Japanese Imperialism and Colonialism
Andrew Reed Hall

Early Meiji
In the nineteenth century, Western powers saddled non-Western states with a variety ofunequal arrangements, from fixed tariffs and extraterritoriality to formal colonization. The
1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the United States and Japan marked theinclusion of Japan into the unfortunate side of this equation. Japanese nationalists
protested the insults against their national sovereignty and led the forces which
overthrew the Tokugawa regime. The prevention of further loss of sovereignty and therevision of the unequal treaties remained the new Meiji government's most pressing
issues for the next twenty years. Leading their list of goals was the need to strengthen
the military in order to withstand future Western impositions. They studied theorganizations and techniques of Western governments and militaries, and they modeled
their own institutions on them. Thus the Meiji government was born in an imperialistic
milieu, and their primary models were the world's leading imperialistic states. It is not
surprising, therefore, that the Japanese government would created its own empire assoon as it was able.
Early in the Meiji period, the Japanese government consolidated its hold on the
peripheral islands of the Japanese archipelago: Hokkaidō (Ezo), the Ryūkyū Islands,
and the Bonin Islands. By the end of the seventeenth century, Ezo and Ryūkyū fell
under the control of Japanese domains, but throughout the entire Tokugawa period they
were still considered foreign entities, and the native populations there were notconsidered fully Japanese. The Tokugawa regime had entrusted the Matsumae domain
with control of Hokkaidō. While most of the island was reserved for exclusive Ainu
habitation, in practice Japanese fishers and merchants established outposts throughout
the coastal areas, which they began to populate permanently in the 1840s. In 1869, Ezo
was incorporated into the new state as "Hokkaidō" (North Seas District). According toDavid Howell, "After the Meiji state came to power it immediately launched a vigorous
program of agricultural and industrial development. The assimilation of the Ainu was anintegral aspect of that policy." (Howell 1994, 91) The Meiji regime tried to wipe out
markers of Ainu ethnicity (earrings and tattoos, for example) and prohibited the Ainu
from practicing their religion or hunting in their ancestral hunting-grounds. In 1899, thestate enacted the "Law for the Protection of Former Hokkaidō Aborigines," whichremoved land from communal control, thereby forcing the Ainu to become petty farmers.

Japanese assimilation policies not only dispossessed the Ainu, they destroyed nearly all
indicators of Ainu cultural and ethnic identity.
The Ryūkyū Kingdom was formed in the early fifteenth century on a chain of islands
stretching from the southwest of Japan to the northeast of Taiwan. The largest of theislands was named "Okinawa." The islands were populated by peoples who spoke alanguage closely related to Japanese, although they were also greatly influenced by
Chinese culture. Although the Ryūkyū kings sent tribute to the Ming and Qing courts in
China, in the seventeenth century the kingdom came under the domination of theSatsuma domain of southern Kyūshū. The Tokugawa regime used the Ryūkyū kingdom
as an intermediary in trade with China. Neither the Ryūkyū Kingdom nor China werestrong enough to resist the demands of the assertive Meiji government. In 1879, the lastRyūkyū king was forced to abdicate, and the Ryūkyū Kingdom became Okinawa
Prefecture. The Meiji government, which had already offended the Qing court bydeclaring sovereignty over a Chinese tributary state, initially was hesitant to cause
further tension by pushing an assimilation policy like that in Hokkaidō. Japan's victory
over the Qing in the late 1890s (Sino-Japanese War), however, removed Japanese
inhibitions, and in 1899 the government passed the "Okinawa Prefecture Land
Reorganization Law." As in Hokkaidō, the law replaced communal with private landownership.
Teresa Morris-Suzuki says of the law:
The tradition by which the village controlled farmland and had the power to redistribute itfrom time to time among inhabitants was replaced by a system of individual property
rights vested in the heads of households. . . . This removed some of the arbitrary andoppressive aspects of the old regime, but opened the way to the rapid consolidation offarm holding in the hands of landlords, many of whom . . . were Japanese merchants(Morris-Suzuki 1998, 27).
The Japanese government also embarked on a policy of cultural assimilation in
Okinawa during this same period, paying particular attention to discouraging the use of
the native Okinawan language and enforcing the use of standard Japanese among
schoolchildren.
Japanese officials and intellectuals universally treated the Ainu and Okinawan cultures
as primitive and uncivilized, thereby justifying assimilation policies as a way of "raisingup" the native populations. However, because of supposed evidence of Ainu
contribution to the ancient Jōmon culture of Japan, and because of the relationship of
Okinawa's language to Japan's ancient language, some also thought of these peoples
as representations of Japan's antiquity. The Ainu and Okinawans could thus be viewed
simultaneously as Japanese and non-Japanese-as timeless pools left behind by themainstream, as if "marooned in some earlier phase of national history" (Morris-Suzuki
1998, 31).

