d to settle in the Martial Law. With this done, the people of Japan who were supporting the duty of Japan to become a dominant force in Asia knew they had to move fast. Earlier that century, Japan and China had many wars between each other and China was just beginning to recover from the damages. They were still weak and Japan knew that they could carry out their plan without any resistance from the Chinese government.
             By the 1930s, the Japanese had launched an undeclared war with China. It was on September 18, 1931, the Japanese army blew up the tracks of a Japanese owned railway in southern Manchuria, hoping to incite an incident. Many Chinese rebelled against the Japanese for this but Japan was not going to allow the rest of the world to know about the incidents that were occurring so they took the necessary tasks to be sure of the secrecy. Japan isolated themselves from the international community and withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933.
             It wasn't now that the Japanese had to prepare their country for war, for they had done it for decades before. Toyshops became virtual shrines to war, selling arsenals of toy soldiers, tanks, helmets, uniforms, rifles, antiaircraft guns, bugles, and howitzers. Schools taught their male students to hate the Chinese, how to use guns, and their textbooks became vehicles for military propaganda; one geography book even used the shape of Japan as justification for expansion: "We appear to be standing in the vanguard of Asia, advancing bravely into the Pacific. At the same time we appear ready to defend the Asian continent from outside attack."
             It wasn't until the summer of 1937 that Japan finally succeeded in provoking a full-scale war with China. But conquering China seemed to me much more of a task than Japan expected. Their first setback occurred when they were bringing 35,000 troops into China as reinforcements. Hidden was Chinese artillery, which opened fire kil...