Japan

Beginning as early as the first decade of the 19th century, the efforts of Western imperialists brought merchants, explorers, and soldiers to the shores of Japan. The colonization of Siberia by Russia, the development of European and North American trade with China, and the strategic location of Japan as a base of resupply for whaling ships and merchantmen all combined to bring foreign pressure to bear. The initial reaction of the Shôgunate was to expel the foreigners by force, but Japan's long era of self-segregation from the wider world had made it backward and defenseless against the guns of the most advanced western European powers. An American expedition sent to Japan in 1849 successfully forced Japan to open a limited number of ports to foreign shipping, and was quickly followed by expeditions from France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia. Foreign residents in Japan enjoyed extraterritoriality on Japanese soil, and the Shôgunate was forced to give up control of customs to committees of foreign powers, in the so-called unequal treaties.

Many contemporary Western observers fully expected Japan to begin the steady slide towards semi-colonial status begun by Japan. In the early 1860's, Japan had been beset by a decidedly anti-Western xenophobic reaction. The princes of Choshû and Satsuma had tried to drive the Western merchants and navies away from Japan, but suffered sharp defeats at the hands of the technologically and organizationally superior Western forces. The Western bombardments of Kagoshima and Shimonoseki, capitals of the domains, respectively, of Choshû and Satsuma, naturally humiliated the Shôgunate, and by the mid-1860's the Shôgunate was beseiged by a coalition of provincial warlords -- led by the princes of Choshû and Satsuma -- who sought to destroy the Tokugawa and replace it with so-called direct imperial rule by the Meiji Emperor.

Even after the imperial restoration had been completed in 1869 with the final destruction of the Tokugawa, many Westerners carelessly assumed that the new Japan would collapse under the strain of Western influence, or that it would stagnate like the much larger and more powerful China. They underestimated the pragmatism of the powers behind the new Meiji regime. The attempts to drive away Westerners with Japanese indigenous arms and technology had failed; therefore, in order to defend Japan against continued Western incursions, Japan would have to adopt Western arms and Western technologies. In order to afford these new Japanese acquisitions, Japan would need to develop a modern economy on Western lines. To this end an immense program of economic modernization began, driven by Japan's indigenous advantages of relatively high literacy and familiarity with cash-based economies, and fuelled by foreign -- particularly French -- capital. In the 1870's Japan suffered from perennial trade deficits that were compensated only by Japanese exports of cotton goods and porcelain manufactures, but by the following decade, indigenous Japanese manufacturing industries had taken hold, particularly in the great industrial cities of Osaka and Tôkyô-Yokohama. As the Japanese economy slowly began to recover from the shock of Western conflict, the Meiji regime embarked on a period of military modernization, purchasing British-made naval vessels, adopting French armaments, and absorbing German training methods. Soon, the Japanese military emerged as the most capable armed force indigenous to East Asia, though still far behind those of the Western powers.

Perhaps the most important goal of the Meiji leadership was the political modernization and Westernization fostered under their reign. At the time, Western chauvinism discounted the possibilities of any civilized modern state being organized along non-Western lines. In order for Japan to be accepted as a civilized state worthy of equal treatment with any Western state, it was deemed essential to adopt a Western-style state. In the early 1870's, the domains of the daimyo were abolished and replaced with prefectures controlled directly by the national government, while steps were taken towards the adoption of a parliamentary system of government on the German model and a national constitution, both acts accomplished in 1883 to popular acclaim. Indeed, the unequal treaties themselves were abandoned by 1894, and Japan did achieve acceptance as a civilized state..

Once Japan had managed to secure the Home Islands from the possibility of Western occupation, it embarked on a cautious program of expansion. The island of Hokkaidô in the north of the Japanese archipelago was extensively colonized by Japanese migrants in the last quarter of the 19th century, drawing upon the advice of United States experts to establish a Western-style agricultural economy in the cold northern island, saving it from the possibility of Russian annexation. In Korea, the Japanese government carefully embarked on a policy of opening the country to Japanese commercial interests, with the ultimate aim of reducing the peninsula to a protectorate. To the south of Japan, however, Japan slowly began to encroach upon the Chinese sphere of influence, sending a punitive expedition against Taiwanese aboriginal tribes in 1873 and annexing the Kingdom of the Ryûkyûs in 1879. In 1885, Japan joined France in the latter's war against China, defeating the Chinese fleets and winning Taiwan and the Pescadores in the peace settlement.

For Japan, Taiwan was an entirely new experience, for at no time since early Heian did Japanese sovereignty extend permanently over a dense non-Japanese population. The two-and-a-half million Chinese inhabitants of the island -- overwhelmingly descended from settlers from China's Fujian province -- lived in what was still, after several centuries of settlement, a frontier society, with much of the land inhabited only by Austronesian-speaking aboriginal tribes. After some initial uncertainty, it was decided to administer Taiwan as an overseas prefecture on the French model of the départements d'outremer. The 1895 Sino-Japanese War briefly threatened Japanese control over Taiwan, but the crushing Chinese defeat preserved Taiwan for Japan. By 1900 three hundred thousand Japanese had settled in the island, either in the new agricultural communities or in the expanding colonial cities of Taipei and Kaohsiung. As Taiwanese exports of tea and rice began to play an important role in the Japanese economy, it became apparent that the Japanese colonial experience in Taiwan was a success.

