R3.9 Politics and economy in Japan (1912–2020)

Japan between 1912 and 2020 went from a constitutional empire with a young parliamentary system, through militarism, total war and defeat, to occupation, democracy and one of the fastest economic expansions in history, followed by long stagnation. Few countries changed their political system and their place in the world so completely within a single century.

The timeline of Japan from 1912 to 2020 shows the main turning points. Political change and economic change were closely connected throughout: the boom of the First World War and the Depression of 1929–1931 shaped the rise and fall of party government, and the long post-war growth and the bust of 1990 shaped the politics of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

Japan in 1912: the Meiji inheritance

The Meiji emperor died on 30 July 1912. His son Yoshihito became emperor, and the new reign was named Taishō ("great righteousness"). The Taishō emperor was often ill, and from 1921 his son, Crown Prince Hirohito, acted as regent. Japanese eras are named after reigns, so "Taishō" refers both to the emperor and to the years 1912–1926.

The new emperor inherited a state built during the Meiji period (1868–1912). In forty years Japan had abolished the feudal domains, built a conscript army and a modern navy, industrialised its textile industry, defeated China (1894–1895) and Russia (1904–1905), and acquired an empire: Taiwan (1895), the southern half of Sakhalin and a leased territory in southern Manchuria with the South Manchuria Railway (1905), and Korea (annexed in 1910). How these changes came about is the subject of the study of the Meiji Restoration.

The Meiji Constitution

The Meiji Constitution of 1889 was presented as a gift from the emperor to his subjects. It declared the emperor "sacred and inviolable" and the holder of sovereignty. It created an Imperial Diet with an elected House of Representatives and an appointed House of Peers, but the Diet's main power was over the budget: if it refused a new budget, the previous year's budget continued.

The diagram of the Meiji system shows why power was fragmented. Prime ministers were not chosen by the Diet. In practice they were recommended to the emperor by the genrō, a handful of elder statesmen from the Meiji leadership; by 1912 the most powerful were Yamagata Aritomo, the founder of the modern army, and Saionji Kinmochi, a liberal aristocrat. The Privy Council, a body of senior appointed advisers, reviewed treaties and constitutional questions.

Two features made the armed forces almost independent. The first was supreme command. The second was a rule of 1900 that the army and navy ministers in every cabinet must be serving generals and admirals. Because a cabinet could not exist without them, the army or navy could bring down a government by withdrawing its minister, or stop one being formed by refusing to nominate one.

The Taishō political crisis, 1912–1913

The first test came within months of the new reign. In late 1912 the army demanded two new divisions for Korea. When the cabinet of Saionji Kinmochi refused on grounds of cost, the army minister resigned in December 1912 and the army declined to name a successor, so the cabinet fell. Yamagata's protégé Katsura Tarō, a general, became prime minister for the third time.

The army's action provoked a popular movement "to protect constitutional government", led in the Diet by the politicians Ozaki Yukio and Inukai Tsuyoshi. Crowds surrounded the Diet and attacked pro-government newspapers in Tokyo in February 1913, and Katsura resigned after less than two months. His successor, Admiral Yamamoto Gonnohyōe, relaxed the 1900 rule so that retired or reserve officers could serve as ministers.

The crisis showed both sides of the Taishō system. Public opinion, the press and the parties could now bring down a government. Yet the army had shown that it could break a cabinet, and the rule on military ministers was only relaxed, never abolished; it was restored in full in 1936.

The First World War and Japan, 1914–1918

Japan entered the First World War early and fought little. It had been allied with Britain since the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, and when Britain asked for naval help against German raiders in the Pacific, the government of Ōkuma Shigenobu, guided by its foreign minister Katō Takaaki, saw a chance to take Germany's possessions in East Asia. Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914.

The military impact

• Shandong. Japanese troops, with a small British force, besieged the German naval base of Qingdao on the Shandong peninsula in north China. It surrendered on 7 November 1914. Japan then took over the German-built railway inland, gaining a sphere of influence in Shandong.

• The Pacific islands. In October 1914 the Japanese navy occupied Germany's island colonies north of the equator: the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana Islands (except American Guam) and Palau.

• Convoy escort. From 1917 a Japanese destroyer squadron based at Malta escorted Allied troopships in the Mediterranean against German submarines, and Japanese cruisers patrolled the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

• Siberia. In August 1918 Japan joined the Allied intervention in Siberia after the Russian Revolution. The others sent a few thousand troops each; Japan sent more than 70,000 and stayed until 1922 (in northern Sakhalin until 1925), hoping for a buffer state in the Russian Far East. The Siberian Intervention cost lives and money, gained nothing and made the army unpopular at home.

Japan's losses in battle were small, a few thousand dead at most, compared with the millions of the European powers. The war's importance for Japan lay in what it allowed Japan to do while the European powers were occupied elsewhere.

Pressure on China

In January 1915 the Ōkuma government presented the Chinese president, Yuan Shikai, with the Twenty-One Demands. They asked China to confirm Japan's gains in Shandong, extend its leases in Manchuria and accept Japanese influence over Chinese industry; a fifth group would have placed Japanese advisers in the Chinese government. Under an ultimatum in May 1915, China accepted most of the first four groups, and the fifth was dropped after British and American protests. The demands turned Chinese nationalism against Japan for a generation; their effect on China belongs to the study of modern China. Later, the Terauchi government lent about 145 million yen to the government in Beijing (the Nishihara Loans of 1917–1918) in return for further concessions.

The United States accepted part of this. In the Lansing–Ishii Agreement of November 1917 it recognised that Japan had "special interests" in China because of geographical closeness, while both sides affirmed the Open Door (equal trading access to China for all powers). Each side interpreted the vague wording in its own favour.

The economic boom and the Rice Riots

The war brought Japan an economic boom. European goods disappeared from Asian markets, and the Allies bought Japanese ships, munitions and textiles. Exports roughly tripled in value between 1914 and 1918, shipbuilding and heavy industry expanded, and Japan turned from a debtor into a creditor nation. Newly rich speculators and shipping magnates, the narikin, became a symbol of the age.

The boom also brought inflation. Wages lagged behind prices, and the price of rice, the staple food, roughly doubled between 1917 and the summer of 1918, pushed up further by speculators who expected the army to buy rice for Siberia. In July 1918 fishermen's wives in Toyama prefecture protested against rice shipments out of their town. The Rice Riots spread over eight weeks to nearly 500 cities, towns and villages and to the coalfields. More than 100,000 troops were used, dozens of people were killed and over 25,000 arrested.

The riots brought down the cabinet of General Terauchi Masatake in September 1918. The genrō, led by Yamagata, accepted that only a government with a majority in the Diet could restore order, and recommended Hara Takashi, president of the Rikken Seiyūkai party. Hara was the first prime minister without a noble title and the first to lead a cabinet drawn mainly from one party.

Hara Takashi and party politics, 1918–1921

Hara was a skilled party manager more than a democrat. He lowered the tax qualification for voting in 1919, roughly doubling the electorate to about three million, but rejected universal male suffrage, arguing that it would endanger the social order. He won the 1920 election by promising railways, roads, schools and harbours to rural constituencies, the "positive policy" that tied local notables to the Seiyūkai. Scandals over party funds made the parties look corrupt, and on 4 November 1921 Hara was stabbed to death at Tokyo Station by a young railway worker.

The Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations, 1919

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 Japan sat as one of the five great powers, alongside Britain, France, Italy and the United States. Its delegation was led by the former prime minister Saionji Kinmochi and the diplomat Makino Nobuaki. Japan had three aims: to keep the German rights in Shandong, to keep the Pacific islands, and to have a clause on racial equality written into the Covenant of the League of Nations.

The racial equality proposal

Japanese emigrants faced discrimination in the United States, Canada and Australia, where laws restricted Asian immigration and landholding. On 13 February 1919 Makino proposed an amendment to the draft Covenant.

The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord as soon as possible to all alien nationals of states, members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.

Japanese delegation, proposed amendment to the Covenant of the League of Nations, League of Nations Commission, Paris, 13 February 1919. The wording was careful: it asked for equal treatment of the nationals of League members, not for an end to racial discrimination everywhere, and said "as soon as possible", not at once. The Japanese delegates wanted equal status for Japan above all, and a universal principle was not their main concern.

The Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes, opposed the clause because he feared it would undermine the White Australia policy, and the British Empire delegation would not support it. When a weaker version was put to the League Commission on 11 April 1919, a majority of the members present (11, in most accounts) voted for it and none voted against. The chairman, President Woodrow Wilson, ruled that such an important change needed unanimity and declared it rejected. Japanese newspapers treated the rejection as proof that the Western powers would never accept Japan as an equal, and the episode was remembered for decades.

Shandong, the Pacific islands and the League

On its other aims Japan succeeded. The Treaty of Versailles transferred Germany's rights in Shandong to Japan, which provoked the May Fourth Movement of protest in China and China's refusal to sign the treaty. The former German islands north of the equator became a Japanese League mandate, administered from 1922 by the South Seas Government at Koror in Palau; under the mandate system, Japan was not to fortify them. Japan became a permanent member of the League Council, and the educator Nitobe Inazō served as an under-secretary-general of the League from 1920 to 1926.

The Washington Conference and the Pacific order, 1921–1922

After 1918 the United States, Britain and Japan began a costly naval building race. The American government invited the powers to Washington, where a conference met from November 1921 to February 1922 to limit navies and settle the problems of the Pacific and China. Japan was represented by its navy minister, Admiral Katō Tomosaburō, and its ambassador, Shidehara Kijūrō.

