Russia then acted to deprive Japan of its gains in both Korea and Manchuria. In 1894/95 Japan fought a victorious war against China, and in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, compelled China to abandon its overlordship of Korea and grant to Japan the Liaotung Peninsula in South Manchuria, including the naval base of Port Arthur. Its location made it a potential base for an invasion of Japan, but also a bridgehead for Japanese expansion onto the Asian mainland. The attention of this new Japan turned first to Korea, which had been a vassal state of China since 1644. In this way the three belief systems reinforced each other to inspire an unusually strong national spirit. Buddhists could readily see that as guaranteeing reincarnation to a better life, while the Confucian emphasis on loyalty and the idea that rulers enjoyed the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ were consistent with Shintoist concepts of the dead guarding their descendants – and of the emperor as a living god. It taught that those who died in wars returned to fight in spirit alongside their descendants, and that death for emperor and country was the noblest end one could meet. They were not banned, but from 1889 teaching them in schools was forbidden, and Shintoism, considered indigenous, older and the ‘way of the gods’, was proclaimed the state ethic. Two other belief systems existed, Buddhism and Confucianism, both ‘imported’ from China in the first millennium. So too was a cult attached to the emperor, which claimed he was a direct descendant of the sun goddess Omikami Amaterasu, whose father, Izanagi, and grandson, Ninigi, featured in Japanese creation mythology as respectively creator of Japan and founder of its ruling dynasty. The Royal Navy was chosen as the model for the nascent Japanese Navy, and naval officers, including the future Admiral Togo, were sent to England to study and train, while warships were ordered from British shipyards.Īlong with this physical modernisation, universal primary education incorporating strong nationalist indoctrination was introduced. The model first chosen for the Japanese Army was that of France, but following its defeat by Prussia in 1870/71, Prussian military instructors took over in the late 1870s. Individuals were sent abroad, to seek out the best ‘models’, and to learn the appropriate skills. Attempts to resist served only to demonstrate the superiority of the foreigners’ military and naval technology, and in 1868 Japan embarked on a thorough programme of modernisation, encapsulated in the slogan ‘Rich country. Japan, a late entrant to the race for territory, would prove as expansionist as any, and its ambitions would soon clash with those of Russia.įor well over 200 years Japan maintained almost total isolation from the outside world, but in 1855 visits by American and Russian naval squadrons extracted visiting rights to some Japanese ports. Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 had an unintended spin-off, Social Darwinism, which justified subjugation of other peoples as fulfilling nature’s laws. Expansion at the expense of the weak central Asian Khanates continued, and acquisitive eyes turned to China’s northern territory, Manchuria, and vassal state, Korea. This did not prevent his successor, Alexander II, selling Alaska to the USA in 1867, but the sale signified not an end to expansion but the decline of the principal resource (sea-otter and seal pelts) that had brought the Russian–American Company there. Tsar Nicholas I (1825–1856) declaimed that where the Russian flag had been raised, it should never be lowered. Twenty years later the Kuriles were ceded to Japan in exchange for the large island of Sakhalin.įrom 1798, Alaska was Russian, and there was settlement briefly as far south as northern California. Kamchatka had been acquired in the seventeenth century and in 1855 so had all bar the most southerly islands of the Kuriles chain, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific Ocean. The name Vladivostok (‘Rule the East’), given to the settlement established on the Sea of Japan in 1860, was an unequivocal statement of ambition, as were the treaties forced on China in respect of central Asian territories and the Amur river valley from 1860. From the 1850s, prevented from expansion to the west by Germany and Austria-Hungary and to the south by the British and French shoring-up of the Ottoman Empire, the tsars turned their attention to central Asia and the Far East. Occupying a vast plain without natural defences such as seas and mountains, Russia long equated security with expansion, protecting earlier territorial acquisitions by adding new ones.
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