Courtesy of AlternateHistory user HongCanucker
Excerpt from The Sun Rises: Japan in the Early 20th Century
By Professor Norman Zuckerman, Princeton University, New Jersey, United States of America, 2001
Japan's emergence as a great power was confirmed following the Hispano-Japanese War of 1900-01, which ended with its seizure of the Philippine Islands, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905-06, both of which were enormously significant in that the former was the first time an Eastern nation had been able to inflict a stunning military defeat on a Western colonial empire, while the latter had done the same to a true world power. The former also led to Spain's transformation into a republic, and the latter event also precipitated the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of Communism. Japan would later consolidate its gains during the wars by declaring the Philippines open to Japanese settlement and keeping the locals in place, and placing an entire fleet of its modern navy at Port Arthur (now Liaoning, Manchukuo). The fledging empire also annexed its protectorate of Korea, which had been under its control since the end of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95.
Following the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912, Japan entered a period known as "Taisho Democracy", in which the country instituted a constitutional monarchy under the Emperor Taisho. Japan would enter the Great War on the side of the Entente as a junior member, fulfilling its obligations to the Anglo-Japanese alliance of the early 20th century. The Imperial Japanese Navy launched the first ever seaplane raids, its target being the German Navy at the German concession of Tsingtao in China, from the seaplane tender Wakamiya. While a failure, successive raids conducted by the Royal Navy and United States Navy in both the Atlantic and Pacific proved the worth of aerial combat in a naval setting. The Japanese Navy would take part in the Battle of the Three Navies in 1916, and would also prove instrumental in the British recapture of the Sandwich Islands in mid-1917.
The years after the Great War saw Japan acquire the former German and concessions in China. Japan would also send forces to Siberia and the Russian Far East at the height of the Russian Civil War to bolster the White movement against the Bolsheviks during their march eastwards. However, the Japanese ultimately failed to achieve numerous goals. During the war, in 1915, to consolidate its control in East Asia, the Japanese had drafted a series of demands to the Republic of China's President Yuan Shikai, the infamous Twenty-One Demands, which effectively forced China to cede its sovereignty to Japan and rendered it a Japanese protectorate. Vociferous opposition from the Chinese public and the foreign powers ultimately saw this unequal treaty, which would later be attached to the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, as dropped.
Japan in the early 1920s entered a period of relatively stable economic growth, and reaped the fruits of the prosperity that marked the decade. The period of Taisho Democracy saw the expansion of many civil and political liberties in the country, and the country experienced levels of prosperity similar to those in the nations of the Entente. However, at the same time, Japan was also wracked by numerous crises, such as the 1923 Kanto earthquake which devastated Tokyo, and the resurgence in militaristic and jingoistic ideals among the bureaucracy coupled with the death of Emperor Taisho in 1926 saw the end of Taisho Democracy.
The ascension of the new emperor, Hirohito, saw the gradual rollback of many of the progressive reforms that had marked the Taisho period. Among the Japanese populace, radical nationalist sentiments across the nation would see resurgence, and would spike after the Crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression. Many new military officials obtained high-ranking positions in the government, and foreign policy took a marked shift from relatively minimal interventionism to very aggressive militarism.
The first of Japan's many foreign endeavors in this decade began with the country facing off against an old foe: China. On September 18, 1931, Japanese saboteurs masquerading as Chinese bandits blew up a section of the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway, an acquisition from the Russo-Japanese War. Immediately afterwards, Japanese troops poured into Manchuria from Korea, seizing the region and six months later declaring it the Empire of Manchukuo, under the leadership of the last Qing Dynasty Emperor of China, Puyi. This act, the truth and nature of which were soon revealed to the international community, would draw international condemnation from Japan's former allies of Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in Japan proper, the country slowly began its shift towards a totalitarian military state, as power became increasingly concentrated in the military and new, racist and aggressive policies would be enacted. Hopes of being able to maintain a stable, reasonably moderate government were dashed following the "League of Blood" assassination plot and the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi on May 15, 1932, after which the military government curtailed many of the civil and political freedoms of the past few years and instituted a new authoritarian state.
The end of the rule of law in Japan and beginning of the new military state marked the renewal of Japan's imperial ambitions. On July 7, 1937, following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident near Beijing, the Imperial Japanese Army poured into China, taking advantage of the sectarian divides between the current government (the Republic of China) and the Chinese Communist Party, both of which were engaged in a civil war at the time. The first two years were marked by rapid and overwhelming successes for the Japanese, as their armies swept across eastern and southern China. By the end of July the Japanese had captured the city of Peking, had reached Shanghai in October, and at the end of the year controlled the capital, Nanking. Following the capture of the city on December 13, Japanese soldiers engaged in a brutal and horrific civilian massacre of the city known as the "Rape of Nanking", with approximations of the number of people killed still under debate among many historians today.
As the Second Great War broke out in 1941, Japan seized the opportunity to turn its sights onto the colonies of the other Western powers. Although never formally a member of the Axis Powers due to lingering resentment over the Great War between Japan and the United States, both nations as well as Germany did sign non-aggression pacts, and the Japanese Navy worked in tandem with German advisors during naval exercises. The next three years were marked by the continued expansion of the Japanese military's power and its reach, as the country began building many more ships and placing more guns into more of its citizens' hands, culminating in the launch of the enormous Yamato-class battleships in 1941. Then, on February 7, 1942, the Empire of Japan leaped and struck.