Eli5: Why did Japan side with Germany in WW2?
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It mostly boiled down to the results of being a very aspiration nation but being stuck on a relatively small, mountainous, and resource poor island. The home islands of Japan lack a lot of essential resources for a major superpower – very specifically oil and and grazing lands for Western-type farm animals. Around the 1930s Japan really started desiring to match it’s internal image (a global powerhouse destined by fate to me a leader among nations) with its external image (a relatively small, isolationist, and let’s be honest, non-globally relevant nation).
You have to be fair and factor in a specific set of grievances – the US was manhandling Japan in terms of it’s getting fossil fuel resources, and both China and Russia had repeated beaten back Japan for hundreds of years. Japan had some major bitterness against the powers that be.
So when the opportunity came in the 1940s for Japan to rise up and take it’s rightful place on the global stage as THE LEADER of Asian and Pacific power, it was only right. Of course the Time was RIPE for Japan to seize it’s rightful place and role *and especially* to make the US, China, and Russia very specifically pay dearly for their insults and injustices, well, all the better.
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