Dr Chris Harding

And it's never really resolved.

One way of putting it in a nutshell, I think, is what's the difference between modernising and westernising?

Modernising, yes.

Westernising, they want to avoid.

But in practice, those two things are so, I think, interlocked that Japan really struggles.

You know, I think they do.

So I'm a big fan of Japanese drama.

And this period, the Meiji period, is always represented as a really mixed blessing for the Japanese.

You often see, and it's partly because some of the people who play foreigners in these dramas are just Westerners living in Japan, teaching English, getting a bit of a job on the side.

So they are quite clunky and embarrassing people.

But it gives this impression of the Westerners just blundering into Japan, having no idea about customs and behaving well and infecting Japan with something that the body politic can never really expel.

So I think for the Japanese, it really is a mixed period.

For all its successes, it's a mixed period.

I think it really is.

It's hard to argue.

Decade by decade across quite a long Meiji period.

So the Meiji Emperor passes away in 1912.

And by the time of his death, Japan is a world power.

By far and away the greatest power in Asia.

I think the way Japan's leaders think about Japan quite early on, actually, just in the early part of this period, really in the early 1870s, is...