Japanese History · Chronicle X of XI
大正・昭和 · Democracy and War
Taishō democracy, the turn to militarism, and Japan's road through the Pacific War to defeat.
Taishō DemocracyPolitical
Amid nationwide rice riots, Japan gains its first commoner prime minister, in the liberal years of Taishō democracy.
The 1910s and 1920s brought a hopeful liberalism: party cabinets, a lively press, mass culture and, in 1925, the vote for all adult men. Yet the same year a Peace Preservation Law armed the state against dissent, and the gains rested on shaky ground as economic crisis and army ambition gathered strength.
CatastropheEvent
A colossal earthquake and firestorm devastate Tokyo and Yokohama, killing well over a hundred thousand people.
Striking at noon, the quake toppled the capital and ignited firestorms that consumed whole districts. In the chaos, rumours sparked massacres of Korean residents. The disaster erased much of old Tokyo — and the vast rebuilding that followed helped shape the sprawling modern metropolis that rose in its place.
The Turn to MilitarismMilitary
The army seizes Manchuria on a staged pretext, defying the government and the League of Nations.
Officers of the Kwantung Army blew up a railway and blamed the Chinese, then overran Manchuria and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo. When the League condemned the act, Japan simply walked out. Civilian government lost control of the military, and a wave of assassinations cowed the politicians who resisted.
The War in ChinaMilitary
Full-scale war engulfs China, marked by the atrocity of the Nanjing Massacre.
A clash at the Marco Polo Bridge exploded into all-out war. Japanese armies took the coastal cities and the capital Nanjing, where they massacred and raped on a horrifying scale. But China did not surrender; the war became a vast, bloody quagmire that drew Japan ever deeper and set it on a collision course with the West.
The Pacific WarMilitary
Japan attacks the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor and sweeps across Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Facing an American oil embargo over its war in China, Japan gambled on a knockout blow. Its carriers struck Pearl Harbor while its armies seized the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore and the Indies in a few triumphant months. But the sleeping giant was now awake, and the industrial might of America would prove overwhelming.
The Tide TurnsMilitary
American carriers sink four Japanese flattops at Midway, turning the tide of the Pacific War.
Six months after Pearl Harbor, the two carrier fleets met near Midway atoll. In a few minutes American dive-bombers destroyed the heart of Japan's carrier force, losses it could never replace. From that day Japan was on the defensive, and the long, brutal island-hopping campaign back toward the home islands began.
DefeatMilitary
After atomic bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito announces Japan's surrender.
Firebombing had already gutted Japan's cities when atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union declared war. On 15 August the emperor's voice, never before heard by his people, called on them to "endure the unendurable" and accept defeat. An empire lay in ashes, and a shattered nation faced foreign occupation for the first time in its history.
