10 │ The Expansion of Imperial Japan — Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, Karafuto, and the Reach of Empire

🗺️Article 10 │ The Expansion of Imperial Japan
Karate spread out of Okinawa and across the world in step with the territorial expansion of the Japanese empire. Between the annexation of Taiwan in 1895 and the defeat of 1945 — roughly half a century — Japan colonized or occupied a vast arc of territory: Taiwan, Korea, South Sakhalin (Karafuto), the Kwantung Leased Territory, the South Sea Islands, Manchuria, occupied China, and Southeast Asia. This article surveys that half-century, setting the Western understanding and the Japanese understanding side by side, and it also glances at the Western colonial empires of the same era. This is an indispensable premise for understanding the context in which karate dispersed across the home islands, the colonies, and the occupied territories.

🧭Orientation for readers new to Japanese history

• Era names. This article runs across the Meiji (1868–1912), Taishō (1912–1926), and Shōwa (1926–1989) periods. Era names are always paired with the Western calendar year.
• Four different things, often blurred together. Japanese expansion took several legal forms, and they are not the same. A colony (shokuminchi) was annexed and ruled directly (Taiwan, Korea, South Sakhalin). A leased territory (sōshakuchi) was land “leased” from another state by treaty, usually under duress (the Kwantung Leased Territory, leased from China). A mandate (inin tōchi) was administered under League of Nations authority rather than owned outright (the South Sea Islands). A puppet state was nominally independent but actually controlled (Manchukuo). A military occupation was territory held by force during wartime without formal annexation (occupied China, Southeast Asia). Keeping these apart matters, because the degree of legal control — and of responsibility — differs in each case.
• “Both understandings.” For many of the events below, the mainstream Western (especially English-language) reading and the older or official Japanese reading diverge. Following this series’ policy, both are presented; where something is an established fact, it is stated as a fact.
• Why this matters for karate. Karate did not travel through a neutral “cultural exchange.” It moved along the same channels as soldiers, settlers, railways, and colonial schools. The map of empire in this article is, in large part, the map of how karate reached Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, the Pacific, Hawai‘i, and ultimately the world.

A Timeline of Territorial Expansion

Year	Territory	Form
1879	Okinawa Prefecture	Incorporation into the home territory (former Ryukyu Kingdom)
1895	Taiwan and the Penghu (Pescadores) Islands	Colony (Treaty of Shimonoseki)
1905	South Sakhalin (Karafuto)	Colony (Treaty of Portsmouth)
1905	Kwantung Leased Territory and the South Manchuria Railway	Leased territory and concession rights
1910	Korea	Colony (Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty)
1914 / 1920	The South Sea Islands	League of Nations mandate
1932	Manchukuo	Puppet state
1937–	Occupied China	Military occupation
1941–	Southeast Asia	Military occupation

Taiwan (1895–1945)

Overview

As a result of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the Treaty of Shimonoseki made Taiwan Japan’s first formal colony. Across roughly fifty years of rule, modernization (infrastructure, education, medicine) and discrimination and repression (restricted political rights, forced assimilation) advanced in parallel.

Features of the administration

• The “scientific” administration of Gotō Shinpei (後藤新平) as head of civil affairs (1898–1906): land surveys, household registration, government monopolies, railways, and water and sewage systems, together with measures against plague.
• Assimilation and discrimination side by side: Japanese-language education, Shintō shrines, and (in the wartime years) kōminka — “imperial-subject-making” — policies, set against restrictions on political rights and a gap in pay and rank between Taiwanese and Japanese.
• Resistance: indigenous resistance such as the Musha (Wushe) Incident of 1930 (an uprising by the Seediq people against the Japanese), and the petition movement for a Taiwanese parliament led by figures such as Lin Hsien-tang (林獻堂), submitted annually to the Imperial Diet between 1921 and 1934.

📝Why Gotō Shinpei is called a “scientific” administrator. Gotō, a physician by training, argued that a colony should be governed according to its actual customs rather than by simply importing the home country’s laws — an approach he framed as following “biological principles.” In practice this meant detailed surveys (of land, population, and local custom) used to make rule more efficient and more profitable. It produced real modernization and a more thorough apparatus of control; the two were not opposites but the same project.

The Western and the Japanese understandings

• Western understanding: a textbook case of colonial rule — economic extraction combined with cultural assimilation.
• Japanese understanding (prewar): a “civilizing mission” and a doctrine of “extending the home territory” (naichi enchō shugi). In the war years the vocabulary of kōminka and of “the whole world under one roof” (hakkō ichiu) was also mobilized.
• Contemporary Taiwanese understanding: divided. Some view the Japanese period as having modernized Taiwan through infrastructure (especially when compared with the later Nationalist [KMT] period), while others judge it to have been colonial extraction and discrimination. Both views coexist.

