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Although Chinese political influence had been effectively eliminated in Korea, the Japanese struggled to assert themselves as rulers on the peninsula. Encouraged by activists who championed Korean sovereignty, Korean King Kojong declared himself emperor of Taehan (“Great Korea”). The Korean regime also sought help from the Russian Empire to act as a counterweight against Japanese expansionism.

During the Boxer Rebellion (1900), Japanese troops constituted a large part of the allied force that liberated foreign nationals from Beijing. Russia, which had also dispatched a sizable force to the region, took advantage of the emergency to occupy south Manchuria, thereby strengthening communications with Korea. Recognizing that it needed a European ally if it wished to forestall a reversal such as the one that followed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the Japanese government began talks with Britain that led to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902). By its terms, each signatory was to come to the aid of the other in the event of an attack by two or more powers but remain neutral if the other was at war with a single power.

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With this safeguard the Tokyo government was prepared to take a firmer line with respect to Russian advances in Manchuria and Korea. On February 8, 1904, Japanese ships attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur without the formality of a declaration of war. Adm. Stepan Osipovich Makarov, perhaps the most brilliant commander in the Russian navy, was dispatched to the Pacific theatre. Once there, he engaged in a series of running battles with the Japanese fleet, preventing the Japanese from establishing a firm blockade of the harbour at Port Arthur. On March 21, 1904, Makarov was killed when his flagship, the Petropavlovsk, struck a mine and sank.

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With the Russians deprived of their ablest strategist, the Japanese scored a string of victories. Having begun landings in Korea in March 1904, another Japanese army landed on the Liaodong Peninsula in May. On May 26 this army cut off the Port Arthur garrison from the main body of Russian forces in Manchuria. The Japanese then pushed north, defeating the Russians at Fu-hsien (now Wafangdian) on June 14 and Liaoyang on August 25. Aleksey Kuropatkin, commanding the main body of the Russian army in Manchuria, was forced to fall back to Mukden (now Shenyang). Port Arthur surrendered in January, and the war’s most significant land battle took place at Mukden in late February and early March 1905. Some 330,000 Russians and 270,000 Japanese engaged in brutal fighting for more than two weeks; Russian casualties approached 90,000, whereas the Japanese suffered more than 70,000 killed and wounded. Kuropatkin and his exhausted army withdrew, and the Japanese captured Mukden on March 10. The Japanese victory was sealed at the Battle of Tsushima (May 27–29, 1905), when the ships of Adm. Tōgō Heihachirō destroyed the Russian Baltic Fleet, which had sailed halfway around the globe in an effort to tip the scales.

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Japanese armies, despite victories at Port Arthur and in Manchuria, were strained to their utmost, and it was with relief that Japan accepted U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt’s offer to negotiate a conclusion to the war. The Treaty of Portsmouth was concluded on September 5, 1905, and by its terms Japanese primacy in Korea was recognized. Russia surrendered to Japan its economic and political interests in south Manchuria (including the Liaodong Peninsula) as well as the southern half of the island of Sakhalin. The victory over Russia represented a tremendous achievement for Japan, and it dramatically shifted the balance of power in East Asia. Japan’s performance also demonstrated that an ascendant Asian power could defeat one of Europe’s great empires, and the development of nationalist movements accelerated elsewhere in Asia. Within Japan, however, the failure to secure a Russian indemnity to cover the costs of the war made the treaty unpopular.

Annexation of Korea and expansion in East Asia

After the conclusion of the war, Japanese leaders had a free hand in Korea, and resistance to their agenda was met with force. Itō Hirobumi was sent to Korea as resident general, and he forced through treaties which made Korea a Japanese protectorate. Hoping to enlist aid from the international community, King Kojong secretly dispatched envoys to the second Hague Convention (1907). Kojong’s emissaries were rebuffed by the convention organizers, and, when Itō learned of the effort, he forced Kojong to abdicate. In 1909 Itō was assassinated by An Chung-Gŭn, a Korean nationalist. The following year Korea was formally annexed by Japan. Korean civil liberties and resistance were crushed under military rule. Japanese officials attempted to erase Korean national identity by imposing a Japanese language-educational system that excluded Korean history and the Korean language. By the time the Meiji emperor died on July 30, 1912, Japan had thus achieved equality in every sense with the West. It had, in fact, supplanted its rivals as the strongest military and imperialist power in East Asia.

Japan had ample opportunity to exercise its new influence in the years that followed. World War I found the Western powers fully engaged in Europe. Japan took part in the war in compliance with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, but, aside from some convoy assistance in the Mediterranean, its participation was largely limited to seizure of German overseas possessions. German Adm. Maximilian, Graf von Spee, had ordered his Far Eastern Squadron to Atlantic waters, and the Japanese hastily occupied the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall islands in the North Pacific. In November 1914 Japanese troops, aided by British ground forces and Allied warships, captured the German treaty port of Tsingtao (Qingdao) on the Shantung (Shandong) Peninsula.

When China pressed for return of the former German possessions in Shandong province, the Japanese government presented the so-called Twenty-one Demands in January 1915. After several months Chinese Pres. Yuan Shikai was forced to accept provisions which extended the duration of special concessions in Manchuria and granted the Japanese joint control of the Han-Ye-Ping steel- and ironworks in central China. The Shandong question was to be settled during the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles, but Japan and the Western allies had secretly agreed to support each other’s claims to former German possessions around the world. In May 1919 it was announced that German concessions in Shandong would be transferred to Japan, and the May Fourth Movement erupted in China. What began as a student demonstration in Beijing quickly spread to the rest of the country; workers went on strike and merchants boycotted Japanese goods. Although China successfully resisted a group of demands that would have reduced its status to that of a Japanese ward, Japan’s new privileges in Manchuria brought it abundant opportunity for exploitation. Japan’s China policy during and after World War I would lay the foundation for the anti-Japanese focus of 20th-century Chinese nationalism.

During the Russian Civil War, Japanese troops occupied Vladivostok as part of a larger Allied effort to aid anticommunist “White” Russian armies. The Western Allies grew concerned, however, when Japan moved to expand its zone of control into Siberia and along the Pacific coast. Thus, one of the principal goals of the Washington Conference (1921–22) was to check Japanese influence. The network of treaties that emerged from the conference was designed to restrain Japan’s imperial ambitions while guaranteeing Japanese security. Japan, Great Britain, the United States, and France concluded a Four-Power Pact, which replaced the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The Five-Power Naval Limitation Treaty (the four powers plus Italy) established limitations on capital ship construction to a ratio of 5 each for the United States and Great Britain, 3 for Japan, and 1.67 each for France and Italy. Parallel guarantees against fortifying advance bases in the Pacific assured Japan of safety in its home waters. The Nine-Power Pact (the five powers plus the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, and China) would, it was hoped, guarantee Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity. Subsequent to the official conference sessions, Japan agreed to retire from Shandong, and shortly afterward Japanese armies also withdrew from Siberia and northern Sakhalin. In 1925 a treaty with the Soviet Union extended recognition to the communist government in Moscow and brought to an end the active hostilities.

The mid-1920s thus saw the end of Japan’s initial surge in East Asia and the Pacific. Observers hoped that, having established itself as the dominant power in the region, Japan might adopt a more peaceful and moderate foreign policy. Indeed, when Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijūrō began promoting economic rather than military expansion, these hopes seemed well founded.