Japan’s Great War as a Response to Western Hegemony

Abstract

Some preliminary remarks are necessary when dealing with the effects on Asia and Japan of what in Europe we usually refer to as the ‘First World War’ (or World War I) — and for the generation that directly experienced it, the ‘Great War’. First, it should be noted that when the war broke out in Europe in 1914, the two main events destined to mark East Asian history in the early twentieth century had already occurred a few years earlier. With the war fought and won against the empire of the Tsars in 1905, Japan had concluded its long rise from the condition of a weak country, humiliated by the Western imperialist powers, to the rank of a major regional power with its own sphere of influence — Taiwan, Port Arthur, and the Liaodong Peninsula, along with the conquest of Korea. Meanwhile, the collapse of the Chinese Empire (1911) and the birth of the Republic (1912) had marked the start of the transition of China towards ‘modernity’. From this perspective, then, 1914 — a fatal year for Europe — did not result in a ‘turning point’ in East Asia’s history.