Introduction

This introduction briefly presents the goals of the book – presenting an overall picture of interwar international politics and examination of foreign policies trends in the countries involved in those politics – and introduces the four “waves of international change” that the book uses as its framework. It summarizes the prior research and dominant theories on these topics and describes how this book’s arguments and approaches differ – primarily in arguing for continuity in Japanese foreign policy and undertaking a more expansive approach. It also discusses the explicit analytical framework the book uses for categorizing Japanese foreign policy positions towards China.