The Japanese colonial experience in Micronesia, or Nan'yô -- purchased, save for the Marianas, from Spain in 1895 with the indemnity received from China in that year -- was even less conflictual. The scattered indigenous populations of Micronesia, overwhelmed by Eurasian epidemic disease and Spanish warfare, posed no threat to Japan or to Japanese colonists. In fact, a model colonial policy based heavily upon the prescriptions of anthropologists helped assimilate the Micronesian natives as mass immigration -- mostly from the Ryûkyûs -- created the first new Japanese society. The warm climate, the ample land, the fertile soil, and the abundant fisheries all contributed to the rapid colonization of the area. By the beginning of the First World War, Micronesia had become Japanese.

Throughout the 1890's, even as Japan began to approach Western levels of economic development, the Japanese state found itself in an uncomfortable international situation. The 1895 Sino-Japanese War alienated Chinese and Korean officialdoms from the possibility of a Japanese alliance, while the Japanese annexation of the Shandong peninsula enraged the Russian government. The treaties of alliance signed with France and Britain dramatically improved the Japanese security environment, while the 1894 abolition of the unequal treaties marked Japan's emergence as a fully sovereign state. Still, Japan was now a participant in the complicated European alliance system, and Japan found its international situation deteriorating. Not only did China's perennial instability -- exemplified by the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1900, which led to the armed intervention of all of the major Western powers and the near-partition of the country -- threaten Japanese national security, but the tempting void in the fertile yet underpopulated region of Manchuria allowed Russia to intrude. For Japan, Russian control of Manchuria would not only threaten Japanese Shandong, but it would allow Russia to apply pressure upon Korea, by this time a near-satellite of Japan for all of Korea's desperate attempts at modernization. At first, Japan attempted to negotiate a partition of Manchuria between Russian and Japanese spheres of influence. By the 1904, though, neither Russia nor Japan were willing to abandon their respective claims, or modify them to any significant degree. It had become apparent to the Japanese government that Russia wouldn't agree to an acceptable division of Manchuria. Faced with no other options, Japan started the Russo-Japanese War.

The Russo-Japanese War began with an undeclared Japanese attack on the Russian Pacific Fleet -- in port, at Vladivostok -- that destroyed most of Russia's Pacific naval forces. Japan proceeded to raid the Pacific coastline of Siberia, seizing the entire island of Karafutô to the north of Hokkaidô, and fought battles in central Manchuria against ill-equipped Russian troops, incidentally providing the world with the first experience of modern trench warfare. Had Russia been able to effectively mobilize its substantial army, Japan might have lost. As it was, Japan's superior organization and tactics were enough to allow Japan to win the war, despite a hundred thousand Japanese dead. After a crushing defeat of the Russian Baltic Fleet in 1905 off of the Tsushima islands, Russia sued for peace. The resultant peace led to Japan's acquisition of Russian rights in Manchuria, and to the annexation outright of the island of Karafuto into Japan. This decisive Japanese victory affirmed Japan's status as a Great Power, and made an alliance with Japan more important than ever before for Britain and France

The remaining seven years of the Meiji Emperor's life were dominated by Japan's renewed industrial boom, but other themes played an important role. Under Russian rule, Karafutô had been a mere appendage, noted mainly for its prison labour camps. Under Japanese rule, Karafutô quickly joined Hokkaidô as another vital colony of settlement, a useful valve for Japan's rapidly growing population as well as an important domestic source of oil and Western food crops. Although the colonization process was far from complete, by the second decade of the 20th century Karafuto was firmly Japanese. Many had hoped that the Hawai'ian islands would likewise become Japanese, but the 1904 United States annexation of those islands -- officially protested by the Japanese government -- prevented that.

In contrast to Japan's prior colonial experiences, the colonization of Korea was far more difficult. In the two decades preceding the death of the Meiji Emperor, Korea had embarked on an ambitious program of modernization akin to Japan's program of modernization in the 1870's and 1880's, motivated to a considerable extent by a fear of Japanese colonization. Unfortunately for Korea, Russia's defeat in 1905 and the Franco-British alliances with Japan deprived it of any source of foreign patronage. After a peasant uprising in 1911, the Japanese government demanded that Korea acquiesce to Japanese control. When the Korean government refused, pro-Japanese elements of the Korean military overthrew the ruling Ri dynasty and its supporters, forcing their flight to Switzerland under Russian auspices. In their place, a prince from a collateral branch of the Ri was placed on the Korean throne as a puppet ruler, and forced to accept the establishment of a Japanese protectorate over Korea. The eleven million Koreans were outraged by their subordination to their hated neighbour, and some rioters attacked Japanese military bases and officials of the Japanese puppet government. In the space of a year, the resistance of the Korean peasantry was broken, and Korea was prepared for Japanese economic colonization.

The death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912 signaled the end of Japan's major efforts to catch up to Western levels of development. The short reign of the Taishô Emperor -- from 1912 to 1926 -- saw Japan emerge as a Great Power equal to any other in the world. Only two years into the Emperor's reign, the First World War broke out in Europe. Japan enthusiastically joined its allies in declaring war against Germany and Austria. It seized the German enclave at Weihaiwei in northeastern China along with the German Marianas, and it dispatched a token naval force to patrol against U-boats in the North Sea and the Mediterranean. While Europe's industrial powers warred, industrial Japan took advantage of their distraction to achieve a higher level of industrialization than ever before, breaking into the prosperous markets of the Americas for the first time, even achieving a large market share in the British and French colonies while developing a large and prosperous market of consumers, nearing southern European standards of living and production. Indeed, for the first time in its post-Tokugawa history Japan achieved a net surplus of capital and exports. As the 1920's progressed and Japan felt able to decrease the size of its standing armed forces, the Japanese economic boom continued uninterrupted.

