In 1947, through Allied efforts, a new Japanese constitution was enacted, officially ending the Japanese Empire and forming present-day Japan. The Pacific War officially came to an end on 2 September 1945, leading to the beginning of the Allied occupation of Japan, during which American military leader Douglas MacArthur administered the country. By August 1945, plans had been made for an Allied invasion of mainland Japan, but were shelved after Japan surrendered in the face of a major breakthrough by the United States and the Soviet Union, with the former detonating two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the latter invading Japan's northern territories. Eventually, the American military captured Iwo Jima and Okinawa Island, leaving the Japanese mainland unprotected and without a significant naval defense force.
The American-led island-hopping campaign led to the eventual loss of many of Japan's Oceanian island possessions in the following three years. However, from 1942 onwards, and particularly after decisive Allied advances at Midway Atoll and Guadalcanal, Japan was forced to adopt a defensive stance against the United States. The Imperial Japanese Armed Forces initially achieved large-scale military successes during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. This ideological shift eventually culminated in Japan joining the Axis alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and also conquering a large part of the Asia-Pacific. Economic and political turmoil in the 1920s, including the Great Depression, led to the rise of militarism, nationalism, and totalitarianism, as embodied in Shōwa Statism.
All of these aspects contributed to Japan's emergence as a great power following the First Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I. Under the slogans of fukoku kyōhei and shokusan kōgyō, which followed the Boshin War and the restoration of power to the Emperor from the Shogun, Japan underwent a period of large-scale industrialization and militarization, often regarded as the fastest modernization of any country to date. In the closing stages of World War II, with Japan defeated alongside the rest of the Axis, the formalized Japanese Instrument of Surrender was issued in compliance with the Potsdam Declaration of the victorious Allies, and Japanese de facto territory subsequently shrunk to cover only the Japanese archipelago as it is today. The South Seas Mandate was a single Japanese dependent territory in the name of the League of Nations. From 29 August 1910 until 2 September 1945, it administered the naichi (the Japanese archipelago and post-1943 Karafuto) and the gaichi ( Korea, Taiwan, Kwantung Leased Territory, and pre-1943 Karafuto). The Empire of Japan or Japanese Empire, also referred to as Imperial Japan, was the Japanese nation-state that existed from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 until the enactment of the reformed Constitution of Japan in 1947.
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