Japan in the First World War

Japan entered the war on 23 August 1914 as Britain’s ally, but it fought above all for its own aims in Asia. By November 1914 it had taken the German fortress of Tsingtao in China and the German islands in the Pacific north of the equator. It sent no troops to Europe, but its warships escorted Allied convoys. It used the war to strengthen its position in China, and ended it among the victorious great powers at the peace conference in Paris.

The road to war

In 1895 Japan defeated China, but Germany, Russia and France then “advised” it to give up the Liaotung peninsula it had won. Japan gave way, and its public reacted with outrage. From 1902 it was bound to Britain by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. A decade before the world war Japan defeated Russia in a war that won it the southern part of Manchuria and half of Sakhalin, and in 1910 it annexed Korea. It soon came to terms with its former enemy: in 1907, 1910 and 1912 the two states divided Manchuria and Mongolia into spheres of influence.

Entry into the war

The alliance did not oblige Japan to take part in a European war, but in the first week of August the British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, asked Tokyo for help against German warships in Chinese waters. The government of Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu, and especially the Foreign Minister, Katō Takaaki, saw the war as a unique opportunity: Germany, distant and tied down by the fighting in Europe, could not defend its possessions in Asia. Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s German East Asia Squadron was not at Tsingtao when the war began.

On 15 August Japan demanded that Germany withdraw its warships from Far Eastern waters and hand over to it the whole leased territory of Kiautschou with the port of Tsingtao. The ultimatum went unanswered, and on 23 August Emperor Yoshihito proclaimed the declaration of war. The British had doubts, fearing Japanese expansion in China, and Australia and New Zealand watched the Pacific with unease, but Tokyo could not be held back. On 25 August Japan also found itself at war with Austria-Hungary, because the Austro-Hungarian cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth was stationed at Tsingtao.

Tsingtao and the Pacific islands

On 2 September Japanese troops landed on the Shandong peninsula, violating Chinese neutrality, and advanced on Tsingtao, today’s Qingdao. In the siege they were supported by a small British force. The Japanese took the fortress by methodical sapping and concentrated heavy artillery fire, and for the first time in history used ship-launched aircraft in combat. After a night assault the garrison surrendered on 7 November, and about 4,700 Germans and Austrians were taken prisoner. Figures for the Japanese army’s losses vary widely: from about 240 to more than 700 killed and about 1,300 wounded. To these were added about 270 sailors of the cruiser Takachiho, sunk by a German torpedo boat.

The Japanese navy, acting almost independently of the government, seized without a fight in October the German islands north of the equator: the Marianas, the Carolines and the Marshall Islands, among them Yap, a hub of German telegraph cables. The islands south of the equator were taken by the Australians. In December London gave way to Japan and agreed that the Australians would not occupy the islands held by the Japanese, and Katō announced in parliament that their fate would be decided by the peace conference. The conquests gave the navy an argument for a budget twice the size of the army’s.

China and wartime diplomacy

China was the main field of Japan’s war. In January 1915 the government presented President Yuan Shikai with the Twenty-One Demands, which were meant to subordinate China to Japanese influence. Their first group concerned the takeover of the former German rights in Shandong. When the negotiations dragged on, on 7 May Japan gave China 51 hours to accept the demands, postponing most of the far-reaching fifth group. Yuan Shikai’s government accepted the ultimatum, and in China 9 May became known as the Day of National Humiliation. On 25 May treaties on Shandong and on South Manchuria were signed in Peking.

Berlin sounded out Tokyo about a separate peace, and the Allies wondered how far Japanese loyalty went. On 19 October 1915, through the efforts of the new Foreign Minister, Kikujirō Ishii, Japan acceded to the Pact of London and pledged not to make a separate peace with Germany.

In July 1916 Japan signed with Russia an open convention and a secret alliance concerning China. In February 1917 London secretly promised to support Japan’s claims to Shandong and the islands north of the equator. On 2 November 1917 the United States recognised Japan’s “special interests” in China, and both sides reaffirmed the “Open Door”, that is, equal opportunity for the trade of all nations.

A navy instead of an army

In November 1914 Japan rejected the Allies’ requests, especially France’s, to send troops to Europe. Katō explained that the Japanese army existed solely for the defence of the country. Japanese warships, on the other hand, helped hunt German cruisers in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean and escorted convoys from Australia and New Zealand, and in February 1915 Japanese sailors helped put down the Singapore mutiny.

The navy came to Europe only in return for British promises. On 13 April 1917 the 2nd Special Squadron of Rear Admiral Kōzō Satō arrived at Malta: the cruiser Akashi and eight destroyers, later reinforced. According to various counts it escorted more than 700 ships, which carried from more than half a million to about 700,000 people. On 11 June 1917 an Austro-Hungarian submarine torpedoed the destroyer Sakaki, and 59 Japanese sailors were killed. To the request for battlecruisers for the Grand Fleet, however, Tokyo answered with a refusal.

The home front

Japan did not mobilise its economy on a large scale, but the war brought it a boom. Factories filled Allied orders for textiles and industrial goods, exports quadrupled between 1913 and 1918, and the country became a creditor for the first time. The influx of capital, however, brought inflation. The prices of food, fuel and clothing doubled, and by 1918 real wages had fallen by more than 30 per cent. A handful of the newly rich, known as narikin, became a symbol of undeserved wealth.

In October 1916 Ōkuma was replaced by Marshal Masatake Terauchi, whose cabinet did not rest on the parties. In the summer of 1918 the price of rice rose week by week. Protests by women from fishing villages in Toyama prefecture turned into rice riots in dozens of cities, towns and villages. The government used more than 100,000 troops, several dozen civilians were killed and more than 25,000 people were arrested. Terauchi resigned, and on 29 September 1918 the leader of the Seiyūkai party, Takashi Hara, became prime minister; his government is regarded as the first full party cabinet in the country’s history.

Siberia, the end of the war and the cost

On 5 April 1918, after the murder of a Japanese national, Japanese sailors went ashore at Vladivostok, and on 2 August the government announced that, at the request of the United States, it would send troops to help the Czechoslovak Legion. Japan promised up to 12,000 soldiers, and by November had sent more than 70,000. Its 12th Division routed the Reds on the Ussuri and took Khabarovsk. Japanese troops stayed in the Maritime Province until October 1922, and the intervention cost the lives of nearly 1,500 soldiers killed in action and 600 who died of cold and disease.

Japan’s losses in the world war itself were small. In 1924 the Japanese government reported to the International Labour Office eight hundred thousand men mobilised and 4,661 dead and missing, while the US War Department counted only 300 killed and died. At the peace conference in Paris Japan gained a permanent seat on the Council of the League of Nations, the German rights in Shandong, which provoked mass protests in China, and the former German islands as a mandate. Its proposal to write a principle of racial equality into the Covenant of the League failed. Japan returned Tsingtao to China only in 1922, after the Washington Conference.