Japanese political life in the post-First World War era, by contrast, was troubled. Domestically, urban workers rioted over high rice prices; the brutal suppression of the riots by the military discredited the old Meiji regime. Pressures for democratization had been building up throughout the Meiji era, but once the Japanese establishment became convinced of the need for change. In 1922, a new constitution was passed by the Diet, granting all adult males more than 20 years in age finally gained the vote, irrespective of their income or social background. This vastly broadened electorate prepared Japan for fiercely-contested multi-party elections, with socialists, American-style liberals, and conservative monarchists each gaining the support of equally large shares of the electorate. In keeping with Taiwan's status as a Japanese prefecture, the same voting qualifications applied to Japanese were extended to male adult Taiwanese, while all native-born Taiwanese gained Japanese citizenship. Although anti-Taiwanese discrimination continued and the Taiwanese electorate was manipulated into voting for conservative monarchist parties, Japan's new Taiwan policy did meet with the acceptance of the Taiwanese population and the acquiescence of most of the Japanese population. To a considerable extent, then, Japan managed to maintain itself as a reasonably tolerant and stable constitutional monarchy, despite its lapses in its Korean protectorate and its incursions upon Manchuria. Even the death of the Taishô Emperor in 1926 did nothing to disturb this basic equilibrium.

Throughout the decade, Japan became a steadily more modern society in every sense of the word. For instance, urbanization accelerated sharply despite a deceleration of Japan's economic growth in the mid-1920's, and Tôkyô became one of the largest cities in the world, alongside Paris, Buenos Aires, London, and New York, despite the catastrophic earthquake of 1923, which razed the city and killed a hundred thousand people in aftershocks and firestorms. Japanese capital was poured into the prestigious reconstruction of Tôkyô along modern lines, with broad boulevards, abundant parks, and modern skyscrapers reaching high into the sky. This vision had been substantially achieved by the 1930's. Despite a degree of sterility, the reconstruction was a success. In the meantime, Japanese popular culture attained new heights. As always, it was centered on Tôkyô, and despite that city's considerable population of White Russians, Koreans, and Taiwanese, and the considerable cultural influence emanating from France and Britain, the popular culture of late Taishô was indisputably Japanese in style. The literature and music of the era lacked the psychological traumas of an entire generation of Europeans, thanks to Japan's painless participation in the First World War. Rather, late Taishô literature was driven by the uneasy synthesis of Japanese traditions with Western industrialism, by the anomie experienced by many Japanese in their country's great cities, and by socialist-inspired calls for sweeping sociopolitical reform. The popular music was more mixed, with some Western influence via Western opera and musical drama, but with Japanese popular opera and traditional song forms such as enka continuing to predominate.

Although Japan was unable achieve hegemony over China, and Japanese fiercely resented the refusal of the Western nations to include a clause prohibiting racial discrimination in the League charter, the post-war Versailles settlement did give Japan title to Weihaihai. Moreover, Japan was able to take advantage of Russia's prostration to occupy the Siberian Maritime Provinces, with the aim of creating a cordon sanitaire that would limit Communist infriltration into Manchuria or the Japanese Empire. Local Cossacks and White forces declared the independence of a Far Eastern Republic, and immediately requested Japanese protection. Korean peasants periodically revolted against the Japanese protectorate, leading to ruthless repression in Korea and persecution of Korean migrant workers in the Home Islands. Regardless of the problems of Korea, Japan had built a position of unchallenged dominance in northeast Asia.

This position of dominance allowed the Japanese government to cultivate relatively warm and friendly relations with most of its neighbours and all of the major Western countries. The Allies of the First World War, for instance -- Britain, France, and the South American republics-- were polite with their wartime ally and claimed the Japanese role in maintaining an anti-Bolshevik barrier in the Amur valley, despite disputes over colonial boundaries and trade. Likewise, Japanese relations with North America -- particularly with the United States -- remained warm, with Japan's voluntary restriction of emigration to California and Hawai'i staving off a complete legal prohibition of Japanese immigration and allowing the two countries to maintain warm relations. Only Japanese relations with China showed a tendency to deteriorate, as the collapse of the unified Chinese state into regional warlordism and growing Japanese interference in the Manchurian provinces led educated and politically-active Chinese to fear the possibility of a Japanese invasion.

Had the Great Depression not intervened in 1930, Japan might have been able to manage a relatively painless transition towards a stable and fully democratic constitutional monarchy. Unfortunately, the Great Depression was particularly severe in the Japan of the early 1930's. Living standards for all but the wealthiest Japanese deteriorated sharply, particularly for the members of the Japanese peasantry. At the same time Japanese industrial production collapsed, and worsened as Japan's trading partners in the League of Nations imposed restrictive tariffs on Japanese imports. The May 1930 elections undercut the strength of the Liberals by bringing the expansionistic Conservatives to power and expanding the strength of the growing Socialist Party. An army revolt in 1932 brought about by the Japanese refusal to declare war upon China was suppressed bloodily, and fears of military dictatorship began to sweep the Japanese population. As much the rest of the world participated in the Reflation Program, Japan embarked on its own Keynesian reflation through a vast military build-up.

