The rise of Japanese militarism has been blamed on hardships caused a worldwide depression, reaction to anti-Japanese sentiments in China, numerous scandals, flaws on the Meiji constitution that paved the way for the military's rise to power and other factors. read more
While the United States was still struggling to emerge from the Great Depression at the end of the 1930s, and would do so partly because of the war, Japan had emerged from its own period of depression, which had begun in 1926, by the mid-1930s. read more