The table of the Washington treaties shows why historians speak of a "Washington system": a set of agreements that stabilised the Pacific for about a decade. Katō Tomosaburō accepted the 5 : 5 : 3 ratio because he believed Japan could not win a building race against American industry; a war with the United States, he argued, was impossible without American money, and Japan should avoid it. A group of naval officers led by Admiral Katō Kanji, later called the "fleet faction", believed that 70 per cent of the American fleet was the minimum needed for safety and never accepted the ratio.

Shidehara diplomacy

For most of the 1920s Japanese foreign policy followed the Washington system. As foreign minister in 1924–1927 and 1929–1931, Shidehara Kijūrō pursued cooperation with Britain and the United States, non-interference in China's civil wars and the growth of Japanese trade and investment in China by economic means. Critics in the army and the Seiyūkai called Shidehara diplomacy weak, especially when Chinese nationalism threatened Japanese interests in Manchuria after 1925.

Racism and resentment

The sense of being treated as an inferior power grew in the 1920s. In 1924 the US Congress passed an Immigration Act that excluded immigrants who were ineligible for citizenship, which in practice meant almost all Japanese. Japanese newspapers called it a national humiliation, and protests were held across the country on the day it took effect, 1 July 1924. Many Japanese saw it as the same racism that had defeated the racial equality proposal.

The whites are obsessed with the mistaken theory that they are superior to all other races. This is the most serious obstacle in the way of the realization of racial equality. … Of the non-white countries, Japan had taken the lead in adopting the best parts of European civilization—including its military side.

Ōkuma Shigenobu, "Illusions of the White Race", in K. K. Kawakami (ed.), What Japan Thinks (New York, 1921). Ōkuma, a Meiji leader and twice prime minister, wrote shortly before his death; the essay was published in English in New York, in a collection meant to explain Japanese opinion to Americans in the year of the Washington Conference. He presents Japan as the leader of the non-white peoples, a role that later nationalists used to justify expansion in Asia; the same essay accepts that some peoples were "backward" and needed "guidance", which shows that a protest against Western racism could sit alongside Japan's own imperial hierarchy.

Taishō democracy: liberal reform in the 1920s

Historians use the term Taishō democracy for the growth of party politics, liberal ideas and popular movements between about 1905 and 1932. Its high point came between 1924 and 1932, when the leader of the largest party in the House of Representatives was normally made prime minister. Contemporaries called this the "normal course of constitutional government". It depended on Saionji Kinmochi, the last surviving genrō, who recommended party leaders to the emperor because he believed party cabinets were the best way to govern a modern country.

The table of cabinets from 1918 to 1932 shows how often party government was ended from outside the Diet: by assassination, by the Privy Council, by the emperor's displeasure or by the army. Only one cabinet in the period fell after losing an election.

The two-party system

Two parties alternated in power. The Rikken Seiyūkai, founded in 1900, drew support from rural landlords, local notables and parts of big business, and favoured spending on railways and public works, and a firmer line in China. Its rival, the Kenseikai (renamed the Rikken Minseitō in 1927), was stronger in the cities, had links to the Mitsubishi group, and favoured balanced budgets, cooperation with the Western powers and moderate social reform. Both parties depended on donations from the large business groups, the zaibatsu (Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Yasuda), and both used money to win votes.

Liberal ideas

Liberal thinkers gave the movement its theory. In 1916 the political scientist Yoshino Sakuzō argued in the journal Chūō Kōron for minponshugi, usually translated as "people-based politics": government should serve the welfare of the people and follow their wishes. Yoshino avoided the word for democracy that implied popular sovereignty, so his ideas could be squared with the emperor's sovereignty under the constitution.

The constitutional lawyer Minobe Tatsukichi of Tokyo Imperial University taught the emperor organ theory: that the state was a legal body and the emperor its highest organ, acting through the cabinet and the Diet, not an absolute ruler above the law. In the 1920s this was the accepted interpretation in universities and among officials, and it gave party cabinets a constitutional justification.

The 1925 laws: universal male suffrage and the Peace Preservation Law

A second movement to protect constitutional government in 1924 brought a coalition of three parties to power under Katō Takaaki of the Kenseikai. In 1925 his government passed two laws that together show the limits of Taishō democracy.

• The General Election Law of 1925 removed the tax qualification and gave the vote to all men aged 25 and over who had lived in their constituency for a year. The electorate rose from about 3.3 million to about 12.5 million, a fifth of the population. Women remained excluded.

• The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 made it a crime, punishable by up to ten years in prison, to form or knowingly join an organisation that aimed to change the kokutai (the national polity centred on the emperor) or to abolish private property. In 1928 an emergency decree added the death penalty.

The chart of registered voters shows the scale of the change. The government expected that newly enfranchised workers and tenant farmers might vote for socialist parties, and that Japan's recognition of the Soviet Union in January 1925 would bring communist influence. The Peace Preservation Law was the price the conservative House of Peers and Privy Council demanded for the suffrage law. In 1928 the Tanaka government used it to arrest more than 1,500 suspected communists in a single day (the March 15 Incident), and the special higher police (Tokkō) expanded across the country.

Army reform

Party governments also cut military spending. In 1925 the army minister, General Ugaki Kazushige, abolished four divisions to pay for modern weapons. The officers made redundant were placed in middle schools and universities to give military training to students, and youth training centres were set up for young men who had left school. The cuts saved money, but they also spread military values through civilian education and left many officers resentful of the parties.

Society and mass culture

The 1920s were a decade of social change in the cities. Tokyo and Osaka grew rapidly; a new salaried middle class read mass-circulation magazines, went to the cinema and listened to radio, which began broadcasting in 1925. The moga ("modern girl") with short hair and Western dress became a symbol of urban modernity and, to conservatives, of moral decline.

• Labour. The Yūaikai, a moderate workers' friendly society founded in 1912, became the Japan General Federation of Labour (Sōdōmei) in 1921. Strikes and tenant farmers' disputes over rents increased through the decade.

• The left. The Japan Communist Party was founded secretly in 1922. Legal "proletarian" parties won eight seats in the first election under universal male suffrage in 1928.

• Minorities. The Suiheisha (Levellers' Society), founded in 1922, campaigned for the rights of the burakumin, a group descended from outcaste communities who still faced discrimination in jobs and marriage.

• Women. Hiratsuka Raichō and Ichikawa Fusae founded the New Women's Association in 1920; it won the right for women to attend political meetings in 1922. Bills to give women the vote in local elections passed the lower house in 1931 but were blocked by the House of Peers. Women did not vote in national elections until 1946.

The Great Kantō Earthquake, 1923

On 1 September 1923 an earthquake and the fires that followed destroyed much of Tokyo and Yokohama and killed about 105,000 people. In the chaos, rumours spread that Koreans were poisoning wells and setting fires. Vigilante groups, police and soldiers killed thousands of Korean residents; estimates range from a few hundred in official figures of the time to about 6,000. Military police also murdered the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae and his partner Itō Noe, and labour activists were killed at Kameido.

The killings showed the limits of Taishō liberalism. Ethnic prejudice and fear of the left ran deep, and the authorities treated radicals as enemies even while the parties governed. In December 1923 a young radical fired at the Prince Regent, Hirohito, in Tokyo (the Toranomon Incident), which strengthened the case for the Peace Preservation Law.

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Political developments in the early Shōwa era, 1926–1931

The Taishō emperor died on 25 December 1926, and Hirohito, aged 25, began the Shōwa ("enlightened peace") era. Under the constitution he was sovereign and supreme commander, but he had been educated to act on the advice of his ministers and of Saionji, and he rarely intervened openly. His role in the decisions of the 1930s and 1940s is one of the main debates about the period.

The financial crisis of 1927

The post-war slump of 1920 and the costs of rebuilding after the 1923 earthquake left many banks holding bad debts. In March 1927 a careless statement in the Diet by the finance minister, claiming that a Tokyo bank had failed, set off runs on banks across the country. The great trading firm Suzuki Shōten collapsed, and the semi-official Bank of Taiwan, its main lender, faced ruin. When the Privy Council rejected the Wakatsuki government's emergency decree to rescue it, the cabinet resigned in April 1927.

The new finance minister, Takahashi Korekiyo, halted the panic with a three-week bank moratorium and emergency loans. The crisis closed dozens of small banks and concentrated deposits in the big banks of the zaibatsu, which added to the popular view that politicians and big business served each other.

Tanaka Giichi and China, 1927–1929

The Seiyūkai cabinet of General Tanaka Giichi (1927–1929) took a harder line in China, where the Nationalist armies of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) were advancing north to reunify the country. Tanaka sent troops to Shandong three times in 1927–1928 to protect Japanese residents, and in May 1928 they fought Nationalist forces at Jinan, where thousands of Chinese were killed. At home, the first election under universal male suffrage was held in February 1928, and the March 15 Incident followed weeks later.

On 4 June 1928 officers of the Kwantung Army, the Japanese garrison in southern Manchuria, blew up the train carrying the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, hoping that the confusion would allow Japan to take control of Manchuria. The plot was organised by Colonel Kōmoto Daisaku without the knowledge of the government. Tanaka promised the emperor that the culprits would be court-martialled, but the army resisted, and Kōmoto was only moved to a reserve post. When Tanaka reported this, Hirohito rebuked him, and Tanaka resigned in July 1929.