Korea (1910–1945)

How it came about

• 1876: the Japan–Korea Treaty of Amity (an unequal treaty).
• 1894–95: the First Sino-Japanese War ended China’s claim of suzerainty.
• 1904–05: the Russo-Japanese War removed Russian influence.
• 1905: the Second Japan–Korea Convention (a protectorate).
• 1907: the Third Japan–Korea Convention (intervention in internal government); the Hague Secret Emissary Affair; the abdication of Emperor Gojong.
• 1910: the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty. The Government-General of Korea was established.

Features of the administration

• The period of “military rule” (1910–19): a gendarmerie-police system, control of speech, and a cadastral (land-survey) project.
• The March First Independence Movement (March 1919): nationwide demonstrations demanding independence. Suppression by the Japanese military police left many dead.
• The period of “cultural rule” (1919–31): Korean-language newspapers were permitted and education was expanded — though substantive discrimination continued.
• The kōminka period (1937–45): Sōshi-kaimei (the policy of adopting Japanese-style names), compulsory shrine worship, restrictions on the use of the Korean language, labor mobilization and the National Requisition Ordinance (applied to Korea from 1944), the Japanese military “comfort women” system, and conscription (from 1944).

📝Reading the two understandings honestly. That sōshi-kaimei, compulsory shrine worship, labor mobilization and requisition, and the Japanese military “comfort women” system were implemented is established by the documentary record — these are facts, not claims. What remains genuinely debated is the operation of each system, the concrete forms that coercion took, the scale of the harm, and where responsibility lies. To deny the facts themselves is not permissible as evidence-based historical writing. (The English term “comfort women” is itself a euphemism, translating the Japanese ianfu; it refers to women coerced into sexual servitude for the military.)

The Western and the Japanese understandings

• Western understanding (contemporary Anglo-American scholarship): a coercive colonization. Infrastructure was built, but as an instrument of extraction and control; sōshi-kaimei, shrine worship, and the “comfort women” system were grave human-rights violations.
• Japanese understanding (prewar official): that “the annexation saved Korea,” framed as a “civilizing mission,” an “extension of the home territory,” and “impartial benevolence” (isshi dōjin).
• Postwar Japan: the Japanese government has taken the position that, under the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations, the pre-annexation treaties were confirmed to be “already null and void.” Within Japan there is debate over their status in the international law of the time, the degree of coercion in how they were concluded, and the question of responsibility for colonial rule. In historical scholarship on the modern period, however, work emphasizing the coercive and discriminatory character of that rule, and the responsibility for the harm done, is the mainstream.
• South and North Korean understanding: colonial rule was an unlawful forcible occupation, and an object of thoroughgoing criticism. The “comfort women” and wartime-labor (“requisitioned workers”) issues remain unresolved historical problems to this day.

South Sakhalin / Karafuto (1905–1945)

• Under the Treaty of Portsmouth, Japan acquired the part of Sakhalin south of the 50th parallel. The Karafuto Agency (Karafutochō) was established.
• Assimilation policies were directed at the indigenous peoples (the Ainu, the Nivkh, and the Uilta).
• The region was developed as an economic zone for timber, pulp, and fishing.
• In August 1945 it was occupied by the advancing Soviet army, and the Japanese population was repatriated. It is today Sakhalin Oblast (Russia).

The Kwantung Leased Territory and the South Manchuria Railway (1905–1945)

• Japan acquired the southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula — including Lüshun (Port Arthur) and Dalian — as a leased territory.
• The South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu, founded 1906) was a “national-policy company” that combined railway operation, the administration of railway-zone lands, and a research apparatus.
• Gotō Shinpei served as its first president, transplanting the know-how of Taiwanese colonial governance to Manchuria.

The South Sea Islands (1919/1920–1945)

• During the First World War, Japan occupied the German South Sea Islands in 1914, and in 1920 was granted a League of Nations Class C mandate over them. This was not a cession of sovereignty but a mandate under the Covenant of the League.
• These are the islands of present-day Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
• The South Seas Agency (Nan’yōchō) was established (1922), and education and the sugar industry were developed.
• The islands became fierce battlefields of the Second World War (Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu, Truk).

📝What a “mandate” was — and was not. After the First World War, former German and Ottoman territories were not simply handed to the victors as colonies; they were assigned as “mandates” under the new League of Nations, in theory to be administered on behalf of their inhabitants. A “Class C” mandate, such as Japan’s in the Pacific, allowed the holder to govern the territory almost as an integral part of its own. In practice, then, Japanese rule of the South Sea Islands looked much like a colony — but its legal basis was international trusteeship, not ownership, which is why it appears separately in the timeline above.

