The 19th century saw to the rise of Japanese territorial expansion that would continue up to World War II. There are many different reasons that Japan would expand across the 1800s, and it would continue to their debacle at Midway. There are many parts to the Japanese territorial expansion, and they all play a fairly major role in why Japan became so aggressive, depending on who you ask.
Japan is known to be a fairly aggressive state, whether it was inner turmoil (time period before their expansionist government, in which the Japanese government fought with localized war lords in an effort to unite all the Japanese people and land together, which saw to large amounts of blood shed during the Sengoku Period and throughout the Age of Samurai. This led to the mostly isolated state of Japan up until 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry with a fleet of ships sailed into the Tokyo Harbor and demanded Japan to open up to foreign influence and established trade.
Japan then was most notable in expanding westward in the late 1800s with the first iteration of the Sino-Japanese War, which saw to Korea being alleviated from China's control and placed under Japan's sphere of influence. The following Sino-Japanese War would then take place in mainland China, and would see to Japan taking territories up to the Chahar, Shuyuan, Shanxi, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiang Xi, and Fujian province. From these territories, Japan extracted large amounts of raw material, as well as taxing the citizens living there, using them as workers, and terrorizing Chinese citizens with inhumane acts.
Towards the end of the 1800s, Formosa would exchange hands from China (ROC, or Republic of China), to Japan as a territory. Japan improved the islands much more comparatively to their other territories counterparts, modernizing infrastructure, expanding the economy, and industrializing the country.
Japanese territorial expansion in the late 1800s was essentially to obtain more raw materials, have more population to tax and use as workers, and to establish themselves as a regional, if not, global, power.
Learn more about Japan's empire & expansion, here:
https://brainly.com/question/23962277?referrer=searchResults - Reason for their expansion.