Hamaguchi Osachi, the gold standard and the London Naval Treaty

Hamaguchi Osachi of the Minseitō became prime minister in July 1929 and won a large majority in the election of February 1930. He was known as "the Lion" for his determination. His government had two main policies, and both caused it serious trouble.

• Return to gold. The finance minister, Inoue Junnosuke, cut government spending and returned the yen to the gold standard in January 1930 at the pre-war rate, which overvalued the yen and made exports dear. Inoue intended deflation to make Japanese industry competitive. It came just as the world depression began, and it deepened the slump in Japan.

• Naval limitation. At the London Naval Conference Japan accepted a treaty (April 1930) that gave it about 70 per cent of the US strength in smaller warships taken together, but only 60 per cent in heavy cruisers. The Navy General Staff, led by Admiral Katō Kanji, had demanded 70 per cent in heavy cruisers and protested that the government had signed against its advice.

The navy's opponents of the treaty, the Seiyūkai opposition and the ultranationalist press claimed that the cabinet had violated the emperor's right of supreme command by overruling the Navy General Staff. Hamaguchi secured ratification through the Privy Council, an important victory for civilian control. On 14 November 1930 a young ultranationalist shot him at Tokyo Station; he died of his wounds in August 1931. The London Treaty dispute turned supreme command into a political weapon, and it showed that the Seiyūkai was willing to side with the military against a party rival.

Ultranationalist and anti-democratic beliefs

Party government was attacked from the right throughout the 1920s. Ultranationalists believed that Japan was a unique nation, bound together by loyalty to an emperor descended from the sun goddess, and that Western individualism, liberalism, capitalism and communism were corrupting it. They wanted Japan to lead Asia and to free it from the West.

These ideas were spread by patriotic societies, by army officers and, increasingly, by the state itself. The table of ultranationalist groups and army factions shows their variety. What united them was hostility to the parties, which they saw as selfish and corrupt, and a belief that the emperor's rule had been usurped by politicians and businessmen.

The groups differed in their aims. Kita Ikki's Outline Plan combined nationalism with radical economic ideas: a coup carried out in the emperor's name, a three-year suspension of the constitution, nationalisation of large businesses and a limit on private fortunes, followed by expansion to liberate Asia. Historians often compare it with European fascism, although Kita placed the emperor, not a party leader, at the centre. The agrarians, by contrast, looked backward to an idealised village community.

Rival army factions

Within the army, two loose factions competed in the early 1930s. Both wanted a stronger, more militarised Japan; they disagreed about how to achieve it. The Imperial Way Faction (Kōdōha) put its faith in spiritual training and the purity of the young officers, and many of its supporters wanted a "Shōwa Restoration": a coup that would remove the emperor's corrupt advisers and give the army direct power. The Control Faction (Tōseiha) believed that modern war would be won by industry and planning, and preferred to gain power legally, through the army ministry and the bureaucracy, in partnership with big business.

Kokutai ideology as state doctrine

By the mid-1930s the ideas of the ultranationalists had become official doctrine. In 1935 Minobe Tatsukichi's emperor organ theory, standard teaching for two decades, was denounced in the House of Peers as disloyal. His books were banned, he resigned from the House of Peers, and the government issued two statements "clarifying the national polity" that rejected his interpretation. In 1937 the Ministry of Education published Kokutai no hongi (Fundamentals of Our National Polity) for schools and teachers.

The various ideological and social evils of present-day Japan are the result of ignoring the fundamental and running after the trivial … so many aspects of European and American culture, systems, and learning have been imported and too rapidly.

Ministry of Education, Kokutai no hongi, 1937, translated in W. T. de Bary, C. Gluck and A. Tiedemann (eds.), Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2 (2005). The text was written by officials for teachers and students in the year war with China began. It blames Japan's problems on Western ideas, and elsewhere treats socialism, anarchism and communism as extreme products of Western individualism, which explains why the state could suppress all of them at once. It is a source for what the government wanted citizens to believe, not for what most Japanese actually thought.

The Great Depression in Japan

The world depression that began in 1929 hit Japan hard, made worse by Inoue's return to gold at an overvalued rate in January 1930. The value of exports fell by about half between 1929 and 1931. How the collapse of American demand for raw silk led, through rural poverty, to support for expansion is one of the causes of the war in Asia; here the concern is its effect on Japanese politics.

The crisis in the countryside

About half of Japan's working population still lived from farming, and many farm families relied on silk cocoons for cash. When silk prices collapsed, a record rice harvest in 1930 also drove rice prices down, so farmers lost on both of their main products at once. Crop failures followed in the north-eastern Tōhoku region in 1931 and 1934. Newspapers reported hungry children and families selling daughters into factories or brothels, and disputes between tenants and landlords reached record numbers in the mid-1930s.

The countryside mattered politically because most army conscripts, and many junior officers, came from it. Young officers saw the suffering of their soldiers' families and blamed politicians and the zaibatsu. In 1931, when Britain left the gold standard, the big banks, led by Mitsui, bought dollars in the expectation that Japan would follow and the yen would fall. When it did, they made large profits. The "dollar-buying" affair seemed to prove that big business was profiting from national misery.

Takahashi's recovery

When the Seiyūkai returned to power in December 1931, Takahashi Korekiyo became finance minister again. He took Japan off gold at once, let the yen fall sharply, and increased government spending financed by bonds that the Bank of Japan bought. Cheaper exports, especially cotton textiles, flooded Asian markets; by 1933 Japan had overtaken Britain as the world's largest exporter of cotton cloth. Japan recovered from the Depression faster than most industrial countries, and Takahashi is often described as having used Keynesian methods before Keynes published his General Theory in 1936.

Much of the new spending went to the armed forces and to heavy industry, and military expenditure rose to nearly half of the national budget by 1936. When Takahashi tried to cut military budgets to prevent inflation, he made himself an enemy of the army. He was murdered in the February 26 Incident of 1936, and after his death military spending was no longer restrained.

Militarism, assassinations and coups, 1930–1936

Between 1930 and 1936 political violence ended party government and brought the army to the centre of power. Militarism in Japan did not take the form of a single seizure of power, as in Germany in 1933; it grew through a series of murders, failed coups and concessions, as the vertical timeline of violence shows.

Coups and terror, 1931–1932

In March 1931 members of the Sakurakai and the civilian Ōkawa Shūmei planned a coup to make the army minister, General Ugaki, prime minister. Ugaki withdrew his support and the plot was abandoned. A second plot in October 1931, during the Manchurian crisis, aimed to kill the cabinet; it was discovered, but its leaders received only short periods of confinement. These "phantom coups" showed that senior officers sympathised with the plotters, or feared them.

In February and March 1932 members of the League of Blood, a band of young men led by the Buddhist preacher Inoue Nisshō, shot the former finance minister Inoue Junnosuke and Dan Takuma, the head of the Mitsui combine. On 15 May 1932 young naval officers, army cadets and members of Tachibana Kōzaburō's agrarian group attacked the prime minister's residence, police headquarters and power stations in Tokyo. They shot Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, aged 76, who had tried to negotiate with China over Manchuria.

The trials of the May 15 conspirators turned into public displays of sympathy. The defendants presented themselves as patriots acting for impoverished farmers against corrupt politicians, and the court received some 110,000 petitions for leniency, some written in blood. The naval officers received prison sentences of up to fifteen years, and most were released within a few years. No party leader became prime minister again until after the war.

The February 26 Incident, 1936

The rivalry between the army factions came to a head in 1935, when a Kōdōha officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Aizawa Saburō, killed General Nagata Tetsuzan, the leading figure of the Control Faction, in his office. Aizawa's public trial became a platform for Kōdōha ideas. In February 1936, as the 1st Division, which contained many Kōdōha officers, was about to be sent to Manchuria, a group of young officers decided to act.

Early on 26 February 1936 about 1,500 soldiers led by young officers occupied the centre of Tokyo, including the War Ministry and police headquarters. They murdered the finance minister Takahashi Korekiyo, the former prime minister Saitō Makoto (by then Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal) and the inspector-general of military education General Watanabe Jōtarō, and wounded the grand chamberlain, Suzuki Kantarō. Prime Minister Okada Keisuke survived because the rebels killed his brother-in-law by mistake. The rebels demanded a Shōwa Restoration under a Kōdōha government.

Senior army leaders hesitated, but Hirohito was furious that his ministers had been killed and demanded that the revolt be crushed, threatening to lead troops against it himself. The navy brought warships into Tokyo Bay. On 29 February the rebel soldiers surrendered. After secret courts martial, 19 people were executed, including the leading officers and, in 1937, the civilian theorist Kita Ikki.

The incident had paradoxical results. The coup failed, and the Kōdōha was purged. But the army leadership used the fear of further revolts to demand more from civilian governments. In May 1936 the rule that army and navy ministers must be serving officers was restored, giving the army a veto over every cabinet. The Hirota Kōki cabinet that followed accepted larger military budgets and the army's plans for national defence.

The diagram of the causes of the failure of party government groups the explanations by type. The structural weaknesses had been present since 1889 and help to explain why party rule was fragile; the Depression and the Manchurian crisis explain why it collapsed when it did. A strong explanation shows how the factors connected: economic crisis created anger, ideology directed it against the parties, and the constitution let the army profit from it.