In June of 1933 the Conservative government of Japan almost fell after Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek demanded the Japan withdraw from Manchuria. As it was, the Conservatives were forced to form a coalition government with the Liberals aimed against the Socialists. By 1934, the worst of the Great Depression had passed Japan by, but the legacy of domestic desperation and foreign adventurism encouraged by the shock remained. In March, the Chinese army made demonstrations in Manchuria, but Japan responded by recognizing the Soviet Union only one month later. At this time, the Liberals began to quietly support the Communists, as determined and durable opponents of the Nationalists.

In 1935, after Brazil and Australia banned all Japanese immigration, Japanese favoured aggressively anti-League and anti-Chinese policies. When China attempted to move fresh troops into Manchuria, Japan began to supply arms to the Communists now based in north-central China. League-sponsored negotiations came to no avail, and the Chinese Nationalist regime began to find itself under serious pressure from the Communists. In September of 1936, the Japanese government secretly signed a treaty with the Soviet Union with the intent of limiting the possibilities of Soviet involvement on the side of the Chinese Nationalists, partially demilitarizing the Far Eastern Republic in exchange for Soviet recognition of the Japanese sphere of influence in Manchuria.

In May of 1937, after a series of Chinese-arranged incidents, Japan finally declared war on China. In a sweeping offensive, by the end of the summer Japan had eliminated hostile Chinese forces in Manchuria and had launched invasions of Hebei and Shanghai. In October, Japan halted its offensive after securing control of most of northeastern China and the lower Yangtze, offering peace to the Nationalists in exchange for a Chinese recognition of Japanese predominance in Shandong and Manchuria. When China refused, Japan continued its invasion of China aided by the anti-war activities of the Chinese Communists. By 1938, Japan's involvement in China had become a major international crisis. The fall of the Chinese capital of Nanjing brought about a chorus of condemnation  by the League of Nations, and by the British and French governments. The Japanese government responded to these criticisms by withdrawing from the League of Nations and continuing its bloody and expensive invasion of China.

In 1939, a coup was staged by anti-Chiang elements of the Nationalist Party which simply wanted peace. Under Wang Chingwei, the Nationalist Party went on to negotiate a humiliating piece treaty with Japan, granting China's main enemy a 100-year lease on Port Arthur and special rights in Manchuria that made that territory a de facto Japanese colony. This surrender of the Nationalists to Japan makes the Republic of China enormously unpopular, and Chinese Communists made Major gains despite Japan's withdrawal of support, eventually culminating by the end of 1940 in a heated civil war between the Nationalist government and a Communist-led anti-Japanese coalition. In order to protect its new satellite government, Japan was forced to keep its army deployed in China. The constant low-level warfare was unpopular among the Japanese poor, who by and large weren't interested in a Chinese empire and who were upset that the expansion of the Japanese war effort had managed to eliminate much of the post-Depression recovery in living standards.

Throughout this time, the Japanese relationship with the League of Nations continued to deteriorate. Even though the European and Southern Hemispheric members of the League of Nations were preoccupied by the vicious conflict in central and eastern Europe, they were equally concerned by Japan's apparent attempt to impose its hegemony over all of China. Worse, rumours that Japan was moving towards an alliance with Germany raised fears that allied, Japan and Germany might jointly attack first the Soviet Union, then western Europe and western European colonies in Southeast Asia.

As 1941 progressed, Japan found itself increasingly isolated. In China, the Japanese army and that of the Nationalists under Wang Chingwei found itself fighting a losing war against a broad Communist-led coalition. The Pacific War was a bold attempt to try to overturn the global political framework that seemed to limit Japanese goals in China. It failed catastrophically.

By the terms of the post-War San Francisco and Helsinki treaties, Japan was stripped of most of its territorial acquisitions since the beginning of Meiji. Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and Hainan were returned to China. The Soviet Union gained the Far Eastern Republic and maintained its protectorate over Outer Mongolia, while Lüshun and the South Manchurian Railway were placed under joint Sino-Soviet control. By the terms of the San Francisco treaty, Japan was compelled to withdraw from the Spanish Philippines and to leave the Filipino Provisional Government supported by Japan to its fate. Even independent, conservative, and non-Communist Korea was hostile to Japan, owing to general Korean resentment of their homeland's colonization and ill-treatment by Japan.

Relative to its Asian neighbours, Japan was more isolated than it had ever been since early Meiji. Negotiating with their Soviet and Chinese counterparts, Japanese diplomats were able to avoid war, even managing to start a barter trade between Japan and the Communist bloc. Relations with the Soviet Union and China -- and with the post-Soviet Civil War Siberian republic -- remained decidedly cool until the joint industrial projects of the 1970's. This isolation made the process of decolonization even more painful for Japan, as five million Japanese soldiers and civilians were evacuated from mainland Asia. The pragmatism of the Korean government left the low-profile Korean collaborators with the Japanese mostly untouched, but high-ranking collaborators and their families fled to the Home Islands in their hundreds of thousands. From Manchuria and the Far Eastern Republic, though, almost a million and a half Russians, Manchu, and Chinese fled from Vladivostok and Lüshun ahead of the advancing Communists. In all, almost eight million people from every corner of Asia were imperfectly absorbed into a war-impoverished and radicalized Japanese population of some 80 million people.

