Dr Chris Harding

You have the Franco-Prussian War.

So then it makes more sense for a Prussian model.

Looking quite tasty.

Yeah.

American banking, all these different things.

In the space of two years, they hoover up all these ideas.

They employ lots of foreign experts as well to try to come into places like Tokyo and school them on what they need to do.

Internally, they're quite brutal.

If you think that samurai as a class have been in charge of Japan for centuries and that most of these young leaders are samurai themselves, they have no qualms at all about getting rid of the old feudal domains, getting rid of the samurai as a class.

They just think these things are outdated now.

what they think you need in the modern world and they're being pragmatic about I think their army and their technology is conscripts who are biddable and prepared to be cannon fodder basically you know the cliche of a modern state army a modern state army exactly I think the cliche about samurai is that they might go into battle and they'll be more worried about how they personally look on the battlefield and how they do you can't have that kind of me first uh um war making anymore so they they essentially they pay these people off the samurai paid off

Instead, you've got a conscript army, everyone now paying taxes in cash to Tokyo.

So you've got your tax base, you've got your conscript army.

I think really importantly what they also do is very quickly they establish primary education, which means they gather everybody's children by the end of 1890s.

Everyone's children into schools where they can essentially tell their story of what Japan is going to be, you know.

And in that way, maybe the older generation don't entirely, you know, not entirely on board with what Japan's becoming.

But the younger generation, they grow up and the vision of this tiny clique of leaders becomes the new normal for them.

And it's incredibly successful in a very short space of time.

There is a bit.

What's interesting is a while ago, historians dug up these documents all around Japan, which suggested that after these leaders took power in the late 1860s,