Ever been surprised to learn something that contradicts what you just KNEW that you knew?  Its an odd feeling, I know, and have felt it on occasion myself.  It’s almost like you suddenly feel the need to doubt EVERYTHING you know … because that one “fact” turned out not to be so factual.  This, like any real self-reflection or earnest intent to better oneself, can be a painful process, but it always leads, I think, to a fuller understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

What am I blathering on about today, you ask?  Well, it occurred to me this week—perhaps because I’m just strange and totally obsessed with history and the lessons it offers us today—that the angst much of Northeast Asia continues to feel toward Japan for past aggression is built upon a pretty weak foundation.  The story of historical Japanese aggression is both true and false, both fact and … pardon the allusion to one of my own recent blog posts … fiction.  So, let’s jump into this and separate fact from fiction. 

Japan has existed as a political entity essentially since the Yamato State first congealed in about 250 A.D.  The Meiji Restoration began in 1867.  In the intervening 1,617 years, Japan had only ever launched three invasions of foreign states: the twin invasions of Joseon Korea in 1592 and 1597, and the invasion of the Kingdom of Ryukyu—modern day Okinawa—in 1609.  In a millennium and a half, that’s it!  Now, don’t get me wrong, much of that time—at least until the Tokugawa enforced a peace regime on the country in about 1615—was spent in internal warfare.  Still, the central government, whether led by the emperor early on or military strongmen later, very rarely ventured abroad.  One can easily contrast that record with over ten invasions of Korea by various Chinese dynasties, seven by the Mongols alone, and more incursions and invasions than can be easily counted by the Jurchen and Manchus.

The exception—though admittedly the distinction wouldn’t have mattered much to people at the time—was the pirate or wokou phenomenon which lasted from the 13th to the 16th Centuries.  That said, the close correlation between that period of intense pirate activity across Northeast Asia and the worst of Japan’s Warring States Period, the Sengogku Jidai, cannot be overlooked or diminished.  Piracy has, throughout human history, often resulted from horrible economic conditions at home, and the same appears to have been true in Japan.  Regardless, there remains no evidence of Japanese state sponsorship of pirate raids on the Korean and Chinese coasts.  In fact, one of the first indications of increasing central authority in Japan was a noticeable decrease in pirate activities along the coasts of Northeast Asia.

All that said, the eventual fall of Joseon Korea to the Manchus in 1637—a tribal people derived mainly from the vast Jurchen tribes the Koreans had successfully fended off for nearly a millennium—can be directly attributed to the devastation caused by Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s 16th Century invasions of Korea.  That war resulted in the deaths of up to a million Koreans, and all but destroyed the agrarian infrastructure that fed the kingdom.  For Joseon to be attacked while still recovering from such a blow—albeit a successful defense of their kingdom that saw untold numbers of Japan’s military elite to early graves—was just too much.

More to the point, however, despite Hideyoshi’s stated intent to pass through Joseon to invade China, one can infer an awful lot by the lack of demonstrated application of military force to achieve such a lofty goal.  The 1592 invasion involved—at its height—some 173,000 men, though only about 150,000 actually set foot on the peninsula.  These battle-hardened veterans, survivors of endemic warfare at the time in Japan, proved wholly insufficient to even take and hold Joseon, much less invade China.  Hideyoshi, the product of a lifetime of conflict and victor of countless battles, campaigns, and wars, couldn’t have possibly thought that force powerful enough to take and secure the Korean Peninsula, and then launch itself into the vastness of Chinese land and people.  A preposterous idea!  More likely, having finally achieved the unification of all Japan, Hideyoshi sought to rid himself of those troublesome samurai holdouts—mainly from Kyushu and Shikoku.  Those domains bore a burden in prosecuting the Korean campaigns all out of proportion to their size, making up a full half of the invading army.

The invasion of Ryukyu, in 1609, is also worthy of a slight digression.  While certainly blessed by the Tokugawa regime before and after the fact, the invasion was funded, planned, and executed by a single samurai clan, the Shimazu.  This family then ensured that they alone benefited from the vital trade route running through Naha port on Okinawa.  It was neither billed nor treated like a Japanese acquisition, really, until the Meiji Era, long after the fact.

Where claims of Japanese aggression start to ring more true is beginning in the relatively recent past, with the dissolution of the Tokugawa Shogunate and establishment of a Meiji Constitution.  Forced at the point of very large cannon on modern U.S. Navy warships, Japan “opened” to western trade, an experience that shocked the Japanese system to its core, speeding an end to the otherwise peaceful 268-year Tokugawa rule.  Meiji Japan, fearing colonization by western nations or simply dominance and economic exploitation, committed the nation to a rapid modernization in all sectors of society, including the military.

The more Japan sought to modernize along the lines of western nations, the more certain elements within the Meiji government came to believe that in order for Japan to be taken seriously by the world’s major powers, it needed to act like one.  In simplest terms, this meant the taking and administration of overseas colonies.  This, in turn, required military conquest.

Rapidly building a formidable army—on first a French, and then a German model—Meiji Japan complemented it with a first-class navy inspired by the British.  Regardless, with much national sacrifice, essentially forcing their people to speed through some five centuries of western progress in the space of just 30 years, Japan willed itself into modernity.  That policy and philosophical elements they envied in their national-level role models would lead to their destruction was quite beyond anyone’s comprehension at that point.  They simply observed that “great states” took, administered, and exploited weaker ones.  To a technologically backwards Meiji Japan looking to absorb as much as possible from the modern world in the shortest possible time, this was the most poignant lesson learned.