Factors in Japan's Late Meiji Imperial Expansion
While the securing of the peripheral islands of the Japanese archipelago was done at
the expense of relatively weak indigenous peoples, any further growth would have tocome at the expense of established East Asian states and/or Western colonial powers.
Despite the dangers, leading Japanese intellectuals and government officials in the
1880s and 1890s began to support the idea of winning control over neighboring regions.
Three factors were responsible for this drive: a nationalist desire for equality, desire foraccess to the raw materials and markets of East Asia, and strategic needs.
The first was the nationalist desire for equality with foreign powers. A colonial empire
was seen by many as a mark of becoming a "first-rate" modern country—a label many
Japanese desired. An example of this inclination was a memorandum by Foreign
Minister Inoue Kaoru in 1887, in which he pointed out to his colleagues the Western
powers' rapid division of the world into colonies and the need for Japan to get into thegame. He concluded,
In my opinion, what we must do is to transform our empire and people, make the empire
like the countries of Europe and our people like the peoples of Europe. To put it
differently, we have to establish a new, European-style empire on the edge of Asia
(Myers and Peattie 1984, 64).
A second factor was the economic benefit of gaining secured access to the raw
materials and markets of East Asia, which could be lost if another Western power
gained control of the regions first. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Meiji political leadershipsaw industrialization as the key to national strength, yet the domestic market by itself
was not yet strong enough to make large-scale industry profitable. The Japaneseleaders hoped that the huge China market would spur development of their industries, if
only they would be allowed in. Koura Juntarō, a leader in the Foreign Ministry, stated in
an inter-departmental report in 1895,
The territory of China is vast, her people are numerous, and her resources notinconsiderable. If our marine products and manufactured products are to have one great
market in the future, then we must take this opportunity to expand our commercial
privileges [in China] (Myers and Peattie 1984, p. 135).
Peter Duus, in a study of the Japanese business community, concluded that they largely
supported the expansionist policies of the government:

"Until the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1905) big business leaders and the highest
echelons of government were moving on parallel tracks in their assessments of theeconomic future, their evaluation of an expansionist foreign policy, and their sense of
economic promise in Asia. . . . Both government leaders and businessmen were
responding to the same situation with shared attitudes (Myers and Peattie 1984, 146)."More than any other factor, however, the political instability of China and Korea and theconcerns the Japanese leaders had for their own country's security were the primary
motivations for imperialist expansion. Unlike the Western powers, whose empires werein distant continents, Japan would expand in regions adjacent to itself in East Asia. As
Mark Peattie has noted,"No colonial empire of modern times was as clearly shaped by strategic considerations.
. . . Many of the overseas possessions of Western Europe had been acquired in
response to the activities of traders, adventurers, missionaries, or soldiers acting far
beyond the limits of European interest or authority. In contrast, Japan's colonial
territories (with the possible exception of Taiwan) were, in each instance, obtained as
the result of a deliberate decision by responsible authorities in the central government touse force in securing territory that would contribute to Japan's immediate strategicinterests (Duus 1988: 218)."
Japanese leaders in the 1880s and 1890s were well fully conscious of the fierce
competition among powers for position in East Asia. They saw the declining fortunes of
the Chinese and Korean courts as potential opportunities for Western intrusion.
Preventing a third country from taking control of Korea became a chief concern inJapanese foreign policy. The Prussian advisor to the Meiji government coined a phrase
which was repeated endlessly in the period: that the Korean peninsula was "a dagger
thrust at the heart of Japan." Japanese officials and private interests therefore took it as
their natural right to intrude in Korea's internal affairs.
As Korea had for centuries been in a tributary relationship with the Chinese regimes,
jockeying for position in the peninsula between Japan and Qing China in the 1890s
soured relations between those two countries. War broke out in August 1894, and by
April 1895, the Japanese military overwhelming defeated the Chinese army and navy.
The Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ended the war, ceded the Pescadores, Taiwan, andthe Liaodong Peninsula to Japan, recognized Korea's independence from China, andrequired China to pay an indemnity and offer commercial concessions to Japan. The
military victories and treaty concessions were very popular in Japan, as they seemed tovalidate the direction the country had gone in modernizing itself in the previous
decades.

