Japan’s history defines its people and their actions today. As with any nation, there are certain key events in their history that still exert a significant effect on the national psyche.

THE JAPANESE PEOPLE

Early immigrants

The Japanese people are not as homogeneous as we might believe. The first inhabitants of what is now Japan would have moved across Asia to what was then the coastal limit of the Asian landmass probably around 50,000 to 80,000 years ago. The earliest unchallenged archaeological finds date back to around 50,000 years ago, and by the late Palaeolithic Period (say 15,000 years ago) there are a number of clear signs of human habitation. However, there were new influxes of immigrants from the south and from what was now becoming the Korean peninsula over the next several hundreds of years, and today’s Japanese nation is a mixture of a variety of different peoples: Chinese, Korean, Ryukyuan and Ainu (the indigenous natives of the archipelago, now almost extinct, no more than a tourist attraction in northern Japan). One study concluded that there were so many different immigrations to the Japanese archipelago between about 700 BC and 500 AD that over 90% of the gene pool (of over one million people by that time) was of immigrant stock.

The first Japanese state

Although the official date of the beginning of the Emperor Jimmu’s reign is given as 660 BC, it is generally estimated that the first organised state in Japan, with a clear leader who can be described as an emperor, was established in the Yamato region of Japan, around modern Kyoto and Nara, in the second or third century AD.

By the fifth century AD, there is clear evidence of organised rule, and there is also evidence of trade and other contacts with the kingdom of Silla on the south-eastern tip of the Korean peninsula. Japan was a thriving and busy place, and the evidence of the massive tombs of their emperors, such as that of the fifth century Emperor Nintoku still dominating the landscape near Osaka, shows not only that their leaders were very powerful within their society, but also that they were able to organise vast numbers of men to labour on public projects.

The influence of Prince Shotoku

The first great hero of Japanese history is Prince Shotoku (Shotoku Taishi), the second son of Emperor Yumei, who became regent to his aunt, the Empress Suiko, in 594 AD. He was at the heart of the adoption of Buddhism into Japan, being the driving force behind the building of hundreds of temples. He was also very influential in the creation of the written Japanese language, the hybrid that grew out of Chinese characters. The reason that he is remembered to the extent that his image still features on banknotes, however, is that he instituted the Taika reforms of 604 AD, designed to strengthen the power of central government, and in the process created a nation which endures to this day.

He attempted to bring in Confucian ideals of advancement by merit, and created 12 ranks that were to be attained by courtiers according to their abilities rather than their birth. However, over the years the Japanese turned his ideals on their head and for hundreds of years court and government positions were handed on from generation to generation through the same family, the only merit involved being the merit of birth. The hierarchical structure of mediaeval and feudal Japan, from 600 to 1868, had its beginnings in Prince Shotoku’s Taika reforms.

A civilised capital city

In 694 AD the first Chinese style city built on a grid layout was founded in the Asuka region south-east of present-day Osaka. This city only served as the capital for 16 years, before the government moved a short distance north, to a new and much grander city which they named Heijo-kyo, or Nara. For most of the eighth century, when Europe was still struggling through the war- and disease-stricken dark ages following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Japan’s capital at Nara was a haven of advanced civilisation, and, inevitably, of political intrigue.

THE IMPERIAL LINE

Japan’s imperial line has endured through 125 emperors and almost 2,000 years, but even as early as the Nara period, the true authority was passing out of the hands of the emperor and into those of his chief courtiers. The first family of the time was the Fujiwara family, and they quickly became adept at cementing their influence within the imperial household.

The rules of imperial succession had been settled by the Emperor Keitai in the early sixth century, rules which stipulated that the title should pass from generation to generation rather than from brother to brother (or sister to sister – women were not barred from inheriting the throne until the eighteenth century), but that did not stop people from trying to exert their own influence on the choice of emperor. What is more, throughout the first thousand years or so of the imperial line, it was common for the emperor or empress to abdicate in favour of the next generation and retire to a monastery, making the appointment of the regent a crucial one. Of the 125 emperors to date, over 60 – practically half of them – have abdicated rather than died on the throne.

The power of the Fujiwara clan

The way the Fujiwara clan secured their grip around the throat of the imperial family was simple. For several generations, the search for a suitable bride for the reigning emperor usually ended when they got to the Fujiwara home. There were always suitable daughters of the household available to be wed to the current emperor, and for years the empress was likely to be the daughter or the sister of the regent.

