Why did Japan begin World War II by invading China in 1937 and then widen it by attacking the British and Americans in 1941? Were these attacks the outgrowth of a Japanese state with a uniquely intense nationalism, or of a particularly coercive social order, or of economic and social inequalities, or had Japan by the late 1930s entered a stage of late capitalist development that naturally segued into fascism? Was there a direct causal connection between the West's forced intrusion into Japan in the 1850s and subsequent Western pressure on Japan and its neighbors and the launching of Japan's World War II in Asia in 1937? Various wartime and postwar Western and Japanese writers have advanced all of these views in discussing Japan's involvement in World War II.