Japan's military defeat changed the country. The utter failure of the attempt to acquire a Japanese empire in Southeast Asia had discredited the Nationalists and the Japanese military. The repair of Japan's relations with the League and League member-states was made the top priority of the Foreign Ministry, and in 1951 a chastened Japan had regained its membership in the General Assembly. (Japan did not regain its permanent seat on the League Supreme Council, though, until 1978.) In the 1947 general elections, the Japanese electorate voted by a margin of three-to-one against the Conservatives and in favour of a Liberal-Socialist coalition government. With the blessing of Emperor Hirohito and public opinion, the Liberal-Socialist coalition remained in power until the 1960's under Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru. Under the Shigeru government, a wide variety of reforms were enacted, including the extension of the vote to women in 1948, the redistribution of agricultural land owned by politically-indefensible private and corporate landowners, and the establishment of a national network of financial cooperatives, aimed at lending money to members of the lower and middle classes for housing and business purposes. Although many of these reforms were vociferously resisted by conservatives, the isolation of Japanese conservatives and -- perhaps more importantly -- the recovery of the Japanese economy by 1949 -- had allowed for the passage of these reforms.

Many observers had doubted that Japan would be able to regain its rapid rate of pre-war economic growth. Although wartime needs forced the development of extensive heavy industry throughout Honshû and northern Kyûshû, the Japanese consumer economy had been systematically starved of capital throughout the wartime years. Further, Japan had lost most of its overseas markets hampered Japanese recovery -- Japanese trade with the Americas and Europe recovered slowly, while trade with China and Siberia never recovered to pre-war levels. Despite this, Japan's reintegration into the League of Nations and its enthusiastic participation in the post-war ACTI process resulted in the rapid expansion of Japanese exports -- including, now, a growing range of manufactured goods -- in the early 1950's. By the mid-1950's, Japanese living standards and per capita output and income began to rise rapidly.

The question of rearmament was widely debated in the decades after the Pacific War. That conflict's demonstration that Japan could not stand alone and lingering anti-militarism encouraged the Yoshida government to move towards a defensive military posture linked with the League of Nations. Without any land borders, the Japanese army evolved into a purely defensive force charged with repelling any invaders that penetrated Japanese defenses. The Japanese air force -- inheritor of an advanced aerospace industry built from nothing in the Pacific War -- expanded rapidly throughout the 1950's and 1960's. The Japanese navy, though, became the linchpin of Japanese defenses, as the Pacific War's destroyer fleets were modernized and the aircraft carrier fleets built. By the 1970's, the Japanese navy was perhaps the largest in the world, rivaled only by the European and United States fleets. From the mid-1950's on, Japan was integrated into overall League defenses, with an emphasis upon the defense of the Korean peninsula from Communist invasion.

Naturally, this rapid political and economic change in the late 1940's and 1950's led to rapid social change. Perhaps the most noticeable of these changes was the emergence of a new popular culture, one that was visibly more liberal and international than ever before. The enfranchisement of women inspired a new wave of Japanese feminism, inspiring Japanese women to become more assertive in demanding equal rights and responsibilities with men. Similarly in pop music, while pre-war musics such as enka remained vibrant musical forms, the global prominence of Brazilian music inspired fans and imitators throughout the Home Islands, while Ryûkyûan folk music acquired a new credibility. Post-war literati also reflected this new cosmopolitan, as urban authors influenced by Western popular fiction and coping in the aftermath of military defeat

Another notable feature of post-war Japan was the rapid decline in the Japanese birthrate. At the end of the Pacific War, an average of two million children were born in a year. The return of Japanese from abroad created a shortlived baby boom; more than three million babies were born in 1946, 1947, and 1948. Many informed Japanese were alarmed by this rapid population growth, and feared mass unemployment, poverty, or even a second war against Japan's neighbours. Throughout the 1950's, a government program of family planning, the sharp rise of living standards, and the growing emancipation of women led to a very rapid decline in the Japanese birth rate. Birthrates among native Taiwanese also remained high until the end of the 1960's, when Taiwanese also experienced the same rapid decline in birthrates. The long-term effect of the declining birthrate was partly counterbalanced by the growth of the average Japanese lifespan, from 43 years in 1945 to 63 years by 1954, eventually reaching 75 years by 1980. Still, this and the rapid urbanization of the Empire ensured the decline of population growth. The 1960 census revealed that the Japanese Empire had a total population of 101 million, and the 1970 census demonstrated that 117 million people lived in Japan, but the rate of increase was slowing. The Japanese population was expected to stabilize at 140 million by 2000, and thereafter to slowly decline without immigration.

As the total Japanese population grew, the Home Islands become more pluriethnic. Of the roughly four million Koreans transported to the Home Islands to serve as industrial labourers without pay, a half-million remained in Japan, most in the Kansai plain surrounding the city of Osaka. Many Taiwanese emigrated from their island homeland to the Home Islands, searching for higher living standards and jobs, most of these making their homes in the Kansai plain, with secondary Taiwanese communities in northern Kyûshû and Tôkyô. The 700 thousand Far Easterner Slavs, living in their compact communities in Karafuto and Hokkaidô, also contributed to these growing pluriethnicity, as did the Western and Filipino expatriate communities of Tôkyô and Micronesia.

