I agree 100% with your post, until you mention Japan lol. No, that didn't happen outside Hollywood sterotypes, the dramatic systemic changes were eight decades before WW2: the Meji "Restoration".

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Emperor took guns, money and advisers from the West to turn his medieval, feudal country into a centralised bureaucratic dictatorship and then speedrun an Industrial Revolution. File that under "stuff that definitely shouldn't have worked but somehow did..."