Meiji to the present

Meiji: a revolution carried out by the ruling class

The Meiji Restoration is usually described as returning power to the emperor. In practice a small group of mid-ranking samurai from Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa and Hizen took the state and used the fifteen-year-old Emperor Meiji as its legitimating symbol. What makes the period extraordinary is that this warrior elite then deliberately abolished itself.

In 1871 the domains were dissolved and replaced with prefectures answering to Tokyo. Between 1873 and 1876 the samurai lost their monopoly on arms, their right to wear swords, their topknots, and finally their hereditary stipends, which were commuted into government bonds that inflation promptly devalued. A universal conscript army replaced them. Some two million people lost their entire social position by legislation.

The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 was the last armed protest — led by Saigo Takamori, one of the Restoration's own architects, and crushed by the conscript army he had helped create. It is the historical basis, loosely, for The Last Samurai.

The speed was genuine. Japan's first railway opened in 1872. By 1894 it had a modern conscript army and a fleet capable of defeating China; by 1905 it had beaten Russia at Tsushima, the first time in the modern era that an Asian power had defeated a European one in a full-scale war. That victory reverberated through every colonised country in Asia and Africa.

It also set the direction. The same logic that said Japan must be strong to avoid being colonised concluded that Japan should acquire colonies of its own. Taiwan came in 1895, southern Sakhalin and a protectorate over Korea in 1905, and formal annexation of Korea in 1910 — a colonial period Koreans remember very differently from the way it appears in Japanese textbooks, and a live diplomatic issue to this day.

Taisho: brief liberalism, and a city destroyed

The years around the First World War — which Japan entered on the Allied side, cheaply and profitably — brought party cabinets, mass-circulation newspapers, a labour movement, women's suffrage campaigns, jazz, and the moga, the modern girl. Universal male suffrage passed in 1925, in the same session as a Peace Preservation Law that criminalised political dissent. The pairing tells you how fragile the liberalism was.

On 1 September 1923 the Great Kanto Earthquake struck at lunchtime, when thousands of cooking fires were lit. The firestorms that followed killed something over 105,000 people and destroyed most of Tokyo and Yokohama. In the chaos rumours spread that ethnic Koreans were poisoning wells and committing arson; vigilante mobs, and in places police and soldiers, murdered several thousand Korean residents. It is one of the darker episodes in modern Japanese history and remains contested in public memory.

Militarism, war, and defeat

The Depression hit Japan's rural economy brutally, and the political parties were widely seen as corrupt and captured by big business. Into that gap moved the army. A sequence of assassinations of prime ministers and ministers — 1930, 1932, the attempted coup of February 1936 — made civilian government afraid of its own military, and field officers began setting policy by presenting Tokyo with accomplished facts.

The Manchurian Incident of 1931 was staged by officers of the Kwantung Army without authorisation; Tokyo ratified it after the event. Japan left the League of Nations in 1933. Full-scale war with China began in 1937, and the capture of Nanjing that December was accompanied by mass killings of prisoners and civilians and widespread rape, on a scale historians generally place in the tens of thousands to over 200,000 — a range that is itself a matter of unresolved and politically charged dispute.

The war in China could not be won and could not be ended. American oil and steel embargoes in 1940–41 presented a choice between withdrawal and a wider war. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, along with British and Dutch possessions across Southeast Asia, and expanded further and faster than planned before the industrial imbalance asserted itself. From mid-1942 the war was a retreat.

Its end was catastrophic. Firebombing destroyed most major Japanese cities; the Tokyo raid of 9–10 March 1945 alone killed around 100,000 people in a single night. The Battle of Okinawa cost perhaps a quarter of the island's civilian population. Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, killing on the order of 200,000 people by the end of that year, counting those who died later of injuries and radiation. The Soviet Union declared war on 8 August. Japan surrendered on 15 August.