War with the Manchurian Qing Dynasty, then ruling China, in 1894-95, was for all intents and purposes a cake walk as a fully modern Imperial Japanese Army and Navy all but destroyed the forces of the once-mighty Qing.  As their reward—after a much-resented intervention by Russia, Germany, and France forced Japan to return the Liaodong Peninsula—Japan secured a huge financial indemnity and broke Joseon Korea out of the Qing orbit … a precursor for establishing control over that by now greatly weakened state.  Japan also gained rights “in perpetuity” to Taiwan and the Pescadore Islands.  The relative ease of Japan’s victory over the Qing—fought primarily, as in the 16th Century invasions, up and down the Korean Peninsula—only encouraged greater military adventures.

These would reach fulfillment in 1904-05 when the Japanese opened their war against the Russian Empire with a surprise attack on the Russian Far Eastern Fleet anchored at Port Arthur.  The bloody, brutal war which followed was no walk in the park, and Japan lost just under 100,000 casualties in the short conflict.  But Russia had lost more, and the destruction of the Baltic Fleet by Admiral Togo at the Straits of Tsushima pushed Czar Nicholas II to sue for peace.  The negotiated settlement which followed ceded the Korean peninsula to Japan’s influence, the Meiji government’s long-term goal.  Yet the terms were nowhere near the bonanza achieved—for much less loss of life—in the war against China ten years prior. The Japanese people, under tremendous stress after the unprecedented sprint to modernization, rioted against a government and politics that were themselves becoming increasingly violent.

Consequently, Japan began to squeeze the Joseon Court in Seoul, targeting with violent acts pro-Russian and pro-Chinese advisors while supporting pro-Japanese officials.  The numbers of troops deployed to the Peninsula, ostensibly to keep the peace, increased as Japan slowly but surely seized control.  Japan announced its protectorate of Korea in 1905, then formally annexed the kingdom in 1910, beginning the final phase of Japan’s attempt to achieve a western-style exploitation of Korean resources.  This would continue until the end of World War II when U.S. troops arrived on the Peninsula to disarm and repatriate Japanese forces south of the 38th Parallel, with Soviet forces mirroring that effort in the north.

But none of what came to pass had ever been in anyone’s imagination in 1931 when Japan invaded Manchuria, quickly evicting Chinese forces, and establishing the puppet state of Manchukuo.  Once again, the ease of the campaign and clear economic benefits to be achieved through aggressive expansion and exploitation continued to lure the Meiji Government like a siren song. This behavior in turn led to the invasion of China proper in 1937, the U.S. oil embargo in July 1941, Pearl Harbor the following December, and, inevitably, the airborne destruction of nearly every city in Japan by the war’s end in 1945.

The Nanjing Massacre, widespread conscription of occupied citizens for military and industrial service, establishment of official brothels worked by sex slaves … these things all happened, and can only really be denied by highly-politicized individuals ignorant of or willing to disregard the historical record.  Yet these acts, however evil, all took place within an extremely limited period of Japan’s existence, at a time of world economic upheaval (the Great Depression), after the Japanese people had been forced to quick-step through centuries of western modernization.  It was a singular time and, frankly, a turning point in human history, wherein the old, much more barbaric ways, were largely exorcised on the world stage, and aggressive, expansionist warfare exposed for the evil it is.

Japan’s current constitution—admittedly forced upon it by U.S. Occupation Authorities—prohibits war as a legal solution to addressing international issues and problems.  Externally “suggested” or not, however, Japan’s constitution has yet to be amended even though that’s been a legal option for the Japanese Diet since the U.S. occupation concluded in 1952.  More importantly, perhaps, the “peace article” outlawing aggressive war (all nations have the right to self-defense under the United Nations charter, after all) consistently polls within Japan as the single most popular article of the constitution.

While ultra-nationalists make the news with their bombastic expressions of support for a return to Japan’s exploitive past, these individuals and groups operate on the fringe of Japanese society and are rarely provided, within Japan, the air and internet time they’re accorded by watchers in other countries.  It’s useful, I think, to bear in mind that the concept of Japan as an historically aggressive nation has little in the way of facts to back it for 97% of its existence as a civilization.  Further, Japan’s experience in rapid modernization should serve as a warning, to any nation, of the cultural and societal side effects that spin off such a campaign to intentionally adjust long-established norms in a short period of time.  Widespread violence is often the unintended effect of such attempts, inevitably bringing into question the wisdom of these efforts in the first place.

Japan’s few hard-liners claim that without the rapid modernization, their country would have fallen victim to western colonization like so much of the rest of the world.  On the other hand, that expeditious modernization led directly to the deaths of two million Japanese over a brutal fifty-one-year period, leaving in its wake a stubborn, difficult to remove stain of hatred and distrust across the region that has persisted into the 21st Century. 

All that said, Japan’s situation today is different in nearly every respect from where it found itself in 1853 with U.S. warships riding ominously at anchor in Tokyo Bay.  While I’d certainly never comment on the policy aspirations of future Japanese administrations, a return to military aggression seems the most unlikely future of all.  Given the domestic popularity of Japan’s “Peace Constitution” even if the government were able to push through constitutional revision, it would likely be so minor and come with so many limitations on the use of force as to only highlight the lack of appetite within Japanese society for any type of military adventurism.  The Japanese population’s continued strong support for a self-imposed limitation on armed aggression seems to make their view on the matter quite clear.  A fact that should go much further than it does in allaying regional fears of some mythical, resurgent Japanese empire.

M. G. Haynes