The exhilaration of victory turned into humiliation and anger one week later though, asGerman, Russia, and France demanded that the Japanese government give up its
claim to the Liaodong Peninsula-an event known as the Triple Intervention. Unable tostand up to three great powers at once, the Japanese government was forced tocomply. In reaction to the Triple Intervention and Russia's subsequent taking control of
the Liaodong Peninsula in 1900, the Japanese government prepared for a war with
Russia by increasing military expenditures and finding a powerful ally of its own. They
succeeded in their search for an ally in July 1902, when the government signed analliance with Great Britain.
Leading Japanese generals had planned on winning control of the Liaodong Peninsulaof Manchuria as a way of securing Korea. This followed a strategic logic explained byPrime Minister Yamagata Aritomo at the opening session of the Diet in 1890. As he
explained,"The independence and security of the nation depend first upon the protection of theline of sovereignty and then the line of advantage. . . . If we wish to maintain the nation's
independence among the powers of the world at the present time, it is not enough to
guard only the line of sovereignty; we must also defend the line of advantage . . . andwithin the limits of the nation's resources gradually strive for that position (Hackett 1971:138)."
Yamagata declared that Japan's security depended on the establishment of Japanese
influence beyond its actual territorial limits. In 1890, this "line of advantage" referred to
Korea, and later it would be extended to include Manchuria and areas beyond.
As Russian intervention in Manchuria and Korea appeared to the Japanese government
as a threat, in February 1904 Japan declared war on Russia. The Japanese military, inparticular the navy, eventually defeated the Russian forces, but the cost in casualties
was ten times higher than that in the Sino-Japanese War. The resulting peace treaty
signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, resulted in Japan's winning recognition of its
interests in Korea, the lease of the Liaodong Peninsula, railway rights in southern
Manchuria, and the acquisition of the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, which theJapanese named Karafuto.

TaiwanThe aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan were Malayo-Polynesians, and they had little or nocultural affiliation with China. After the Qing regime wrested control of Taiwan from Ming
loyalists and pirates and placed it under the administration of Fujian province in 1683,
however, Chinese immigrants began to arrive. By the mid-nineteenth century, themajority of Taiwan's inhabitants were Han Chinese. In 1886, Taiwan became an
independent province of China.
After the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, to govern Taiwan the Japanese Diet createdthe office of Governor-General. They granted the Governor-General authority to issue
any executive ordinances he saw fit. The system resembled the British colonial systemof separate government.
Most Japanese saw the control of Korea and Southern Manchuria as the primary goalsof the Sino-Japanese War, so it was somewhat of a surprise when Prime Minister Itō
Hirobumi forced the Chinese government to cede Taiwan to the Japanese empire.
Japan was not prepared to administer a large, semi-tropical colony, and so it had tostart from scratch. Additionally, after the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed, both Han
Chinese and Aborigines rose in rebellion, and a group of local elites tried to establish an
independent republic. Although resistance against the Japanese was divided andchaotic, it continued, with support from the Aboriginal community in particular, until
1902.
After three years of bureaucratic flailing, General Kodama Gentarō was named thefourth Governor-General of Taiwan. He appointed the medical doctor Gotō Shinpei as
the chief civil administrator. Gotō launched a variety of projects that laid the foundationfor extensive economic development and modernization in Taiwan, such as modernizing
harbors, building roads, expanding postal, telegraph and telephone service, andcreating a banking system. He also introduced a series of reforms intended to improve
the health and hygiene of the population, including the establishment of a public hospitaland medial college in Taipei.
Gotō's administration also created a public school system which resembled Japan's
two-track system, in which only a small number of elementary school graduates wereallowed to advance to general education middle and higher schools, while the majority
went no further than elementary school or a vocational middle school. In Taiwan, thefirst group consisted of Japanese residents, while Taiwanese children constituted thesecond group. The schools for the Taiwanese taught the Japanese language, Japaneseculture, technical skills and political obedience, so that after a long, gradual process
they could be assimilated into Japanese society.
Gotō once remarked that true assimilation would take at least a hundred years.
After 1919, those who advocated for a faster assimilation process gained power overthe colonial administration. Two governors-general in a row worked to improve thesecondary school system for the Taiwanese, and they opened Japanese schools toworthy Taiwanese students. This measure, however, actually reduced the number ofTaiwanese who received higher education because they were then forced into
competition with Japanese children using tests whose results were based largely on
students' mastery of the Japanese language.
Taiwan's economy in the colonial era was dominated by a triangular trade. Taiwan's
agricultural sector exported sugar and rice to Japan, while Japan exported
manufactured goods to the island's non-agricultural sector. The non-agricultural sector,
in turn, supplied industrial goods and commercial services to the agricultural sector.
During the period of colonial rule under Japan, agricultural production in Taiwan showeda rapid advance, partly through the increases in land, labor, fertilizer, and irrigation
inputs. Industry was partitioned into a large traditional sector, largely operated by the
Chinese, and a modern enclave, dominated by the Japanese. Japan's domination of themodern enclave allowed it to control Taiwan's economy and transfer profits back to theJapanese mainland.

