LIFE AS A FEPOW · HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Japan's Path to World War II
From modernisation to militarism — how an ancient empire became the Pacific's most feared military power, and why it went to war.
1868
MEIJI RESTORATION
1937
SINO-JAPANESE WAR BEGINS
1940
TRIPARTITE PACT SIGNED
7 Dec
1941 — PEARL HARBOUR
From Isolation to Empire
The story of Japan's involvement in World War II is one of transformation, ambition and conflict. Over the course of just eight decades, Japan went from a feudal, isolated nation with almost no contact with the outside world to one of the most powerful military empires on earth. Understanding how that transformation happened is essential to understanding why the war in the Far East began — and why the men of Scotland's regiments found themselves prisoners of a power that regarded surrender as the ultimate dishonour.
The Meiji Restoration: A New Beginning (1868–1912)
Japan's path to militarism began with the Meiji Restoration in 1868. For centuries, Japan had been a feudal society closed almost entirely to the outside world under the Tokugawa Shogunate. When American naval commodore Matthew Perry arrived with a fleet of warships in 1853 and effectively forced Japan to open its ports to trade, the shock of that encounter with Western power transformed Japanese politics. The old order collapsed. Emperor Meiji was restored to power, and Japan embarked on a programme of rapid, systematic modernisation.
During this period, Japan adopted Western-style institutions — a constitutional monarchy, industrialisation, a modern army and navy modelled on European lines. Japan was determined never again to be vulnerable to foreign coercion. Within a generation it had transformed itself from a feudal backwater into a modern nation-state, and it intended to take its place among the great powers of the world.
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Imperial Expansion and Rising Tensions (1910–1931)
With the annexation of Korea in 1910, Japan firmly established itself as an imperial power. During World War I, Japan fought on the side of the Allies, seizing German territories in the Pacific and further expanding its influence in China. Japan emerged from the war expecting recognition as a major global power — and was bitterly disappointed when the Western nations largely ignored its claims at the Paris Peace Conference.
The 1920s saw Japan increasingly militarised, driven by economic struggles, political instability and a growing conviction that Western powers would never willingly share the world with an Asian nation. Nationalist and militarist factions gained strength within the Japanese government and armed forces. In 1931, the Japanese Army staged the Mukden Incident — a manufactured pretext — to justify the invasion and occupation of Manchuria. The League of Nations condemned the action. Japan withdrew from the League and pressed on.
"Japan had set out to prove that an Asian nation could match and surpass the Western empires that had carved up the world. By 1941, it had succeeded — with devastating consequences for millions."
HISTORICAL ASSESSMENT — THE RISE OF IMPERIAL JAPAN
The Second Sino-Japanese War: Full-Scale Aggression (1937–1945)
Japan's militarism escalated into open conflict with China in 1937 following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident — a minor skirmish near Beijing that Japan used as justification for a full-scale invasion. The war that followed was brutal. Japanese forces committed mass atrocities, most notoriously the Nanjing Massacre, in which an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were killed over six weeks.
Despite initial victories, Japan became bogged down in a protracted and costly war. The vastness of China, the tenacity of Chinese resistance and the enormous distances involved meant that Japan could occupy cities and railway lines but could not deliver the decisive knockout blow it needed. Japan was consuming resources it could ill afford — above all oil — at a rate that made expansion into Southeast Asia increasingly tempting.
The Tripartite Pact and the Road to War (1940–1941)
In 1940, Japan formalised its alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy by signing the Tripartite Pact. The three powers pledged mutual assistance if any one of them was attacked by a nation not already in the war — a clear warning aimed at the United States. Japan was now part of a global Axis.
Japan's expansion into French Indochina in 1940 — aimed at cutting off supply routes to Chinese forces — provoked the United States into imposing severe economic sanctions, including the oil embargo that cut off 80% of Japan's oil supply. Japan faced an impossible choice: abandon its conquests and humiliate itself before the Western powers, or strike south into the oil-rich territories of Southeast Asia and risk war with Britain, the Netherlands and the United States simultaneously. Japanese military planners chose war — and chose to begin it with a strike that they hoped would cripple America before it could respond.
The Attack on Pearl Harbour: The Point of No Return
Desperate to neutralise the United States as a threat to its expansionist goals, Japan launched a surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii on 7 December 1941. 353 Japanese aircraft struck in two waves, sinking or damaging eight battleships, destroying nearly 200 aircraft and killing 2,403 Americans. The attack was intended to buy Japan six months to establish its defensive perimeter across the Pacific. Instead, it united a previously divided America in fury and determination.
Simultaneously, Japan launched coordinated offensives across Southeast Asia — targeting British-controlled Malaya, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as the Philippines, Wake Island and Guam. For the men of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders fighting in Malaya, and the Royal Scots defending Hong Kong, the world had just changed irrevocably. The long march into captivity had begun.
Legacy of Japan's Entry into World War II
Japan's entry into World War II was the culmination of decades of militarisation, imperial ambition and resentment at Western dominance. What Japan's leaders had calculated as a bold, decisive stroke to secure their empire became the beginning of a four-year war that would end in catastrophic defeat, atomic devastation and occupation.
The consequences of Japan's aggression were profound — not only for the millions who suffered during the war itself, but for the Far East Prisoners of War who endured years of captivity in conditions of deliberate brutality. The story of what happened to Allied soldiers after the fall of Singapore and Hong Kong — how they lived, how they died, and how some of them came home — is the story this site exists to tell.
I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.
ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO — COMMANDER OF THE JAPANESE COMBINED FLEET, DECEMBER 1941