Manchuria and the war with China, 1931–1939

Japanese imperialism in the 1930s grew out of the empire Japan already had. Southern Manchuria, with the South Manchuria Railway, its coal mines and about 200,000 Japanese residents, was seen as Japan's "lifeline": a source of raw materials, a market and a buffer against the Soviet Union. When Chinese nationalism and the rule of Zhang Zuolin's son, Zhang Xueliang, threatened that position, officers of the Kwantung Army decided to seize the whole region.

The Manchurian Incident and decision-making in Tokyo

The Mukden incident of 18 September 1931 was planned by two Kwantung Army staff officers, Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji and Colonel Itagaki Seishirō. Ishiwara believed that Japan would one day fight a "final war" against the United States and needed Manchuria's resources to win it. The army then occupied the main cities of Manchuria. On 21 September the commander of the Japanese army in Korea sent troops across the border into Manchuria without imperial sanction, an act that was legally a grave offence.

The Minseitō cabinet of Wakatsuki Reijirō announced a policy of "non-expansion" but could not enforce it: the army minister and the General Staff would not restrain their officers, and the cabinet approved the money for the troops from Korea after they had already crossed. Public opinion, stirred by newspapers and radio, cheered the army, and the cabinet fell in December 1931. Ishiwara and Itagaki were promoted, not punished.

Manchukuo and the League of Nations

In March 1932 the army set up the state of Manchukuo, with Puyi, the last Qing emperor, as its head (emperor from 1934). Real power lay with Japanese officials and the Kwantung Army. The Saitō cabinet formally recognised Manchukuo in September 1932. The League of Nations sent a commission under the British peer Lord Lytton, whose report found that Japan's actions were not legitimate self-defence and that Manchukuo was not a genuine independent state, while accepting that Japan had special interests in the region.

On 24 February 1933 the League Assembly adopted the Lytton Report by 42 votes to 1, with Japan voting against. The Japanese delegate, Matsuoka Yōsuke, led his delegation out of the hall, and on 27 March 1933 Japan announced its withdrawal from the League. Matsuoka returned home to a hero's welcome. In 1934 Japan gave notice that it would leave the Washington naval system, and it walked out of the second London Naval Conference in January 1936, ending naval limitation.

Manchukuo became a laboratory for state-planned industry. From 1936 the bureaucrat Kishi Nobusuke helped direct a five-year industrial plan, and in 1937 the Manchuria Industrial Development Corporation, led by the industrialist Ayukawa Yoshisuke, took over heavy industry. The government also sponsored settlement by poor Japanese farmers, with the aim of moving a million households to Manchuria; about 270,000 settlers had gone by 1945. Many of them died or were abandoned during the Soviet invasion of August 1945.

The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945

After 1933 the Kwantung Army pushed Japanese influence into northern China, and in 1936 Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany. On 7 July 1937 a minor clash between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing escalated into full-scale war. The prime minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, a popular aristocrat who had taken office in June, chose to send reinforcements rather than settle locally. The fighting spread to Shanghai in August. Japanese forces took the Nationalist capital, Nanjing, in December 1937, where they massacred prisoners and civilians; the massacre and the experience of Chinese civilians belong to the study of how the war affected people's lives.

Japanese leaders expected the Nationalist government of Jiang Jieshi to collapse. Instead it moved inland to Chongqing and fought on, with Chinese Communist guerrillas active in the north. In January 1938 Konoe declared that Japan would no longer deal with Jiang's government, which closed off negotiation. In November 1938 he proclaimed a New Order in East Asia uniting Japan, Manchukuo and China. In 1940 Japan installed a collaborationist government in Nanjing under the former Nationalist leader Wang Jingwei. By 1941 more than half a million Japanese troops were tied down in China, in a war that Japan could not win.

Mobilisation at home

The war with China transformed Japanese politics. The National Mobilization Law of 1938 gave the government power to control labour, wages, prices, materials, factories and the press by decree, without further approval from the Diet. Electric power was nationalised, and planning agencies staffed by military officers and "reform bureaucrats" such as Kishi directed industry towards armaments. Japan in these years became what historians call a "total war" economy.

Nomonhan and the turn south

Many army leaders still regarded the Soviet Union as Japan's main enemy. From May to September 1939 Kwantung Army units fought Soviet and Mongolian forces along the disputed border at Nomonhan (Khalkhin Gol). Soviet tanks and artillery under General Georgy Zhukov inflicted a heavy defeat. In August 1939 Germany, Japan's partner in the Anti-Comintern Pact, signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union without warning Japan, and the Japanese cabinet resigned in confusion. Together these shocks turned Japanese strategy away from the north and towards the resource-rich colonies of Southeast Asia.

Empire, the Co-Prosperity Sphere and the Tripartite Pact, 1940–1941

Germany's victories in Europe in the spring of 1940 changed Japan's options. With the Netherlands occupied, France defeated and Britain fighting for survival, the Dutch East Indies (oil, rubber, tin), French Indochina and British Malaya and Burma lay almost undefended. Army leaders and many civilians argued that Japan should not "miss the bus".

Konoe's "new political order"

Konoe returned as prime minister in July 1940 with Matsuoka Yōsuke as foreign minister and General Tōjō Hideki as army minister. He promised a "new political order" that would unite the nation behind the war. The political parties dissolved themselves in the summer of 1940, and in October their members joined the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, a national organisation headed by the prime minister. It never became a mass party like the Nazi party; it was a loose umbrella under the control of the bureaucracy. Labour unions were replaced by a patriotic industrial association, and neighbourhood associations (tonarigumi) of about ten households were organised everywhere to distribute rations and pass on official orders.

The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

On 1 August 1940 Matsuoka announced that Japan's aim was a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, extending the New Order in East Asia to Southeast Asia. Official propaganda presented it as the liberation of Asia from Western imperialism and a partnership of Asian peoples under Japanese leadership. In practice it was designed to give Japan secure access to the raw materials it needed for the war in China and for a possible war with the Western powers. In September 1940, by agreement with the Vichy French authorities, Japanese troops entered northern Indochina to cut a supply route to China.

The photograph of the Greater East Asia Conference of November 1943 shows how Japan presented the Sphere at the height of its empire. The conference issued a joint declaration on cooperation, independence and the end of racial discrimination, echoing the language of 1919. Japan had granted nominal independence to Burma and the Philippines in 1943, but Japanese forces controlled both, and in the occupied territories requisitioning, forced labour and violence turned many people against Japanese rule. How occupation was experienced in Southeast Asia, and how it shaped the independence movements there, belongs to other studies; the Japanese decision-making behind the Sphere belongs here.

The Tripartite Pact, 1940

On 27 September 1940 Japan, Germany and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin.

Germany and Italy recognize and respect the leadership of Japan in the establishment of a new order in greater East Asia. … Germany, Italy and Japan … further undertake to assist one another with all political, economic and military means when one of the three contracting powers is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Chinese-Japanese conflict.

Three-Power Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan, Articles 2 and 3, signed in Berlin, 27 September 1940 (English text, Avalon Project, Yale Law School). The only great power not yet involved in either war, apart from the Soviet Union (which Article 5 excluded), was the United States, so the pact was aimed at deterring American intervention. Its value as a source lies in what it shows of Matsuoka's calculation: that the threat of a war on two oceans would force the United States to accept Japan's new order.

The pact had the opposite effect. Americans now saw Japan as part of a single Axis threat, and the United States increased aid to China and Britain. The alliance brought Japan little practical help: Germany and Japan never coordinated their strategy, and Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 without consulting Japan, two months after Matsuoka had signed a Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact (13 April 1941) in Moscow. Matsuoka then urged an attack on the Soviet Union; he was dropped from the cabinet in July 1941.

The US embargo and the decision for war, 1940–1941

Japan's war in China depended on imports from the United States: oil, scrap iron and steel, machine tools. American leaders used this dependence step by step. The United States ended its commercial treaty with Japan in January 1940 (after six months' notice), required licences for exports of aviation fuel and top-grade scrap in July 1940, and banned all exports of scrap iron and steel to Japan in September 1940, after Japanese troops entered northern Indochina.

The chain from embargo to war shows the spiral of 1941. On 2 July 1941 an Imperial Conference, a meeting of the government and military leaders in the emperor's presence, decided to advance into southern Indochina even at the risk of war with Britain and the United States. When Japanese troops landed there in late July, the United States froze Japanese assets, and from August no oil export licences were granted; Britain and the Netherlands East Indies took similar measures. Japanese propaganda called this the "ABCD encirclement" (America, Britain, China, the Dutch).

The decisions of September to December 1941

1. 6 September 1941. An Imperial Conference decided that war preparations against the United States, Britain and the Netherlands would be completed by the end of October; if diplomacy had brought no prospect of success by early October, Japan would decide on war. Hirohito, unusually, spoke: he read a poem by his grandfather, the Meiji emperor, about the wish for peace among the "four seas", which those present understood as a call for more effort at diplomacy.

2. October 1941. Konoe hoped for a summit meeting with President Roosevelt, but the Americans insisted on agreement in principle first, above all on withdrawal from China. The army minister, Tōjō, refused any withdrawal. Konoe resigned on 16 October, and on 18 October Tōjō became prime minister, keeping the army ministry.

3. 5 November 1941. A new Imperial Conference set midnight on 1 December as the deadline for diplomacy and approved two last offers ("Plan A" and "Plan B").

