Sarah Paine

legal, educational, you name it, they westernized them.

But there wasn't enough time for these things to grow deep roots.

And then if you think about who's doing this, they're called the Genro, this very distinguished generation of Japanese who all knew each other.

And so they're

career paths were very broad, covering both civil and military areas.

And when they died, they couldn't transfer their prestige to anyone else, nor had they institutionalized it in some kind of cabinet or something that would force all these different

fat groups to discuss things without giving a primacy to the military and then understand what is the tradition in Japan.

Shogunate, that's what Japan had before.

What's a shogun?

Shogun is a Japanese word for general.

So the long history of Japan is military rule.

So when it comes back in World War II, that in a way is a kind of normalcy.

It would have taken a long time.

So this comes back to the United States and fooling around with tariff walls, thinking that was such a clever idea.

Maybe if the Great Depression had been managed better, it would have given time for these institutions to take deeper roots.

No one knows, but I would not criticize the Meiji generation.

They're brilliant.

They did so much.

But you're talking just a number of years.

And look at this country.