2026-10-08 20:00:52
This week's premium article: How Japan Redrew Asia
This is the 8th and final article of the series about Japan. Previous ones:
Why Japan is so populated (free)
Why Japan is the first big economy to shrink its population (premium)
Why Tokyo is the biggest city in the world (paywalled)
Why the imperial capital was Kyoto, and why it moved to Tokyo (premium)
Today, we’re going to explain the crazy trajectory that the country has followed over the last 150 years:
Why was it the only non-Western country that built an empire during the Industrial Revolution?
How did it become the 2nd richest country on Earth?
Why has it stagnated in the last three decades?
Why is it so indebted, but pays so little in interest?
The entire sequence is surprising here:
Why was Japan the only non-Western country to join in on the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s?
Why did it take advantage of it to build an empire?
In 1900, eight countries fought side-by-side to attack China during the Boxer Rebellion. Find the odd one out: Germany, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan. This is shocking, right? A non-Western country marching in the same alliance as seven Western industrial powers?
In the late 1800s, Europeans had made contact with the entire world, but the only outside country that industrialized out of that was Japan.1 Why? Because it had a set of unique characteristics.
To industrialize, you need:
A surplus of food, to allow for a big chunk of the population to not work in farming
Some light industries that could serve as stepping stones to heavy industries
A big urban population that can be brought into factories
Fast transportation
Widespread trade
High literacy and a class of literate administrators
Japan had it all.
We saw how geography brought it the food and the urban population: great fertile plains in a good climate for double cropping, but limited enough so people couldn’t just expand by farming more land, forcing urbanization and specialization into trade. By the mid-1850s, Japan was already very densely populated, with a very high urbanization rate.
As a set of islands with its Seto inland Sea, it was well-situated for fast and cheap transportation. Tokugawa Japan developed transportation on the east and west coasts too, in the Pacific and the Sea of Japan. As the country had been unified and tolls eliminated, Japan also developed roads that allowed short-distance trade of goods and fast communication.
The political unity, good transportation, and high urbanization all helped trade flourish.
All these elements also enabled light industries: textiles, silk, paper, sake, etc.
And the class of samurai had spent 250 years forgetting to fight, because there was just no need. They replaced the katana, horse, and gun for the pen and became administrators.2 The entire country had high literacy, but the samurai class had an exceptionally high one for the time.
Of course, the question becomes: Why did Japan gather these assets and no other country did?
Nick Szabo noted the surprising parallel between Japan and Britain.
Both are islands, neither too big nor too small. They are pretty mountainous, creating several valleys in between and competition between their different rulers. They are close enough to the continent that they could receive plenty of technology. But island geography also made defense unusually efficient: Britain and Japan could concentrate defense at maritime chokepoints rather than have to defend vast land borders.
This also meant that agricultural productivity could be high, because farmers were more secure in their land. They could invest in their long-term improvement, knowing that nobody would come and steal the fruits of their labor. Compare that with Ukraine, for example, which was so exposed to horse-mounted hordes that it invested substantially less in farming.
Thanks to this security, both countries established property rights that allowed landowners to affirm and trade their properties, which increased their value, and justified more investment.
So both Britain and Japan in the 1800s had high homeland security thanks to their geography, which had brought conditions that favored agricultural investment, which increased agricultural yields, which increased the population, which allowed for urbanization, which fostered trade and industrialization.
And since both were secure, they could invest part of that surplus not in more soldiers, but in education, and the administrators needed for industrialization.
This section is a hypothesis, but now that I think about it, a lot of these conditions remind me of the US and Italy too. They’re not islands, but close,3 they’re well defended, had many valleys that fostered competing rulers,4 but were connected enough that they could be unified, and plenty of farmland to produce a surplus of people.5
So Japan was in a unique position to industrialize, but it had to decide to do it. It lived in a feudal system when the Europeans arrived, but rather than dragging their feet, the Japanese recognized the threat and replaced their political system extremely quickly.
China again is a good comparison: It had a big population, cities, trade, taxation, good transportation, high literacy, a huge administration… The ruler could have identified the Western threat in the First Opium War but didn’t. Why did Japan, but not China?
I think it’s again due to the unique geography of Japan: Having all these separated plains in mountainous and elongated islands allowed for political independence. They were all one country, but each lord (daimyo) could manage his lands differently, make different bets, and create some local power. This was crucial to overthrowing the Tokugawa shogun and ushering in a new government system, copying the West.
