Sarah Paine

And if you look at them, only two of them pertain to the military.

There's the draft and then creating the general staff.

And then if you look at the two that start it all, they start it...

at the top of the social pyramid with the feudal domains.

That's the power brokers of Japan, and they're getting rid of all of those.

And then they go right to the bottom of the social pyramid, which is children, and deciding that they need to have compulsory elementary education because they don't believe you can have a modern country, a strong country, without a literate population.

But if you look at the rest of these things, you're getting a Bank of Japan.

You're going to be having something running your currency and other things.

You've got a cabinet, a higher education.

You're going to have a professional civil service, constitution, a parliament.

You're going to have a court system that looks like a Western court system with laws that look an awful lot like Western laws.

As a result of doing all of this, the Westerners had no excuse left for having a treaty port system because this mirrors what's going on in the West.

So Britain, which is the precedent setter in these things, the superpower of its day, it renegotiates its treaties with Japan on the basis of juridical equality.

And the other powers follow suit and do it.

This happens in Japan a half century before China gets rid of its unequal treaties.

All right, so domestic phase is over the moment Japan signs that treaty with Britain.

The foreign policy phase has to do with Japan believes it needs an empire and its neighborhood is a mess.

China is imploding for various reasons, which I will get to.

And Korea is even worse.

And China, because it's having a massive civil wars throughout China, can no longer fulfill its Susan role to stabilize Korea.