The enormity of WWII

[Anomalocaris]

The Japanese fighting soldier and sailor was as fierce as they come. There is no nobility in war.

The fun thing about the 20th C. "samurai" was that they never defeated China, even when it was fighting them AND a civil war. Definitely not bushido material.

Yamamoto Isoruku was adopted into a samurai family to give the line some much needed new blood.

Japan was well positioned to defeat China if she had not grossly overestimated her own powers and overreached.    The reason why late imperial and early Republican China had never been able to successfully oppose western imperialism is western imperialists take relatively small bites, and China was too riven by internal conflicts to ever rally the whole country to try to reverse these relatively modest if humiliating concessions.   Japan being right on china’s door steps was better placed than any western colonial powers to sustain such an approach.   But japan grossly overestimated her own powers and grossly overreached in china,  so she accomplished what western colonial powers had hitherto avoided doing, which was to launch such broad and brutal aggression across so much of China that they manage to rally most of the fraction in china’s civil war to at least call a truce and oppose the common external foe with successful defense in depth.