Imperial Japanese Army

The Imperial Japanese Army was the ground force of the Empire of Japan from the Meiji Restoration period in the 1870s until Japan's defeat in World War II in 1945, built initially on French and later German military models as part of Japan's rapid modernization effort, and grew into a major regional and then global military power that fought successfully in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, the latter marking the first major modern military victory by an Asian power over a European one. Through the 1930s and into World War II the Army drove Japan's aggressive expansion across China following the 1931 Manchurian Incident and the 1937 outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and subsequently across Southeast Asia and the Pacific following the December 1941 attacks on Pearl Harbor and British and Dutch colonial possessions. The Army's wartime conduct, including mass civilian killings during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and widespread atrocities against prisoners of war and occupied populations, remains a defining and deeply contested element of its historical legacy across East Asia. Japan's surrender in September 1945 following its defeats across the Pacific and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the Imperial Japanese Army's dissolution, with Japan's postwar constitution renouncing offensive military capability and establishing the significantly more limited Self-Defense Forces in its place.