The natural next step after the marriage was the birth of a child, who was, of course, not only heir to the throne but also the grandson of the Fujiwara regent. As soon as the child was old enough to walk and talk, or at least as soon as it was clear he had survived the first difficult years of his life, the regent would put pressure on the emperor (his son-in-law) to abdicate and spend his declining years perhaps in a monastery surrounded by his friends and away from the responsibilities of being emperor. This pressure was usually too great for any but the very strongest emperors to fight against, and the result would be a young boy on the throne as emperor, with all the power wielded by his grandfather, acting of course entirely in his imperial grandson’s name.

Power behind the throne

This process was repeated often enough through early Japanese history for it to be considered national policy. It has also become a national trait that can still be seen in Japanese society, and the Japanese business world, today. The man who wields the true power is not necessarily the man with the most powerful title. In Japan, rank and responsibility are often separate. Even today, the authority in a large corporation will not necessarily reside with the man with the most exalted title on his business card. There is always likely to be a power behind the throne.

The Fujiwara’s tactics were so successful that they became the norm in politics as well. Throughout Japanese history, the role of the emperor has been sacred and inviolate, even if the dignity of the person holding that office has not been. The Fujiwara clan never tried to overthrow the emperor and usurp the throne for themselves; they merely made themselves indispensable to the imperial family, and as distributors of all the ranks and titles within the court, equally indispensable to all the lower ranked courtiers. Their title was inherited just as much as the title of emperor was and the loyalty expressed by the regents to the throne was handed down from generation to generation along with the authority and the trappings of power.

Plots against the Fujiwara family

It became inevitable that after several generations, the Fujiwara clan dominance would cause resentment among other families at court, and this in turn led to violence. The capital, which had moved from Nara to Kyoto (Heian-kyo, as it was originally known) in 794 AD, was regularly torn by factional strife as one family after another plotted against the Fujiwara. But for many years it was all to no avail. From the middle of the tenth century for another hundred years, there was a Fujiwara regent in power with an infant – or at best young adult – emperor on the throne. To add to the influence they wielded, it was the custom for a new husband to live in the bride’s family home, so that the children of the union lived with their maternal grandparents. In the imperial case, this meant that young and future emperors were brought up in the regent’s family home.

Tales of court life

We have a wonderful picture of eleventh century Japanese court life from the great Japanese book, often described as the world’s first novel. The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), written by an obscure court lady about whom very little is known except her probable name Murasaki Shikibu. It is a huge sweeping work of fiction, written in the early years of the eleventh century, based on Japanese court life, and is without doubt one of the great works of world literature. Murasaki also left us her diary as a further key to the life of a Japanese courtier a millennium ago, and her near contemporary Sei Shonagon wrote her brilliant and often very funny Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) which documents the likes and dislikes of courtiers and the tedium and excitements of court life.

CENTURIES OF WAR

It became inevitable that the power of the Fujiwaras would not last for ever, but it was not until armed rebellion against their power sprang up that the change would prove to be possible. The weakness of the Fujiwara rule was that they did not have a standing army, and indeed based their entire social system on the fact that the country was at peace. This was true enough around Kyoto and its environs, but in other parts of the country there was little peace, especially in the north where the indigenous Ainu people fought continuing guerrilla style battles against the encroaching Japanese. These areas were the training grounds for the warriors who would eventually prove to be the downfall of the Fujiwara. Two families in particular, the Taira clan and the Minamoto clan, became highly skilled warriors while the Fujiwara grew ever more effete.

Eventually, in a struggle that was more about the disgruntled state of ex-emperors in the priesthood and the frustrated ambitions of court outsiders than the failings of the Fujiwara regents, a civil war broke out, pitting them against the rebel clans. It is worth pointing out that in this civil strife, as in all internal conflicts in Japan up to the present day, all sides claimed to be fighting for the emperor. Nobody ever fought a battle in Japan to overthrow an emperor, although some had that effect.

