Introduction: Japanese Empire as an Excrescence of Imperialism

Abstract

After acquiring the lucrative colonies of Taiwan and Korea in 1895 and winning the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japan developed an imperial system that was distinctly different from those of Western countries. Those two military accomplishments exemplified the success of the Meiji Restoration, and, as Japan’s concerns shifted from national security to national assertiveness in its colonial endeavors, they also showed how the regional dominance in East Asia had shifted from China to Japan. In this introductory chapter, the reasons for Japan’s imperialist policies and its strategies for territorial expansion are compared with those of the European powers, to account for the ways in which the Japanese Empire was in many ways peculiar among the other empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.