Sarah Paine

And if you think about it, this dichotomy is still with us.

There are a lot of fighters in the Middle East and North Africa who are more than happy to use state-of-the-art technology.

But the last thing they want is westernized institutions.

And the Japanese, when they posed this question back in the day, asking whether you can have one without the other, they decided the answer was no.

They didn't particularly like Western culture, but they believed that in order to have, to not only use and import state-of-the-art technology, but become an independent producer of it, you've got to do some degree of Westernization.

So they got home, they set themselves a policy objective,

which is to protect Japanese national security and sovereignty in an age of accelerating imperialism.

And they come up with a two-phase grand strategy to do this.

It's going to be start with a domestic phase of westernization, westernize your institutions.

And then they're going to, when they're done with that, they're going to have a foreign policy phase, which is going to be about starting an empire.

Why do that?

Because they look at all the powers of their day and think, what's a great power look like in those days?

Well, it has an empire.

So they go, well,

We're going to have an empire.

All right.

This is the domestic phase.

These are known as the Meiji reforms in honor of the emperor who reigned in this period.

It's between 1869, 1890.

It's a whole generation.