Studying the development, expansion, and eventual collapse of Japanese imperialism from the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895 through 1945, Beasley here discusses the dynamic relationship between a successful industrial economy and the building of an empire.

In this book a distinguished historian of Japan discusses Japan's "cultural borrowing" from America and Europe. W.G. Beasley focuses on the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan's rulers dispatched diplomatic missions to the West to discover what Japan needed to learn, sent students to learn it, and invited foreign experts to Japan to help put the knowledge to practical use.

This clear and authoritative book surveys the history of Japan from the mid 19th century up to the present day. It charts the spectacular rise of Japan, a society which leapt in little more than a generation from the feudal to early industrial forms of organisation - an exceptionally disturbing experience for the Japanese as they left behind the traditional and Asian and moved towards the modern and Western. It examines the turbulent 1930s and an empire won and lost between 1937 and 1945, and investigates the major changes after 1945 including the astonishing economic growth that has been...

First, there are questions concerning the role and relative importance of internal and external factors in the pattern of events. Did the activities of the Western powers prompt changes in Japan that would not otherwise have taken place? Or did they merely hasten a process that had already begun? Similarly, did Western civilization give a new direction to Japanese development, or do no more than provide the outward forms through which indigenous change could manifest itself? Was it a matrix, or only a shopping list? Second, how far was the evolution of modern Japan in some sense -inevitable-?...