08 │ The First Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars and Japanese Self-Consciousness — From “Catching Up” to “Great Power”

⚓Article 8 │ The First Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars and Japanese Self-Consciousness
The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) were, more than military victories, the events that decisively changed how the Japanese understood themselves. The Meiji-era (1868–1912) anxiety to “catch up with the great powers” turned, through these two wars, into a self-assured pride in being “one of the great powers.” This article asks how that change in self-consciousness acted upon the martial arts, karate, colonial rule, and education.

🧭Orientation for readers new to Japanese history

• Era names. The events here fall in the Meiji period (1868–1912) and reach into the Taishō (1912–1926) and Shōwa (1926–1989) periods. Era names are always paired with the Western calendar year.
• “The great powers” (列強, rekkyō). The late-nineteenth-century empires — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and others — that competed to acquire colonies. The overriding aim of Meiji Japan was to join their ranks rather than be colonized by them.
• Two wars, two enemies. The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) was fought against Qing China; the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) against Imperial Russia. The two are easy to confuse, so it is worth fixing the dates and opponents in mind from the outset.
• Why this matters for karate. Victory in these wars sharply raised the social prestige of the soldier and of budō (武道, the “martial way”). That rising prestige is what opened the door of the schoolroom and the university club through which karate would later pass (see Articles 6 and 7).

The First Sino-Japanese War — Breaking the “Sleeping Lion”

The Road to War

In the latter half of the nineteenth century the Korean peninsula lay under the suzerainty of Qing China while being torn internally among pro-Qing, pro-Japanese, and pro-Russian factions. In 1894 the Tonghak (Donghak) Rebellion (東学党の乱, also called the Gabo Peasant War) broke out in Korea. The Korean government requested troops from Qing; Japan dispatched troops in response. Out of the confrontation over the two armies’ presence in Korea, the First Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1894.

The Course of the War

• Battle of Pyongyang (平壌の戦い, September 1894): the Japanese army won on the Korean peninsula.
• Battle of the Yellow Sea (黄海海戦, September 1894): the Japanese Combined Fleet defeated the Qing Beiyang Fleet.
• Capture of Lüshun (Port Arthur) and Dalian (旅順・大連, November 1894).
• Capture of Weihaiwei (威海衛, February 1895).
• Treaty of Shimonoseki (下関条約, April 1895).

The Treaty of Shimonoseki

By the peace treaty, Qing acknowledged the following:

1. The independence of Korea (a renunciation of Qing suzerainty).
2. The cession to Japan of the Liaodong Peninsula, Taiwan, and the Penghu (Pescadores) Islands.
3. An indemnity of 200 million taels (roughly 300 million yen in the currency of the day — several times the annual national budget).
4. Additional treaty ports and most-favored-nation treatment.

Through the Triple Intervention (三国干渉) of Russia, France, and Germany, however, Japan was compelled to return the Liaodong Peninsula to Qing. This left a deep sense of humiliation, and “gashin shōtan” (臥薪嘗胆, literally “sleeping on firewood and tasting gall” — enduring hardship without forgetting a grievance) became a national slogan.

📝The Triple Intervention and “gashin shōtan.” Less than a week after the treaty was signed, Russia, France, and Germany jointly “advised” Japan to give back the Liaodong Peninsula it had just won, on the pretext of preserving peace in the Far East; militarily unable to resist three powers at once, Japan complied (in exchange for an additional payment). The bitterness of having a prize taken away by European fiat is what made gashin shōtan — an old Chinese phrase about biding one’s time for revenge — the watchword of the years that followed, and it pointed Japan toward its eventual reckoning with Russia.

What the War Meant

The First Sino-Japanese War shattered the two-thousand-year-old Sinocentric order of East Asia. Qing, long feared abroad as the “sleeping lion,” came after its defeat by Japan to be derided as the “sick man of East Asia.”

