Dr Chris Harding

So, you know, in the Tokugawa period, all the feudal lords would have these lovely mansions, right, gathered around the Tokugawa main castle in Edo.

Those mansions are now turned into ministries for civil servants.

So if you're an up and coming young man in this period, what you want to do is go and study law in the new Tokyo University and then get a job as a civil servant.

Because, given that party politics doesn't really, you know, have much traction in Japan, the real power is civil servants looking at the West saying, you know, for the most part, okay, what do we need?

What are we going to emulate and innovate?

But they're also saying, what do we want to avoid?

We need to have cities like Osaka and Tokyo become these industrial centres, but we don't want a big working class who are angry.

We don't want an impoverished class living in slums who are also angry.

And so these civil servants see themselves, they call themselves shepherds of the people.

So they want to look at Europe and then say, OK, here's how you should organise a city.

They look at London.

Here's how we might organise Tokyo.

Here's what we're going to avoid.

Here's how we can try and forestall some of the social problems that Europeans have.

I think alongside that, there are, to go back to your question earlier on, there are some in Japan who do say, actually,

Maybe we need the weapons, but can we draw the line at the weapons?

They say, actually, do we want to dress up in suits?

Do we need to get rid of samurai status?

European fashion is so boring at this point.

I think there are people who say what we had was actually quite good.