Japan’s demands marked a new chapter in the nation’s growing militarism and expansionism. With the political support and negotiating muscle of Great Britain and the United States, most of the demands were ultimately rejected by Chinese leaders, yet they still took a toll, further fracturing an already fragile republican government. Failing to agree to them, the Japanese threatened, would result in more war. With European powers focused on the war effort, Japan in 1915 presented China with a diplomatic ultimatum known today as the Twenty-One Demands. Japan also sent naval ships to assist the Allies in the Mediterranean. Japan declared war in August 1914 and immediately sent troops to fight German forces in German colonial territories in China, including Qingdao (Tsingtao), points in Shandong, and German-held islands in the Pacific. In the midst of this transition, World War I broke out in Europe during the summer of 1914. Korea became a Japanese colony in 1910, and with the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912 and the ascension to power of his first son, Yoshihito, Japan’s Taisho era (1912–1926) began. Some believed that a necessary ingredient in furthering the expanding Japanese empire was to separate and distinguish themselves from neighboring China, despite the fact that a great deal of Japanese culture is rooted in traditions from China.ĭespite the embrace of imperialist ideology in Japan, the country’s territorial expansion across East Asia unfolded gradually. Many Japanese nationalists, for instance, claimed that Japan’s rapid and successful modernization was a testament to the nation’s superiority and signaled Japan’s rightful place as the Asian leader in the region. They thought of their ambitions as bringing their Asian brethren together.Īs was the case with many other imperial powers at the time, such differences were often framed in a language of racial, ethnic, and cultural superiority. 2 In the minds of many Japanese, expanding their empire into other Asian regions was somehow different from that sort of imperialism. Advocates of Pan-Asianism in Japan believed that they were expanding their empire in order to liberate Asian territories from Western imperialism.

These ideas were captured in a word widely used at the time but rarely heard today: Pan-Asianism. It was also fueled by a strong ideological sense of mission and racial superiority. Japanese imperialism was not simply about increasing the nation’s territory. It is a race feeling, which repeated triumphs have served only to strengthen. It is not a new feeling created by victory. Perhaps the future danger is just in this immense self-confidence. The war is ended the future, though clouded, seems big with promise and, however grim the obstacles to loftier and more enduring achievements, Japan has neither fears nor doubts. In 1895, a year after the end of the first Sino-Japanese War, writer Lafcadio Hearn Lafcadio Hearn recounted:

Imperialism 2 diplomatic vctory