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Positive Effects Of The Sino Rapanese War

Decent Essays

The Sino-Japanese War was an event that shook the structure of East Asia’s traditional world order, one that for more than 2000 years had centered around China and its civilization. The war didn’t just take away China’s centrality, it was also the catalyst for Japan’s transformation into an imperialist power.
The conflict transformed the nature of Japanese society, giving birth to a sense of national identity and planting the roots for nationalism in the minds of Japanese people. Coming into contact with real China for the first time, many soldiers and war correspondents were appalled by the situation the country was in. China acquired a new image in Japanese minds, it strengthened the belief that Japan had chosen the right path by embracing Western ideas and techniques. China started to be used as the negative for Japan’s positive: a backward, uncultured, aging giant against a progressive, rational, enlightened modern state [Saya Makito - The Sino-Japanese War and the Birth of Japanese Nationalism]. Japan now saw itself as the only advanced nation in Asia, the one burdened with the …show more content…

Much like the Sino-Japanese War, it had great impact both on internal and external developments. In Japan it inflated self-confidence and strengthened the belief in military solutions (trends that would later take the country into a second war with China). It showed Japan that they were now able to defeat a strong adversary, even a Western one. On the international level it had great repercussion on East Asia. It stopped Russian expansion in the region and ensured Japan rise to the rank of Great Power even in the eyes of Western ones. Their victory in the Russo-Japanese war only served to verify the ideas that had already been born from the Sino-Japanese War: Japan was the only Asian nation capable of providing much needed leadership in the

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