Once you follow all of the above, pursuing an empire becomes pretty easy to understand:
Japan’s geopolitical priorities: Japan wanted to secure the five gates leading to it.
Japan saw how Western powers were becoming powerful by creating empires. Japan could either eat or be eaten, and it chose to eat.
There’s probably a status question too. Japan industrialized by copying the West. And the West was creating empires, which gave them status. Why not copy them?
After WW2, though, Japan was completely destroyed. How did it become the world’s 2nd biggest economy? And then, after growing for so long, why did it start stagnating? Because the very assets that made it rich became a liability.
2026-10-06 21:47:18
I’m exploring adding short articles like this one every week. LMK if you enjoy them.
2026-10-03 20:00:53
Population grows based on births, deaths, and immigration. The Japanese live long, but their immigration and fertility rates have been dismal for much longer than in other developed coutnries.
2026-10-01 20:02:01
I’ll be trying a few short articles this week on different topics, rather than a couple of very long ones. Tell me what you think
2026-09-29 20:03:43
Japan is extraordinary.
Why did it develop samurai?
Why did it close down to the world for 250 years?
Why did it forget how to make guns?
How did it go from feudal to industrial in a matter of decades?
How did it conquer half of East Asia?
Why did it later lose it?
You can explain all of these, and more, just by looking at its geography. We’ve started to do this in the last two articles on Japan’s population and its geopolitical priorities. Now it’s time to connect that to history.
As a reminder, this is Japan:
In the previous article, we saw how the #1 goal of Japan is to unify these islands, especially the three southern ones of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku.
Kyushu is so close to Korea that it’s always been the Japanese island most connected to the mainland, to new ideas and technologies, and to maritime trade, which made it one of the richest and strongest early on. But it has few plains, so with just 12M people today, it’s not very populated compared to Honshu.
Meanwhile, Shikoku is so mountainous that it could never harbor a big population and has “just” 3.5M people today.
All of this means that the majority of the population concentrates in southern Honshu, on the plains, because as we have seen, the north of Honshu and Hokkaido were too cold for rice agriculture and double cropping.
But look at the distribution of these plains. What can you deduce politically?
The key thing to notice is that there are scattered plains, separated by lots of tall mountains. That made transportation very challenging: In 1700, it took 15 days to go from Kyoto to Tokyo! What do you think the consequence of this was?
Feudalism.
When it’s difficult to go from one place to another, armies can’t easily move. When mountains divide them, they can use them as defense.
Information is also more time-consuming and costly to gather, so any central power had a hard time knowing how much rice each plot of land produced: There were floods, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, eruptions, typhoons… From the capital, it was hard to know what each paddy could actually produce. So locals could easily lowball it, making it hard to tax fully. The local lords knew exactly how much was produced though, because they could inspect the paddies personally. They pocketed the difference.
Mountains also made trade difficult, because carrying goods over them was too expensive. Normally, trade unites, since traders must cooperate and fight against bandits, so less trade meant a weaker unifying force.
But these valleys nestled between mountains were too close to each other for lords to ignore their neighbors, and they vied for each other’s land and wealth. If you think about it, all these are very similar conditions to those we find in Europe, and unsurprisingly, Japan landed on a similar political system for 1000 years.
However, Japan also had a unifying force, the Seto Inland Sea. It was a bit like Rome’s Mediterranean, allowing people and goods to travel cheaply from one seaside plain to the other.
The Seto Inland Sea was not a perfect highway. All the crannies on the coast and the strong currents in the sea enabled pirates and maritime lords to flourish. The same thing happened in the Mediterranean early on, until Rome could fight pirates away. But in Japan, since no plain was strong enough to create a powerful navy to monitor it, the sea became both a unifying factor for trade and a feudal one for political power.
For about 1000 years, technology moved from Korea to Japan: rice agriculture, iron metalworking, horseback riding… The Japanese simply expanded across the islands, grew their population, and clans emerged in every valley.
As that phase progressed, new technologies from the mainland, mainly writing, Buddhism, and the Chinese-style administration, allowed the state to strengthen. A central ruler emerged in the powerful central Yamato around 600–700 AD.
Japan meddled in Korean politics in the 600s, and when its allies lost to the Chinese, Japan feared an invasion, so they centralized vigorously to organize their defenses. The Japanese settled their original capital in Nara,1 near Osaka and Kyoto, and built a centralized system around an emperor, with a census, written laws, officials, provinces, taxation and conscription.
This centralization was too expensive for the time, and crumbled. Why?