4. 26 November 1941. The American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, replied with the Hull note, which called for Japan's withdrawal from China and Indochina. Japanese leaders treated it as an ultimatum.

5. 1 December 1941. The Imperial Conference decided on war. The carrier fleet had already sailed for Hawaii on 26 November.

The navy chiefs had argued since the summer that Japan's oil stocks were shrinking each month, and that the American naval building programme would soon make the US fleet overwhelmingly stronger. Japanese leaders saw three choices: give up the war in China, which the army refused and which would have meant admitting that a decade of sacrifice had been for nothing; wait while the oil ran out; or seize the oil of the Netherlands East Indies by force. Because the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and the US-held Philippines lay on the flank of any advance south, the plan of Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, commander of the Combined Fleet, was to destroy the Pacific Fleet at the outset.

The attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 (8 December in Japan) sank or damaged eight American battleships and killed about 2,400 Americans, but the American aircraft carriers were at sea and the oil tanks and repair yards were left intact. Simultaneous attacks were made on Malaya, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island. Within six months Japan had taken Malaya and Singapore (15 February 1942), the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and Burma.

Reasons for Japanese defeat in the Second World War

Japan's leaders went to war knowing that the United States had far greater industrial strength. Their plan was to seize the southern resource areas, build a defensive perimeter of island bases across the Pacific, and make an American counter-attack so costly that the United States, also fighting Germany, would accept a negotiated peace. The plan failed for military, political and economic reasons, which the diagram of reasons for defeat groups together. How the war's outcome was decided is also a question in the study of conflict; the emphasis here is on Japan's own decisions and weaknesses.

Military factors

The early victories encouraged over-extension, which Japanese officers later called "victory disease". Instead of consolidating, the navy pushed further: towards Port Moresby in New Guinea (checked at the Battle of the Coral Sea, May 1942) and to Midway Island (June 1942), where it lost four of its six large carriers and many of its most experienced aircrew. From August 1942 to February 1943 the struggle for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands cost Japan thousands of soldiers, hundreds of aircraft and dozens of warships that it could not replace.

Japan's system of training pilots produced a small elite, not large numbers. Once the veterans of 1941–1942 had been killed, their replacements had far fewer flying hours than their American opponents. In June 1944, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, American pilots destroyed some 600 Japanese aircraft in two days, a battle American airmen called the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot". The fall of Saipan in July 1944 put Japanese cities within range of American B-29 bombers.

Japan's greatest weakness was at sea. It needed merchant ships to bring oil, iron ore, bauxite, rubber and rice from its new empire, but the navy had prepared to fight a decisive fleet battle and neglected convoy escorts and anti-submarine warfare. American submarines, and later aircraft and mines, sank most of the merchant fleet. By 1945 the oil of the East Indies, the main reason for going to war, could hardly reach Japan at all.

As defeat approached, Japanese forces relied increasingly on fighting to the death. At Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the last great naval battle, the navy organised its first kamikaze units, pilots who deliberately crashed their aircraft into enemy ships. On Iwo Jima (February–March 1945) and Okinawa (April–June 1945), garrisons fought almost to the last man; on Okinawa, roughly 100,000 Japanese soldiers (including Okinawans conscripted locally) and between about 40,000 and 150,000 Okinawan civilians died, depending on the estimate. From March 1945 American bombers burned most of Japan's large cities, and in August came the atomic bombs and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.

Political factors

Japan's system of government made it hard to fight a coordinated war. The army and navy were separate services answering to the emperor, and Imperial General Headquarters, set up in 1937, was a meeting place for the two General Staffs, not a joint command. The services competed for steel, aluminium and aircraft factories, built their own aircraft to different designs and followed different strategies: the army's main forces remained in China and Manchuria, while the navy fought the Americans in the Pacific. The prime minister had no authority over military operations. Tōjō took the post of army chief of staff in February 1944 to gain more control, which was widely criticised as unconstitutional.

• Strategy. Japan never had a realistic plan for ending the war. Its hope that Germany would defeat Britain and the Soviet Union, and that Americans would tire of the war, was not shared with its ally in any concrete plan: Japan and Germany never coordinated their operations.

• China. The war in China continued throughout. In 1944 the army even launched its largest offensive of the war there (Operation Ichigō), tying down troops that could not be used against the Americans.

• Leadership. The fall of Saipan brought down Tōjō's cabinet in July 1944, but his successors could not agree to end the war. In February 1945 Konoe warned the emperor in a written memorial that defeat was certain and that continuing risked a communist revolution in Japan; Hirohito replied that a further military success was needed before negotiating.

• Ending the war. The cabinet of Admiral Suzuki Kantarō (April 1945) included ministers who wanted peace, but the army insisted on fighting a final battle on the home islands. The government spent the summer of 1945 trying to persuade the Soviet Union to mediate, a hope that ended with the Soviet declaration of war on 8 August. The decision to surrender, taken only after the emperor intervened, is the subject of the study of how peace was established.

The economy and the home front

Japan's economy was too small for the war it had begun. American output was several times larger before the war started, and the gap widened each year. Japanese production of aircraft, ships and steel peaked in 1944 and then collapsed as the blockade cut off raw materials and bombing destroyed factories.

The war reached into every household. Rice was rationed from 1941, and by 1945 most people lived on far less food than they needed, supplemented by sweet potatoes, barley and whatever they could grow or buy on the black market. Neighbourhood associations organised air-raid drills, savings campaigns and the distribution of rations; the military police (Kempeitai) and the special higher police watched for dissent. University students lost their exemption from conscription in 1943, schoolchildren were sent to work in factories, and from 1944 unmarried women were mobilised in volunteer labour corps. Hundreds of thousands of Korean and Chinese labourers were brought to Japan, many by force, to work in mines and factories. From 1944 schoolchildren were evacuated from the cities to the countryside.

The Japanese government estimates that about 3.1 million Japanese died in the war, about 2.3 million of them soldiers and sailors and about 800,000 civilians. Morale did not collapse into revolt, as Konoe had feared, but by 1945 exhaustion, hunger and the destruction of the cities left the population unable to sustain the war.

The US occupation and reconstruction, 1945–1952

Japan signed the instrument of surrender on 2 September 1945 aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The occupation that followed was formally Allied, but in practice it was run by the United States under General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), a title also used for his headquarters. How the occupation made a lasting peace, and how the war crimes trials and the new constitution's renunciation of war were judged, belong to the study of peacemaking; the emphasis here is on how the occupation changed Japanese politics and the economy.

The occupiers ruled indirectly. Unlike Germany, Japan kept its government, its civil service and its emperor; SCAP issued directives and the Japanese cabinet and Diet carried them out. This made reform faster, because the existing bureaucracy implemented it, but it also gave Japanese officials and politicians room to slow, adapt or reshape what the Americans wanted. Historians therefore see the occupation as a joint product of American reformers and Japanese actors, not as a simple imposition.

The emperor

The photograph of MacArthur and Hirohito shows the central decision of the occupation. Many in the Allied countries wanted the emperor tried as a war criminal, but MacArthur concluded that he was more useful as a symbol of continuity who could persuade the population to accept the occupation. Hirohito was not indicted, and occupation officials and the defence at the Tokyo trials took care to keep him out of the evidence. On 1 January 1946 he issued an imperial rescript, known as the "Humanity Declaration", in which he rejected the idea that the emperor was a living god and that the Japanese were a race destined to rule the world.

The Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power.

Constitution of Japan, Article 1, promulgated 3 November 1946 and in force from 3 May 1947 (official English text, National Diet Library). The constitution was drafted in a week in February 1946 by SCAP's Government Section after a Japanese draft proved too conservative, and was then debated and amended by the Diet. Article 1 reversed the Meiji Constitution: sovereignty now lay with the people, and the emperor became a symbol without political power. It kept the monarchy, which reassured conservatives, while removing the basis on which the military had claimed to act in the emperor's name.

Political and social reform

The early occupation aimed at demilitarisation and democratisation. About 200,000 people were purged from public office, including most wartime politicians. Political prisoners, among them communists jailed since the 1920s, were released, the Peace Preservation Law and the special higher police were abolished, and State Shinto was separated from the state. Women voted for the first time in April 1946 and elected 39 women to the House of Representatives. The new constitution guaranteed equal rights for women in marriage and the family (Article 24), the right to organise and bargain collectively, and a bill of rights. Education was reformed on the American model, with nine years of compulsory schooling and textbooks stripped of militarist content.

Economic reform

American reformers believed that the concentration of wealth had produced militarism: poor tenants had provided the army's recruits, and the zaibatsu had profited from war. The land reform of October 1946 compelled absentee landlords to sell all their land, and resident landlords all but a small holding, to the government, which resold it to tenants on easy terms at prices that inflation soon made trivial. Land worked by tenants fell from about 46 per cent of cultivated land to about 10 per cent. Millions of former tenants became small owners, and rural Japan, once a source of radical discontent, became the most reliable base of conservative parties.

The zaibatsu holding companies were dissolved and the founding families' shares sold off. Trade unions grew rapidly: by 1949 about 6.6 million workers, roughly half of the industrial workforce, belonged to one. The economy, however, remained in crisis. Industrial output in 1946 was less than a third of its pre-war level, food was short, and prices rose many times over between 1945 and 1949. In 1947 the government began a "priority production" plan, channelling scarce resources into coal and steel.