THE RULE OF THE MINAMOTO CLAN

It was not until 1185, with the decisive naval battle of Dannoura, that these civil wars ended with the Minamoto clan in charge. They moved their capital to Kamakura, south of what is now Tokyo, and took for themselves the title Shogun, which like all good Japanese titles was then handed down through the generations. Shogun is the Japanese for ‘general’ or ‘military leader’ (in full, the rank was Sei-I-Tai-Shogun, which means ‘Great Barbarian Conquering General’).

The rule of the sword

From now on in Japan, the rule of the court, of gentility and civility, was replaced by the rule of the sword. The warriors had replaced the politicians. The emperors continued to reign in Kyoto, sustained Just about) by a court that had no authority and virtually no money, but which still maintained the inherent mystery and prestige of being led by the descendant of the Sun Goddess. All the business of running the country had moved to Kamakura.

The nobility of failure

At this stage it is worth mentioning one of the great heroes of Japanese history, Minamoto no Yoshitsune. Yoshitsune was the younger brother of Minamoto no Yoritomo, who was the ultimate victor after the Battle of Dannoura and went on to rule Japan as Shogun and establish a style of government that was to endure for another 700 years. Yoshitsune, on the other hand, was a tragic hero whose death in a hopeless cause marks him out forever as one of the great role models of Japan.

Popular myth has overtaken historical fact in the case of Yoshitsune, who is seen as a dashing, popular hero who could not be allowed to live because, by his very charm and popularity, he would always pose a threat to the rule of his brother a cold, jealous and heartless power-hungry warrior. There is no need to go into the details of his career or of his final stand with his loyal retainer Benkei against the overwhelming odds of his brother’s army, but there is no doubt that the image presented even today by popular films and books based on his life is no better than a half truth.

Yoshitsune was probably a man who could not settle for a peaceful life and always found a reason to be stirring up trouble that he would then have to quell. His brother, who seems to have the place in Japanese legend reserved for the Sheriff of Nottingham in the English equivalent, was probably no more nor less barbaric than his contemporaries, in an era remembered for its extreme ruthlessness. But the affection within the Japanese psyche for noble failures is personified in Yoshitsune. As the late Ivan Morris points out in his brilliant book, The Nobility of Failure, ‘in battle he was imaginative and daring, in private life spontaneous, trusting and sincere. But above all he was loved for his misfortune and defeat... Yoshitsune’s brilliant success during his fighting years was a prerequisite for his greatness, since it made the subsequent collapse all the more impressive and poignant.’

There is even, as Morris points out, a Japanese word, hoganbiiki, which literally means ‘sympathy with the lieutenant’ – Yoshitsune’s rank in the Imperial Police – which denotes not merely sympathy for the underdog, which is a common enough emotion around the world, but sympathy with the losing side. That is a Japanese trait which still pervades its society today.

JAPAN MEETS THE WEST

In 1543, a ship was wrecked on the island of Tanegashima off the southern coast of Kyushu, causing three unfortunate Portuguese sailors to be able to claim the title of the first Westerners to reach Japan. This was an event that changed the course of the history of Japan, in many different ways. The Portuguese brought with them firearms and Christianity, both of which were to have a far-reaching effect on Japan over the next one hundred years.

The introduction of firearms

The arrival of the Westerners in Japan (the Portuguese were soon followed by the Spanish and the Dutch) coincided with a period of extreme civil strife in Japan, as the Shogunate set up almost four centuries earlier began to crumble. In the 1540s, there were several regional lords who were fighting for supremacy as the central authority of Japan fell apart. The arrival of a new and supreme weapon in the shape of the Portuguese arquebus meant that the Europeans were greeted with eagerness by the local warlords, and it did not take long for the new weapon to prove its superiority on the battlefield.

In 1549, just six years after the Portuguese arrived, one military leader, Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), purchased 500 muskets for his troops. They were already being made in Japan by this time, and typically the Japanese craftsmen had made improvements to the European design so that they could now be used effectively in the rain and in the dark. This meant that the Japanese product was rather better than the imported version – a state of affairs that has prevailed ever since in Japanese manufacturing industry.

Muskets were used in several battles over the next few years. The authority of the central government had completely broken down, and rival feudal lords fought for control of the country, or at least their part of it. The battle that persuaded even the most traditional of Japanese warlords that the new western weapon was a necessity was the siege of Nagashino Castle on 29 June 1575, where Oda Nobunaga defended the castle against the assault of several thousand mounted samurai. His 3,000 musketeers slaughtered the heavily but traditionally armed samurai cavalry and secured a victory that was noted across the whole country. From then on, the use of firearms became a key skill for all fighting men in Japan.