Under the centralized government, every household was registered in a census, and taxes were due per household. So for example, person A owned rice paddy B, so he had to pay x% of B’s annual rice production.
We saw before how it was difficult for central leadership to know the production of a specific paddy. But also, how did you keep track of the households that had to pay you? People are born, die, marry, move… It was nearly impossible to keep up with it all. The census had to happen frequently, and all that information had to travel back to the capital, which took a very long time and was very expensive.
All of this worked while the system was still new, and while the Japanese feared a Chinese invasion. But as the fears receded, and people learned the system, it became very hard to maintain.
So little by little, power reverted to local authorities, who knew who owned each paddy, what the harvest was going to be, and were able to tax them accordingly. As more money stayed local, the emperor had less money to fund an army, but also less of a need for one, since now the local authorities were in charge of collecting the taxes and sending them to the capital. As a result, the local authorities also had to hire their own local forces to defend against bandits and neighboring clans. These would become the samurai.
Notice how similar this is to the process in Europe! The Roman Empire fell, with its centralized power, census, and administration, and in its wake appeared local lords who taxed local peasants and defended them through the figure of the knight. In fact, just like knights, samurais were also mounted! A key factor of the samurai’s strength was in fact the expensive ownership and maintenance of horses.
Peace and war alternated for centuries, culminating in the Warring States Period (or Sengoku Period), between ~1450 and ~1600. In the late 1500s, a series of leaders2 were able to finally unify Japan. This started the longest period of peace in Japan, the Tokugawa Shogunate, which lasted ~250 years between ~1600 and 1868, and was named after the dynasty of the last one of these leaders, Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Why did that happen then, and not, say, in 1000 AD or 1800 AD? After centuries of military action, civil administration, and new ideas from Korea and China, state capacity had dramatically improved. The only states that could survive were the rich ones that could tax their citizens efficiently and field an army effectively—so, the bigger, better-managed states.
Also, the Portuguese arrived in the 1500s and started selling firearms. This initially created a crisis, but eventually helped whoever was rich enough to buy more, had the right influence to source them, and could learn to use them better. A local lord no longer had any chance against a well-funded one. Firearms also made populous valleys more powerful: A samurai needed lots of training to fight well with his bow, his katana, and his horse, but you could give a firearm to a farmer and quickly make him lethal. So more populous lands became stronger.
Another factor of unification was the discovery of silver mines in the mid-1500s. Those who controlled them could trade with the Chinese and the Portuguese, sourcing more weapons and fielding bigger armies.
Of course, silver means more currency, so it’s easier to trade. This meant more wealth, which could be taxed to invest in war.
Imagine you’re one of these Japanese leaders, ruling after centuries of feudalism and living your entire life in war. What would you do? Spend all your efforts to ensure that didn’t happen again, eliminating all the decentralizing forces of Japan, to be replaced by centralizing ones.
Here’s what the Japanese leaders did:
Weaken the military power of potential opponents:
They eliminated the military power of lots of competitors: Buddhist temples, warrior leagues, autonomous towns, guilds…
They forced lords to destroy their castles (except for their residence) and ask for permission to do repairs, and banned them from building more.
Local lords also lost the ownership of their lands. They were now entrusted with the land by the shogun, always on a temporary basis. They were then moved around, so as not to settle too much on a particular land and grow their control on it. This made samurai landless warriors.
The most loyal ones were granted the best lands.3
Marriages between lords required approval.
They ordered farmers to surrender swords, daggers, bows, spears, firearms, and other weapons.
Without wars to fight, the samurais’ horseback fighting became a hobby, and skills were lost.
Only a few gunmakers were licensed, and all were centralized in a single location. They could not travel to other provinces, share fabrication procedures, or sell firearms without reporting first to authorities. So lords could not buy guns domestically or from outside the country. To prevent illicit trade, gunmarkers were given a stipend, whether they sold arms or not. The reduction in volume of sales made firearms so expensive that they disappeared from Japan over the centuries as a weapon of war.4
They eliminated pirate lords in the Seto Inland Sea. Authorities had to identify ship captains, fishermen and other maritime populations, make them swear not to engage in piracy, and threatened confiscation of a lord’s lands if piracy continued within his territory.
To foster trade and reduce enemy income, they abolished many toll barriers and monopoly privileges.
Improve income
They ordered a new nationwide cadastral survey: measure fields, classify quality, estimate yield, and identify cultivators, so they knew exactly who should get taxed, and how much.