Korea
Unified in terms of ethnicity and language and self-governed for centuries, Korea wasan unlikely victim of colonial subjugation. Koreans had responded to Japanesemodernization and expansion by instituting their own drive for modernization in the
period from 1876 to 1910, but it was not effective enough to preserve the nation's
sovereignty. Korea had begun its modernization drive twenty years later than Japan,
and by 1910 Korea remained significantly weaker than Japan in all meaningful indicesof state power. Japan took advantages of these vulnerabilities.
Alexis Dudden has shown how Itō Hirobumi and his allies, among the first East Asians
to master Western diplomatic and legal language, used this new "vocabulary of power"
to both invalidate China's long-held position in East Asia and discredit Korea's claims of
independent nationhood. After the Russo-Japanese War, Japan established aprotectorate over Korea, under the direction of Itō. He tried to gain public support for amodernization plan that favored Japanese interests, but was met with widespread
opposition fueled by Korean nationalists. One of these nationalists assassinated Itō in
1909, and the following year the 518-year-old Choson Dynasty ceded the remaining
vestiges of its sovereignty to Japan, thus making Korea a Japanese colony. In a 1905
secret agreement with Japan, the United States traded rights to Korea for rights to thePhilippines, and Great Britain acknowledged Japan's interest in Korea in exchange forJapan's recognition of British rule in India.
The new colonial government was intensive but selective in its reach. In some areas ofmajor interest, such as the economy, the Japanese were highly interventionist, whereas
in other areas, such as social policy, they left undisturbed many aspects of Korean

