Geopolitical Framework

Geopolitical Imperatives 

The following geopolitical imperatives have governed and will continue to govern Japan’s behavior as a geographical and cultural entity:

• Establish and maintain central authority and internal unity in the home islands

• Gain sovereignty over peripheral seas and islands

• Secure autonomy by controlling strategic approaches to the home islands, especially from Korea and Taiwan but also Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands in the north

• Acquire necessary goods, resources and labor by expanding military or mercantilist power farther abroad, including Siberia, Manchuria, China and Southeast Asia

Japan’s geopolitical imperatives gained sharper definition in the modern era due to the rapid pace of events, especially leading up to the confrontation with the United States in the Pacific during World War II. 

The first imperative required establishing centralized control and national unity. During the Tokugawa period from 1600 to 1868, Japan had a relatively decentralized, feudalistic governing structure andwas almost entirely withdrawn from the outside world. Though the society was remarkably stable formost of the period, with only a few rice riots and peasant rebellions, different factions emergedthroughout the 19th century as Western powers became more persistent in demanding that Japan become commercially engaged with the outside world. 

U.S. gunboats sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853

In 1853, U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry famously demanded that Japan open its doors to foreign trade. The Japanese faced the prospect of either being colonized like their neighbors or industrializing in order to negotiate with the West on an equal footing. This confrontation triggered the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when aradical group of young samurai from the western territories launched a coup against the Tokugawa-shogun and restored the emperor as the formal national leader, igniting a rapid process of re-centralization and modernization of Japan’s socio-economic, political and military systems. Newly unified under a stable leadership, Japan had met its first imperative.

Next was to establish sovereignty and autonomy in surrounding areas. Tokyo was able to achieve this relatively easily once it had built a modern army and navy. Some Meiji leaders pressed for invading Korea. This was rejected and instead an expedition against Taiwan was launched in 1874, when the Japanese reinforced their claim over the Ryukyu Islands. These islands offered a pathway for any naval power in the South China Seato approach the Japanese core and were therefore critical for Japan to hold.

By 1894, Japan looked again to Korea asa potentially threatening land approach.  It fought a war with China over influenceon the peninsula, increasing its influenceover Korea and gaining Taiwan and the Shandong Peninsula, a crucial tradingpost and launching pad into the East China Sea. Japan tried to prevent Moscow,whose power was growing in the region,from staking a claim on Manchuria’smineral resources and labor pool andfrom making advances that could give ita firm position in Korea. From 1904 to1905, Tokyo crushed Moscow in war andseized these areas as well as thesouthern portion of Sakhalin Island andother territories in the Sea of Okhotsk,potential approaches to Japan from thenorth. In 1910, Japan formally annexed Korea and brought Taiwan under its  control, thereby meeting its threeprimary imperatives.From this position, Japan had the option of reaching out in almost any direction in the region. Its goalswere primarily economic. After industrialization, Japan’s focus was on obtaining the resources it needed to maintain its vastly expanded empire. The rapid growth of the economy had made Japan painfully aware of its limited natural resources, since as industry grew it required ever-increasinginputs of raw materials such as oil, iron, coal and rubber, among others, as well as food to feed Japan’s booming population, which doubled from 30 million to 60 million from 1868 to 1926. Demandvery quickly outpaced Japan’s domestic production, and Japanese policy-makers  were keenly aware that the very existence of a modernizing Japan dependedon imports and trade routes that were vulnerable to innumerable threats.

Manchurian Incident

Thus, in the 1930s Japan fully appropriated Manchuria and surged deep into China to exploit labor andresources. Yet the situation with China quickly deteriorated and war broke out while tensions with the West were coming to a boil. The United States, concerned about its Pacific territories, especially thePhilippines, gave Japan an ultimatum to abandon its territorial acquisitions or face an oil embargo. Tokyo had to make a choice: itcould either capitulate or lay claim to the vast resources of Southeast Asia — especially oil-rich but Dutch-controlled Indonesia. The latter option involved striking the Dutch and British, both U.S. allies,and thus engaging in war with the United States. This was an excruciating geopolitical dilemma: whether Japan should aim for its final strategic goal or give up on previously achieved imperatives.The Japanese made a hard gamble and lost, pre-emptively attacking U.S. naval forces at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and plunging the country into all-out war with the United States while it attempted tosnatch up all of the resources of Southeast Asia to gain economic independence. 

Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941

The U.S. victory in World War II stripped Japan of its sovereignty, even on the home islands temporarily, thus depriving it of its fundamental strategic imperative. The United States rebuilt Japan but imposed upon it a constitution for swearing the maintenance of land, sea and air forces, toeliminate any future Japanese threat to American strategic imperatives, which include navaldomination of the Pacific.

San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1952

But the Japanese were quickly rehabilitated and back on the trail toward achieving their geopolitical goals, this time with the help of the United States. By returning to Japan its sovereignty through the  San Francisco peace treaty in 1952 and admitting it into the U.S. security alliance in 1960, Washingtonrestored Japan’s first three strategic goals. South Korea and Taiwan were secure, from Japan’s point of view, because of their participation in the U.S. alliance. The United States was also there to counter balance threats from the Soviet Union and encouraged Japan, from the mid-1950s on, to rebuild some military power. The resulting Japan Self-Defense Forces were mostly aimed towardcountering any potential Soviet encroachments in the north. In fact, with the U.S. Navy dominant inthe western Pacific, Japan enjoyed the security that it had attempted to win for itself through conquest but without having to shoulder the attendant fiscal burdens. Through the so-called Yoshida Doctrine, Japan developed a limited military capability to preserve the security of its home islands while lettingthe United States provide for its security abroad.