For the Japanese, the war carried three meanings:

1. Proof of Western-style modernization. In roughly forty years from the opening of the country, Japan had acquired the military power to defeat Qing.
2. Colonial acquisition. Taiwan was made a colony (1895–1945). Japan had become a colony-holding power.
3. “Leaving Asia.” The logic of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s (福澤諭吉) “Datsu-A Ron” (脱亜論, “On Leaving Asia,” 1885) was now made real: Japan would be a member not “of Asia” but “of the civilized nations.”

For Okinawa Prefecture, the victory was the event that internationally settled its status as Japanese territory. Until then Qing had protested over where the Ryukyus belonged, but defeat forced it, in effect, to abandon that claim (see Articles 4 and 11).

📝“Datsu-A Ron” (“On Leaving Asia”). An anonymous 1885 newspaper editorial, conventionally attributed to the influential writer and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi, arguing that Japan should stop waiting for its “backward” neighbors China and Korea to reform and should instead align itself with the Western powers. Whether Fukuzawa wrote it, and how programmatic it really was, are debated among historians; but as a slogan it neatly captures the mental shift by which many Japanese came to place their country above the rest of Asia.

The Beginning of Colonial Rule in Taiwan

Through the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Japan acquired Taiwan. This was Japan’s first formal colony, and it became the template for the later rule of Korea, the South Seas, and Manchuria.

• Government-General of Taiwan (台湾総督府, 1895–1945): from military government (1895–1896) to civilian administration.
• Gotō Shinpei (後藤新平), chief of civilian affairs (1898–1906): governance grounded in scientific survey — land surveys, monopoly systems, and public-health and sanitation works.
• The coexistence of assimilation and discrimination: Japanese-language education, Shintō shrines, and imperialization (kōminka) on the one hand, and, on the other, the restriction of Taiwanese political rights and discriminatory treatment of Taiwanese relative to Japanese.

Taiwan became an important reference model for the colonial and “outer-territory” (gaichi) administration later developed in Korea, the South Seas, and Manchuria. This is treated in detail in Article 10.

📝Gotō Shinpei and “scientific colonialism.” Gotō, a physician by training, is famous for the maxim that one cannot govern a society without first studying it as one studies a living organism. His administration in Taiwan combined careful statistical and customary surveys with hard infrastructure (railways, ports, sanitation) and revenue-raising monopolies (camphor, opium, salt, tobacco). It is often cited as an early, “rational” model of colonial rule — which is precisely why it should be read critically: efficiency and modernization were placed in the service of foreign domination, not of the colonized population’s self-government.

The Russo-Japanese War — Defeating a “White Empire”

The Road to War

After the Triple Intervention, Russia leased the Liaodong Peninsula and Port Arthur and strengthened its grip on Manchuria and Korea. In conflict with Russia over control of Korea, Japan concluded the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (日英同盟) in 1902 — within the wider context of British–Russian rivalry — and opened the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904.

The Course of the War

• Siege of Port Arthur (旅順攻囲戦, August 1904 – January 1905): the Third Army under Nogi Maresuke (乃木希典) took the fortress at the cost of some 59,000 killed and wounded.
• Battle of Mukden (奉天会戦, March 1905): the largest land battle of the war in Manchuria; a narrow Japanese victory.
• Battle of Tsushima (日本海海戦, May 1905): the Combined Fleet under Tōgō Heihachirō (東郷平八郎) annihilated the Russian Baltic Fleet.
• Treaty of Portsmouth (ポーツマス条約, September 1905): peace mediated by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.

The Treaty of Portsmouth

1. Russia recognized Japan’s paramount interest in Korea.
2. Russia transferred to Japan the lease of the Kwantung Leased Territory (Port Arthur and Dalian) and the rights to the South Manchuria Railway.
3. The southern half of Sakhalin (Karafuto, south of the 50th parallel) was ceded to Japan.
4. No indemnity — a term so unpopular that it triggered the Hibiya incendiary incident (日比谷焼打事件) of September 1905.

