1899 in Japan

Decades:	1870s; 1880s; 1890s; 1900s; 1910s;
See also:	Other events of 1899; History of Japan • Timeline • Years

Events in the year 1899 in Japan. It corresponds to Meiji 32 (明治32年) in the Japanese calendar.

Incumbents

February 1 – Telephone service begins between Tokyo and Osaka.
February 7 – Keiō and Waseda become Japan's first private universities.
February 13 – The income tax law is promulgated.
March 1 – Sankyo Pharmaceutical established in Yokohama, as predecessor of Daiichi Sankyo.^{[citation needed]}
March 4 – Japan passes its first copyright law.
March 9 – Japan promulgates its commercial code, the Shōhō, to take effect on June 16.^[2]
July 15 – Japan's first comprehensive copyright law takes effect and, on the same day, Japan agrees to join the Berne Convention.
July 17 – NEC Corporation is organized as the first Japanese joint venture with foreign capital.
November – Momijigari, the oldest extant Japanese film, is shot an open space behind the Kabuki-za in Tokyo.^[3]
Unknown date – Morinaga Confectionery was founded, as predecessor name was Morinaga Western Confectionery.^{[page needed]}
Unknown date – The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act is enacted by the Imperial Diet

January 20 – Kenjiro Takayanagi, television engineer, creator of the world's first all-electronic television receiver (d. 1990)
February 10 – Suihō Tagawa, manga artist (d. 1989)
February 13 – Yuriko Miyamoto, novelist (d. 1951)
March 7 – Jun Ishikawa, writer (d. 1987)
June 11 – Yasunari Kawabata, writer, novelist, Nobel laureate in Literature (d. 1972)
August 1 – Saburō Matsukata, journalist, businessman and mountaineer (d. 1973)
August 5 – Sakae Tsuboi, novelist and poet (d. 1967)
September 1 – Takuma Nishimura, general (d. 1951)
September 8 – Akiko Seki, soprano (d. 1973)
October 1 – Matsutarō Kawaguchi, novelist, playwright and film producer (d. 1985)
November 7 – Daisuke Nanba, communist activist (d. 1924)
December 3 – Hayato Ikeda, Prime Minister of Japan (d. 1965)
Unknown – Genkei Masamune, botanist, (d. 1993)

^ "Meiji | emperor of Japan". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 27 March 2019.
^ "Commercial and Corporate Law in Japan", by Harald Baum and Eiji Takahashi, in History of Law in Japan Since 1868 (Brill, 2005) p. 355
^ Irie, Yoshiro (2009). "Saiko no Nihon eiga ni tsuite" (PDF). Tōkyō Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan Kenkyū Kiyō (in Japanese) (13). National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo: 67. ISSN 0914-7489. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 January 2013. Retrieved 9 December 2014.