Occupation and the economic miracle

The Allied occupation under MacArthur ran from 1945 to 1952 and rewrote the country: a new constitution drafted in a week by American staff and adopted in 1947, women's suffrage, land reform that broke up tenant farming, the dissolution (partial, and later reversed in effect) of the zaibatsu conglomerates, and Article 9, in which Japan renounces war and the maintenance of war potential. Article 9 has never been amended, and the exact constitutionality of the Self-Defense Forces has been argued over for seventy years.

What followed was the fastest sustained growth any large economy had recorded: averaging roughly 10% a year through the 1960s. The Korean War procurement boom started it; a high savings rate, industrial policy coordinated through MITI, and a deliberate move up the value chain from textiles to steel to ships to cars to electronics sustained it.

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were the public announcement. The Tokaido Shinkansen opened days before the games, running at 210 km/h between Tokyo and Osaka — the first high-speed railway anywhere. By 1968 Japan had the second-largest economy in the world.

The costs were real and were paid domestically: appalling industrial pollution, most notoriously the mercury poisoning at Minamata; punishing working hours; and a term, karoshi, coined for death by overwork.

The bubble, and the decades after

By the late 1980s asset prices had detached from anything underneath them. Tokyo land values reached the point where the grounds of the Imperial Palace were calculated, only half in jest, to be worth more than the state of California. The Nikkei peaked just short of 39,000 on the last trading day of 1989.

Then it fell, for most of two decades, and the banking system spent years refusing to recognise the losses. What followed was not a crash so much as a long deflationary flatline — the “lost decade” that became two, and then arguably three. It is now studied worldwide as the reference case for what happens when a credit bubble bursts into an ageing population.

Two shocks bracket the Heisei era (1989–2019). The Kobe earthquake of January 1995 killed over 6,400 and exposed a slow, badly coordinated official response; two months later the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin on the Tokyo subway. And on 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Tohoku generated a tsunami that killed roughly 18,500 people and caused meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant — after which Japan shut down its entire nuclear fleet, and has restarted only part of it since.

Reiwa: the shape of the country now

Emperor Akihito abdicated in 2019 — the first Japanese emperor to do so in two centuries — and his son Naruhito acceded, beginning the Reiwa era. The Tokyo Olympics, scheduled for 2020, were postponed and then held in 2021 in empty stadiums.

The defining fact of contemporary Japan is demographic. The population peaked around 2008 at roughly 128 million and has been falling since; more than a quarter of it is over 65, the highest proportion of any large country. Rural depopulation has produced millions of akiya — abandoned houses — and villages with no children in them. Immigration policy has loosened significantly since 2019, from a very low base, and the foreign-resident population is at a record high.

For a visitor, the most visible change of the 2020s is tourism. Japan reopened to independent travellers in October 2022 after a long pandemic closure, and inbound numbers then broke every record on the books — passing 36 million visitors in 2024, well above the pre-pandemic peak, helped by a yen that had weakened sharply against the dollar and the Australian dollar alike. Japan is, at the time of writing, unusually good value.

It has also produced strain. Kyoto has restricted access to some private lanes in Gion; Mount Fuji's trails now have entry fees and daily caps; several towns have put up barriers at viewpoints where visitors were standing in traffic. None of this makes the country difficult to travel in. It does mean that the courtesy of going somewhere other than the five most photographed places counts for more than it used to — which is the argument the regions page makes at length.

Visiting this period today

• Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum. The most serious and best-presented museum in Japan, and unavoidably difficult. Allow more time than you think, and do not schedule anything immediately after.
• Nagasaki covers the same ground with a different emphasis, and has the longer story of foreign contact around it.
• Meiji-mura, near Nagoya: sixty-odd relocated Meiji buildings including the entrance hall of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel.
• Tomioka Silk Mill, Gunma — the 1872 French-engineered filature that industrial policy was built around, and now a World Heritage site.
• Gunkanjima (Hashima) off Nagasaki: an abandoned coal-mining island, once the densest place on earth. Landing tours run subject to sea conditions.
• Tokyo itself. Marunouchi's restored 1914 station building, the 1950s survivors under the tracks in Yurakucho, and the Metabolist architecture of the 1960s and 70s — a city that has rebuilt itself completely at least twice in living memory.