📝Why “no indemnity” set Tokyo on fire. The public had been told, through a triumphant press, that Japan had won outright; few knew that the country was financially and militarily exhausted and could not have fought on. When the Portsmouth terms brought territory but no cash indemnity (unlike the windfall from Qing a decade earlier), crowds in Tokyo erupted in riots around Hibiya Park, attacking police stations and government offices. It is an early, vivid example of the gap between popular nationalist expectation and the limits of what the state could actually deliver.

Its Significance in World History

The victory in the Russo-Japanese War was epoch-making in world-historical terms. Strictly speaking, because Ethiopia had already defeated Italy at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, this was not “the first victory by a non-European state over a European power.” But as a case in which a modern Asian state defeated a European great power in a large-scale modern war, it delivered a profound shock to the world.

That impact was felt more strongly in colonized Asia and Africa than within Japan itself.

• Intellectuals and nationalist activists in India, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere received the war as an event proving that “an Asian modern state can prevail against the European powers.” It drew notice in the Middle East and Africa as well, though the strength of that resonance and the meanings attached to it varied by region.
• A symbolic impression spread that Asians could fight Europeans on equal — or even superior — terms.
• It exerted a major influence on the later anti-colonial nationalist movements.

On the other hand, the victory also gave the Japanese an excess of self-confidence. A self-image as the “leader of the East” and “the representative of Asia” took shape, and this became a thread leading toward the later vision of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

📝Two terms to keep apart. The Battle of Adwa (1896) was the defeat of an Italian invasion force by the Ethiopian Empire — which is why careful historians avoid calling 1905 the first non-European victory over a European power. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (大東亜共栄圏) was a slogan of the late 1930s–1940s under which Japan justified its expansion as “liberating” Asia from Western imperialism while in fact subordinating it to Japanese control. The point here is that the self-image enabling that later slogan was already being formed in the afterglow of 1905.

The Effect on National Consciousness

“First-Rank Power” Consciousness

After the Russo-Japanese War, Japan began to style itself a “first-rank power” (一等国, ittōkoku). In 1911 the Japan–US Treaty of Commerce and Navigation was revised, and the unequal treaties were almost entirely undone. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902), the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), and the Franco-Japanese and Russo-Japanese agreements (1907) were all symbols of Japan’s incorporation into the great-power system.

📝“Undoing the unequal treaties.” Recovering full sovereignty from the lopsided treaties of the 1850s was the defining diplomatic project of the whole Meiji period (see Article 5). Extraterritoriality — foreigners’ exemption from Japanese courts — was abolished in 1899; full tariff autonomy (the right to set one’s own customs duties) was regained only with the 1911 treaty revision. Winning two wars was central to persuading the Western powers to deal with Japan as an equal.

The Rising Status of Soldiers and the Martial Arts

Victory markedly raised the standing of soldiers and of the martial arts. Nogi Maresuke (army general; head of the Gakushūin peers’ school) and Tōgō Heihachirō (admiral) became national heroes and, alongside the Imperial Rescript on Education, spiritual pillars of prewar Japan.

With this tailwind, the introduction of the martial arts into schools advanced:

• 1905: tūdī (唐手, “Chinese hand,” the older written form of karate) was adopted as a regular physical-education subject at Okinawa Prefectural Middle School and the Okinawa Normal School.
• 1911: on the mainland, fencing (gekken) and jūjutsu were approved as elective subjects in middle schools — and, the following year (1912), in the men’s normal schools.
• From 1907: Nogi, as head of the Gakushūin, advanced a “Nogi-style” education that stressed the full boarding system, life-guidance, and kendō.

The Bending of the View of Asia

The dissolution of the Sinocentric order by the First Sino-Japanese War, and the victory over a “white empire” in the Russo-Japanese War, bent Japanese self-consciousness in the following way:

• Japan was a “civilized nation,” a member of the Western great powers.
• At the same time, it was “the representative of Asia,” Asia’s liberator.
• And yet China, Korea, and Taiwan were “backward” parts of Asia that required Japan’s guidance.

This contradictory self-image — “I am Asia and at the same time I am not Asia” — became the spiritual foundation of the later colonial rule and of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It is a distortion that persists in Japan’s view of Asia down to the present day.