A united Japan

Nobunaga, who was a cruel, duplicitous man, is nevertheless rightly regarded as one of the founders of modern Japan. His ambition, as stated on his personal seal, was ‘to bring the whole country under one sword’, a goal he only fell short of because he was assassinated before he could claim hegemony over the entire nation.

The credit for uniting all Japan must go to a small but immensely strong peasant who gave himself the name Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Toyotomi, the family name he adopted after using several other family names as he rose from obscurity to supreme power, means ‘abundant provider’, which is how he wished to be remembered. Hideyoshi was a menial retainer in Nobunaga’s service who proved himself a great fighter, tactician and general. Within eight years of his mentor’s death, he was undisputed controller of all Japan.

Heroes of mediaeval Japan

After he died, peacefully in 1598, his son failed to hold on to the reins of power. Within two years a decisive battle, at Sekigahara near Lake Biwa between present-day Nagoya and Kyoto, had effectively transferred power to the third great Japanese general of this era, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616). Ieyasu went on to found the dynasty of Tokugawa shoguns who transferred their headquarters to a small fishing village called Edo, and from there ruled Japan for the next two and a half centuries. They were three men of very different styles, but they are revered today as heroes of mediaeval Japan, and as leaders whose methods are still studied today.

Three styles of leadership

The story goes that Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu were sitting together during one of their campaigns, watching a bird perched silently in a tree. Nobunaga, renowned for his cruelty and his threatening style, said, ‘If that bird does not sing, I will kill it.’ In today’s management terms, his leadership style is seen as not persevering with somebody who cannot do the job – get rid of him and try somebody else.

Hideyoshi, a man of significant charm and powers of persuasion, said, ‘If that bird does not sing, I will persuade it to sing.’ The manager who uses persuasion – which may include extreme moral pressure – to get his men to work effectively, is seen as a Hideyoshi-type leader.

Ieyasu, the man who waited until the time was right to take control of the country, said, ‘If that bird does not sing, I will wait until it does.’ Birds sing: they do not need to be taught or persuaded. You just have to wait until the time is right.

These three different attitudes to making things happen are considered to embody the three different styles of management in Japan. But the preferred method is that of Ieyasu: wait and you will get what you want. Patience and persistence are cardinal virtues in Japan.

THE TOKUGAWA ERA

One of the first acts of the Tokugawa family as they set about consolidating their power was to banish all foreigners from Japan, and in particular to banish all traces of Christianity, a faith they considered subversive and a direct danger to the hard-won peace that had been re-established, rather forcibly, across the nation. The Tokugawa government wished to establish itself as the undisputed ruler of the country, and therefore took upon itself the control of various elements in Japanese society that until now had been considered beyond the powers of the court, or perhaps just beneath its dignity. So matters such as foreign affairs, the issuance of currency and the control of what people read, learned and thought became central to their system of rule. Christianity was the first philosophy to be proscribed.

The key to the longevity and the stagnation of the Tokugawa government, or Bakufu as it was known in Japanese, was its policy of isolation from the rest of the world.

Closed to outsiders

Once the Tokugawa clan and its allies had established their superiority, they set about making sure that nothing would ever over throw it by excluding all foreigners from the country and banning the practice of the foreign religion, Christianity. Hideyoshi had already seen the dangers of this alien way of life, and issued edicts as early as 1587 restricting the practice of Christianity and banishing all missionaries, but it was not until the Tokugawa Bakufu took control that the exclusion policy took full effect.

In 1614, a decree expelled all missionaries and was followed up by mass crucifixions of Christians in Japan and of any foreign missionaries foolish to have ignored the decree. In 1639, Ieyasu’s heirs passed laws to end all trade with Portugal and all contacts with the outside world. There was one small exception, a small Dutch trading post was allowed to operate from reclaimed land in Nagasaki Bay, a peninsula called Deshima on which a Dutch trading post survived, and occasionally thrived, for the next 200 years and more. But effectively Japan was closed to all outside influences.

