plantagenet,

Them they're tough words mister!

Do!

I think you mean "Doh!"

Someone said Japan wanted to make an exclusive zone in East Asia and that the 1930's Japan was a totalitarian fascist country. So I wanted to say Japan wished to avoid war with the United States and that it was not a fascist country.
Readers here are concerned with China, quite naturally. So I will give up now and leave it for another time but except a few things. The truth told will shed some important light on China.

Edwin O. Reischauer, born in Tokyo, was fluent in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and some other languages. Fluency in the first three will be essential for study of East Asia.
He wrote an article in the magazine, Foreign Affairs, and said Japan was the pivotal country for American foreign policy in East Asia. The president-elect Kennedy read it and appointed him ambassador to Tokyo in 1961.
The US-Japanese relations were strengthened and Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea rapidly.
His specialty was in ancient China and ancient Japan. Perhaps good knowledge of ancient China will illuminate most of today's China, not vice versa.

Nixon and Kissinger thought China was pivotal. They went to Beijing in 1972. So, we stand where we are now in the wei qi game.

I will take up only the Washington Conference, 1921-22, and the second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-45, which led to the Pacific War.

The US had isolationist policy concerning European affairs. It had a monopolistic policy, monopolizing imperialism exclusive of other countries, in Latin America, where dictatorship or democracy did not count but pro-American capitalism mattered.

1889, the year of the enunciation of the the Open Door Doctrine, introduced another dimension to American foreign policy. "The United States blundered into the the Spanish-American War and emerged not only dominant in the Caribbean but, unexpectedly, in the Pacific...Captain Mahan ransacked history to justify naval supremacy...and President Theodore Roosevelt brandished a big stick. The piercing protests of the anti-imperialist were drowned out by the thunder of the manifest destiny (Henry S. Commager, The American Mind, Yale University Press, 1978, p. 47.)"
To be continued.

Michi,

It is obvious that you are not a scholar because your comment that fluency in Japanese, Chinese and Korean is essential for study of East Asia is absolute nonsense.

If one does not have a knowledge of a language than one is limited to using secondary sources and translations in his research in the areas of history, sociology, anthropology, etc. One does not need to know everything before one can start producing a history or a sociology or an anthropology on a topic in East Asian studies.

It is only a lack of an appropriate education and training in these areas that will stop people from conducting research in East Asian studies. Something which you seem to definitely have.

"Had the War with Spain gone no further than the crusade to liberate Cuba the change would not have been so momentous. But it did go further. It was carried beyond those continental boundaries envisioned in Washington's Farewell Address, beyond the popular conception of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny; beyond, even, the seemingly inevitable assertion of American supremacy in the Caribbean, and in the long-pending annexation of Hawaii. Amid the clashes of arms the Philippine Archipelago became an American colony...A step so unprecedented could not have failed to influence the character of American diplomacy in every quarter of the globe, and nowhere more profoundly than in that which included the Philippines (A. Whitney Griswold, The Far Eastern Policy of the United States, Yale University Press, 1962. pp. 3-4.)"
The followings are some excerpts from the book; "Like most popular oracles, Mahan merely rationalized what he already saw in progress around him." "A few Americans - and these in high American high places - were ready to play for larger stakes than Cuba Libre or supremacy in the Caribbean when the war with Spain broke out in 1898."
Of course desire for more money played a role, but also "The church was likewise inspired. Dewey's triumph created the inviting prospect of new mission fields in the islands of south-western Pacific. American missionaries had long been active in China and Japan. In China especially their political significance was great. For nearly half a century they had been virtually the sole sole interpreters of the Far East to their own countrymen."
Don't jump to the conclusion that Japan felt challenged by all these movement. On the contrary, "For nearly half a century Japanese-American relations had been cordial, So, although Japan favored sharing in a protectorate over the Philippines in the event that the United States should give them up, she approved American annexation once it was announced. In fact, Japanese diplomats had freely urged the decision on the United State, preferring that country to any other as a neighbor in the south Pacific"

To be continued.