Throughout these changes the Japanese economy experienced booming growth -- in the two decades after 1960, Japanese GDP per capita enjoyed twenty years of consistent very high growth, rarely less than 7% per annum and often higher than 10%. This economic boom revolutionized Japanese living standards.By the 1970's, most Japanese -- even in Taiwan -- enjoyed First World living standards. To be sure, Japanese industry was relatively fragmented, with few of the corporate monoliths of Europe, South America, and the United States, and Japan's industry was not as technically advanced as their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Still, Japan certainly was one of the most prosperous regions in the world, surpassed every individual nation of Western Europe in terms of gross national product 1969 and ranking alongside the United States and Brazil a world industrial power. Indeed, by the end of the 1970's Japan had become the largest exporter in the world behind only the European Confederation. The successful touchdown and return of the Japanese lunar module Amaterasu on the Moon in February of 1972 -- launched using Japanese-designed rockets and computer technologies -- signalled Japan's advancement.

To be sure, Japan in the 1970's still had many problems. Domestically, Japan faced problems of urban overcrowing, an inefficient agricultural sector, and extensive industrial pollution. The infamous Minamata disease of the 1950's and 1960's, produced by industrial plants that carelessly allowed waste mercury to enter the food chain, was seized upon by citizen's groups as needing reform. At the same time, many conservative Japanese were worried by the increasing 'libertinism' of Japanese popular culture, and all Japanese were at a loss to cope with the Home Islands' new pluriethnicity. As the decade passed, though, the problem of industrial pollution was regulated by the Socialist governments of the 1972-1980 period, while Japanese became accustomed to their new pluriethnic nation and cosmopolitan culture. Even the intractable problem of overcrowding was partly resolved, if not by the construction of the high-rise suburbs ringing the major cities then by the rapid growth of consumerist lifestyles.

Japan's external problems, though, were rather more intractable. Although Korea and Japan had maintained diplomatic relations since 1956, Korean nationalism and Japan's resentment with Korea's increasingly efficient and competitive export trade kept relations cold. Despite the rapid improvement in Japan's relationships with League members in the Americas and Europe, continued Korean resentment of Koreans at Japan's overlordship and Japanese concern over increasing competitiveness of Korean exports with Japanese exports kept the relationship frosty. Despite Japan's friendly relationships with the powers of the Americas, Europe, India, and even the South Pacific, protectionist sentiments in all of those countries were stimulated by Japan's exporting success. In 1972 the Liberal prime minister Tanaka Kakuei agreed with AGTI to take steps to reduce Japan's trade surplus with the rest of the League. Despite these quarrels, though, Japan's relationship with Korea and the West were positively productive compared to Japanese relations with the rest of Asia and the United States.

The half-million Japanese in the United States -- most living in the American state of Hawai'i with substantial Japanese communities in the Pacific coastal states of California and Oregon -- provided Japan with an unobstructed view of the American situation. Many politically-aware Japanese rightly feared that just like Japan a generation earlier, the unstable United States might start a war to try to solve its domestic problems. In Southeast Asia, the extensive investments of Japanese corporations in Thai manufacturing plants helped to maintain friendly Japanese-Thai relations, but Thailand was the only country in the region that was even moderately friendly towards Japan. The Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, and Vietnam -- independent since 1954, 1955, 1956 and 1969, respectively -- remained hostile towards Japan, and went so far as to form the US-allied Manila Pact in 1973. The Manila Pact, for its part, almost went out of its way to enrage the Sino-Siberian alliance despite quiet Japanese warnings to the contrary, with the Philippines engaging in pogroms against its million-strong Overseas Chinese minority and other supposed Communists, and Indonesia going so far as to conquer Malaya, with that erstwhile country's large Chinese population, and kill almost a million Overseas Chinese in bloody pogroms the length of greater Indonesia. The 1978 deployment of the United States Fourth and Fifth fleets at Camh Ranh Bay and Quezon City precipitated a Japanese diplomatic protest, as did the sale of long-range nuclear-capable missiles to Indonesia in 1979. Far more than any other country in the Pacific -- more than even Australia or Korea -- Japanese officials knew that the Pacific area was coming dangerously close to the point of a total breakdown into war.

Despite the problems of the world outside their borders, though, in 1981 Japanese enjoyed an unprecedented degree of prosperity and stability. The 131 million Japanese, enjoying the fruits of what was essentially a prosperous First World economy, had the highest standards of living in all Asia, with family and individual incomes, rates of consumption, and a modern and technologically consumer industry second to none in the entire Pacific basin, with a total GNP larger than that of the United States and on par with that of Brazil. The Taiwanese immigrants in the Home Islands were being successfully integrated, and Taiwanese nationalists in Taiwan itself were being placated with token moves towards a degree of official biculturalism. Japan's relations with Korea were improving sharply as Japanese investment in the booming Korean economy continued to grow apace, while Japan possessed a very high stature in the wider world. The intrusion of the outside world in 1982 changed this dramatically for the worse.

