One also could interpret WW2 in the Pacific to have been caused by the US forcing Japan to open up to foreign trade by sending Commodore Perry and his fleet. This ultimately resulted in the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate and lest to the nationalistic Meiji restoration.
After that some elements in Japanese politics tried to get respect from Western powers by making nice nice and imitating Western culture. That didn't bring the hoped respect and better trade deals though. Japan ended up learning from Western empirialism and got it's respect by showing some military might on its own.
You could only interpret it that way if you believed that every step in the process was a necessary progression from the previous one. That is a very big stretch over the time scale of the 1850s to the 1940s. At every stage there were possible alternative choices that would have resulted in different outcomes. Don't make the mistake of believing that what actually happened was set in stone at the beginning like a row of falling dominoes.
This is a difficult criticism since it applies to nearly every human interpretation of history. Cause and effect are so wired into our perception of the world. It's like saying, don't be fooled by your eyes, you're not seeing the truth, just a reflection of photons on your retina. Technically true, but totally useless.
No, it's not like that at all. The outcome was not determined in advance because there were multiple possible outcomes. People could have chosen to take different actions than they actually did. The events of the 1940s were not set in stone in the 1850s.
I don't disagree with that. I'm saying that no events are ever set in stone, so you can't talk about history without tying together events that are only partly related.
The same is true for the US response to Japan's invasion of Mongolia and Japan's response to the US response. If any step along the way had been different the outcome would have likely been as well.
An important point here is that it's much harder to find a clear starting point of WWII from a Japanese perspective. The whole thing pretty much was a mess starting with Commodore Perry's arrival.
