If there’s one thing we’ve learned from spamming the tech tree in a game of Civilization, it’s the simple joy of rolling up to a medieval city in an M-1 Abrams tank. Normally, this is one of the less historically accurate parts of the game, but the big exception comes in periods of mass-Industrialization. Within a single lifetime, a society can start from horse-drawn carriages hauling hand-sewn shirts to the local market and end up with an arsenal of steam trains ferrying machine-made clothes halfway across a country. But once people graduate from ooh-ing and aah-ing at a sewing machine, they start getting creative with how to use all this newfound tech to wreak havoc, and this is where militaries can develop truly frightening power disparities. In Europe’s case, this made mass-colonization an absolute breeze, but today we’ll see the extreme counter-example of Japan, who covered centuries of lost-ground in the space of mere decades. So, to see how Japan pulled off the world’s greatest industrial-reverso, Let’s do some History. The first thing we have to understand is Japan’s political structure at the time this was all going down. The Japanese archipelago has been ruled by an emperor for thousands of years, but since roughly the first millennium, real power belonged to a military leader known as the Shogun. The Emperor remained the figurehead and the symbolic ruler of Japan, but the Shogun had all the Samurai, so he was really the one in charge. That said, medieval Japan wasn’t centralized in the slightest, and most governing was in the hands of local Daimyo, who were basically Mob Bosses for Samurai. But the problem with Big Sword Politics is that it’s vulnerable to other people with large stabby-sticks, so several Daimyo took swipes at the Shogun, and in 1467, Japan broke into a century and a half of all-out war. On paper, few things on earth are cooler than Samurai War, but few things are also more disruptive to well-being than 148 years of constant conflict. Things got even dicier with the arrival of European traders, whose show and tell exhibit included Christianity and Guns. While Jesus didn’t particularly affect the trajectory of the war, firearms made a much bigger and bloodier splash. This mercifully wrapped up at the start of the 1600s, when Tokugawa Ieyasu won the war and reasserted Shogun supremacy. For the next 250 years, the Tokugawa family ruled a finally-peaceful Japan from their new capital at Edo, and their government had one priority above literally everything else: keep the peace. The Shogunate confiscated swords from everyone except Samurai, they implemented a strict class hierarchy, and they closed Japan to any and all foreigners… except the Dutch, they’re cool, they can stay. Even into the start of the 1800s, Japanese society vaguely resembled medieval Europe, where the country was unified but not centralized. For one thing, taxes were chaos to manage, as the 300 Daimyo set their own tax-rates and only collected payment in goods. Meanwhile, the common people had to work hard and even endure famines while their taxes paid for Samurai to do kendo and write poetry in their abundant free time. This of course begs the question of why is there still a warrior-class if we’re not supposed to have wars anymore? While the Edo period saved Japan from civil war, two and a half centuries is a long time to just stay in place. People were hungry, Samurai were useless, Daimyo were antsy, & also there’s a gunship in the harbor. See, hot on the heels of Britain steamrolling China in the Opium Wars, European powers were systematically siphoning wealth out of Asia because what else is an empire supposed to do? At the same time, America was westward-expanding so fast they blew past the pacific coast and kept on going until West became East and they bumped right into Japan. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with a fleet of gunships and requested the opening of trade relations on the basis of “Do It Or Else”. With the intimidating might of a steam-powered gunship fleet and one model train, America forced Japan to accept wildly imbalanced trading terms: full access to merchant ports, no export taxes, and legal immunity to merchants and diplomats. Soon enough, half of Europe had similar treaties with Japan, and the Shogun was powerless to stop it. Japan recognized that America’s threats and China’s recent thrashing was a warning to shape up or get whacked, because there was no way they could resist an invasion, and so far they’d only been experiencing Colonization-Lite, with Zero Military Occupation, and Same Exploitation. Hurdle number one was technology, because steam-powered transportation and high-accuracy shooty-sticks made for a massive imbalance. But since they were trading, Daimyo and Samurai across Japan now had access to rifles and artillery, and some of them started pointing the barrels at the Shogun. In 1868 he tried to quash this insubordination, but an alliance of the Satsuma and Choshu domains not only beat the Shogun’s army, they routed him all the way up to the imperial capital of Kyoto, proclaimed a restoration of Imperial authority under the teenage emperor Meiji, and demanded the dissolution of the Shogunate. That is one heck of a reversal, but it didn’t stop there. The Shogun declared war to try and save his skin, but the pro-imperial forces were far better equipped, so they hammered all the way up Japan and out to the island of Hokkaido. So 7 centuries after the first Shogunate, the emperor was restored to power. Now, our boy-o Meiji was all set for life, but there was still the problem of all those predatory colonizers, so him and his advisors (but mostly advisors) wasted zero time in reforming Japan. The first order of business was reconfiguring the country from a fractured society of local lords into a centralized Nation State. That meant sending all the Daimyo into a cushy early-retirement, and converting their domains into Imperial Prefectures. And with land reform came standardized taxes, paid with a shiny new currency system which gave the government steady revenue for the first time in literally forever. This afforded Japan cash to pay for new infrastructure like railway networks and telecom lines. Although Japanese industry was starting from scratch, the Emperor was proactive in hiring consultants from all over Europe to advise their projects, so Japan looked like it was timeskipping full centuries ahead. Really shows how innovation can snowball fast. All this newfound unity also depended on people and a national Japanese identity. So Meiji’s second priority was disassembling Japan’s rigid social hierarchy of Samurai, Farmers, Artisans, and Merchants. Samurai, like the Daimyo, were given a pension