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Comment by disneygibson | Hacker News Reader

The Japanese emperor concept precedes Western “invade everyone” imperialism by about a thousand years and has historically almost nothing to do with other countries. It really took Western ideas of imperialism to get Japan to be interested in the outside world.

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The Romans were into the "invade everything" business, 2,500 years ago. They ruled over kingdoms all around the Mediterranean.

The Greeks (well, Macedonians, if you prefer) built an empire that lasted 1,000 years, and stretched from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan. All during the lifetime of a warrior who died aged 32 (?). That was around 320BC.

So you have to go quite early in history, to find a culture that precedes "invade everything" imperialism (I doubt that there is any "beginning" to invade-everyone imperialism).

Which of course is also the go-to "excuse" of the modern Japanese right-wingers to deflect any blame from the "pure" Japanese for what they did.

Not sure how that has anything to do with my comment.

I’ll repeat it: the primary reasons which caused Japan to become “imperialist” are directly tied to Western imperialism. The Japanese emperor was mostly a political symbolic figurehead that united the Japanese islands, not a Roman emperor or British monarch intent on conquering the world.

This is all basic Japanese history.

Are you forgetting the 1592 Japanese invasions of Korea which had the intent of conquering the Korean Peninsula and then the whole of China?

I don’t think he is. Not even Korean right wings blame emperors for that invasion. By all intents and purposes it is Hideyoshi’s invasion.

My comment was in response to his assertion that "the primary reasons which caused Japan to become imperialist are directly tied to Western imperialism".

These are indeed matters of basic Japanese history as GP claims, although I’m not too sure whether “basic Japanese history” is actually common knowledges except for Japanese history majors or someone who has gone through Japanese compulsory education.

Wikipedia article on Shogun[1] has a nice quick summary on pre-modern Shogunate system. It’s similar to British constitutional monarchy in a sense: the emperor was to delegate all power to the government and was to remain within instructions and supervisions of the government.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogun

Oh, it has everything to do with it. I don't understand how you couldn't see that, immediately, so I don't think further explanation would help you.

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