TOKYO: Japan’s growing empire was ready to make a big gamble in the summer of 1914, buoyed by its victory over Tsarist Russia 10 years earlier and later annexation of the Korean peninsula.

As the Great War raged on battlefields half a world away, Tokyo declared war on Germany in August of that year as it grabbed hold of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Chinese concessions.

The declaration of war during a sweltering Japanese summer was little noticed on the other side of the world, where millions lost their lives.

Tokyo’s jump into the wider conflict powered its industrial base and sowed the seeds of a rapid economic rise, but also foreshadowed its crushing humiliation decades later in World War II.

Japan was betting that Germany — embroiled in the European conflict — would be unable to protect its eastern enclaves in China, and the gamble paid off.

The imperial army seized the port of Qingdao, German-controlled since 1898, after a week-long siege, bolstered by forces from its British alliance.

“The Japanese knew that Germany couldn’t respond,” said Professor Toshikazu Inoue of Gakushuin University.

By 1915, Tokyo had presented a list of demands to China in a bid to consolidate its political and economic gains.

Exhausted by conflicts with regional warlords, Emperor Yuan Shikai had little choice but to agree.

GOLDEN ERA: The Great War would come to be seen as a “ten-yu” or “gift from the heavens” for Japan, Inoue said, and one that Tokyo “wished would never end”.

By 1918, gross national product had tripled in just six years, and 30 percent of the budget was driven by exports.

The war may have decimated a distant Europe, but it ushered in a golden era for Japan’s economy, which soared as it ramped up its involvement in industries previously dominated by Europe.

“The First World War represents the origin of Japanese industry and its export-led economy,” said Manabu Arima, professor emeritus at Kyushu University.

“Heavy industry developed thanks to European demand, and the chemicals sector was born thanks to the interruption of exports from Europe due to the war. “That gave birth to a new class of Japanese “war-trepreneur”, known as the Nari-kin.

By the time the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919, Japan was not only on the side of the winners -- with a fraction of its European allies’ casualties -- but it also reaped added political spoils.

Japan was crowned one of the four permanent members of the executive body of the newly formed League of Nations, and was able to consolidate its position in China.

POST WAR COLLAPSE: But the boom years were not to last.

The armistice — which was greeted with desperate joy by a decimated Europe — did not augur well for Japan.

Factories continued to push out goods at full throttle, drawing peasants away from the countryside to the cities where a worker could earn triple that of someone working the land.

Meanwhile, European buyers were reeling from four years of war and the attendant financial damage it had wrought, leaving Japan with an excess supply that its home market could not absorb.

Rapid inflation took hold with rice prices tripling between 1916 and 1920, prompting traders to launch mass demonstrations. In 1918 the government was replaced amid protests staged by tens of thousands of discontented Japanese around the country.

The economy took a dive and in the political fallout that followed, Tokyo found itself under increasing pressure from the twin threats of communism and pacifism, mirroring the situation in Europe.

As a concession, Tokyo ushered in universal suffrage for men in 1925, but also reinstated restrictive laws on freedom of expression.

The repression of communism was necessary, the military establishment believed, to avoid the fate of the Tsar and his family in Russia, who had been put to death in 1918 by the Bolsheviks.

“In studying the war in Europe, Japan’s army chiefs realised the importance of Japan’s shortage of natural resources, and of national cohesion,” said Yoichi Hirama, a former professor at Japan’s National Defence Academy.

Japan’s countryside had been largely emptied as rural residents flocked to cities where they now suffered unemployment as the war economy collapsed.

That sowed the seeds for greater militarism as Japan looked to expand its reach while people counted the cost of boom times that were built on the now-ended conflict.

It was this mentality that led an aggressive and hungry Japan into the terrible theatre of a war decades later in an alliance with Nazi Germany — a war that it could not win.

Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2014