A feudal hierarchy

This allowed the Tokugawa shoguns to strengthen their grip on Japan, and to establish their feudal hierarchy, divided into four classes which were unchangeable, in theory at least. At the top of the pile were the samurai, the warrior class who were the only class of people allowed to take part in government and the only people allowed to own property. Beneath them came the peasants who in theory at least were highly respected as the class that produced the food – especially the rice – that kept Japan going. Beneath the peasants came the artisans, the makers of all the clothes, utensils, tools and other implements that every samurai and every farmer needed. Finally, on the bottom rung came the merchants, the parasites who bought and sold things but, in the eyes of the samurai, were of no value to society.

These four classes were fixed: if you were born a peasant you would die a peasant and there could be no changes within the system. In practice, however, the samurai, who as a warrior class in peacetime had little to do except make mischief for themselves, soon found themselves heavily in debt to the merchant class, who were quite content to be at the bottom of the feudal pile if it also meant that they had money to spend. The feudal system endured because nobody dared to change it, because it suited Japan after centuries of war and because the Tokugawa Bakufu used a very thorough system of checks and spies to ensure that no rebellion was likely or even possible. It also survived because there was no outside stimulus for change.

A flowering of artistic life

The Tokugawa period was also an era of great flowering of Japan’s artistic life. Peace meant that great writers, painters, playwrights and poets could not only have the time to create their masterpieces but also there was a huge and rather idle public that was eager to read, watch, listen and look at their works. Most of the giants of Japanese arts were active during the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the poet Basho, the artists Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro, among many others whose influence has been felt on art all around the world.

The Way of the Warrior

It was also a time during which the philosophy of Bushido – the Way of the Warrior – was refined and raised to a central place in Japanese society. Bushido might have seemed singularly inappropriate for the longest period of continued peace in Japanese history, but because it emphasised self-denial, unthinking obedience to one’s lord and a great deal of ceremony, etiquette and formal behaviour, it was espoused by the government as the way the samurai should live. Of course, samurai, being human, did not always live up to these lofty ideals. Sometimes they deliberately did not do so.

The Forty-Seven Ronin

The greatest heroic tragedy of samurai times is the story of the Forty-Seven Ronin, or masterless samurai. The ronin were masterless because their lord, Asano, was forced to commit suicide in 1700 after being provoked into insulting a senior government official. The ronin, following the code of Bushido, wished to avenge the death of their lord but knew they would be closely watched by the government. They therefore scattered to avoid observation and lived lives of debauchery and petty crime to allay suspicion that they were planning any revenge. Almost three years later, on a suitably romantically snowy February night in 1703, they forced their way into their enemy’s mansion and took his life. Patience and persistence achieved their ends again.

The Forty-Seven Ronin (who as noble failures were proud to commit ritual suicide after killing Lord Asano) are thought of as great heroes even today, because they represent virtues of loyalty, self-discipline and patience that are still highly valued. Japanese management style, for example, is one of continuous strategic thinking, of putting oneself into the position one would like to be in the future and working out how one would have got there, and the impact its achievement will have on all other aspects of the company' s operation.

THE COMING OF THE BARBARIANS

The Tokugawa shoguns continued to govern Japan (while the emperor served little more than a ceremonial purpose at his court in Kyoto) until the middle of the nineteenth century. Japanese society had hardly progressed in those years, although the population grew so much that Kyoto, with a population in excess of 600,000 by 1700, was bigger than Paris. The economy was stagnant, as was the rest of society, but there was still no real internal pressure for change. Everyone had become used to the status quo.

Shipwrecked sailors

The Japanese certainly learned of the war that broke out between Britain and China in 1839, through the Dutch at Nagasaki, but this threat to China merely confirmed to them that isolation from the rest of the world was the best option. It was something that they could not possibly have catered for that finally began the process that brought Japan back into the community of nations – the United States began opening up the west coast of America. The process began in the 1830s and was accelerated by the discovery of gold in California in 1849. One of the effects of this greater population on the west coast of America was an increase in shipping across the North Pacific, especially between San Francisco and China. Some of these ships were shipwrecked on the coasts of Japan, and the sailors were, according to the laws of Japan, summarily executed.

Relations with America

In 1853, the Americans sent a mission to Japan, under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry, to insist that Japan treat foreign sailors fairly, and at the same time to attempt to open trading and diplomatic relations. The ‘black ships’, as they are known, sailed into what is now Tokyo Bay and Perry began negotiations with the Tokugawa officials. These talks were in danger of getting nowhere until Perry demonstrated his technological superiority by means of a little light bombardment of the shoreline. Thereupon the Japanese decided that negotiation was the sensible option, and the Bakufu eventually agreed to the presence of an American consul in Japan, and to limited trade relations.