 

With U.S. security guarantees in place, the Yoshida doctrine called for Japan to pursue its fourth geopolitical imperative, acquisition of resources, through mercantile rather than military means. By1948, the United States began to focus on rebooting Japan’s economy, a process that was soon accelerated by the U.S. need for military supplies during the Korean War. As the Cold War developed, the United States wanted Japan to be a strong example of capitalism in East Asia to counterbalance communism. Japanese government and industry took advantage of the opportunity with the same zealthey had previously committed to warfare.The first step involved developing an industrial policy. Japan’s prewar economy was powered by zaibatsu, giant industrial conglomerates that had been established by oligarchs during the Meiji period.The chief conglomerates were Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo and Yasuda. The zaibatsu operated instrategic industries, like steel, mining, chemicals, construction, machinery and shipping, and were intimately connected with the wartime government and the war effort. In a purge during the post war occupation, the United States ousted many of their top executives and demanded that the companiesbe broken apart in order to bring more competition to the economy.

The Dissolution of the Zaibatsu 

However, the United States changed policies as the Cold War ramped up andas it needed Japan to retain its strong industrial backbone, so the dissolution of the zaibatsu was never completed (Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo survived). Moreover, new industrial groups quickly took shape which was called keiretsu (company groups).The keiretsu retained the same essential structures of the zaibatsu. Each group has a core bank and several smaller banks, each of which owns shares in and grants preferential loans to the group’s companies. Meanwhile, the companies  are spread out across the breadth of the economy, with one company for each major sector. Each keiretsu is vertically  integrated with smaller suppliers, wholesalers and retailers, forming adistribution block. Unlike the prewar zaibatsu, which had a strict top-down chain of command, the individual companies in Japan’s modern industrial groups have more freedom to take their own actionsand potentially compete with each other. Nevertheless, the keiretsu still exemplified the close relationship between industry and government that characterized Japan’s postwar economic development.

Economic Miracle in 1960s

The next step was to use this manufacturing power to bulk up shipping capacity and lay claim to the world’s sea-lanes, strengthening Japanese manufacturer’s supply chains and boosting exports. With trade surpluses surging, and commodity prices relatively low throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Japan temporarily overcame its inherent problem of relying on imports of raw materials. It soon became agiant in global trade.The economic boom was astounding. The United States granted Japanese manufacturers preferential access to technology and to its massive consumer markets while tolerating the protectionist policies Japan used to boost its domestic economy, such as capital controls to ensure domestic investment and depreciated currency to promote exports. The Japanese government harnessed citizens’ high savings rates and reinvested them through the Ministry of Finance and theformer Ministry of International Trade and Investment to boost capacity in strategic sectors. Politicians, bureaucrats and corporate

heads formed an “iron triangle” that ruled Japan both politicallyand economically. Although Tokyo’s deep involvement in directing the economy would later createproblems, initially it was hugely successful and Japan experienced an “economic miracle,” with itseconomy doubling in size between 1960 and 1967, when it became the second-largest capitalisteconomy in the world. Despite a few slow downs, the Japanese economy continued to surge throughout the 1970s and 1980s.Yet as the economy grew, Japan’s need for raw materials increased, raising the perennial Japanese fear of overdependence on the outside world. Tokyo felt vulnerable to events beyond its control, and there was no military option to reduce this vulnerability. As a result, Tokyo began more concentrated efforts to direct its economic might outward, increasing control over its crucial supply lines and for manufacturing and trading relationships abroad.Wielding economic power externally came naturally to Japan because of the close linkages betweenJapanese government and corporations. Japanese banks already provided subsidized loans to businesses in line with domestic policy objectives, and from the late 1960s onward these policy objectives shifted toward outsourcing production, securing resources and opening markets abroad. Japanese investment poured forth, accelerating especially after the oil shocks of the 1970s broughthome the dangers of Japan’s heavy reliance on imports of essential goods. Outward investment further accelerated in the 1980s, when the superabundance of capital in the Japanese bubble economyenabled banks to go on a lending spree, promoting industrialization in neighboring economies thatcraved yen-denominated capital and served as suppliers for Japan’s manufacturers and consumers.Tokyo’s investment aims followed the same paths as its early 20th-century conquests: South Korea,Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Even China received Japanese investment, especially after it opened up trade to the capitalist world and the United States and China normalized relations in 1979.In Southeast Asia, Japan gained access to the same energy sources that it had attempted to seize out right during World War II. Japan solidified its economic dominance in East Asia by recreating its keiretsu supply chains, providing development aid and easily accessible and cheap financing, andforming strong bureaucratic and personal connections.In other words, Japan largely achieved its fourth geopolitical imperative of economic security in the1970s and 1980s through purely mercantile means. By the late 1980s, the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” that Japanese wartime planners had once imagined now seemed to be taking shapethrough Japan’s regional economic dominance. 

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