewer than six major invasions and uncountable minor incursions onto the Korean Peninsula. In addition, Tang China would involve itself in the ubiquitous warring of the Korean Three-Kingdom period, allying with Silla to defeat first Baekje and then Goguryeo, before being ejected. As well, China would come to Joseon Korea’s aid to expel the Japanese invasion of 1592, dispatching both armies and navies to that conflict, yet even then, once the Japanese had withdrawn, Korea was anxious to rid itself of an allied army whose behavior was little better than that of the invaders they fought. China’s final incursion onto the peninsula occurred in 1950 when it intervened to prop up the Marxist regime of Kim Il-Sung in North Korea, a decision that made permanent the division of the peninsula into Northern and Southern states, and led inexorably to the current nuclear crisis in Northeast Asia.
Throughout the existence of unified Chinese rule, the country would invade the lands of the Viet peoples, Tibet, Burma, and India again and again, generally without lasting success. The most recent failed attempt at forcing a military solution in Southeast Asia took place in 1978 when the People’s Liberation Army marched into Vietnam resulting in the loss of some 7,000 Chinese military casualties—and untold numbers of Vietnamese civilians— before withdrawing three weeks later.
Yet these periods of aggressive Chinese expansion have generally been interspersed with periods of decline. The latest of these occurred with the passing of the Manchu-dominated Qing Dynasty in 1912, and continued more-or-less until China recovered from the effects of World War II, arguably sometime within the past two decades. This recovery was greatly aided by the acquisition of Hong Kong’s vast financial assets in 1997 as well as subsidies provided to the “developing country” as late as 2018 by—ironically enough—Japan. Not to be confused with post-war reparations, Japan contributed significantly to the rise of the nation that would take its place as the second strongest economy in the world … and then threaten it militarily.
Today, claiming sovereignty over islands far from its shores and lands far from its borders, China’s return to a policy of aggressive expansion is clear for all to see. China has built military bases off the coasts of multiple other nations and all but dared the rest of the world to respond. And yet, despite the rapid growth of China’s military capability in the region, Chinese fear-mongering, justified by the supposed existence of a fabled, aggressive and threatening Japan, remains never far from PRC rhetoric.
Limiting one’s view of history to a narrow and contrived window can make this look like a well-founded concern, but taking a wider view of the region’s historical record provides an altogether different picture. When China is healthy, it tends to invade other countries. While this might appear at first glance a policy option belonging to the distant past, nothing ever really changes, it seems, for China, which has awakened from its recent slumber … and is once again looking for a meal.
M.G. Haynes