and politely forced to retire, while the other 3-tiers were brought up to equal status. The caveat is that women were still held in lower regard than men, and expected to be good wives, wise mothers, and dutiful laborers in the new textile factories. However, there is a caveat to this caveat, as both boys and girls were given 4 years of education. It was clear that sending out scholars to copy Europe’s homework would only get Japan so far, so they made a point to give all kiddos the smarts to become Japan’s next innovators. And though this may have looked like another copy-paste of western schooling, it encouraged a distinct Japanese identity through the teaching of national culture and a standardized Japanese language. Additionally, schools coopted elements of the Bushido Code. Historically, it wasn’t much more than a loyalty oath between a Samurai and his Daimyo, but it was embellished with Honor and Virtue to echo European Chivalry, and fully mythologized into a pillar of Japanese identity. Meanwhile, in art, sculptors and painters alike were incorporating western techniques to create totally new works. Painting developed into two new styles: Yoga, which was naturalistic and very photo-real, and Nihonga, which was very traditional and stylized. In architecture, western building materials found use in Japanese designs. And in 1889, the emperor lifted a ban on Hanafuda playing cards, so a new little company called Nintendo began printing them. So when you fire up Breath of the Wild, say thanks to your old pal Meiji. Now, beyond a central government and a unified populace, Japan desperately needed some defenses against bigger and stockier European militaries. That meant echoing the big boys and creating a western-style conscript army, with 3 years of mandatory service, where everybody fought as Japanese Soldiers rather than bands of dubiously-loyal Samurai. And speaking of, this was their last slap in the face — they’d lost their social rank and their military honor, and their stipends were yanked too. Meiji saw them as a relic that was too dangerous to use and too expensive to not use. In 1877, the Samurai of Satsuma tried to rebel against this affront to their dignity, but the army stomped them and axed the samurai for good, which, hey, reforms worked. Now, all of these changes beg the question of whether Modern could exist outside of Western, and since Japan was the first outside-nation to the post-Industrial party, they had to figure out for themselves if they could meaningfully remain Japanese despite enjoying all of this progress. We definitely don’t have time to cover all the biases baked into the concept of “Development”, but for Japan’s purposes, the one key trait that kept them distinct from Europe was The Emperor. Sure, Europe had monarchs aplenty, but they weren’t as culturally and nationally vital as The Emperor, especially now that Meiji was head honcho again. So even when Japan adopted a constitution in 1889 with a prime minister, cabinet, bicameral and slightly elected legislature, that constitution was officially a gift from emperor Meiji, and he remained the focal point of Japanese pride and identity, even if Meiji maybe left all of the governing to his advisors. And this idea of Japan being unique from and even in competition with The West became a driving principle of their foreign policy, as they began freeing Asia from the grip of western imperialism with… Japanese imperialism. Alrighty let’s see how this all went wrong. SO, in 1879 they annexed the Ryukyu islands, and in 1894 they nabbed Korea on the logic that “hey, if not us, it would be some westerners. And besides, we can help you to modernize”. Koreans weren’t thrilled, and called in China for backup, but Japan absolutely thrashed China, and annexed Taiwan afterwards because heck, why not. If you’re seeing any parallels to the Fire Nation, that’s intentional. Japan also got more suspicious of the West, who ended the unequal treaties, but were also pushing to deny this new sphere of influence. This might have worked against the Shogunate in 1853, but we’re in the 1900s now, and Japan was 4 training-montages stronger, so they rolled up to nearby Russia and utterly flattened them. This surprised pretty much everybody, and Russia’s monumental embarrassment only fueled Japan’s newfound imperialistic pride. In 1912, Emperor Meiji died after 44 years on the throne, but the empire kept on growing. Though Japan got to sit at the treaty table after WWI, suspicion of the West only deepened, as Britain and France went on a massive post-war land-grab. Japan tried to include a racial equality clause in the preamble to the new League of Nations, but big shock, it got voted down. So now Japan felt like all this post-war high-fiving was just making an ever-smaller cool-kids-club of Who Gets To Do Empire, which… well? Inspired by this attitude as well as their unbroken string of victories, Japan’s military became more dominant in politics, and in 1932 they invaded Manchuria, with a push into China proper in 1937. By 1940 this expanded south into French Indochina, and America issued an oil embargo against Japan to try and keep them in check. The next year, Japan tried to go two-for-two on Western smackdowns and bombed America’s Pearl Harbor, and by 1942 the Japanese empire encompassed nearly all of East Asia, yoinking the American Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, and Thailand. Needless to say, this did not last, and Japan was forcibly dis-empired in 1945. So, what can we learn from this century of the Meiji Restoration and Japanese Imperialism? Well, it’s as much an instruction manual as it is a cautionary tale. First off, it’s an excellent role model for how any country, even one isolated in place for 250 years, can actually flourish into something greater. And it also shows that Modernity will look slightly different for everyone, that there isn’t some single formula for how Society should be. But of course, it’s impossible to detangle this modernizing renaissance from Japan’s runaway imperialism. There’s no simple culprit, so this period offers a chance to investigate just what can lead a state like Japan down the slope to imperial villainy: from self-defense, to growing national hubris, to carte-blanche conquest. As with Europe as with Asia, Imperialism is a hell of a drug. Thank you so much for watching! This kind of video is a treat for me because I really enjoy covering one specific topic from several different angles. It always feels right to round out a historical discussion with a look at art, language, and culture. And if you want to be a person of culture as well, consider adding your name to this list by joining our Patreon! See you all in the next video!