They linked taxes not to the people, but to the paddies in the village. Each parcel owed a precise amount of taxes in the form of rice every year.
Farmers were tied to the land, so the difficulty of knowing who owed what disappeared.
Control mines: silver and gold mines fell under the shogun’s direct control.
These are the actions to achieve Japan’s first geopolitical goal—unite internally—but remember Japan’s two next geopolitical goals:
Protect the five gates towards Japan (four island paths plus Korea)
Neutralize Asia’s superpowers
And here, Objective 1 was threatened by 2 and 3, because Europeans started appearing in Japan, while China and Korea had always been threats. So the Japanese leaders addressed these threats, too.
Hideyoshi had a battle-hardened army with no more wars to fight; dangerous to have in your own backyard. And since Korea was nearby and a constant threat, he figured he might as well launch an attack.
This reminds me so much of what Portugal and Spain did after their Reconquista unified the Iberian Peninsula against the Muslims: They kept going. They invaded neighboring northwestern Africa (now Morocco) and started sailing around the world. Fortunately for Spain and Portugal, they had no strong empire nearby to throttle them. Unfortunately for Japan, they did. The land campaigns worked well in Korea, but their naval campaign suffered from a catastrophic battle where it lost a huge chunk of its fleet. The war bogged down, and Japan pulled out when Hideyoshi died in 1598.
The only option left to the Japanese was to hunker down, and that’s what they did.
The Japanese people were banned from traveling abroad, under pain of death.
Foreigners couldn’t come into Japan either, under the same threat of capital punishment.
Trade with foreigners was extremely limited. The Dutch and Chinese were limited to trading in Nagasaki, on the southwestern island of Kyushu, and the Koreans in Tsushima. This notably kneecapped Kyushu lords, who used to conduct most of the trade, but had to stop.
The Portuguese, the first to arrive in the 1500s, didn’t just bring weapons. They also brought Christianity, which spread like wildfire in Japan. During the Warring States Period, local lords would adopt Christianity to get arms and money. The Spanish landed in Japan soon after, and the Japanese learned from them what happened to the Aztecs and Incas. The Japanese leaders decided to ban Christianity, the Portuguese, and the Spanish from landing in Japan, and they prioritized Christian lords in the national cadastral survey, to suppress them.
You can see how intense all the policies were to secure Japan’s main geopolitical priorities. The Tokugawa achieved it for good, and the peace lasted 250 years.
Japan’s stability came at the cost of completely isolating itself from the world. But the world didn’t want to isolate itself from Japan.
In the mid-1850s, Westerners had just humiliated China in war and forced it to open up to Western trade, as I explained here.5 The Japanese knew the West was coming for them, and it did, in 1853, when Commodore Perry knocked on the door of Japan’s past.
Perry entered Tokyo Bay6 with steamboats that could easily outmaneuver any Japanese sailing ship, and with guns whose violence the Japanese had only heard tales of.
Outpowered, the Tokugawa Shogunate was forced to open up to trade with the West, and this exposed its military weakness after 250 years of isolated peace. This became the downfall of the shogunate: The Japanese split into two camps, one that wanted to expel the Westerners, the other that wanted to co-opt their technologies. How exactly did the shogunate fall?
After 250 years of mostly peace, the military force of the shoguns was diminished.
The shoguns controlled a lot of the military power, but the local management was not centralized, still belonging to local lords who knew the local conditions. So well-organized local lords, with the right strategy, could beat the Tokugawa (the feudal nature of Japan still showing up).
The right strategy was to co-opt the emperor. The same figurehead dynasty had been the emperors of Japan for centuries. It was a useful convention to legitimize the shogunate, with no real power. Seizing the emperor would weaken the shogun’s legitimacy.
It won’t surprise you to learn that Kyushu leaders (and some from the westernmost part of Honshu) were among those who wanted to Westernize: They were more open to foreigners and had already been schooled by their weapons (as Westerners arrived from the southwest and could only trade in Kyushu), so they had started sourcing them and arming up. Eventually, they marched on Kyoto, took control of the emperor Meiji, defeated the Tokugawa in a battle, and “restored” the power to the emperor. The Tokugawa side disappeared. The period that followed is called the Meiji Restoration, and it’s probably the most radical modernization a country has ever seen. The Japanese studied everything about Western powers, adopted it all, and within a decade, virtually the entire economy, military, and administration were Westernized.
This worked so well that by the end of the century, Japan could face the historical regional behemoth (China) and a Western empire (Russia)... and win.
