The nation that hoped to gain power, prestige, wealth, and security by becoming an imperial power in the late 1800s was Japan.
Japanese imperialism was a process that began in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration and ended in 1945 with the end of the Second World War.
Meiji Japan experienced rapid economic growth and applied measures to modernize its administration and army following the Western model. This policy was accompanied by a marked expansionist and aggressive desire, which had as a strategic objective to take control of Korea and China.
The reasons that explain Japanese imperialism were population pressure, the need to provide raw materials that it lacked (iron, coal, oil, copper, tin) to consolidate its industrialization and the search for foreign markets for its products.
Once the nearby archipelagos (Kuril and Ryukyu Islands) were conquered, Japan forced Korea, the tributary kingdom of China, to open three ports and allow the settlement of Japanese emigrants. The war with China was inevitable. Between 1894 and 1895, Japanese troops occupied all of Korea, entered Manchuria and, after an easy naval victory, landed at Port Arthur and other strategic points in the Bohai Sea. China recognized Korea's independence and yielded Formosa (Taiwan), the Fisher Islands and the Liaodong peninsula with the strategic enclave of Port Arthur. However, Japan collided with Russian interests in the area and had to give them Port Arthur and share their protectorate over Korea until 1905.
The Japanese presence in southern Manchuria was considered intolerable by Russia. But Japan attacked Russia in 1904, without a previous declaration of war and annihilated the Russian fleet anchored in Port Arthur. Japan obtained the south of the island of Sakhalin and the protectorate over Korea, which was annexed in 1910, and consolidated its hold on Manchuria.
This is how Japan consolidated its position as an Empire, being the dominant force of the Asian continent until its fall in 1945.
