Declaring a Republic of Hawaii, the rebels then requested annexation by the United States, which took place in 1898. An independent kingdom with a long and proud history of its own, then “discovered” by the West and dubbed the Sandwich Islands, Hawaii had only become a US possession in the 1890s, when a rebellion by the Anglo population of the islands rose up in revolt against the rule of Queen Liliuokalani. Sitting in the Japanese crosshairs that fateful Sunday morning was not only the US Pacific Fleet, but the Hawaiian Islands. That was the “long fuse” of the Great Pacific War (1941-45), the long-term background to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. The very success Japan enjoyed, however, placed the island empire squarely in the sights of the other Great Powers, and generated an increasingly tense strategic rivalry with the United States for domination of the Pacific. Again and again, Japan struck quickly to win wars over larger and theoretically more powerful opponents. Japan’s rise to Great Power status was rapid, with victorious wars over China (1894-95) and Russia (1904-5), as well as successful, if subsidiary role on the side of the Allies in World War I (1914-1918). Japan’s sudden exposure to the outside world, after centuries of isolation, generated a helt-er-skelter period of transformation, a revolutionary era in which Japan threw overboard many of its oldest traditions and built itself into a technologically advanced industrial state, with modern systems of administration and government-and a powerful military. The tangled relationship between the United States and Japan began with the forced opening of Japan in the nineteenth century, courtesy of Commodore Matthew Perry and this “black ships” of his squadron. Japan, the United States, and the Hawaiian Islands
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