Dan Snow

It sort of ingests some of these ideas and ends up becoming a great power that can go toe-to-toe with these European and North American powers.

What happens then over the next 50 years?

If you're not being an absolute legend crushing barbarians.

So after 250 years of peace, we're back into that more ancient Japanese tradition, which is grab the emperor and then topple warlordism, get rid of that guy and run Japan in his place.

Absolutely, yeah.

Exactly.

Build up an economy.

And buy some technology.

OK.

But they swallow their pride in a way the Chinese don't.

That's interesting.

They're like, let's do this.

We've got to do a dirty deal, but let's make sure we get the technology.

So very like China or Shanghai.

So worrying echoes here for the Japanese.

This is imperial.

We're here serving the emperor.

But part of that, as you say there, is they've got this technological edge.

They're using these modern European weapons.

So not for the first time, these weapons have completely upended the political geography of Japan.