The table of occupation reforms shows what was done before and after the change of direction in 1947–1948. Some reforms survived unchanged (land reform, women's suffrage, the constitution); others were weakened or partly reversed (the purge, the break-up of big business, labour rights).

The Reverse Course, 1947–1952

From 1947 American policy changed. The Cold War was beginning, the Chinese Communists were winning the civil war, and American officials concluded that Japan should become an economically strong ally, the "workshop of Asia", not a weak and neutral country. The occupation's priority moved from reform to recovery and stability. Japanese critics called this the Reverse Course (gyaku kōsu).

Stages of the Reverse Course

• Labour. On 31 January 1947 MacArthur banned a general strike planned for 1 February by public-sector unions. In 1948 public employees lost the right to strike.

• A new policy in Washington. The State Department planner George Kennan, the author of the policy of containment, visited Japan in 1948. His recommendations became US policy in National Security Council paper NSC 13/2 (October 1948): economic recovery first, a halt to new reforms, and stronger Japanese police.

• The Dodge Line. In 1949 the Detroit banker Joseph Dodge imposed a balanced budget, cut subsidies and fixed the exchange rate at ¥360 to the dollar. The Dodge Line ended inflation but caused a sharp recession, with mass dismissals in government enterprises such as the national railways. A tax mission under Carl Shoup reformed the tax system.

• The Red Purge. In 1949–1950, with SCAP's encouragement, employers and the government dismissed thousands of communists and suspected sympathisers from unions, newspapers, broadcasting and the civil service. The Red Purge broke the power of the left-wing unions. At the same time most of those purged in 1946–1947 were allowed back into public life.

• Rearmament. After the Korean War began in June 1950 and American troops in Japan were sent to Korea, MacArthur ordered the creation of a 75,000-strong National Police Reserve. It became the National Safety Force in 1952 and the Self-Defense Forces in 1954, despite Article 9.

The Korean War boom

The Korean War (1950–1953) rescued the Japanese economy from the Dodge recession. American forces bought trucks, uniforms, ammunition, repairs and services from Japanese firms on a huge scale. These "special procurements" (tokuju) earned Japan more than 2 billion dollars in 1950–1953 and brought in the foreign currency it needed to import raw materials and machinery. Toyota, close to bankruptcy in 1950, survived on army truck orders. The governor of the Bank of Japan called the war "divine aid".

Independence and the alliance

Japan regained its independence under the Treaty of San Francisco, signed on 8 September 1951 and in force from 28 April 1952. On the same day Japan and the United States signed a security treaty.

Japan grants, and the United States of America accepts, the right, upon the coming into force of the Treaty of Peace and of this Treaty, to dispose United States land, air, and sea forces in and about Japan. Such forces may be utilized to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East and to the security of Japan against armed attack from without, including assistance given at the express request of the Japanese Government to put down large-scale internal riots and disturbances in Japan, caused through instigation or intervention by an outside power or powers.

Security Treaty between the United States and Japan, Article 1, signed 8 September 1951 (in Columbia University, Asia for Educators). The treaty let the United States keep bases in Japan without any matching commitment to defend it, and allowed American troops to help suppress internal unrest. It was written by the stronger party at the moment of Japan's independence, and its one-sided terms became the main target of the left in the 1950s; its revision in 1960 caused the greatest political crisis of post-war Japan.

The policy behind these treaties came to be called the Yoshida Doctrine, after Yoshida Shigeru, prime minister in 1946–1947 and 1948–1954. Yoshida accepted dependence on the United States for security, resisted American pressure for large-scale rearmament by pointing to Article 9 and public pacifism, and concentrated national effort on economic recovery. Okinawa remained under American administration until 1972.

The 1955 system and the politics of growth

In 1955 the two wings of the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) reunited, and in response the two main conservative parties merged in November 1955 to form the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The LDP governed without a break until 1993. Political scientists call this arrangement the "1955 system": a permanent conservative government, a permanent socialist opposition holding about a third of the seats (enough to block constitutional amendment), and close links between LDP politicians, senior bureaucrats and big business.

The LDP was a coalition of factions, each led by a senior politician who raised money and distributed posts. Prime ministers were chosen by bargaining among the faction leaders, not directly by voters. Elections were fought in multi-member districts, where LDP candidates competed against each other, which encouraged personal support organisations and spending on local projects. The system was stable and delivered growth, but it also bred "money politics" and repeated scandals.

The security treaty crisis of 1960

Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke (1957–1960), a wartime minister of munitions who had been held as a suspected war criminal until 1948, negotiated a revised security treaty with the United States. The new treaty removed the clause on internal unrest and committed the United States to act if Japan were attacked, but it also tied Japan into the American alliance for at least ten years. On 19–20 May 1960 Kishi had police remove protesting socialist members from the Diet chamber and forced the treaty through the lower house.

The Anpo protests (from Anpo, the Japanese abbreviation of the security treaty) that followed were the largest in Japan's history. Millions took part in strikes and demonstrations, and hundreds of thousands surrounded the Diet. On 15 June a Tokyo University student, Kanba Michiko, was killed in a clash with police. President Eisenhower's planned visit was cancelled. The treaty came into force automatically, but Kishi resigned in July. The crisis showed both how strong popular pacifism and anti-American feeling were, and that they could not overturn the alliance.

From conflict to consensus: Ikeda and his successors

Kishi's successor, Ikeda Hayato (1960–1964), a former finance ministry official and MITI minister, deliberately turned national attention from politics to prosperity. In December 1960 his government adopted the Income Doubling Plan, which aimed to double national income within ten years. The target was reached in about seven. Economic growth became the shared goal of government, business and most of the public.

• Satō Eisaku (1964–1972) normalised relations with South Korea (1965), announced the "three non-nuclear principles" (not to possess, produce or allow nuclear weapons into Japan) and secured the return of Okinawa to Japanese rule on 15 May 1972, although American bases remained.

• Tanaka Kakuei (1972–1974), a self-made construction businessman, normalised relations with the People's Republic of China (1972) and promised to "remodel the archipelago" with public works. He resigned over his finances in 1974 and was arrested in 1976 in the Lockheed bribery scandal, yet remained the most powerful faction leader into the 1980s.

• Nakasone Yasuhiro (1982–1987) privatised the telephone monopoly (NTT, 1985) and the national railways (1987), drew closer to President Reagan and sought a more assertive international role for Japan.

The Recruit scandal of 1988–1989, in which a company gave cheap shares to many leading politicians, forced Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru to resign in 1989 and opened a period of political upheaval.

Reasons for the "economic miracle"

Japan's growth after 1950 is often called the "economic miracle". The economy regained its pre-war level of output by the mid-1950s and then grew faster than any other major economy for nearly two decades. In 1968 Japan's gross national product overtook West Germany's, making it the second largest in the capitalist world after the United States.

The graph of real GDP growth shows three distinct eras: average growth of about 9 per cent a year in 1956–1973, about 4 per cent in 1974–1990, and under 1 per cent from 1991 to 2020. Explaining the first era, and why it ended, is one of the main debates in Japanese history. The diagram of the reasons for high growth groups the explanations.

The state: MITI and industrial policy

The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), created in 1949, guided industry towards sectors that officials expected to grow. In the 1950s it controlled the allocation of scarce foreign exchange, so no firm could import raw materials, machinery or foreign technology without its approval. It decided which firms could license foreign patents, arranged cheap loans through the Japan Development Bank, granted tax breaks and organised cartels in depressed industries. Its main tool was "administrative guidance": informal instructions to firms that had no legal force but were difficult to refuse. MITI targeted steel and shipbuilding in the 1950s, petrochemicals and cars in the 1960s, and electronics and computers in the 1970s.

MITI's influence had limits. It tried in the early 1960s to merge car makers into a few large firms and to keep new companies out of the industry; Honda ignored it and became one of the world's leading car makers. Sony had to wait for permission to buy the licence for the transistor in 1953. Some economists argue that Japan grew fastest in sectors where MITI did least.

Business, finance and labour

• Savings and banks. Japanese households saved a high share of their income (often 15–20 per cent from the 1960s), partly because pensions were small, bonuses were paid twice a year and housing and education were expensive. Banks lent these savings to industry at low interest rates set by the Ministry of Finance.

• Keiretsu. Former zaibatsu firms regrouped into keiretsu: groups of companies (Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo and others) linked by cross-shareholdings and a "main bank". Because shareholders were mostly friendly firms, managers could plan for long-term growth and market share rather than short-term profit.

• Employment practices. Large firms offered core male workers lifetime employment, pay that rose with seniority, and unions organised by company. These practices, sometimes called the "three sacred treasures" of Japanese management, encouraged loyalty and training, and made workers accept new technology because their jobs were secure. They covered only part of the workforce: women, temporary workers and employees of small subcontractors did not share them.

• Technology and quality. Japan bought foreign technology cheaply through licences and improved on it. The American statistician W. Edwards Deming lectured Japanese managers on quality control from 1950, and Toyota developed "just-in-time" production with minimal stocks and continuous improvement (kaizen).

Society and the international setting

Japan entered the period with an educated, disciplined workforce and with millions of underemployed people in agriculture who moved to the cities: the share of the labour force in farming fell from about 40 per cent in 1955 to under 20 per cent by 1970. Land reform had raised rural incomes and created a home market for consumer goods. Households bought the "three treasures" of the 1950s (television, washing machine, refrigerator), then cars and colour televisions in the 1960s.

