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This was especially true in the case of the invasion of China-Japan's leaders in the summer of 1937 were so sure of the overwhelming superiority of Imperial Army soldiers over Chinese ones that they thought the war would be ended by the following year. Fifth and most tragically for Japan, there was an alternative before 1936 that was not considered again until after Japan's defeat in 1945: because Britain and America were more advanced economically and industrially than Japan, it benefited more from cooperation than confrontation with the two English-speaking powers. In fact, as one Japanese critic of militarism pointed out shortly before his assassination by young right wing officers in 1936, Japan's army and navy themselves depended on American raw materials and technology-by going to war with the United States, the Japanese military not only took on a stronger country, but also cut itself off from the benefits of cooperation with that country.
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Japan entered the modern world when the Americans, and the then much more powerful British, forced open its gates in the 1850s. When the Western countries revisited China and Japan in the mid-19th century, they came out not asking for trade, but demanding it. In the 100 years before Matthew Perry's incursion in 1853, and earthshaking revolution had occurred in Britain, and then in continental Europe and America: the industrial revolution. The West returned to Asia with new steamships, improved weapons, and a new attitude, an attitude that demanded China and Japan open themselves to trade. It also imposed the infamous "unequal treaties" on the two countries: treaty ports, extraterritoriality, tariff restrictions and the most-favored nation clause.
Japan's response presaged the cooperation-autarky dichotomy in later foreign policy debates. One group of samurai advocated cooperation with the West-open the country to learn how to make Western weapons in order to defend Japan from the West. The other group advocated resisting the West no matter what the costs-forerunners of General Araki's "bamboo spear" theory. In 1868, the former group came to power and Japan began to remake itself on the Western model. But you should keep in mind, of course, that the reform group's goal in remaking Japan using Western models was to defend Japan from the West. Members of both groups were nationalists reacting to what they saw as excessive and unwanted Western interference in their country's affairs.
The primary goal of Japan's leadership in the 1870-1890 period was to rid Japan of the unequal treaties; both the government and public opinion objected to the treaties' limitations on import duties and to the despised extraterritoriality, the right of foreigners to live in treaty ports like Yokohama and Kobe under the laws of their home countries. Thus, the newly nationalistic Meiji leadership undertook a host of reforms aimed at creating a Japanese state. To them Japan needed to be unified in the face of the outside threat. The government promulgated a new taxation system, a modern, Western style army and conscription, a centralized local government structure, universal education, a legal system, and a Prussian-style constitution. The government built model factories to import up-to-date Western industrial technology, and encouraged entrepreneurship among rural landlords and the urban merchant class. Two reforms in this process of state-building stand out: the creation of an orthodox nationalist ideology centered on the emperor, and the creation of a unified and standard Japanese language.
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