Editing The World Wars (section)

===The Empire of the Rising Sun===
Japan began emerging as something of the world power a few decades before the war. In 1854, the Japanese were peacefully telling foreigners to stay the fuck out of their country (a policy which hasn't really changed much to this day, only this time they are using things called "laws" instead of [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|katanas]]) when suddenly this funny guy named Matthew Perry shows up with some warships. His purpose was to open Japan for business with the West, particularly America. Now contrary to many countries of the period that were forced to open trade at gunpoint, Japan was smart enough to realize that if they did not modernize, they'd be made someone else's bitch. This fate was something that the Japanese have loathed and regularly tried to avoid for their entire history. So after a brief civil war that may or may not have involved Tom Cruise, the Meiji dynasty was established. This began a period of rapid military, economic, and cultural expansion in Japan. Baseball is a popular sport in Japan because Japan took great early influence from the United States. They modeled themselves on Britain, especially its notions of empire, conquest, and spheres of influence; for quite a while, all orders in the Imperial Japanese Navy were given in English, not Japanese. Eventually, this led the Japanese into disagreements with the Russians over Manchurian China and the Kuril Islands. This was the cause of the Russo-Japanese War. 

The Russo-Japanese war of 1905 shocked the dominant European powers because the Japanese had managed to defeat the supposedly superior Russians (though the fact of the matter was that both sides blundered hard and the weebs won because the other side was MUCH more incompetent and further from their supply lines - the Russian armada sent from the Baltic Sea to Japan suffered multiple breakdowns and almost started a war with Britain by firing on a British fishing fleet because they thought it was the Japanese). Japan was a member of the Triple Entente and as such seized some German islands in Asia, sent a small fleet into the Mediterranean to escort naval convoys and participated in an expedition alongside the US and European countries in Siberia after the revolution in Russia, but the main political activity was focused on exerting an ever increasing influence on China. After the war, Japan was awarded a permanent seat in the League of Nations, most of Germany's possessions in the Pacific, and recognition as a 'great power', but their proposal to be recognized as equals race-wise was rejected. This caused alienation from the Western powers, which in turn would partially contribute to [[RAGE|increased nationalism and militarism]] down the line.