In the course of the half-century before the Second World War, two major powers emerged in the Western Pacific. They were Japan and Australia. The former, after over two centuries as a "hermit" empire, undertook forced Westernization on its own terms, defeated Russia, one of the traditional Western Great Powers, in 1905, and was acknowledged by the Washington Naval Conference in the 1920s as the third-ranked naval power in the world, after only Britain and the United States. The latter, founded as a penal colony in 1792, only achieved political unity as late as 1901, and was technically a British dominion, although its de facto independence was acknowledged by the Balfour Declaration in 1926 (Fisher, 1968, p. 225). A decade earlier, however, during the First World War, Australia had participated as Britain's partner rather than its colony, and had its own seat and its own demands at the Versailles peace conference.
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth, then, both nations were faced, though in very different ways stemming from their very different circumstances, with the task of creating themselves as modern nation-states. Perhaps the most fundamental of all the challenges they faced was that of creating political systems that accorded with their heritages while meeting the requirements of a modern major power. Until the 1930s, both were evolving in roughly comparable directions, as constitutional monarchies with two-party parliamentary political systems. (As a member of the Commonwealth, Australia acknowledged, and continues to acknowledge, the British monarch as nominal head of state.)
In Australia, the parliamentary system and two-party democracy were successful, and the political system that took form in the first decades of the century led directly to that of modern Australia. In Japan, the parliamentary experiment failed. As militarism become domina...