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====Japan====

Like Italy, Japan had been a member of the victorious Allied Powers in the First World War. Unlike Italy, Japan faced relatively few casualties and seized a series of former German colonies  However, deepening economic crises caused by the Great Depression and increasing military control of the country left Japan increasingly militaristic and belligerent. Japan had been an aggressive imperial power well before World War I, winning victories against China and Russia in the 1890s and 1910s, respectively, as well as occupying Taiwan in 1895 Korea in 1910. This continued as Japan sought increasing influence in an increasingly fractious China. Japan established a puppet regime in resource-rich Manchuria in 1932 and fought a particularly bloody war with China starting in 1937. Japan also fought and lost a series of border skirmishes with the Soviet Union that ended in August 1939.

Japan had several key war aims once the Second World War began. Its troops were largely mired in various fronts in China as Europe descended into chaos. The fall of France and the Netherlands coupled with Britain's isolation offered Japan a new opportunity. Japan was able to align itself with independent Siam after a brief invasion while also coercing Vichy France into giving up its colony in Indochina. The Netherlands' colonies, the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia), were oil-rich, desperately needed for the war effort. Japan hoped to organize the nations of East Asia, including a potential ally in a liberated India, into the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere under Japanese domination. Japan's far reaching imperial plans put it in direct conflict with the other major Pacific powers, the United States and Britain, which Japan would attack in December 1941. While Japan was able to win a series of rapid victories across Asia in the early part of the war, the rapid mobilization of the United States and the country's massive resources proved to be far too much for Japan to handle. Japan faced a series of defeats across the Pacific before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. <ref>Mimura, Janis. ''[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/150171354X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=150171354X&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=d7532b9556554e5a99844be781d92caf Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State]''. Cornell: Cornell Press, 2011. Pages 195-111.</ref>