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Entry 197 of 240Reform

The Meiji Restoration

1868 CE/East Asia/Meiji Japan
Today Japan (Tokyo)Span Meiji era · 1868–1912

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 knowingThe 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.
◆ The mechanismLabor displacement

A new technology destroys and creates work faster than institutions and people can adapt, producing dislocation and backlash.

Also: State formation & institutional founding · Military-technological disruption · Institutional sclerosis

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