The Third World War did not directly involve Japan, although Japanese shipping routes in the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca became unusable. Japan protested the Vietnamese-American invasion of southwestern China in the strongest terms possible, and (to no avail) offered to mediate the conflict. As the death toll rapidly mounted, and after the regional nuclear exchange in July of 1982, Japanese became conscious of their country's isolation from its allies in the midst of a conflict that had -- by the end of July -- killed more people than the entire Second World War. Though the Japanese military enforced Japan's neutrality, the extreme vulnerability of the dense urban populations of the Home Islands to nuclear attack worried many Japanese.

In the final nuclear exchanges of the Third World War, the Empire of Japan was attacked at 5 am on the 3nd of September, Greenwich Mean Time, with almost one hundred nuclear-armed missiles launched from American missile bases in Alaska. The ABM systems installed in 1980 successfully destroyed or deflected almost all of the warheads from their assigned targets, but the city of Yokohama was destroyed along with four million of its inhabitants, and created a firestorm that would have razed Tôkyô itself but for sheer luck. The dusting of the entire empire with fallout from mainland Asia in the month after the final exchange created numerous health problems, both in the forms of short-term radiation sickness and long-term cancer; even in 2000, three times as many Japanese died of cancer as in 1981.

Still worse, in October the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture was forced to release a report concluding that the decimation of the Ukrainian grain fields, the cessation of food exports worldwide , and the destruction of the Yokohama grain storage binds made it impossible to feed the entire Japanese population, even with extensive rationing. In the cold winter of 1982-1983, almost twenty million Japanese starved; though the Winter Famine victims were disproportionately poor and non-Japanese, its mental legacy remains in the entire surviving population. The epidemics of the post-War period -- aggravated by the Japanese population's poor nutrition, exposure to radioactive and chemical pollutants, and the collapse of public services -- also took a major toll in Japan. The Japanese population dropped sharply to barely more than 110 million, with the very old, the poor, and non-Japanese suffering particularly badly. By 1 January 2001, 15.6 million Japanese had died as a result of the Third World War, of which an estimated 14.7 million died before the 1st of January, 1984.

One War fatality was Emperor Hirohito, who died of lung cancer on the 23rd of August, 1983. The succession of Hirohito's son Akihito to the Imperial throne marked the beginning of what was officially called the reign of Heisei ("achieving peace"), but the shellshocked Japanese population was in no mood to celebrate: The recent decimation of the nation and the collapse that halved the Japanese economy distracted the entire nation from imperial pleasantries, and radicalized the survivors. In the 1984 general election -- held despite rumours in the military and conservative circles of a postponement -- Socialist Party candidates won fully 45% of the popular vote and 36% of the seats in the Diet, while a far-left coalition centred around the Japan Communist Party won 17% of the vote and 11% of Diet seats, and a far-right Nationalist Party that won 19% of the vote and 16% of the seats in the Diet. For most of the next decade centrist parties were faced with the unenviably complex task of trying to prevent the complete implosion of the Japanese political system. Political violence became rife, as free-lance terrorists and party-associated militias assassinated political leaders -- most notoriously, Socialist Party President and Prime Minister Yasumi Maruhoshi in September of 1987 -- or fought pitched street battles with each other or even the police.

In the midst of its domestic turmoil, Japan was not spared pressure from the outside world. Almost as soon as the 1982-1983 winter ended, Japan embarked on a period of territorial expansionism aimed at securing for Japan a defensible strategic perimeter. The slew of Japanese annexations -- beginning with the Aleutian Islands in May of 1983, and continuing through the occupation of the Hawai'ian islands with their large Japanese populations in the summer of 1983 to the occupation of the Aleutian peninsula of Alaska by September -- were popular among the Japanese population despite their financial cost. The League of Nations and the Western Great Powers was willing to tolerate this Japanese expansionism, but the invasion and annexation of Luzon in the spring of 1984 worried public opinion in Australia and South America. An abortive move, in August of 1984, to annex the South China Sea islands might well have triggered a League/Japanese war had the naval commanders responsible for the occupation not been quickly denounced by the Japanese Diet and forced to withdraw. With the gradual penetration of the depopulated landmass of the Siberian Far East north of the Amur in 1984 and 1985, Japan reached its territorial apogee.

Perhaps the most significant of these pressures stemmed the new wave of immigration to the Empire. Japan had initiated this wave with the recruitment, in 1983 and 1984, of almost three million Koreans on long-term contracts to fill the unprestigious and dirty job left vacant after the Third World War. In 1984, Japan accepted its designation by the League of Nations as a country of first resort, for refugees fleeing the erstwhile combatant states in mainland Asia, and over the next seven years absorbed almost 21 million refugees, including 14 million Chinese, three million Indochinese, and more than a million Filipinos. By the end of the decade, Japan had become as much a pluriethnic cauldron as any Southern Hemispheric country. In places as varied as the rural agricultural communities of Kyûshû and north Honshu, the Kansai plain megalopolis, and the suburban cities of Hokkaidô and Karafuto, ordinary Japanese were left to cope with the inhabitants of the strange new Vietnamese, Madurese, and Ilocano neighbourhoods that now dotted their homelands. Although this flood of immigrants was responsible for the recovery of the Japanese population to 126 million people by 1990, the strange customs and odd languages of the immigrants made them subjects of abuse.