You have to understand how absolutely crazy this was at the time. It changes the arc of history in the east: Until then, for literally thousands of years, everything in that region had become more Chinese. Suddenly, little Japan, an appendix at the end of the continent, where technologies arrived after a lag and never originated from, goes from aligned with the Chinese–Confucianist world to Westernized in a few decades, and then beats China.
As for Russia, not a single Eastern country had been able to face Western powers in a modern war and win.7 Not one! Westerners had steamrolled every other country, including India and the neighboring mighty China. Then along comes a random chain of islands at the edge of the Pacific, and it beats the behemothic Russia, which controlled an empire that extended from Europe to the Pacific. Extraordinary.
So how does all this tie to Japan’s three main geopolitical priorities?
Maintain internal unity
Control the islands that lead into Japan
Fend off rivals on the Asian continent
When the Meiji Restoration begins, Japan starts wondering: To what extent can we keep our homeland united (objective 1) if we don’t control the roads that lead to it (objective 2)?
They concluded that they had to take control of all the paths to Japan. It wasn’t an overnight decision: They started with a few nearby islands. But the logic had no end: The more they took, the more buffer they thought they needed. The timeline is:
1853–1854: Commodore Perry enters Edo Bay
1868–1869: The Tokugawa Shogunate ends, the Meiji Restoration begins
1869: The Japanese take full control of Hokkaido and colonize it
1872–1879: They take over the Ryukyu island arc (it used to be a kingdom!)
1875: Russia concedes the Kuril islands, in exchange for recognizing Sakhalin island as Russian
1876: Japan forces Korea to open up trade with them, the same way Perry forced Japan to trade with the West
1894–1895: They go to war with China in the first Sino-Japanese War. They take Taiwan and push China out of Korea.
1900: Japan joins Western powers in fighting China during the anti-Western Boxer Rebellion.
1904–1905: War with Russia. The Japanese take southern Sakhalin and Russia's lease on the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, just north of Korea.
1910: Korea is annexed.
1914–1919: During WW1, Japan joins the Allies to seize Germany’s colonies in the east: its Pacific islands and Chinese concessions.
1931: Japan invades the Chinese province of Manchuria, near Korea.
1937–1945: 2nd Sino-Japanese War. Japan takes a bunch of territory in China.
Now we’re going to take a pause, because something subtle changes here that reveals Japan’s 4th and last geopolitical goal.
If you’ve followed up till now, you recognize exactly the problem here. One of these territories is unlike the others.
Controlling all the islands that lead to Japan is one thing. It’s an entirely different thing to take on the continent. The peninsula of Korea, you can maybe justify: It’s close enough to Japan and secluded enough from Asia. But that’s the slippery slope right there, and the Japanese knew it. If you take Korea, you are exposed to Manchuria. So you take it. And that exposes Manchuria to Mongolia, Russia, and China, so you try to get them, too. Japan gets locked into a catastrophic confrontation with not one, but two land empires (it goes to war with Russia and the USSR a couple of times, too), which it can’t win. Big mistake.
Since Japan can’t conquer China outright, it tries something different: Strangling it by taking French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) in ~1940 to cut land supply routes to China.
Now let’s zoom out for a minute here. WW2 is now underway. France and the UK have declared war with the expansionist Germany, which is allied with similarly-expansionist Japan. Both are conquering land at breakneck speed. The US sees this and concludes:
Japan is about to take the Malacca Strait to stop Chinese maritime supplies.
The Philippines are right there, close to Japan. They might well take them.
Japan is like Nazi Germany in Asia: If we let them continue, they will continue taking over lands until they split the world between them.
So the US does what it can to kneecap Japan: It stops selling it oil. Since 80% of Japan’s oil came from the US, this effectively meant losing the war. Japan could not operate without oil.
You can see the slippery slope from Korea, to China, to Indochina, to oil. It’s now forced to either abandon China—and acknowledge it f***ed up and wasted thousands of Japanese lives for an impossible goal—or keep going, which meant taking the Strait of Malacca (British) to control trade, and Indonesia (Dutch East Indies, a Dutch colony) to take its oil. But Japan knew the US wouldn’t like this and might enter the war.
So it decided to preemptively bomb the US’s navy in Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor.
Immediately after that, it took what are today the Philippines (US colony at the time), Malaysia (UK colony), and Indonesia (Dutch colony), allied with Thailand, and fought the British in Burma. This is how they got to this point:
If you have been following my GeoHistory articles, you know this is a nightmare of an empire. You need a massive navy to oppose two global powers (the US and the British), and an army to oppose three land ones (the Russians, the Chinese, and the British), along with guerilla wars from dozens of different nations.