International conditions were favourable. The United States opened its market to Japanese goods and sponsored Japan's entry into GATT in 1955; the fixed rate of ¥360 to the dollar became increasingly cheap for exporters as Japanese productivity rose; oil and raw materials were cheap until 1973; and the American alliance kept defence spending at about 1 per cent of national income. In 1964 Japan joined the OECD, the club of rich industrial nations, and the Tokyo Olympics and the opening of the Shinkansen high-speed railway that October showed the world a modern, prosperous country.

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The costs of high growth

Rapid growth had serious costs. Industrial pollution caused four major "pollution diseases": mercury poisoning from the Chisso chemical plant at Minamata (identified in 1956, officially recognised as caused by the factory only in 1968), a second outbreak in Niigata, cadmium poisoning (itai-itai disease) in Toyama, and asthma from petrochemical plants in Yokkaichi. Victims' lawsuits, local citizens' movements and opposition-run city governments forced action: the "Pollution Diet" of 1970 passed fourteen anti-pollution laws, and an Environment Agency was created in 1971. Cities were overcrowded, housing was cramped, and long working hours became normal.

The impact of globalisation, 1960s–1980s

From the 1960s Japan was drawn more deeply into the world economy, and its success changed its relations with other countries. Globalisation brought new opportunities for Japanese firms, but also shocks from outside and growing friction with trading partners.

Liberalisation and external shocks

Under pressure from the United States and international organisations, Japan gradually opened its markets: it accepted the IMF's rules on currency convertibility in 1964 and began to allow foreign investment from 1967. In 1971 the "Nixon shocks" hit Japan twice: President Nixon announced his visit to China in July without consulting Tokyo, and in August he ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, which forced the yen up from ¥360 to ¥308 to the dollar and, from 1973, to a floating rate.

The oil crisis of 1973–1974 hit Japan harder than any other industrial country, because it imported almost all of its oil, mostly from the Middle East. Prices rose by over 20 per cent in 1974, and the economy shrank for the first time since the war, which the growth graph shows as the fall below zero in 1974. Japanese industry adapted quickly: firms saved energy, moved from heavy industry into cars, electronics and machinery, and expanded nuclear power. Japan came through the second oil shock of 1979 better than most Western economies.

Trade friction

Japan's export success caused a series of trade disputes, above all with the United States, whose trade deficit with Japan grew rapidly. Japan agreed to "voluntary" restrictions on exports of textiles (1971–1972), colour televisions (1977) and cars (1981), and an agreement on semiconductors in 1986. Japanese firms responded by building factories abroad: Honda began making cars in Ohio in 1982, and Japanese companies moved labour-intensive production to Southeast Asia, Taiwan and South Korea. Critics in the United States accused Japan of unfair trade practices and closed markets.

The Plaza Accord and the bubble economy

By the Plaza Accord of September 1985 the five largest industrial economies agreed to bring down the value of the dollar. The yen rose from about ¥240 to the dollar to about ¥150 by 1987. To protect exporters from the strong yen, the Bank of Japan cut interest rates to 2.5 per cent, and cheap money poured into shares and land. Between 1985 and 1989 share prices tripled and land prices in the big cities rose even faster. At the peak, critics claimed that the land under the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth more than all the real estate in California. Japanese firms bought famous foreign assets, such as the Rockefeller Center in New York and Columbia Pictures in 1989.

Japan's cultural influence also spread. The Sony Walkman (1979), Nintendo's game consoles, cars, cameras and, later, manga and anime made Japanese products familiar worldwide. Books such as Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One (1979) presented Japanese management and education as models for the West. By the late 1980s many observers expected Japan to overtake the United States.

The "Lost Decade" and economic stagnation, 1990–2020

The bubble burst at the start of the 1990s. Worried about speculation, the Bank of Japan raised interest rates sharply from May 1989, and in 1990 the Ministry of Finance limited bank lending for property. The Nikkei 225 share index, which had closed 1989 at its peak of 38,916, fell by almost 40 per cent during 1990, and land prices began a decline that lasted until the mid-2000s.

The chart of the Nikkei 225 shows how far and how long asset prices fell: the index was still below its 1989 peak at the end of 2020. Because banks had lent against land and shares, their collapse left banks holding enormous bad loans and firms with debts larger than their assets.

From bust to the "Lost Decade"

The 1990s became known as Japan's "Lost Decade". Average growth fell to about 1.3 per cent a year, compared with about 4 per cent in the 1980s. Several features made the stagnation long:

• Bad loans and "zombie" firms. Banks, protected by the Ministry of Finance, hid their losses and kept lending to insolvent customers rather than admit defeat. These "zombie" companies survived but did not invest, holding back healthier competitors.

• The banking crisis of 1997–1998. A rise in the consumption tax in April 1997 and the Asian financial crisis tipped the economy back into recession. In November 1997 the Hokkaidō Takushoku Bank and Yamaichi Securities, one of the four big securities houses, collapsed; in 1998 the government nationalised two large long-term credit banks and injected public money into the others.

• Deflation. From the late 1990s prices fell slowly year after year. Falling prices encouraged consumers to delay spending and increased the real burden of debt. The Bank of Japan cut interest rates to zero in 1999 and tried quantitative easing (buying assets to increase the money supply) in 2001–2006, with limited effect.

Economists disagree about the causes. Paul Krugman argued in 1998 that Japan was in a "liquidity trap" in which zero interest rates could not stimulate demand, and that the Bank of Japan should commit to creating inflation. Richard Koo described a "balance sheet recession": firms used their income to pay off debt instead of investing, however cheap money became, so only government spending could sustain demand. Others, such as Fumio Hayashi and Edward Prescott (2002), stressed a slowdown in productivity growth and shorter working hours, and some recent studies point out that output per working-age adult grew at a respectable rate once the shrinking population is taken into account.

Reform and new shocks, 2001–2020

Koizumi Jun'ichirō (prime minister 2001–2006) promised "structural reform without sacred cows". His government forced the banks to write off bad loans, and he made the privatisation of the postal service, which held a huge share of Japanese savings, the issue of an election in September 2005, which he won by a landslide. Growth recovered modestly in 2002–2007, helped by exports to China. The global financial crisis then cut exports sharply, and in 2009 GDP fell by about 5.7 per cent, Japan's worst post-war decline. In 2010 China overtook Japan as the world's second largest economy.

On 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami struck north-eastern Japan, killing or leaving missing more than 18,000 people. At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station the cooling systems failed and three reactors melted down, forcing more than 100,000 people to leave their homes. All of Japan's nuclear reactors were shut down for safety checks, and the country had to import more fuel.

Abenomics

Abe Shinzō returned to power in December 2012 promising to end deflation. "Abenomics" had "three arrows": aggressive monetary easing (from 2013 the new Bank of Japan governor, Kuroda Haruhiko, set a 2 per cent inflation target and bought government bonds and shares on a vast scale, and in 2016 introduced a negative interest rate); flexible government spending; and structural reforms, including encouraging women to work ("womenomics"), corporate governance reform and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (signed in its revised form in 2018 after the United States withdrew).

Abenomics weakened the yen, raised share prices and company profits, and increased employment, especially among women and older people. It did not achieve the 2 per cent inflation target, and wages rose little. Rises in the consumption tax, from 5 to 8 per cent in 2014 and to 10 per cent in 2019, each slowed spending. Government debt, built up by decades of deficits, reached about 235 per cent of GDP by 2019, the highest of any developed country. In 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic caused a further sharp fall in output and the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics.

Political instability, 1989–2020

The end of the Cold War, the bursting of the bubble and a series of corruption scandals broke up the 1955 system. Between 1989 and 2012 Japan had sixteen prime ministers, many lasting a year or less.

Data in the table: Prime Minister's Office of Japan, list of prime ministers.

The end of LDP dominance, 1993–1996

In June 1993 reformers led by Ozawa Ichirō left the LDP and joined a vote of no confidence in the government. In the July election the LDP lost its majority for the first time, and Hosokawa Morihiro of the new Japan New Party formed an eight-party coalition government. Its main achievement was electoral reform in 1994, which replaced the multi-member districts with a mixture of single-member constituencies and proportional representation, intended to produce two-party competition and cheaper, policy-based elections. The coalition soon broke up. In June 1994 the LDP returned to government in an unlikely coalition with its old enemy, the Socialists, whose leader Murayama Tomiichi became prime minister. To join it, the Socialists abandoned their opposition to the Self-Defense Forces and the security treaty, which destroyed their identity; the party never recovered.

Koizumi, the Democrats and Abe

The LDP led every government from 1996 to 2009, but its support weakened. Koizumi was the exception: a charismatic reformer who won votes by attacking his own party's factions and vested interests. After him came three short-lived LDP prime ministers, and in August 2009 the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a landslide, taking 308 of the 480 seats. The DPJ promised to reduce the power of the bureaucracy and spend more on families, but it was weakened by a dispute with the United States over moving the American air base at Futenma on Okinawa, by its handling of the Fukushima disaster and by internal splits, and it lost heavily in December 2012.

Abe Shinzō, grandson of Kishi Nobusuke, governed from December 2012 to September 2020 and became the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history. His long tenure restored stability after two decades of turnover. He pursued a conservative agenda: in July 2014 his cabinet reinterpreted Article 9 to allow "collective self-defence" (defending an ally under attack), and security laws passed in September 2015 despite large protests outside the Diet. He wanted to revise the constitution but never achieved it. Scandals over favours to two private school operators (2017) dented his popularity. In 2019 Emperor Akihito became the first emperor to abdicate in two centuries, and the Reiwa era began under Emperor Naruhito. Abe resigned for health reasons in September 2020 and was succeeded by Suga Yoshihide.