At the same time, Taiwanese regionalists became newly assertive, owing to the plight of their Fujianese-speaking kin in the ruins of China and their own disproportionate suffering in 1982-1983. Taiwanese pressure was largely responsible for Japan's role in resettling of almost one millon Fujianese refugees in 1984 in what had been Washington State. Until the 1980's, Taiwanese had been content with equality with Japanese in a Japanese cultural and linguistic environment; now, Taiwanese increasingly became attached to the idea of some form of Home Rule for their island homeland. The Taiwan National Party became the most vociferous champion of Taiwanese causes, consistently winning the support of half of the island electorate's and a third of Taiwan's seats in the Diet in every general election since 1984.

For most of the 1980's, the Japanese economy had stagnated since the Japanese state couldn't afford the massive neo-Keynesian financial stimulus that had initiated economic recovery in the Southern Hemisphere, and GDP per capita stagnated at 60% of its 1981 level. Beginning in 1988, though, an economic recovery began as international trade recovered, thanks to the auspices of AGEI and the Trade Pact. At first, the economic recovery was limited entirely to sectors of the economy and regions of the country that carried out extensive international trade -- while Kansai and Kyûshû had visibly begun the process of recovery as early as 1989, the entire northern half of the country remained trapped in poverty. By 1991, domestic demand had expanded enough in the southern Home Islands to drive a Japan-wide recovery.

From 1990 until 1995, Japanese GDP per capita grew at a healthy average rate of 6.5%. This economic expansion differed from the boom of the 1970's in that it made extensive use of the latest technologies -- the Japanese sections of the Euronet, for instance, were vastly expanded and improved upon using mass-marketed Euro-3 terminals, while Japan led the world in developing a prosperous space-launch industry out of Palau and Tanegashima that specialized in the launch of communications and weather satellites. By the mid-1990's, living standards in Japan once again approached pre-war levels, despite an unemployment rate of 8%, very high levels of government debt, and severe poverty in Taiwan and among non-Japanese populations of the Home Islands. The rapidly improving economic outlook encouraged further population growth -- even as fertility rates among ethnic Japanese rose to near-replacement levels, an estimated two million Southeast Asians took advantage of tourist or business visas to illegally immigrate to Japan.

In 1996 and 1997, annual GDP per capita growth reached 9%, finally restoring Japan's pre-War GDP per capita and bringing Japanese GDP per capita up to three-quarters of Argentine and French levels. As Japanese police forces broke the most prominent surviving political militias in a series of spectacular raids and plans were drawn up for the rebuilding of Yokohama, it looked to many observers like Japan was finally nearing the end of its physical recovery. Even Japan's relations with the outside world had improved, as Tôkyô evolved into the de facto capital of East Asia and Japanese popular culture -- particularly music, in the forms of Ryûkyûan folk-pop and the so-called "Kantobeat" -- achieved an unparalleled degree of international popularity.

Although rejeuvenated Japan faced problems as various as anti-Japanese sentiments in Korea, Australia, and Europe, economic development in Southeast Asia, and the final struggles of the Second American Civil War, none of these problems seriously threatened the Japanese future. By far Japan's most pressing problem was a domestic problem, namely, the situation of the almost 40 million Taiwanese and immigrants. This problem of Japan's new pluriethnicity touched on so many other problems in Japanese society -- from urban poverty and social exclusion to organized crime and political terrorism -- that it simply could not be ignored.

The Taiwanese question, as the Asahi Shinbum famously referred to the debate sparked by the 1991 Home Rule Manifesto of the Taiwan National Party, was handled gently by the Japanese state. Gradual moves were made by the state towards some kind of devolution of power to a Taiwanese local authority, but these moves were either too slow (for Taiwanese nationalists) or too quick (for their Japanese counterparts). For the most part, though, both sides involved in the Taiwanese question have acted responsibly.

The same cannot be said for the post-War immigrants. With few exceptions, the Chinese and Southeast Asian immigrants remained trapped at the bottom of Japanese society, working (when they could find work at all) in the worst-paying and most dangerous jobs available, living in almost Third World conditions, and denied Japanese citizenship. The problem of integrating these immigrants was apparent throughout the 1990's. Only a minority faction inside the Conservative Party advocated the repatriation of as many of the immigrants as possible to their homelands, but this minority was able to create a major political crisis in 2000 over the passage of the Law on Naturalization. This law, which transformed Japanese citizenship from the principle of jus sanguinis to the principle of jus soli, automatically gave the five million people born in Japan to non-native parents Japanese citizenship, and allowed substantial numbers of post-War immigrants to apply for and eventually acquire Japanese citizenship.

The brief Holy Alliance invasion and occupation of Japan in August of 1998, and the effects of First Contact with the ITA, naturally surprised the Japanese. In the almost three years since First Contact, Japan has managed to adapt reasonably well to interglobalization. After a brief post-invasion recession, the Japanese economy has proved able to cope with interworld competition, even acquiring a substantial market share on nearby alterworlds such as Communauté globale and Estates-General. Further, Japan's large and wealthy population has allowed Japan to maintain a fairly high profile in interdimensional affairs. The announcement in May of 2000 of a substantial program of interworld colonization, using Tripartite Alliance Japanese manufactured goods and technologies and Dynasty Japan colonists, seem certain to establish Japan as an interdimensional power.

For all of its problems, Japan in the early 21st century is a prosperous and pluralistic society, one of the most important Great Powers on Tripartite Alliance Earth, and a bright future. Barring catastrophe, the Japanese nation is assured of future happiness.