tradition and custom, including the family and clan systems. Japanese perceptions ofthemselves helped determine the nature of Japanese rule in Korea. Japan's sense ofcultural uniqueness, pride in its distinctive process of modernization, a lingering senseof inferiority vis-à-vis the great powers, and a sense of racial and cultural superiority
vis-à-vis other Asians all helped create a mindset among Japanese which viewed
Koreans with contempt.
It was important to the Japanese, therefore, to demonstrate the historical inevitability of
Korean annexation. This gave rise to an assimilationist ideology which highlighted both
Korea's proximity to Japan as well as the supposed "backwardness" permeating all
spheres of Korean life. Through such propaganda, Japanese leaders claimed that
Korea was merely a culture that had outlived its time and that should therefore be"rejoined" to Japan, with Japan's serving as a "big brother" of sorts who could bring
Korea by the hand into the civilized world.
Such ideas did not go over so well in Korea, however. Beginning on March 1, 1919,
massive numbers of Koreans participated in demonstrations against Japanese rule,known collectively as the March First Movement. The movement's inspiration was theideology of self-determination promoted by Woodrow Wilson, and the spark was thedeath of the last Choson monarch. A group of prominent religious figures from the
Chondon (a native Korean religion), Christian, and Buddhist churches signed a
Declaration of Independence. The signers were subsequently arrested, but there werewidespread demonstrations which led to violent countermeasures from the police.
Hundreds of Koreans were killed and thousands more were arrested or forced into exile.
About this time in Japan, the atmosphere had changed to one which favored a reform of
the colonial policy in Korean. Wartime prosperity and the victory of the Western
democracies in World War I had infused Japanese politics with a more liberal spirit,
which manifested itself in the growing power of popular political parties. Prime Minister
Hara Kei instituted a new set of policies designed to prevent a repeat of the March First
demonstrations, known as the "Cultural Policy." As a part of this change in direction, thecolonial government adopted a series of measures to eliminate discrimination, abandon
some of the more petty forms of government interference in daily Korean life, provide
more opportunities for Koreans in education and civil service employment, and allow
more freedom of expression and assembly.

Micronesia
Under the stipulations of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japan entered World War I on
the side of the Allies in August 1914. During the war, Japan occupied German-leased
territories in China and German-owned islands in the Pacific including the Marshalls,

Marianas, and Carolines. The Treaty of Versailles awarded the occupied Pacific islands
to Japan under a League of Nations mandate.
The prime value of the islands was initially perceived as strategic. Economic justification
for the acquisition soon followed, and the islands were intensively developed. By the
1930s, all economic activity in Micronesia was controlled by three quasi-governmental
Japanese companies. The development brought a higher standard of living for mostisland communities, but their share of the profits was very low, and their traditionalsociety was greatly damaged by the establishment of Japanese plantations and towns.
Micronesia differed from most other colonies in terms of demographics. After 1935,
Japanese residents outnumbered Micronesian residents, and the Marianas came to be
inhabited almost entirely by Japanese. The official Japanese policy was to assimilate
the Micronesians, but in actuality the government was essentially indifferent to them.
Indigenous peoples experienced almost no assimilation policies at the hands of theJapanese.

Manchuria
Japan's 1905 victory over Russia won for Japan all interests previously controlled by
Russia in southern Manchuria. These included the Liaodong leasehold, which Japanrenamed the Kwantung Leased Territory. Japan also won control of the Russian-built
railway line from Dalian to Changchun, along with special economic and administrative
rights in towns situated along the line. To manage the railway and the other assets thatcame with it, the Japanese government in 1906 authorized the creation of the South
Manchurian Railway Company (SMR). The railroad company served as the spearheadof Japanese economic and cultural activities in northeast China, and it accumulated
substantial profits for much of its history. The Japanese army stationed troops, named
the Kwantung Army (Jp. Kantōgun), in the leased territory and along the SMR rail line.
On the evening of September 18, 1931, elements of the Kwantung Army manufactured
a clash with Chinese troops which led to the Army invading and occupying the entire
northeast China region. The incident's planners acted in order to create a base of
military operations and a buffer zone against the Soviet Union, so as to protect existing
Japanese economic interests from competition and to secure the region as a source of
future raw materials and as a site for industrial development. After the incident, planners
then fabricated an indigenous independence movement as a pretext for creating anominally autonomous state. This new state, Manchukuo (Jp. Manshūkoku), wasestablished on March 1, 1932, with the former Qing emperor Pu Yi as its puppet leader.
The Japanese government allowed the Kwantung Army to control Manchukuo as a
virtual colony until the war's end in 1945.

