Chapter 1 explores vessel-naming practices in the Imperial Japanese Navy and their connections to classical Japanese poetry. This connection linked navy vessels with a past aesthetic rooted linked to the Emperor and rooted in notions of Japan as a divine land.

This chapter explores how the strategic value of bird islands increased in the interwar period, even as their economic value dwindled. The Marcus Island Incident helped spark Japanese interest in offshore guano mining for use as phosphate fertilizer, and Japanese-managed mining operations began to pop up on islands throughout the East and South China seas. They were only intermittently profitable, and were abandoned during economic downturns. But they triggered diplomatic disputes first with China (over the Pratas and Paracel groups) and then with France (over the Spratlys). Over time military planners began to conceive of the islands as potential airstrips or submarine refuelling stations. Japanese companies, often competing with each other for rights to the islands, exploited these visions by portraying themselves as useful adjuncts in the defence of Japan’s ‘maritime lifeline’. By the late 1930s the Japanese Navy was directly bankrolling civilian enterprises as cover for military operations.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.