Tokugawa Shogunate vs the Empire of Japan

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

The roots in Japan going astray were not in the Meiji restoration but rather in the Russo-Japanese War and its increasingly terrible way of proceeding post-1905 (Case in point: Korea). Meiji Era Japan itself was quite good for the most part, as unequal treaties and other legacies of the 1850s and 1860s continued to undermine the country's independence and the country enjoyed the ability to get these off its back. But Japan took all the worst lessons from the Russo-Japanese War and then got progressively more drunk on victory disease, expanding and growing more and more, till they bit off more than they could chew, all while trampling on other Asians to get there. They learned colonialism from Europe and the assorted tricks and ways of doing this that came along with it and got more and more morally reprehensible in how they did it, until they made the Europeans look downright morally good by comparison. While this does not mean the Imperial project was necessarily bad in the beginning, eventually it was very clear that even by the standards of the time Imperial Japan was THE big bad of Asia despite their failure to see themselves as such. It was definitely cool that an Asian power defeated a European one in 1905 but Japan in retrospect was very likely better off losing that one in the long run both from a power perspective and from a moral one.