Meiji Japan abolished the shogunate, industrialized and militarized at unprecedented speed under the slogan 'Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces,' and by the 1930s ruled an empire stretching from Korea and Taiwan to Karafuto and the South Seas Mandate.
Defeated in World War II after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, Japan surrendered on 2 September 1945; Allied occupation followed, and the Empire formally ended on 3 May 1947 with ratification of the postwar Constitution of Japan.
The atlas holds 3 border frames for Empire of Japan — the shape you scrub through changes in 1868 · 1934 · 1946.
Traces the Imperial Japanese Army from its Meiji-era founding through its role in militarist expansion and defeat in 1945 — the institution most central to the empire's rise and fall.
Pulitzer-winning biography of Emperor Hirohito that doubles as a political history of the Empire of Japan from the 1920s through the 1945 surrender.