"Japan had much in common with Great Britain, besides high population density. An archipelago of islands located not far from a well-developed continent with a longer-established civilization, Japan had emerged from an era of civil war to embrace constitutional monarchy. Japan was Asia's first industrial nation, just as Britain was Europe's. Both rose to economic power by manufacturing cloth and selling it to foreigners. Victorian Britain was famous for its stuffy social hierarchy; so too was Meiji Japan. The English had their state religion, propounded by the Church of England; the Japanese had theirs, known as Shinto. Both cultures engaged in what looked to outside eyes like emperor- (or empress-) worship. Both cultures venerated and romanticized the chivalric codes of a partly imagined feudal past. The enduring power of Second World War propaganda still makes it hard for Western observers to acknowledge these similarities; we prefer to accentuate the 'otherness' of inter-war Japan. To ignore them, however, is to miss the essential legitimacy of the basic Japanese objective after 1905: to be treated as an equal by the Western powers. To the Japanese this meant more than the share of the Chinese market that was on offer under the system of unequal treaties. The British had acquired a large and lucrative empire, the core of which was their total control of the defunct Asian empire of the Mughals but which also afforded them vast tracts of living space in North America and Australasia. The Japanese saw no reason why they should not build an empire of their own, complete with living space, in the ruins of the no less defunct Qing empire. The biggest difference between Japan and Britain was one of timing. Economically, at least in terms of per capita gross domestic product, Japan was around a century and a half behind, if not more. Strategically, too, Japan was roughly where Britain had been in the first half of the eighteenth century. Her opponents, however, were more numerous and more formidable than Hanoverian Britain's had been."