Image credits- Reuters/Ali Song This year has seen a spate of retrospective analyses of the horrific war in Europe that began July 28 a century ago, so named the Great War for its unprecedented scale, death count, and destabilizing aftershocks reverberating as far as Asia. How this could have happened, should Britain have entered the war at all, and what was the ultimate meaning of the war are still the stuff of intense controversy and debate. The Britain-Japan-China part of the story, a sidelight to the war engulfing Europe, has gotten less attention. Yet it, too, begs for further explanation of policy choices and cascading consequences that led to a disastrous turn in East Asian politics in the decades to follow. Britain and Japan in 1914 were linked by treaty obligations under the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902-1923), the first-ever reciprocal agreement between a Western and an Asian power. The relationship was already showing signs of strain, chiefly over access to the vast