Japan reached the end of the slide and fell into the mud.
Of course, the US proceeded to beat the s**t out of Japan, because Japan is a series of tiny islands while the US is a continent. And all because of the 4th geopolitical priority: resources.
Japan was small, but had a huge industrialized population and economy. It couldn’t produce everything it needed, so it had to take it from abroad—and prevent its enemies from getting the same resources.
This is why Japan invaded Southeast Asia: to cut China’s resource supplies.
This is why Japan attacked the US: to secure oil.
And this is why the US followed the Pacific strategy it did.
The US didn’t need to conquer every tiny island. It just needed to break the network. Stop the resupplies, and you neutralize every island.
This is why the US invested heavily in a navy here, why its submarines focused on destroying the Japanese merchant fleet (resources!), and why it bypassed countless Japanese islands full of soldiers who were left useless and stranded.8 It only took enough islands (like the Philippines, Iwo Jima, Guam, and Okinawa) to build bases to control the areas and fly over Japan to drop bombs.
By 1945, Japan was out of oil and food. Its navy could not operate. Its population was starving. But it was also pretty fundamentalist. It was never going to give in to foreigners and was ready to fight to the death, literally sending women civilians to fight the enemy with bamboo spears if that’s what it took.
The US would have lost potentially millions of soldiers conquering Japan. That’s precisely what Japan wanted: Not to lose millions of people, but to make the invasion so costly to the US that they would force a settlement, with better peace terms for Japan.
That’s why the US dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead. For the 2nd time in one century, the US forced Japan to realize its technological inferiority and fold.
So in summary, now you know how Japan’s geography determined its four geopolitical priorities, and how these have driven its history.
Because Japan is a series of big connected islands, but with flat valleys separated by mountains, it wants to be united, but it can’t easily do that. So Japan’s unity took about 2000 years, from 300 BC when the first Yayoi arrived, to 1600 AD, when Hideyoshi and Tokugawa finally united Japan. In the middle, they had a first attempt around 700 AD, but it was too early and it fell apart. The conditions were only right in 1600, and today, this goal has been fully achieved.
This only started being important when foreigners from overseas started bothering Japan. The five gates are the Ryukyu Arc ending in Taiwan, the Izu-Bonin Arc, the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin Island, and Korea.
The Izu-Bonin Arc is fully achieved (except Guam, but the US is an ally).
The Ryukyu Arc and Taiwan were taken over at the end of the 1800s. Today, Taiwan is not Japan anymore, but it’s an ally via the US. Threatening Taiwan threatens Japan through the Ryukyu Arc, so it has a vested interest in protecting it from China.
The Kuril Islands and Sakhalin were far north. Even Hokkaido is. So it took until the 1800s for Japan to fully take control of Hokkaido, and several conflicts with Russia to decide who owns the others. Right now, it’s Russia, but that might change in the future. They haven’t signed a peace treaty because of that.
Korea: Japan invaded three times, and succeeded only once. This is a massive slippery slope for Japan, so I doubt it will try again. Better to have an ally there, so South Korea is super important for Japan.
In the past, Japan tried to do this through war:
Two Sino-Japanese wars, in the late 1800s and 1930s-40s
The Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05, and WW2
The war with the US in WW2
Very very bad idea. Japan is too small to be a comparable superpower. So it must ally with these powers instead. Today, it’s a US ally, so the ocean is covered. The instability of its relationship with its Russian and Chinese neighbors is very worrisome, and that becomes Japan’s main unachieved goal: How to ensure peace with them (or ensure their relative weakness).
Russia is weak today, that is good for Japan. In fact, bogging it down in the Ukrainian front is useful: While Russia focuses its attention and resources there, it can’t bother on the other side.
So Japan’s main concern is China. In the last few decades, Japan tried to become friends via trade, but it has learned (like the US), that China takes advantage of this to increase its power and might abuse it, so it’s become more cautious.
China’s crazy appendage, North Korea, is even more worrying, especially now that it has nuclear weapons. So Japan must manage it.
One thing few people know is that Japan is always only months away from developing a nuclear weapon. That’s their trump card.
Either to achieve Goal 3 (prevent its enemies from getting supplies) or for itself. It tried the war path, and that did not go well. It then tried the trade path, and that has worked extremely well. Japan can get everything through shipping and has established commercial ties and investments across all of Southeast Asia, which allows it to obtain everything it needs.
