This period was a time of social and economic change within the constitutional monarchy established in 1890. As the original architects of the Restoration died, the various branches of the government began competing for power. An oligarchy bound closely by its members' shared conception of national purpose was replaced by an aggregate of interest groups — the Parliament, civil bureaucracy, military, and Imperial Household — all vying for the ear of the Emperor in whose name they administered the government.
Japanese industry expanded, both in light export industries like textiles, which were necessary to pay for the raw materials needed from abroad, and also in heavy industries like steel and shipbuilding. Cities grew, as more Japanese moved from farming into jobs in factories and offices. In the countryside larger landlords came to own more and more land, and the number of poor tenants increased. Always dependent on foreign trade, Japan was hard hit by the world depression that began in 1929. The farmers who had grown the silk that was exported to the United States found no market for their product once the roaring twenties and the craze for silk stockings collapsed with the stock market crash. Japan's dramatic economic growth slowed, and social problems increased, especially in the countryside.
At the same time that the leaders of imperial Japan pursued modernization and economic growth, they continued to address the issue of Japan's unequal status in the international order. In 1894, more than forty years after Commodore Perry pried Japan open to the outside world, Japan finally succeeded in revising the unequal treaties so that it regained its legal parity with the Western powers. Japan fought a war against China in 1894-95 over the control of Korea and gained Taiwan, Japan's first colony. In 1902, Japan signed an alliance with Great Britain, which signified a dramatic increase in international status, and in 1904-5, Japan won a war against Russia, one of the major Western powers. In the process Japan expanded its empire, annexing Korea in 1910. Japan was allied with the United States and Britain in World War I, and expected territorial gains at the Versailles peace conference in 1919. Instead Japan met with strong opposition from the United States, and again learned the lesson that the West regarded imperialism very differently if it was the imperialism of an Asian rather than a European power. The failure of the Japanese to get a clause on racial equality inserted into the covenant of the League of Nations was an insult that was compounded in 1924 when the United States barred all Japanese from immigration.
The setbacks and insults from abroad, against a background of economic depression, sowed public frustration with the political leadership at home. Even more, military units under the field commands in Manchuria grew impatient with the politicians' apparent inability to translate any of their military victories into political gains. Increasingly, Japanese were persuaded by the militarists' contention that Japan's security lay in consolidating her access to markets and resources in Asia.