The Chinese government appealed to the League of Nations for redress, and the
League agreed to establish a commission of inquiry. Following the investigation, thecommission's report acknowledged that Japan had legitimate grievances against the
Chinese government. However, the report condemned the Japanese invasion andrefused to recognize Manchukuo as an independent state. When the League adopted
the report, Japan withdrew from the League.
By creating a puppet state, the Kwantung Army opened a new chapter in Japan'scolonial history.
In the formal colonies of Taiwan and Korea, the populations were considered subjects of
the Japanese Empire and, therefore, all attempts at creating a national or cultural
identity separate from Japan were prohibited. In Manchukuo, however, nominal
independence created ideological breathing room, a freedom which some Japanese
saw as an opportunity to create a new kind of culture and national identity for the
inhabitants there.
Japanese officials tried to create a new "Manchurian" national consciousness which
they hoped would replace Chinese nationalistic identity among the majority Han
Chinese. At first, they tried to forge this identity by employing familiar Chinese models,
which they expected would mask Japanese control. They used Confucian terminology
and appealed to historical precedents to try to legitimize the creation of an independent
northeastern state. In time, however, the weight of Japanese demands for empire-wide
ideological orthodoxy led the Manchukuo leaders to abandon the Chinese models andinstead portray the state as client, dependent on the Japanese Emperor and in need of
an injection of Japan's superior culture. Leading Japanese officials began to support
forcing the Chinese to follow Japanese linguistic and ceremonial forms in hopes that it
would cause them to appreciate and even willingly support the Japanese effort to createa unified Greater East Asia. In other words, their goals changed from one of creating a
new ethnicity to one of recreating Japaneseness. Ultimately, however, both proved
unsuccessful.

War with China
In July 1937, Japan and China went to war against each other, and in December 1941
Japan attacked American and British forces, thereby beginning the Pacific War. From1937, Japan came to control large swaths of the most populated areas of China, andfrom 1941 until its defeat in 1945, it took control of more regions in Southeast Asia andthe Pacific.
In constructing justifications for its domination of foreign lands, Japan faced the problem
of how to legitimize imperialist expansion in a world where colonialism was no longer

legitimate. Like other imperialist powers of the time, it had to disguise its domination in
new language that made it seem as though they were actually respecting Wilsonian
concepts of self-rule.
In 1940, Japan established a reorganized Nationalist Government of China at Nanjing
and allowed this puppet government to use the symbols of Chinese nationalism it had
avoided using in Manchukuo. While the puppet government in Manchukuo had rejected
Sun Yatsen's "Three Principles of the People," the new Nanjing government, manned byformer Guomindang members, openly embraced them, declaring itself the true
successor to Sun's legacy. The Japanese even let the new Nanjing government use thetricolor Guomindang flag, albeit with a small pennant proclaiming "peace, national
reconstruction, and anticommunism." In reality, however, the regime was not so different
from Manchukuo, for its Japanese advisers were controlling policies at almost every
level.
The second ideological problem was how to interpret the expansion of the wartime
empire beyond the boundaries of the Sinitic world. In the Meiji empire, notions ofcommon culture and common race were plausible justifications for colonial domination,and to speak of helping "younger brothers" in Taiwan or Korea made some sense. But
the wartime empire included places that had little in common with Japan. The
ideological framework built to legitimate the Meiji government's colonial expansion,
therefore, had to be revamped so as to justify the inclusion of Southeast Asia. In June
1940, Foreign Minister Arita Hachirō put forth a new vision. He said it was natural for
those closely related geographically, racially, and economically to form a sphere for theirown coexistence and co-prosperity and to establish peace and order within that sphere.
In August, the new Foreign Minister, Matsuoka Yōsuke, gave this vision a name: theGreater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. What is striking about the concept is how
rapidly it acquired the status and legitimacy of a national goal.

