Who is the imperialist?

This weekend we saw “Emperor”, a great movie about Japan surrender and about an American general who was a bit to biased toward Japan as he investigated Hirohito's role into Pearl Harbor's attack.

At one point, as he is attacked about Japan imperialist policies, one of the high-ranking Japanese retorts that England, Spain, France or the United States set the example as far as colonialism was concerned and Japan was merely following them.

A great point that shows one more time that it's a lot easy to be holier than thou...