Meiji Japan
Discover Meiji Japan — how a feudal society transformed itself into a modern industrial and military power in just four decades after 1868.
The Meiji era (1868–1912) was the most dramatic national transformation in modern history. In fewer than 50 years, Japan went from a feudal, isolated society ruled by samurai to a modern industrial and military power that defeated China (1895) and Russia (1905) — the first Asian nation to defeat a European great power in modern warfare.
The transformation began with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when a group of reformers overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate and restored the emperor to nominal power. The new government's motto, 'rich country, strong army,' captured its dual priorities. Japan adopted Western technology, military organization, legal codes, education systems, and industrial methods with extraordinary speed and selectivity — borrowing what worked while maintaining Japanese cultural identity.
The Meiji government abolished feudalism, created a national conscript army, built railways and telegraph networks, established universal education, and promulgated a constitution (1889). State-directed industrialization, modeled partly on Prussian and British examples, created zaibatsu (industrial conglomerates) that powered economic growth. By 1914, Japan was an industrial power and a colonial empire with possessions in Korea and Taiwan — a remarkable achievement that proved modernization was not exclusively Western.