Japan — the First World War and Taishō democracy (History (2028+) HL)

In 1914, Japan joined the First World War on the Allied side. It barely fought in Europe.

But the war changed Japan more than almost any other country involved.

Cause and consequence: a war fought far away, felt very close to home: Japan sent a small force to seize German colonies in China and the Pacific. The real story of Japan's war was economic, not military — and that economic story reshaped Japanese society for the next decade.

With Europe's factories turned over to making weapons, European exporters vanished from Asian markets almost overnight.

Japan rushed in to fill the gap.

This boom was not evenly shared. Rice prices rose sharply because of wartime demand and speculation.

By 1918, that price rise triggered the huge Rice Riots, with protests across the country — an early sign that Japan's new wealth was creating new tensions.

The Twenty-One Demands, 1915

With the European powers distracted by war, Japan saw an opportunity in China. In January 1915, Japan's government presented the Chinese government with the Twenty-One Demands.

China's government, led by Yuan Shikai, resisted Group 5 fiercely. Japan eventually dropped the harshest parts under pressure, but China still had to accept most of Groups 1–4 in May 1915.

Why this mattered so much: The Twenty-One Demands humiliated China and provoked huge anti-Japanese boycotts and protests, feeding directly into the nationalism that exploded in the May Fourth Movement. For Japan, they showed the government was willing to use the war as cover to expand aggressively into China — a pattern of behaviour that would recur in the 1930s.

So the same war that brought Japan riches also brought Japan a taste for using its growing power to push other Asian nations around. Both things were happening at once.

By 1919, Japan sat at the table with the world's great powers at the Paris Peace Conference. That alone was a huge change from a few decades earlier, when Japan had been forced to accept unequal treaties from the West.

Japan also tried to get something symbolic but important written into the League's founding Covenant: a racial equality clause, declaring that all League members should be treated equally regardless of race.

The racial equality clause was rejected: A majority of delegates actually voted in favour, but the conference chair — US President Woodrow Wilson — ruled that it needed unanimous support and let it fail (Australia and Britain led the opposition, worried about immigration policy). Many in Japan saw this as proof that the Western powers still did not treat Japan as a true equal, whatever the seat at the table suggested.

This is a genuine historical debate worth holding in your head for the essay: did WWI make Japan a fully accepted great power, or just a power tolerated on Western terms?

The years roughly from 1912 to 1926 are called the Taishō era. This period saw Japan's most serious experiment with party-led, more democratic politics before the Second World War.

This pairing IS the essay: Almost every Paper 3 essay on Taishō Japan turns on this exact tension: was 1925 a genuine democratic breakthrough, or did the Peace Preservation Law prove the whole thing was tightly controlled 'democracy' that never threatened the emperor system or the establishment? Learn both laws together, not separately.

Women, notably, still could not vote at all — despite active campaigning by groups like the New Women's Association, led by figures such as Ichikawa Fusae. So 'universal' suffrage in 1925 meant universal for men only.

Social change and unrest

Taishō Japan was also a period of real social change beneath the politics. Cities grew fast, and a new urban culture appeared — the 'moga' (modern girl) and 'mobo' (modern boy), Western fashion, jazz, cinema and department stores.

The Great Kantō earthquake, 1923

On 1 September 1923, a massive earthquake struck the Tokyo–Yokohama region. It killed over 100,000 people, mostly in the firestorms that followed, and destroyed huge parts of both cities.

The disaster's darkest consequence: In the chaos, false rumours spread that Korean residents were poisoning wells and starting fires. Vigilante groups, sometimes helped by police and soldiers, murdered several thousand Korean residents (and some Chinese and Japanese leftists) in the days after the quake — one of the ugliest episodes of the whole era, and a stark reminder of ethnic tension and the fragility of order even during 'democratic' Taishō.

The earthquake also had a big economic cost: rebuilding Tokyo drained government funds and left banks holding large amounts of bad debt from earthquake-damaged businesses, weakening the economy well before 1929.

The Great Depression from 1929

The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 hit Japan especially hard because its economy depended heavily on exports, above all silk to the United States.

This economic collapse is the hinge between this micro and what comes next: it is the crisis that helped the military and radical nationalists discredit party democracy and push Japan toward the more aggressive, militarist path of the 1930s.