>>13146018History, not science, but it’s a confluence of a bunch of things. The US forced them to acknowledge their position globally in the late 1800’s by showing up with vastly superior military technology. After that they decided that if they didn’t want to become a colony, they had to get on the west’s level ASAP. They were a small enough and resource-poor enough nation that none of the western nations took too much interest in them, compared to China, for example, which got absolutely reamed by the west and were at a very weak point in their history at that time. This meant that Japan could move out into the other weaker asian nations for resources and reach out to the west for knowledge. This confluence of factors put Japan in a very good position to advance very quickly. Meanwhile, the west was going through ww1, and so were too busy to pay much attention to the rapidly developing power in the east, and by the time they noticed and cared, Japan was already able to beat out the Russian military, so it was basically too late. Was the western system superior to what they were doing before? Sure, obviously. But that was only one of many highly coincidental reasons that they succeeded so much where other asian nations did not. Japan became the most dominant power in the east early in the 1900’s, which means they subjugated the rest of asia, obviously impeding their ability to grow and succeed nationally. Basically every major political power right now was already a political power in 1940, the only exception I’m aware of being China. There’s a huge amount of inertia in improving a nation, and unlike Japan in 1900, the other asian nations don’t have impending western colonization as a strong motivator to improve, nor do they have to relative weakness of nations around them to make expansion relatively easy.
