The Way of the Warrior in Interwar Japan

Abstract

In the 1860s, Japan was pulled out of its centuries-long isolation and forced to rapidly adapt to the industrialized world. The state quickly made friends with the more established Western powers and was able to impress them with its surprising miliary victories over China in 1895, Russia in 1905, and Germany in 1919. However, the goodwill that Japan had garnered with the West evaporated after the First World War. How could a nation so adept at modern militarism and economics alienate every friend it had in the span of 25 years? The answer stems from Japan's long feudal age; in the twentieth century, Japan was unable to reconcile feudal concepts of Bushidō and Shinto with emerging Wilsonian idealism, leading to a fundamental disconnect that drove the Japanese down the path to confrontation with the nations that had ushered it into the modern era.