On the decks of the giant U.S. battleship Missouri the brief, fevered course of Japan as a great power came to a quiet end.
After Perry's two steamships and two sloops of war opened Japan to the world, the feudal Japanese learned fast from the West. But their lesson was one-sided, their rise deceptively easy. First, they beat the Chinese, and then they drubbed the Russians. They got in on the right side in World War I. They grabbed Manchuria, and in 1937 they again attacked China, hoping to dominate all Asia. Just after Pearl...
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