The Changing Image of the Martial Artist

Through the First Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, the image of the martial artist also changed:

• Before the Restoration: the professional skill of the samurai.
• 1870s–1880s: decline, and a slide into mere spectacle.
• From the 1890s: the “loyal and patriotic gentleman,” the “well-rounded elite of pen and sword” (bunbu ryōdō).
• A bond with the war heroes: military heroes such as Nogi Maresuke and Tōgō Heihachirō came to be invoked, in the settings of education and the martial arts, as symbols of loyalty, endurance, and discipline.

This climate was not without relevance to karate. The facts that Funakoshi Gichin’s (船越義珍) first mainland demonstration (1922) took place at the Ministry of Education’s Physical Education Exhibition (運動体育展覧会), and that Mabuni Kenwa (摩文仁賢和) and Miyagi Chōjun (宮城長順) had channels for introducing tūdī to universities, the police, and the military, cannot be understood apart from the rising prestige of the martial arts after these two wars.

A Note for Western Readers

When the two wars are discussed, Western history books often portray them as “the beginning of Japanese militarism.” This is half right and half inadequate.

• It is true that the two wars were the starting point of Japan’s military expansion.
• But in the world of that time, military expansion was the standard behavior of the great powers. The Spanish–American War (1898), the Boer War (1899–1902), France’s advance into Morocco, Germany’s lease of Qingdao — every power was competing in colonial expansion.
• Japan imitated the logic of the great powers “so as not to be colonized itself,” and as a result it too came to stand on the side of the aggressor.

To argue, without seeing this double character, that “Japan, unlike other nations, was uniquely aggressive” is to misread history. Conversely, to excuse Japan with “it merely did what the Western powers did” is equally mistaken. The sound view holds both sides together: the entire great-power system of the age was a framework of colonialism, and Japan, as one of its members, carried out acts of aggression.

Notes on Terminology

• Great powers (rekkyō, 列強). The competing imperial states of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Japan’s aim was to join them.
• Triple Intervention (sangoku kanshō, 三国干渉, 1895). The joint Russian-French-German pressure that forced Japan to return the Liaodong Peninsula to Qing.
• Gashin shōtan (臥薪嘗胆). “Sleeping on firewood, tasting gall” — enduring present hardship for the sake of a future reckoning; the national mood after 1895.
• Datsu-A Ron (脱亜論, 1885). “On Leaving Asia”; the argument that Japan should align with the West rather than its Asian neighbors.
• “Sick man of East Asia.” The dismissive label attached to Qing China after its 1895 defeat.
• First-rank power (ittōkoku, 一等国). Japan’s self-description after 1905 as a full member of the great powers.
• Kōminka (皇民化). “Imperialization” — assimilation policy aimed at turning colonial and peripheral peoples into loyal imperial subjects.
• Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (大東亜共栄圏). The 1930s–1940s slogan justifying Japanese expansion as the “liberation” of Asia.
• Bunbu ryōdō (文武両道). “The twin ways of the pen and the sword”; the ideal of combining scholarship and martial skill.

Coming Next

Article 9 takes up Taishō democracy and the subsequent turn toward militarism. For the two decades and more after the Russo-Japanese War, Japan enjoyed an age of parliamentary politics and international cooperation — but it did not last.

Bibliography

• Ōe Shinobu, Nichiro sensō no gunjishi-teki kenkyū [Military-Historical Studies of the Russo-Japanese War]. Iwanami Shoten, 1976.
• Yokote Shinji, Nichiro sensō shi [A History of the Russo-Japanese War]. Chūkō Shinsho, 2005.
• Harada Keiichi, Nisshin sensō [The First Sino-Japanese War]. Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2008.
• Katō Yōko, Sensō made [The Road to War]. Asahi Shuppansha, 2016.
• Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Nichiro sensō no seiki [The Century of the Russo-Japanese War]. Iwanami Shinsho, 2005.
• Duus, Peter. The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910. University of California Press, 1995.
• Paine, S. C. M. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Connaughton, Richard. Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear: Russia’s War with Japan. Cassell, 2003.