Regional foreign relations, 1989–2020

After the Cold War, Japan's relations with its neighbours were shaped by three forces: growing economic ties, especially with China; new security threats from North Korea and an increasingly powerful China; and unresolved disputes over the memory of Japanese colonialism and war. The table of relations with Japan's neighbours summarises each.

History and memory

Disputes over the past repeatedly damaged relations with China and South Korea. They centred on school textbooks that critics said played down Japanese aggression and atrocities; on visits by prime ministers to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which honours Japan's war dead including fourteen Class A war criminals added in 1978; and on compensation for the women forced into military brothels and for forced labourers. Japanese governments made several formal apologies. The most important was issued by Prime Minister Murayama on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war.

During a certain period in the not too distant past, Japan, following a mistaken national policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensnare the Japanese people in a fateful crisis, and, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations. … I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology.

Murayama Tomiichi, Prime Minister of Japan, Statement "On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the war's end", 15 August 1995 (official English translation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Issued by a Socialist prime minister heading a coalition with the LDP, it was the clearest official acknowledgement of "colonial rule and aggression" and became the standard against which later statements were measured. Its date and authorship explain both its strength and the resistance it met from LDP conservatives, who disliked the word "aggression".

Twenty years later Prime Minister Abe issued his own statement on the seventieth anniversary of the war's end. It repeated that Japan had expressed remorse and apology, but it also set a limit.

In Japan, the postwar generations now exceed eighty per cent of its population. We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize. Still, even so, we Japanese, across generations, must squarely face the history of the past.

Abe Shinzō, Prime Minister of Japan, Statement on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, 14 August 2015 (official English translation, Prime Minister's Office). Abe, a conservative who had questioned earlier apologies, quoted the language of the Murayama Statement in the past tense, as what Japan "has repeatedly expressed", rather than making the apology his own. The statement shows how memory had become a question of national identity for a generation born after 1945, and why Chinese and Korean critics judged it differently from many Japanese readers.

Security and the rise of China

North Korea's missile and nuclear programmes, and the abduction issue, made it the most direct threat in Japanese eyes; in September 2002 Koizumi became the first Japanese prime minister to visit Pyongyang, where Kim Jong-il admitted that North Korea had kidnapped Japanese citizens. China's military growth and its pressure around the Senkaku Islands led Japan to strengthen its alliance with the United States and build links with Australia, India and Southeast Asian countries. Abe's "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" strategy and the reinterpretation of Article 9 were responses to China's rise. Yet China remained Japan's largest trading partner, so Japanese governments tried to keep economic relations separate from political disputes.

Work culture, declining birth rate and ageing population

Japan's most fundamental challenge after 1989 was demographic. Japan's population peaked at about 128 million in 2008 and then began to fall, while the share of older people rose faster than in any other country.

The graph of age structure shows the two trends behind this. Children made up more than a third of the population in 1950 and only 12 per cent in 2020; people aged 65 and over rose from under 5 per cent to almost 29 per cent, the highest share in the world. Life expectancy rose to among the highest anywhere, while the birth rate fell.

The falling birth rate

The total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman would have in her lifetime at current rates) fell below the replacement level of about 2.1 in the mid-1970s. In 1989 it fell to 1.57, lower than in 1966, when many couples had avoided births in a year that superstition considered unlucky; the "1.57 shock" made the birth rate a political issue. It reached a record low of 1.26 in 2005 and stood at 1.36 in 2019.

Several causes reinforced each other: later marriage and more people not marrying at all; the high cost of housing and education; long working hours that left little time for family life; workplaces that expected women to leave work when they had children; and, after 1990, insecure employment for young people. Governments responded with childcare expansion (the Angel Plan of 1994 and its successors), child allowances and parental leave, but the birth rate did not recover.

Ageing

An ageing population strained the pension and health systems and reduced the number of workers. Japan introduced long-term care insurance in 2000. Many rural areas lost their young people to the cities, leaving villages of elderly residents and abandoned houses. Japan traditionally limited immigration; by the end of 2019 foreign residents made up only about 2 per cent of the population. A "technical intern" programme, criticised for exploiting workers, brought in temporary labour, and in 2019 a new visa allowed foreign workers into sectors with severe shortages, such as care and construction.

Work culture

The employment system of the high-growth years changed after 1990. Firms protected their core lifetime employees but hired new workers on part-time, temporary or agency contracts. Non-regular workers rose from about one in five employees in 1990 to about 38 per cent in 2019; most were women, young people and older workers, with lower pay, less training and little security. Graduates who entered the labour market in the 1990s and early 2000s, the "employment ice age" generation, found it hard to obtain permanent jobs at all.

For regular employees, long hours remained normal. Karōshi, death from overwork through heart attack, stroke or suicide, was recognised by the courts and the labour ministry from the late 1980s. The suicide in 2015 of Takahashi Matsuri, a 24-year-old employee of the advertising firm Dentsu, after months of extreme overtime, led to the Work Style Reform law of 2018, which for the first time set legal limits on overtime from 2019.

Women's position changed slowly. The Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1985 banned some forms of discrimination, and the share of women in work rose, especially under Abenomics, but many worked part-time, few reached management, and in 2020 Japan ranked 121st of 153 countries in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index. Demographic decline, the work system and the position of women were closely linked: long hours and insecure jobs discouraged marriage and children, and a shrinking workforce made the full use of women's and older people's labour an economic necessity.

Perspectives and debates

Historians' interpretations of modern Japan have changed with Japan's own fortunes. In the 1950s and 1960s, when Japan was a new democracy allied to the United States, Western historians stressed its successful modernisation; Japanese Marxist historians stressed the persistence of an authoritarian "emperor system". In the 1980s Japan's economic success made its institutions seem a model; after 1990 the same institutions were often blamed for the stagnation. The table of historians' perspectives sets out four of the main debates.

Was the militarism of the 1930s an aberration?

The modernisation view, associated with Edwin Reischauer, saw the militarist years as a deviation from a path that led from Meiji to post-war democracy. It explains why democracy revived so quickly after 1945, but it struggles to explain why militarism won so much popular support. Gordon's idea of "imperial democracy" offers an answer: many of the same crowds that demanded political rights in 1905–1918 also demanded a strong empire, so the expansion of the 1930s drew on democratic as well as authoritarian traditions. Maruyama's "fascism from above" explains why Japan never had a fascist party in power: the existing elites took over radical ideas once the radicals themselves had been crushed.

Who was responsible for expansion and war?

Older accounts blamed a small group of militarists. More recent work spreads responsibility wider. Young shows how newspapers, radio and business turned Manchukuo into a popular cause, and Barnhart and Crowley show that civilian ministers and bureaucrats shared the goal of economic security. The debate over Hirohito follows the same pattern. Bix presents him as a commander who took part in planning and could have stopped the war earlier; Wetzler and others accept that he was well informed and approved the decisions, but stress the constraints of his position. The occupation authorities chose not to examine his role, and the debate continues partly because so many records were destroyed in August 1945.

State, market or culture: explaining the miracle

Johnson's "developmental state" made MITI the hero of Japan's growth, and influenced policy in South Korea, Taiwan and later China. Market economists replied that high savings, investment, cheap technology and favourable world conditions explain most of the growth, and that MITI was often wrong. Samuels and Daniel Okimoto argued that the state and business negotiated as partners, so neither led alone. Cultural explanations, such as Ezra Vogel's praise of Japanese group loyalty in Japan as Number One (1979) or Morishima Michio's stress on a Confucian ethic, were popular in the 1980s but lost credibility when the same society experienced decades of stagnation. The best explanations combine factors and explain why growth slowed after 1973: once Japan had caught up with Western technology and moved its rural workforce into industry, the easy sources of growth were exhausted.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the failure of party government

Paper 3: who drove expansion?

Paper 3: the defeat of Japan

Paper 3: the occupation and the Reverse Course

Paper 3: challenges after 1989

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how the Meiji Constitution distributed power, and why supreme command and the rule on military ministers mattered.

• To do:

  I can describe Japan's military role in the First World War (Shandong, the Pacific islands, convoy escort, Siberia) and its economic effects, including the Rice Riots.

• To do:

  I can explain what Japan gained and lost at the Paris Peace Conference, including the racial equality proposal, and at the Washington Conference.

• To do:

  I can explain the liberal reforms of the Taishō era: party cabinets, the two-party system, minponshugi, the General Election Law and the limits set by the Peace Preservation Law.

• To do:

  I can describe the political developments of 1926–1931, including the financial crisis, Tanaka and Zhang Zuolin, Hamaguchi and the London Naval Treaty.

• To do:

  I can explain the ideas of the ultranationalists, including the Black Dragon Society, Kita Ikki, kokutai and the Imperial Way and Control Factions.

• To do:

  I can explain the impact of the Great Depression on Japan and Takahashi's recovery policies.

• To do:

  I can describe the assassinations and coups of 1930–1936 and explain why party government ended.

• To do:

  I can explain how the army seized Manchuria, why Japan left the League, and how the war with China began and escalated.

• To do:

  I can explain the aims and reality of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and why Japan signed the Tripartite Pact.

• To do: