Sarah Paine

And they sent fact-finding mission after fact-finding mission to Europe primarily, but also the United States.

This is just the most famous one, the Iwakura Mission, which is off to the West and the United States as well in 1871.

And they're studying not only Western military institutions, but a whole array of political, economic, legal, social, educational, the works to understand the

the basis for Western power and the problem that is hitting them.

And they arrive in Europe at a really interesting time.

It's when Otto von Bismarck is just finishing up the third war of the unification of the Germanic states.

And the Japanese think, ooh, this might be quite a model for us.

Why?

Because Prussia transformed itself over a succession of three wars from the weakest of the five great European powers to second only to Great Britain.

And it did so in part by unifying the Germanic states into modern Germany.

And the Japanese are thinking, wow, this might be relevant to us because we're divided up into all these feudal domains that we have just tried to glue together.

And what are the lessons to be learned here?

And as they're thinking about this and watching what Bismarck is up to, they come upon the

thinking about institutions and technology.

And modernization, I'm going to use the words in the following sense.

Modernization means adopting the most state-of-the-art technology, whatever it is, not just military technology, but all manner of technology.

And westernization, the way I'm going to use it, means adopting westernized institutions.

And I don't mean just military institutions, I mean everything, from whether you westernize your educational institutions or political, whatever it is.

And the question is, can you have one without the other?

Can you modernize and have all the fancy gadgets and things without having the westernized institutions that the societies that created these things had?