One man's 'elevating Asia to the standards of the West' is another man's "30 million Chinese killed, enslaved, and raped" I suppose.
You are right that Japanese imperialism was in many ways a *copy* of Western imperialism, although in many respects (like the bonkers Emperor cult) it was its own crazeball totalitarian weirdness. Almost all forms of imperialism inevitably characterized themselves as helping the poor peoples of the world advance and achieve civilization against The Evil Darkness. Those supposed aims are, in sordid reality, hopelessly compromised by material and political interests.
"Elevating Asia" rapidly proved to involve elevating *Japan* by raping the shit out of Asia. Partly this is because the Japanese were unable to generate profits by capitalist imperialism and investment, and thus turned to increasingly desperate and militaristic plundering in order to try to keep the whole wretched imperial project afloat. It is remarkably interesting to read analysis of Japan's imperial misadventures back in the days before WWII. Fantastic article about Manchukuo from the 1937 Foreign Affairs.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/japan/1937-10-01/price-japanese-imperialism
"And there is no way out. The new cabinet that took office at the end of June has appointed a national planning board to coordinate economic activities on the basis of a three-point policy: expansion of productive power, balancing of international accounts, adjustment of demand and supply of commodities. This is baying at the moon. Productive power of a sort can be expanded and is being expanded, dangerously so. For much of the expansion is for the production of armament. A good deal of Japan's recent appearance of prosperity is unhealthy precisely because it is based on the production of arms and munitions. Once that lets up, there will be a dangerous deflation; and sooner or later it must let up, because it cannot be paid for. The balancing of international accounts is a physical impossibility so long as the country runs deeper into debt and must strip herself in order to pay for imported raw materials needed for munitions and for manufactures to be exported to pay for raw materials. For the same reason the demand and supply of commodities cannot be adjusted, because there is an uneconomic factor in the equation. No programs or policies, no techniques or devices of organization, are of avail so long as Japan is defying a simple law of mathematics. Whatever permutations of the figures there may be, the resultant will always come nearer the minus sign.
If Japan possessed the assets and resources of Great Britain and the United States, she might have made a success of Manchukuo. She did not, so she has not. A hundred years ago, when conquest was technically simpler, she might have been successful. Had she waited until a hundred years from now, when her resources were more intensively developed, she might have been successful. Now she has not been successful and she cannot be successful. All the conditions of her physical and social being were against success. She has overreached herself. She will fail."
It is tragic that Japan's failure would take almost a decade more of inconceivably hideous warfare, in which so many millions of its neighbors and own people were thrown into the maw of the insane machine, trying to keep it alive.