Manchukuo (1932–1945)

• Triggered by the Manchurian Incident (September 1931), the Kwantung Army occupied the whole of Manchuria.
• In March 1932 the founding of Manchukuo was proclaimed, with the last Qing emperor, Aisin-Gioro Puyi (愛新覚羅溥儀), installed as chief executive (later emperor).
• Formally an independent state, it was in substance a Japanese puppet state. The Kwantung Army held real power, and Mantetsu controlled the economy.
• The slogans of “harmony of the five races” (Japanese, Han Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, Korean) and a “paradise of the kingly way” coexisted with the reality of ethnic discrimination and economic extraction.
• Agricultural migration through settler groups and, for settler youth, the Manchuria–Mongolia Pioneer Youth Volunteer Army (seishōnen giyūgun).
• Biological-weapons research and human experimentation by units such as Unit 731.
• Manchukuo collapsed with the Soviet invasion of August 1945.

📝“Harmony of the five races.” The official ideology of Manchukuo promised that Japanese, Han Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, and Koreans would live together in equality and prosperity (gozoku kyōwa). In reality Japanese settlers and officials sat at the top of a clear hierarchy, took the best land and posts, and the slogan functioned mainly to legitimize Japanese control. The gap between the harmonious slogan and the extractive reality is itself one of the defining features of the puppet state.

Occupied China (1937–1945)

• The Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937 set off all-out war between Japan and China.
• Japan occupied major cities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Guangzhou) and the coastal belt and main rail corridors.
• The Nanjing Incident / Nanjing Massacre (from December 1937): large-scale killing and violence during and after the capture of Nanjing. Estimates of the death toll vary widely among researchers — from tens of thousands to more than 200,000 — but the existence of the event itself is essentially settled in scholarship (Kasahara 1997).
• Other acts of violence included the bombing of Chongqing, the “Three Alls” policy (burn all, kill all, loot all), the use of poison gas, and forced abductions.
• Over eight years of war, Chinese deaths are estimated at 10 to 20 million (figures announced by the Chinese government).

The Occupation of Southeast Asia (1941–1945)

• With the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, Japan placed under military occupation Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), among others. In French Indochina (Vietnam and neighboring lands), after Japanese troops moved in during 1940–41, rule was at first shared with the French colonial authorities; Japan tightened its direct control with the “Indochina coup” of March 1945.
• The slogan was the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, proclaiming liberation from Western colonial rule.
• The reality was military government, extraction, forced labor (the Thai–Burma “Death Railway,” the rōmusha laborers), “comfort stations,” the reckless issue of occupation currency with runaway inflation, and famine. In Vietnam, the famine of 1945 is estimated to have killed as many as two million people (through rice requisitioning and a failed harvest).
• At the same time, some local nationalists — such as Sukarno and Aung San — advanced their preparations for independence through the cooperation, military training, and political organization of the occupation years. In Vietnam, by contrast, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh expanded an anti-Japanese and anti-French movement that fed into the August Revolution after Japan’s defeat. After the war, wars of independence against the former colonial powers began across the region.

📝The double face of the “Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Japan presented its conquest as freeing Asia from white colonial rule, and some Asian independence leaders did use the moment — and Japanese training — to organize. But for most people the occupation was not liberation; it was simply a different, often harsher, master, marked by forced labor and famine. Both things are true at once, and this article holds them together rather than collapsing into either “Japan liberated Asia” or “the occupation meant nothing to decolonization.”

A Comparison with the Western Colonial Empires

In weighing Japan’s colonial and occupational expansion, we have to keep in view the colonial rule of the Western powers of the same era.

The British Empire

• India (1858–1947): direct rule; the Bengal famines (1770 and 1943) and the great Indian famine of 1876–78 (chiefly in southern and western India); the suppression of various revolts. The Bengal famine of 1943 caused an estimated 2–3 million deaths.
• Africa (Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Sudan, and elsewhere): the suppression of the Mau Mau uprising, concentration camps in the Boer War, and the mobilization of colonial troops.
• Malaya, Burma, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Canada.

France

• Indochina (1858–1954): Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. An opium monopoly and forced labor.
• North and West Africa: Algeria (from 1830), Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Madagascar.

The Netherlands

• The Dutch East Indies (17th century–1949): the Cultivation System (forced cultivation), the Aceh War, and unrest in Java.

The United States

• The Philippines (1898–1946): hundreds of thousands of Filipino deaths in the Philippine–American War that followed the Spanish–American War.
• Hawai‘i (annexed 1898): the overthrow of the native Hawaiian Kingdom.
• Military interventions in the Caribbean and Latin America (Cuba, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua).
• The forced removal of North American indigenous peoples onto reservations.

Russia / the Soviet Union

• The conquest of Siberia and Central Asia (17th–19th centuries).
• The forced deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and the Korean population of the Maritime Province in the 1930s–40s.

