The marxist college professor clowns up his thesis by putting it into post-historical anti-”white” racist terms, but there is an interesting question as to Japan’s motives in starting their war. Namely, did Japan feel justified that since European countries had colonies in Japan’s Asian back yard, why couldn’t Japan? It’s a question worth pondering, but what is not worth pondering are the neurotic mind spasms of a degenerate academic.
“...did Japan feel justified that since European countries had colonies in Japan’s Asian back yard, why couldn’t Japan?”
This is correct. Japan wanted to be a colonial “great power” just like the Europeans, for what at the time seemed rational purposes, namely to acquire protected markets and secure sources of food and industrial materials. It deliberately set about creating an overseas empire in the 1890s. By 1937, besides bits and pieces of coastal China, it had Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan (Formosa) and a great number of Pacific islands. If it had limited itself to that, which was quite a lot, all would have been well (maybe, for a couple of decades anyway). But they went absolutely nuts in 1937.