The Meiji Restoration

This move was not supported by many of the ancient enemies of the Tokugawa clan, who felt that the barbarians should be expelled. This led to a brief but vigorous civil war, which, by 1868, caused the abdication of the last of the Tokugawa shoguns, the establishment of a parliamentary system and the restoration of the emperor to his position as head of state (which theoretically he always was). The emperor’s capital was moved from Kyoto to the shogun’s capital, Edo, which was renamed Tokyo (which means ‘eastern capital’), and modernisation began in earnest. The Meiji Restoration of 1868, named for the Emperor Meiji (meaning ‘enlightened government’), is the date from which modern Japanese history is reckoned.

The end of the Tokugawa era was achieved in the end remarkably peacefully. The final shogun, Tokugawa Keiki, lived to a ripe old age as a wealthy and respected but nonetheless private citizen, and the new leaders, under the banners of democracy, led Japan rapidly into the modern age.

Modernisation

It was a typically Japanese experience. The war cry of those who overthrew the Tokugawas was ‘Sonno Joi’, which roughly means, ‘Revere the Emperor and expel the barbarians.’ They certainly revered the emperor, but to achieve the overthrow of the shoguns, they had to make use of western fighting technology just as the first Tokugawa had done 250 years earlier. This time, however, the barbarians could not be expelled again.

We still see this curious mixture of clear vision mixed with extreme pragmatism in Japan today. The Japanese have a predilection for plans and strategies, which they stick to even when things go wrong, for far longer than Europeans or Americans would do. Quite often, the plan proves its worth after all, long after other cultures might have given up on it. But once the Japanese realise that a plan is hopeless, as for example the idea of expelling the barbarians after the 1860s, they change course dramatically. So eagerly did the Japanese embrace western ideas and methods that within 30 years of the fall of the feudal system, they had a government and an army which brought Japan into the first rank of nations. It was an astonishing achievement.

Learning from the West

The modernisation of Japan was no accident. The new government, having abolished the feudal class system and banned the wearing of swords in public, set about learning from the West in a thoroughly efficient way. Official missions were sent around the world to discover the best that the West had to offer and bring it back to Japan. Thus, their naval technology was acquired from Britain, their army was trained by Germans and their bureaucracy was based on French methods. They learned about western education, western production techniques and western communications systems and brought the best back to Japan.

It was an astonishing leap forward by a backward nation, but a nation that was used to being ordered, peaceful and hardworking. The plans were laid down and then carried out. It was probably the greatest example of sustained national effort for peaceful purposes that has been witnessed in modern times. It did not take long for the West to understand that Japan was a power to be reckoned with.

THE ROAD TO WAR

The one trouble with all this progress (looking back with the benefit of hindsight and the moral attitudes of the twenty-first century) was that the countries Japan had modelled herself on – Britain, France, Germany, the United States – were all nations that had achieved their exalted position by military might. Japan learnt, without having to be taught, that might is right. If they meant to rank with the great nations of the world, then they also had to be a fearsome opponent.

The Russo-Japanese War

When this example from outside was coupled with the Bushido code so devoutly espoused by many of the anti-Tokugawa faction who were now part of the Meiji government, the result was a constitution that placed the military at the very centre of government. The first attempts by the new Japan to go to war were satisfyingly successful. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05, which was fought largely for dominance in the Korean peninsula and in Manchuria, was a bloody affair in which the Japanese lost tens of thousands of lives.

It finished in a naval battle in the straits of Tsushima, between Japan and Korea, in which Admiral Togo’ s fleet (built in Britain) took on the Russian fleet that had sailed all the way from the Baltic, round the Cape of Good Hope and up towards their home base of Vladivostok. The Russians were exhausted and ill-prepared even before the Japanese navy (which had sailed no more than a couple of hundred nautical miles) tore into them. It was a slaughter, with the Russian fleet losing 34 ships and almost 5,000 men in little more than 12 hours of engagement.

The battle was Japan’s, the war was over and Japan secured the rights it had sought in Korea. Warfare works: that was the message Admiral Togo brought home.

