The Meiji Restoration

1868 CE — East Asia, Meiji Japan

Today: Japan (Tokyo)

Fifteen years after American warships forced open a Japan that had been closed for two centuries, a faction of reformers overthrew the shogunate and set about deliberately rebuilding the country on Western lines — railways, factories, conscription, a constitution, mass schooling — while insisting it remained Japanese. Within forty years Japan had defeated Russia in a war, the first modern victory of an Asian power over a European one. Japan had looked at what happened to China and chosen radical self-transformation over managed decline.

Worth knowing: The samurai class engineered the reforms that abolished the samurai class — dissolving their own hereditary privileges, swords, and stipends within a decade, on the reasoning that a Japan with samurai would become another China.

Pattern: Labor displacement — A new technology destroys and creates work faster than institutions and people can adapt, producing dislocation and backlash.

Entry 197 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.