Question
- What accounts for Japan’s emergence as a great power?
Overview
Domestic Politics
Japan’s political framework had been passed down from the Meiji era and was increasingly dominated by the military. During the Meiji period, the government was under the leadership of a small ruling group of senior statesmen who had deposed the shogun and formed the new centralized Japanese state.
These men were in charge of coordinating the bureaucracy, military, parliament, the Imperial Household, and other branches of government. Following their deaths in the early 1920s, no single political entity could establish complete authority over Manchuria until the 1931 Manchurian Incident, when Japan assumed control of Manchuria. This marked the beginning of a period in which the military acted autonomously on the Asian mainland and with increased power in domestic affairs.
Ideology
During World War II, Japan’s emperor-based ideology was a relatively new invention, stemming from the efforts of Meiji elites to unite the nation in response to the Western challenge. Prior to the Meiji Restoration, the emperor had no political power and was merely regarded as a symbol of Japanese culture. He was the head of Japan’s native religion, Shintô, which maintains, among other things, that the emperor is descended from gods who founded Japan and is thus semidivine. Westerners only knew him as a mysterious figure resembling a pope at the time.
Racism
The Japanese were proud of their great achievements and despised the racial slurs they encountered in some Western countries. Their attempt to include a proclamation of racial equality in the League of Nations Covenant was thwarted by the United States (due to opposition in California) and the United Kingdom (Australian resistance). This infuriated the Japanese.
