War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its size,

and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. James Early. Welcome back to Key Battles of the Pacific War.

This is James again, and again, I've got Scott with me.

Scott, how's it going?

You're all right.

All right, so let's recap a little of what we talked about in our last episode.

We talked about how Japan in the 1800s, 1868, to be specific, over through the rule of the

Shogun, and we had the Meiji Restoration, which restored the rule of the emperor.

And then Japan embarked upon a program of modernization and industrialization. They built a first class military, both army and

Navy. They won a war against China. They won another war against Russia.

Then they expanded and took over Manchuria and then took over a good chunk of China proper.

And that leads us now to the next thing.

We're going to talk about in our second episode here, Japan's Southern Strategy.

And then we'll talk about Japan's relationship with the U.S. and how that's going to deteriorate in the late 1930s and the very early 1940s. Before I do that, though, I would like to

discuss Japanese pre-war industrialization. I've already mentioned several times how Japan

rapidly industrialized, but I want to put some numbers on that.

So here are some fascinating statistics.

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