Kōminka in Taiwan and Korea
During the wartime period, the ultranationalist fervor in the Japanese homeland wasreflected in the colonies by the kōminka policy movement. Transitioning from therelatively liberal policies of the 1920s, kōminka policies called for a rapid assimilation ofcolonial peoples, making them "truly Japanese" not only in deed but in "spirit." Foranyone familiar with Japanese wartime discourse, when the term seishin ("spirit") wasendlessly repeated, it is not surprising that "spirit" would become the touchstone of thewartime Japanization movement in the colonies. The urgency was due to the expanding
scope of the war in the region, a conflict that Japan could not fight alone. Wartimepressures caused Japanese colonial officials to mobilize all colonial resources andmanpower, and without the colonial subjects' wholehearted loyalty toward the mothercountry, such mobilization would be insufficient. The movement to promote the"Japanese spirit" was, therefore, essential to Japan's war effort.
In 1937-38, though, when the war with China began, Japan instituted four new
programs to increase its ability to control the colonies. These programs consisted ofreligious reform, a national language movement, a name-changing campaign, andincreased military recruitment.
In terms of religious reform, Japan's colonial governments started to promote State
Shinto religious practices while prohibiting the expression of indigenous religions. In
Taiwan, Japan built Shinto shrines and encouraged the public to visit them. Colonialadministrators also encouraged families to maintain a Shinto altar (kamidana) in eachhousehold. In Korea, the policy focused on controlling Christian independence
movements. Several Christian mission schools refused to participate in Shinto rituals,
and they were consequently shut down. In 1940, Japan cracked down on Christians in
Korea, shutting down 200 churches and arresting 70 ministers and around 2,000 church
members. More than fifty of the ministers died in jail.
Regarding the control of national languages, in April 1937, the colonial government in
Taiwan removed classical Chinese from the elementary and middle school curricula andforbade any use of Chinese in newspapers. The following year, the colonial government
in Korea not only removed Korean language education from most schools, it evenbanned students from using Korean at school at all and discouraged them from using it
outside of school. The governments in both Korea and Taiwan promoted the use ofJapanese. While in Taiwan there was no attempt to ban the public use of Chinese orother indigenous languages, Taipei Prefecture began a program in 1937 honoring thosefamilies who claimed to speak only Japanese in the home. In Korea, however, thecolonial government considered the native language a greater threat than Taiwanese
was considered by the Taiwan colonial government, and so it worked more actively toban its use in from public places.
The Taiwan and Korea colonial governments announced in February 1940 a new set of
regulations on household registration which encouraged colonial subjects to replace
their original names with Japanese ones. In Taiwan, the regulations were not rigidly
enforced; but even so, in five years around seven percent of the population hadchanged their names.
In Korea, however, the name change was mandatory. There, the Japanese used a
different rationale. They argued that last names then in use were clan names rather
than family names and that Koreans did therefore not have a "modern family system."
The requirement to change one's name came into effect in February 1940, and thegovernment gave everyone six months to comply. Richard Kim's autobiographical work,Lost Names, provides a moving representation of the humiliation Koreans felt during
this period. Many Koreans responded by dressing in black so as to express their sorrow
over the loss of their names and family identities.
By August, seventy-five percent of Korean households had adopted new Japanesenames. If a family refused to participate, their children could not go to schools and theadults were either demoted at work or deprived of job opportunities.
For about one hundred years, from about 1850 to 1945, Japan tried its best to respondquickly and strategically to political and military pressures from the outside in order tosave itself from becoming a colony. On one hand, Japan opted to fight against colonial
advances on the Japanese islands and, on the other, aspired to become itself a colonial
power that would rival any Western nation. To achieve these goals, the nascentnation-state of Japan quickly and successfully put into motion two broad initiatives, one
to develop a political rhetoric to legitimatize nationalistic and expansionist policies, andthe other to modernize and industrialize the nation as quickly as possible.
By the end of Meiji, Japan was able to renegotiate unequal treaties with the West andbecame a member of the modern nations, and put some of its imperial aspirations into
practice.
It is possible to view the challenges Japan faced and policy decisions Japan madeduring this time as largely necessitated by the rules of the geopolitical contest being
played out in Asia by Japan and Western colonial powers. Japan was ultimately
defeated in this contest at the end of World War II.

Andrew Reed Hall
Andrew Reed Hall received his PhD from the Department of History at the University ofPittsburgh and is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Social and Cultural
Studies, Kyushu University. He specializes in 20th century Japanese history.

Suggested Reading
Beasley, W.G. Japanese Imperialism 1894-1945. London: Clarendon, 1991.
Ching, Leo T. S. Becoming "Japanese": Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity
Formation. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2001.

Duus, Peter, ed. The Twentieth Century, vol. 6 of The Cambridge History of Japan.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Hackett, Roger F. Yamagata Aritomo in the Rise of modern Japan, 1838-1922.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Matsusaka, Yoshihisa Tak. The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904-1931. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E.
Sharpe, 1998.
Myers, Ramon H. and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire,
1895-1945. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Tanaka, Stefan. Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley, California:
University of California Press, 1993.