In summary, for Japan, the future of its geopolitics means remaining friends with the US, making sure it’s strong, containing North Korea, and managing China so that it never again becomes the threatening behemoth next door, and all of it can be seen from its geography.
In the next few articles on Japan, we’re going to answer a lot of fascinating questions on the country:
How did Japan redraw the map of Asia?
Why was it the only non-Western country that built an empire during the Industrial Revolution?
How did it become the 2nd richest country on Earth?
Why has it stagnated in the last three decades?
Why is it so indebted, but pays so little in interest?
Why is it one of the first countries to shrink its population due to a lack of children?
Why was Kyoto the capital at one point?
Asuka and Fujiwara before that, but all three are in the same plain as Nara.
Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Nobunaga was the temperamental lord who started it all, Hideyoshi his vassal, and Ieyasu was Hideyoshi’s.
This is how Tokugawa Ieyasu ends up in what’s now Tokyo, and develops it so much that it would quickly grow into the biggest city in Japan, eventually becoming the capital.
Although farmers continued using them.
They were losing a lot of silver in their trade for Chinese tea, so they forced China to open up to the opium trade: basically, Britain would sell opium in exchange for tea. This got millions of Chinese people addicted and sunk China into their Century of Humiliation. Then the UK took India and introduced tea cultivation there to avoid buying it from China.
Edo Bay at the time
The Afghanis did face down the British in the First Anglo-Afghan War, but that was a more traditional war, and one where the Afghans rebuffed Brits in their home mountains rather than facing them as equals in a war of expansion.
Some remained there for decades!
2026-09-27 09:42:20
If you know how to look at this map, you can deduce a lot of Japan’s history, why it has the borders it has today, where they are contested, and why it went through the wars it did.
What can you see?
The three big islands of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku were destined to be a political unit:
They are very close to each other
They’re also oriented mostly east–west. That means they share the same climate, which facilitates movement, because people’s lifestyle and crops don’t change.
Hokkaido is much farther north, which means different climate and ways of life, so unifying with the other islands would be harder. But the island is so close (~19 km, 12 mi) to Honshu that it was very likely to ultimately unify with Japan. All this explains a lot of Japanese history, like for example, why the three southern islands of Japan united partially for the first time over a thousand years ago, and why Hokkaido was only fully conquered and colonized at the end of the 1800s.
These four islands are not isolated in the middle of an ocean. There are five paths to reach them.
The Izu-Bonin Arc goes nowhere in the Pacific, so it was logical that Japan would own it. This is where the islands of Guam and Iwo Jima are,1 which the US used to approach Japan from the south during WW2. The US still owns Guam.
The other four gates extend close enough to the continent that their ownership could be contested between Japan and the Asian powers.
The Ryukyu arc ends at Taiwan, which is 130 km (80 mi) away from mainland China, separated by treacherous waters. Since Asia is such a massive continent, wars between its biggest powers have always been land-based, so their armies have also been land-based, and hence their navies were never strong. That’s why Taiwan has been part of the Netherlands (sea power), Spain (sea power), the Koxinga regime (a Chinese sea power), Japan (sea power), independent for the last 80 years (supported by the US, a sea power), and only part of China (Qing Dynasty) for a bit over 200 years, in the 1700s-1800s.
That explains why Taiwan has been contested throughout history, and after they lost their independence, the islands in the Ryukyu Arc have been part of either Japan or the ruling power in Taiwan. Since Taiwan has never been that strong, most of that arc of islands belongs to Japan today, after it conquered it in the late 1800s. This is why Okinawa, for example, belongs to Japan today.
As China’s economy and influence grows and it tries to return Taiwan to the fold, it includes more than just Taiwan in its claims. The most notorious example is the Senkaku Islands, whose exclusive economic zone might include oil, and are closest to China (of all the Japanese islands in the area).2
Notably, today China is encircled by enemies in the sea, which means they could blockade it. That’s why it is being so aggressive in pushing against its neighbors in the South China Sea, and another reason why it’s aggressive towards Taiwan.
The island of Sakhalin and the Kuril Arc could have belonged either to Japan or to the continental power in the region—which happens to be Russia. This has always depended on the winner of the latest war. Since Russia became an imperial power before Japan, it had time to reach the Pacific and take Sakhalin before Japan did. By that time, Japan had industrialized, and it won the war with Russia in 1904-1905, so it took control of the southern half of Sakhalin Island and the parts of the Kuril Arc it didn’t already cotrol. But then Japan lost WW2 in 1945, and the USSR rushed to reclaim as much of these islands as it could. It recovered Sakhalin and conquered all the the Kuril Islands
The USSR pushed so aggressively that the closest Russian island to Hokkaido is just ~2 mi / 4 km away!
