Many of the cold war era wars were proxy wars with Russia to stop the spread of communism. A natural place for that to occur was where Russia was attempting to move neighboring governments to communism, which was Asia.
Also we were at war with Japan, they attacked the US after all, so I would hardly call them allies at that point in history.
The first Opium War had already happened, and the second was about to begin. If the Japanese were to maintain their autonomy and avoid the disastrous fate China suffered as a result of Anglo-Chinese trade, colonial expansion was their only realistic option.
When they attacked Pearl Harbor it was mostly out of desperation, because the oil embargo ordered by Roosevelt placed Japanese imperial operations in imminent jeopardy.
For a less US-centric perspective on the US/Japan war, Noam Chomsky's 1967 essay [0] is worth a read. He doesn't excuse their violence, but he does point out that it was more justifiable than other US violence in South East Asia.
Whether some Japanese derived some benefit from the ultimatum doesn't change that it was a coercive relationship, enforced by a nation with a history of destructive exploitation of other nations and races, justifying its exploitation in terms of cultural and racial superiority over its subject people. Your argument is straight out of "White Man's Burden."
That era was a shitshow ruled over by oppressive sociopathic samurai where life was short, domineering, and often brutal. They kept their country isolated from technology for the only reason of disempowering potential reformers. It is only looked back with fondness by those whose naïveté keeps them from knowing better, or who have nationalistic political agendas.
The gunboat diplomacy was frankly a move of liberation that benefited the people of Japan. And it was not an occupation either -- fair trading terms were what was offered, by the standards of the day, a far better deal than China had for example. Japan was enabled by the deal, turned into a prosperous trading partner and world superpower a mere 40 years later.
I don't know what lense you are looking at his through, but it is not refracting history correctly.
Mostly from reading Buruma's Inventing Japan, and Dower's War Without Mercy and Embracing Defeat.
The fact that the pre-Perry regime was nasty has no bearing on the causal factors of Japan's later imperialism
I don't buy the line that coercive actions are necessarily wrong. Using force to remove a dictator that is oppressing its people (or an entire caste of brutal autocrats) is morally justifiable IMHO. And if you compare the American involvement in Japan with the other sorts of things that were going on at the time in East Asia, it was pretty tame.
Historians must restrict themselves to evaluating choices by the standards of the time under consideration. And by the standards of day, the Japanese got a pretty good deal, especially when compared with their neighbors.