International Law, State Will, and the Standard of Civilization in Japan’s Assertion of Sovereign Equality

As a result of World War II—that truncated version of a much longer conflict in east Asia—Japanese colonialism and its demise by nuclear weapons have come to obscure Japan’s unique accomplishments in the nineteenth century. Under the threat of invasion and in response to the territorial concessions demanded by the United States, Britain, and other European powers, a group of Japanese samurai undertook a revolution against the Tokugawa shogunate in 1867 and then a comprehensive Westernization of Japanese institutions in the four decades that followed. This modern Japanese state was constructed with the aim of asserting Japan’s sovereign equality among the family of nations. As a result, far from remaining a victim of Western imperialism, Japan became a world power and proceeded to victimize others. In so doing, Japan followed the examples of its peers within the international community. But because Japan was the sole target of nuclear weapons in the twentieth century, some Japanese now subscribe to an argument that substitutes Japanese victimhood at the hands of her enemies for Japanese aggression as a world power. At the same time, many in the United States think only of Japan’s history as an aggressor and ignore its significant achievements in the nineteenth century.