Alright, this is the quick and dirty episode for July! Full of information on Japan, China, and the very first shots of the Second World War. From the mid-1800s to the 1930s, Japan was moving faster and faster towards superpower in the East status. By the early '30s, Japan had finally arrived on the big stage. China, on the other hand, was unraveling and had in the 20s only recently started to put itself back together. A series of sometimes bloody sometimes innocuous sometimes staged "Incidents" happened from 1931 straight through to 1937. Then the most incident like incident of them all happened near a beautiful old bridge. A missing private, a confusing firefight, and an insulting truce led to the fall of Northern China and the Second Sino Japanese War.