Belgium

• The Congo Free State (1885–1908): the private domain of King Leopold II. Through forced labor in rubber extraction and related causes, it suffered a population loss and death toll for which estimates vary widely — on the order of several million, and sometimes put as high as ten million.

Germany

• South-West Africa (present-day Namibia): the Herero and Nama genocide (1904–1908), widely regarded by scholars as the first genocide of the twentieth century.

A Comparative-History Perspective

The point of placing these side by side is not to relativize Japan’s acts of aggression in order to excuse them. It is rather to show the following.

1. From the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, colonialism was the standard of the international order. Japan was not a uniquely aberrant aggressor; the great powers as a whole were competing in colonial expansion.
2. The non-European societies of Asia and Africa were exposed to colonization by the European powers, and Japan, within that same threat, adopted the great-power model “so as not to be colonized itself.”
3. At the same time, the fact that Japan became a perpetrator does not change. Explaining the context is never grounds for denying or minimizing the fact of the harm done.
4. Colonial rule became the origin of the nationalism, the modernization, and the decolonization movements of the colonized societies. Japan’s defeat accelerated the decolonization of Southeast Asia, but the Japanese occupation itself was not liberation — it was another form of domination.

Karate and the Colonies and Occupied Territories

Karate spread overseas in parallel with Japan’s territorial expansion.

• Taiwan: traces of the reception of karate-dō during the Japanese period can be found through schools, the resident-Japanese community, and newspaper articles. That said, organized postwar diffusion in Taiwan owed much to the dispatch of Japanese instructors from the 1960s onward.
• Korea: Korean students and martial artists learned tūdī / karate on the Japanese mainland, in Manchuria, and elsewhere, and brought it back to postwar Korea. This forms part of the prehistory of Taekwondo (named and systematized in the 1950s) — as seen in the careers of figures such as Choi Hong-hi and Hwang Kee.
• Manchuria: through Mantetsu, the resident-Japanese community, and military circles, Japanese martial arts centered on judo and kendo spread, and karate may also have been transmitted in a limited way.
• Occupied Southeast Asia: karate was introduced, in limited fashion, through Japanese servicemen and resident nationals.
• Hawai‘i: karate spread to the U.S. mainland through Okinawan immigrants before the war, and through American servicemen after it.

These routes of diffusion were by no means a neutral “cultural exchange.” They were cultural transmission that took place within the power relations of colonial rule and military occupation. At the very origin of karate’s globalization lies this historical fact, and anyone who would narrate the history of karate must look it squarely in the face.

A Note for Western Readers

Western books on karate often tell the story of its global spread as “American soldiers learned it in postwar Japan and Okinawa and brought it home.” That is part of the truth — but its precondition was a chain of events: Japanese colonial rule, war, defeat, and the U.S. occupation.

Moreover, the worldwide spread of karate from the 1950s on was a phenomenon bound up with postwar American soft power and the U.S. military presence in Cold War Asia. American servicemen stationed in Okinawa learned karate, carried it back to the United States, and spread it worldwide through Hollywood films and television dramas. This route runs directly into a present-day problem — the concentration of U.S. military bases in Okinawa — which is the subject of the next article.

Notes on Terminology

• Colony (shokuminchi, 植民地). Territory annexed and ruled directly (Taiwan, Korea, South Sakhalin).
• Leased territory (sōshakuchi, 租借地). Land “leased” from another state by treaty, usually under coercion (the Kwantung Leased Territory).
• Mandate (inin tōchi, 委任統治). Territory administered under League of Nations authority rather than owned outright (the South Sea Islands).
• Puppet state. A nominally independent state under another power’s actual control (Manchukuo).
• Kōminka (皇民化). “Imperial-subject-making”: the wartime assimilation policies (Japanese names, language, shrine worship) imposed in the colonies.
• Sōshi-kaimei (創氏改名). The policy in colonial Korea of adopting Japanese-style family names.
• Naichi enchō shugi (内地延長主義). The doctrine of governing colonies as an “extension of the home territory.”
• Mantetsu (満鉄). The South Manchuria Railway Company (founded 1906), a state-policy enterprise combining railways, land administration, and research.
• Kwantung Army (関東軍). The Japanese army garrison in the Kwantung Leased Territory and Manchuria, which engineered the Manchurian Incident and ran Manchukuo.
• Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (大東亜共栄圏). The wartime slogan presenting Japanese conquest as Asian liberation from Western rule.

Coming Next

Article 11 — the final article — takes up Okinawa during the war, after the war, and today. It places the Battle of Okinawa, U.S. military administration, the 1972 reversion to Japan, the U.S. base problem, discrimination against Okinawa, and the fact that Japan is not a single-ethnicity nation within the context of the history of karate.

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