Introduction

In the late nineteenth century, Japan began building an empire. It would soon come to rival the powers of Europe, Russia, the United States, and China. The empire survived World War I, but was eventually defeated during World War II. This article considers how Japanese imperialism can be compared to fascism and authoritarianism during the interwar period.

Militarism in the Early Empire

The Japanese government was pretty busy in the 1890s. They did not want to be colonized like their neighbor, China, so they decided to build an empire of their own! But to become a global power, they had to do two things. First they had to deal with the reforms going on within Japan, and second they had to catch up with industrialization.

To build their empire, the Japanese built a close relationship between civilian and military authority. They modeled their strategy on Germany’s approach in the 1880s. Germany’s leader, Otto von Bismarck, used his tough military leadership to make Germany a major world power in a short period of time. If the Germans could do it, the Japanese reformers thought, why not the Japanese? Borrowing from German law, Japan did not put elected civilian officials in charge of the military. Instead, they gave the emperor total control. This allowed the military to act without having to answer to a government run by civilians. However, Japanese emperors actually had very little political power. As a result, there were no civilian leaders watching the actions of the Japanese army and navy, meaning they were left alone to do what they saw fit. As we will see, these factors shaped imperial Japan’s later history in important ways.

The rise of the Japanese military had two big advantages for a state trying to industrialize and build an empire:

• First, military success inspired national pride. For example, Japan’s conflict with China in 1894–1895 gained territories for the empire and sparked patriotic feelings at home. As a result of these military successes, national pride became associated with colonizing other parts of the world.
• Second, lack of civilian control allowed the military to decide Japan’s colonial policy. This gave the Japanese military the power to shape imperial politics and act like its own authoritarian government. Together, these factors made up the core principles of Japanese militarism: raising military power and using it for political gain. In the next section, we examine the case of Japanese Manchuria to see how militarism helped transform Japan into a fascist, authoritarian empire.

Together, these factors made up the core principles of Japanese militarism: raising military power and using it for political gain. In the next section, we examine the case of Japanese Manchuria to see how militarism helped transform Japan into a fascist, authoritarian empire.

Militarism and the rise of fascist imperialism

By 1930, Japanese leaders had identified two possible enemies. One was the young communist Soviet Union. The other was any western liberal capitalist country, such as the United States. However, Japan realized they had something in common with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, two other powers of the interwar period who also saw liberal and communist countries as their enemies. Meanwhile, the Great Depression was wrecking economies everywhere on the map. As Japan entered the 1930s, the world was becoming more dangerous and unstable.

It was in this environment that the Japanese army invaded the northeast Asian area of Manchuria in 1931. The invasion of Manchuria shows how Japan’s independent military influenced Japanese imperialism during this period. Acting on its own, the army made up a false story that blamed the war on Chinese forces in Manchuria. It used this false story as a reason to set out to conquer the region. After two years of fighting, Japan had successfully taken over much of Manchuria. However, the conquest of Manchuria also had broad economic and political consequences.

The invasion brought many Manchurian resources under the control of the Japanese military. The Japanese had to decide how they would control production and trade of these resources. They decided that the military would keep tight control over Manchurian economy to make sure it was producing enough goods. This “controlled economy” was similar to Stalin’s command economy in the Soviet Union. In both cases, the state controlled the economy in the hopes of building national strength.

Soon, the controlled economy model spread from Manchuria to the rest of the Japanese empire. This ended over twenty years of capitalist free trade. The shift brought significant changes to the empire. One change was that all the resources of the empire were used to create military materials to support Japanese imperialism. Over time, the Japanese state and the military became one. This turned Japan and its colonies into a military state. At the same time, the state took over more areas of daily life to ensure that all people in the empire were contributing to what felt like an endless war effort.

Historian Louise Young believes these changes show two trends:

• The first was that the military state “connected the inside and the outside” of the empire. By taking over the state, the military was able to use Japan’s resources for wars outside Japan. Meanwhile, the state used propaganda to convince the Japanese public inside Japan to support the wars. In these ways, the military state linked the homeland inside Japan to imperial conquests outside the country.
• The second was the belief that the state alone could offer solutions to the problems of modern life. In reality, this was a deeply authoritarian belief. It considered obedience to the state to be the highest value a person could have.

These two ideas formed two of the main pillars of Japan’s “fascist imperialism.” Other key elements of fascist imperialism were a hatred of communism and liberalism. Another was the belief that the Japanese were better than other races. Like the Italian Fascists, Japanese imperialists often viewed their conquests as missions to “civilize” people they saw as less advanced. In reality, Japanese colonialism was more violent than it was civil.

Conclusion

In the late nineteenth century, Japan was on its way to becoming a world power. It used the ideas of German militarism to design its imperial state. One effect of this was that the Japanese military gained a high degree of independence. After conquering Manchuria, the military leadership adopted a controlled economy that dedicated all resources to the war effort. This controlled economy eventually spread to Japan itself. There, it gave rise to an authoritarian and later a fascist system. In these respects, imperial Japan during the interwar period has a lot of similarities to fascism in Europe in this era, although it was not identical.