The 14th Division was initially established in Kokura (present-day Kitakyushu, Fukuoka) under the command of Lieutenant General Tsuchiya Mitsuharu, with men recruited from Osaka, Zentsūji, Kagawa, Hiroshima and Kumamoto.

It was the only one of the four emergency divisions raised that was considered combat-ready (albeit still severely understrength) prior to the end of the war.

However, it arrived too late to see any combat, and was assigned policing duties in the Japanese-occupied Liaodong Peninsula and along the South Manchurian Railway in August 1905.

In March–May 1920, the 3rd Battalion of the IJA 2nd Infantry Regiment stationed at Nikolayevsk-on-Amur was massacred by Bolshevik irregulars in what came to be known as the Nikolaevsk Incident (尼港事件, Niko Jiken).

The outbreak of general hostilities in the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 put the 14th Division under the command of Lieutenant General Kenji Doihara was reassigned to the Northern China Area Army theater of operations and as part of the IJA 1st Army participated in the Beiping–Hankou Railway Operation, proceeding by Baoding - Shanxi - Xuzhou route.

[3] In September 1941, the division was ordered back to line at the Mongolian border at Handagai (south-east of Nomonhan).

Before departure, the infantry regiments were reorganized, absorbing divisional engineers, artillery, transport and reconnaissance units.

The loss of machine cannon company during transportation also has resulted in abandonment of the plans to deploy a newly created 22nd independent mixed engineer regiment to the western New Guinea.