Dr Chris Harding

There's a lovely example of the tutor to the emperor, steeped in Confucian ideas, who says, the Westerners only have fact-gathering and technique as their values.

They go no deeper as a culture, which I think is really interesting.

If you think about, you know, the birth of modern science, the power of all these new technologies, the fact that someone, you know, living in Tokyo who hadn't travelled the world much, nevertheless picked on that as being a Western weakness, because it's the beginning of this idea that gains traction in Japan, it gains traction later amongst Indian nationalists.

It's the idea that

Everything the West has achieved has been purchased at the cost of the Western soul.

They're alienated from nature.

Exactly, yeah.

It's there in poetry, literature.

And the Japanese see that.

So you've got a line of thinking, which I think goes all the way through into the 20th century, which says, as Japanese people, we have to hold on to something and not entirely lose our minds and kind of become an Asian facsimile of Great Britain.

That's not what we want.

And I suppose one moment which really encapsulates this, which a lot of people will have seen in the lovely film, Tom Cruise film, The Last Samurai, right, is this great Satsuma rebellion in 1877.

A really brief sort of overview of it to give you a flavour.

One of these leaders, Saigo Takamori, who is, you know, one of the young samurai in charge of the new country, falls out with his friends, goes home in a huff to Kyushu.

this southern island in Japan.

Quite how this happens, we don't know, but in effect, he ends up raising an army, marches them towards Tokyo, where he plans to have a word with the emperor, basically, about the direction that Japan is being taken.

But the new army, with its conscripts, with its new weaponry, with its ships that can move troops around Japan very efficiently,

um they just get quite literally mown down you know they're lovely images for all its faults i do quite like the film the last samurai this image of some of these samurai with rusty old swords running at these i think they're gatling guns you know these kind of rotating guns that can just fired by a peasant with 10 minutes training just take them all out but there is that sense that by losing the samurai

you are losing a little bit of Japan's soul and that you might not be able to get it back.

So I think there is that concern with Japan losing its past.