Lack of acceptance from the West

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, Japan matched the western nations in its aspirations for international respect through military might, but it was an impossible task for Japan to be accepted as an equal by the western powers. After the First World War, in which Japan invoked its obligations to Britain under the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, western acknowledgement of its Asian ally was muted. Japan’ s proposal for a racial equality clause to be inserted in the covenant of the League of Nations was rejected, and their government also had to accept a smaller size of navy than Britain and the United States. Despite the huge achievements of the previous 50 years, and Japan’ s unwavering support for the British and American causes, any sense of an equal footing alongside the leading nations of the world was denied to Japan.

Influence of the military

Japan’ s western-influenced constitution demanded that no cabinet could be complete without a minister of war, and that this minister had to be a serving officer in one of the armed services. In the early years of Japan’ s post-restoration development, this was not a particularly important point, but as political dissatisfaction and economic unrest after the First World War began to grip Japan, the services realised that by refusing to appoint a war minister to any cabinet they disapproved of, they had a controlling influence on the politics of Japan.

The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1 September 1923, which destroyed much of Tokyo and Yokohama and left over 100,000 people dead, added to the chaos that was beginning to spread across Japan, and the army, in particular, realised that it was time they interceded in Japanese political life.

The Second World War

It was the influence of the military on the civilian government that ultimately led Japan on the path to war, coupled with the national sense of injustice in the attitude of western governments to peoples that they clearly considered inferior. During the 1930s, Japan carved out an empire – the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ was the Orwellian English translation – and in 1941 attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor.

Understanding the behaviour of the Japanese soldiers

The actions of the Japanese soldiers during the war years cannot be condoned or defended, but it is worth looking from a different viewpoint to gain some understanding of how they came about. The Japanese army were trained to obey every order without question, to fight to the death and to consider surrender a fate worse than death. People who surrendered before their onslaughts, rather than fight to the death, were already shamed in the eyes of the Japanese, and had forfeited any hope of respect or sympathy. So prisoners were treated as though their lives were already over, which to their Japanese captors they were. The Geneva Convention did not enter their thoughts: the reasoning that went into creating that document was entirely alien to the Japanese.

The Japanese have also always distinguished between behaviour where you are known and behaviour where you are not known, a variation on our old friends uchi and soto. The Japanese soldiers were not at home, bound by the rules of their own society, and so those rules did not apply. It is a weak excuse in western terms but even today we see instances of appalling behaviour by Japanese abroad (a weekend sex orgy for 300 Japanese businessmen and 400 Chinese prostitutes in a hotel in China is a recent example). The shame of the journey, as the Japanese saying goes, is forgotten at home.

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR

The Second World War ended in August 1945, with the dropping of two atomic bombs, one on Hiroshima and one on Nagasaki. Without arguing the morality of using nuclear weapons, the Americans clearly believed that their deployment would shorten the war and thereby save lives. The effect on the Japanese, not surprisingly, has been deep and long lasting. As the only nation ever to have suffered a nuclear attack, they feel very strongly that the use of such weapons is wrong, and every year the memorial events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki serve to remind the Japanese of their special position in the nuclear debate.

It is a subject that an outsider ventures into with extreme care: I have yet to meet a Japanese who feels that the use of atomic bombs was justified and any frivolous discussion about the events of August 1945 can cause great offence. Oddly, the Japanese rarely focus on why the Americans felt the need to drop the bombs, but this is in part because the history books used in Japanese schools skim fairly lightly over the latter part of the Second World War. Many Japanese just do not know, because they have never been told, the full story of their fathers’ and grandfathers’ activities in the 1930s and 1940s.

A new strategy

For the Japanese, and for the rest of the world, the atom bombs were a turning point in their history. The policies of the first half of the century had failed, so a completely new strategy had to be devised and followed. The Americans, once the hated enemy, now became Japan’ s closest friends. The new constitution, put together by the Americans on behalf of the defeated Japanese, renounced war for all time and prohibited Japan from ever maintaining armed forces. Winning the respect of the rest of the world by military means had failed, so from now on the effort would be made to succeed by economic means.

The history of the past 50 years is the story of Japanese industry, management and business practices which have been far more effective in securing a prosperous lifestyle for the Japanese than any military adventures could possibly have been.