Sarah Paine

I mean, wow.

And then people are complaining we should have marched on to Baghdad.

Well, okay, we did that.

That didn't work out so well.

But then after you do one of these things and you think you're good to go, and in Japan's case, between the two, Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, it shifted the balance of civil and military power in Japan.

And people thought that it's the military officers that did the right thing and that the diplomats lost the peace.

In the Russo-Japanese War, they're saying we didn't get a big indemnity, like as we did in the last war.

Well,

You're getting the whole Russian railway system.

That's an indemnity in kind, but that's not what they're seeing.

So it shifts the balance of power.

And then in addition, this Meiji generation, the prime civil leader, Ito Hirabumi, is assassinated by a Korean revolutionary leader.

because the Koreans don't much like Japanese and their empire.

So he dies, oh gosh, it's a decade plus before Yamagata does.

And so that gives Yamagata and military friends another decade to insinuate the roots of military institutions and civil institutions are not being built.

And then you can go, well,

Look at the Japanese.

They're incompetent because their institution building was inadequate.

Well, in one generation, you can't do it all, right?

Institutions take generations to really sink roots.