Historically, Japan is in a stronger position than Russia to control the Kuril Islands, because they’re small distant islands and Japan is a maritime power, while Russia, by nature, is a land-based one. It’s very telling that Russia and Japan have never signed a peace treaty since WW2, mainly because Japan has a very strong historical claim to these islands, and they disagree on where exactly the border should be.
Russia kind of agrees that the small islands are Japanese (Habomai, Shikotan), but doesn’t want to give them up unless Japan ends the claim on the bigger Kunashir and Iturup.
In the other direction however, Sakhalin is big enough and close enough to the continent (less than 10 km) that, although it could have gone either way, it favored Russia historically—and has almost always been Russian.
Korea is far enough from Japan that it’s quite hard for either Japan to conquer Korea (three attempts, one succeeded in the late 1800s/early 1900s, for less than a century), or for Korea to conquer Japan (two attempts, failed, by the Mongols).
If Korea had been a flatland better connected to China, it would historically have been part of China. Being a mountainous peninsula, it has always been hard for China to control. Here’s a diagram, from the Korea article:
The result is that, for Japan, Korea is likely to always be a buffer against continental powers.
In between the two is the island of Tsushima, which could be used as a stepping stone in either direction, especially since it’s closer to Korea (~50 km) than to Japan (~130 km). The claim to it could have gone either way, but for the same reasons as before, it’s Japanese, since Korea has had to be a land power to fend off China, but Japan is a sea power with no threat to the south or east. It could focus on the island and get it.
Jeju Island, meanwhile, is closer to Korea via plenty of small islands, and farther from Japan, so it ended up in the Korean sphere.
The distance between Korea and Japan is long enough that there have been few invasions on either side, and even fewer that succeeded, but short enough that trade and technology could travel—mostly from the continent to Japan.
We’ve identified Japan’s first three main objectives:
Internal priority: Unify the four main islands
External priorities:
Secure all the islands that lead to Japan
Fend off the threats from powerful Asian empires
To figure out the last objective, we need to zoom back out.
Japan is lonely. There’s nothing to its east and south. To its north, there’s just cold. All its potential threats come from the west—but that’s also where all the resources used to come from.
Because Japan is resource poor. As it’s on a “newly” formed geology,3 it doesn’t have much oil or coal.4 The newly-formed mountains had gold, silver, and copper—which the country used extensively in its past—but not much more than that.5 All the rare-earth minerals, and even more common ones like iron, which it needs for its advanced technology, must be imported.6 And the valleys are good for agriculture, but the population has outgrown its production capacity, so it needs to import the majority of its food: 63% of its calories and 34% of its value.7
So Japan must procure lots of commodities from abroad. As an island, these commodities will always arrive by sea, so Japan must make sure it can secure its maritime supplies—whether by controlling them or by being friends with the ones who do. Most of Japan’s missteps leading to WW2 can be traced back to this.
So these are Japan’s 4 main geopolitical objectives:
Unite the four main islands
Secure the five gates that lead to Japan
Neutralize the superpowers that can invade: the Asian land powers and the international sea powers
Secure all the resources it needs through maritime trade
If you understand this, you can understand virtually all of Japan’s history:
How it coalesced around 700 AD into a united country for 1000 years
How it devolved into a feudal country over the centuries
Why it was unified around 1600
Why it forgot how to produce guns
Why its samurais forgot how to use their katanas and their horses
Why it closed down for 250 years
Why it got traumatized in the mid-1800s
Why it became the only non-Western country to industrialize in the 1800s
Why it created its own empire in Asia
Why it later lost it
Why it is the way it is today
Actually it’s the Izu-Bonin-Mariana Arc, as the Izu-Bonin splits in two and meets the Mariana arc to the east.
But also still closer to Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan than to China
Last 25M years or so.
It has little oil, but more coal. It doesn’t mine it because it’s cheaper to buy it.
Lead (it usually comes with silver), zinc, iron sulfides.
The ore. It refines a lot of it.
That’s why vegetables are so expensive, for example. And why they’re so original, like cubic watermelons: When your land is expensive, machinery and work are relatively less so, and you can afford to play with your food.
