# Map of the Empire of Japan

Source page: https://geographichistory.app/empire/empire-of-japan/

On the Geographic History map, the Empire of Japan appears from 1869 to 1946. It reaches its largest mapped extent in 1942: about 6.8 million km² across 252 provinces.

The Empire of Japan was the state that emerged from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and industrialised the country at great speed. It defeated China in 1894-1895 and Russia in 1904-1905, annexed Taiwan and Korea, occupied Manchuria in 1931, went to war across China from 1937 and overran Southeast Asia and much of the Pacific in 1941-1942. After its defeat in 1945 Japan was occupied, and the constitution of 1947 replaced the imperial system with a parliamentary democracy.

## Mapped area by year (km²)

- 1869: 386,000
- 1874: 386,000
- 1879: 352,000
- 1884: 352,000
- 1889: 352,000
- 1894: 352,000
- 1899: 388,000
- 1904: 388,000
- 1909: 426,000
- 1914: 649,000
- 1919: 649,000
- 1924: 653,000
- 1929: 653,000
- 1934: 648,000
- 1939: 2,265,000
- 1944: 6,761,000
- 1946: 349,000

## About this map

Territory comes from the Chronas historical dataset used by the Geographic History app. Areas are approximate, computed from about 2,400 province shapes, and describe this map rather than official historical figures - border data for the ancient and medieval world is necessarily a reconstruction.