Dan Snow's History Hit - How Did Japan Become A Superpower?

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

In the 19th century, Japan's samurai era ended, and the country transformed from a secluded feudal society into a modern industrial superpower. From sweeping political reforms to rapid industrialisation, this is the story of how Japan reinvented itself in just decades and emerged as a formidable global power.Joining us is Dr Chris Harding, a cultural historian of Japan and India from the University of Edinburgh.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Wilson.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. Hi folks, welcome to the show. We're going back to 1868 and how Japan embarked on one of the most dramatic transformations in world history. After centuries of isolation under the Tokugawa Shogunate, a group of young samurai, basically sort of reformist nobles, restored imperial rule, kind of, and launched the country into a bold new era, the Meiji Restoration. They were determined to avoid the fate of all the other colonized nations around the world. And these new Japanese leaders pursued rapid modernization.

They reformed education, the tax system, they built railways, they built battleships and a national army. In just 50 years, Japan became an industrialized empire and a rising global power. They even defeated a major European empire. Joining us to unpack this really extraordinary story is the cultural historian Chris Harding. He is an expert in all things, Japan, India and East Wales. West Connections. Chris, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me.

Tell me about the Tokugawa Shogunate, because it's such a remarkable period in Japanese history that are perhaps the cliché, is it sort of Japan is isolated, it's seen as a bit of a golden age day of Japanese identity, its peace where as much the rest of the world was enduring utter chaos and subversion.

What was the reality? I think that's actually quite fair. Okay, good. We're definitely to most of the reality. It's this remarkable period, two and a half centuries, so 1600 to middle of the 19th century, of more or less complete peace in Japan, under the control, as you say, of a Tokugawa Shogun based in Edel now, Tokyo. And I think people in Japan remember it as a real flourishing of the arts, of culture,

all sorts of things that a country can do when it's not at war with itself or its neighbours. That's weird, isn't it? And stability, because that period is a time of transformational, every other. the continents. I mean, political upheaval, industrial revolution, political revolution, some of the big, well, the biggest wars in history to that point. And there's Japan, just sailing along. I think Japan is quite lucky, actually, in this, but in retrospect, if you think about countries that start to be of interest to Europe, like India and then later China, Japan is known about, but it's not thought to have very much that you might want as a European, as a trader

or a potential coloniser. So it kind of gets left alone. It's got its own, policy of seclusion that you mentioned, but also the Europeans aren't yet coming knocking. So Japan has a, yeah, a fairly relaxed time of it. But there's a little bit of trade, isn't that? But I get what, the Europeans are starting to sniff out. A, there's no great sort of mineral, natural wealth, but also no weakness that they can slide in and exploit, right? Is that part of it?

I think that's it. Yeah, the only Europeans in Japan in this whole period. So the whole of the 17th century, whole of the 18th and the first half of the 19th are the Dutch. So their pitch to the Japanese basically is we are businessmen, we're not going to get involved in your politics, we're not going to try to convert you to Christianity, and they basically live on a tiny island called Dejima, an artificial island, one street or two streets, that's it,

plus their little warehouses, just off the coast of Nagasaki, joined by a tiny bridge, guarded all the time by samurai, so they can't cause any trouble. And it's funny, there are these lovely drawings, actually, of the Dutch on Dejima, that seemed to show how incurious they were about Japan.

They're there on the verge of being able to know this extraordinary culture, and they're playing tennis with each other, and they're playing billiards. You know, they're just not interested. And it kind of goes both ways, if you have a sense of the Japanese also being, maybe a little bit incurious. I don't want to generalise, but the Dutch were asked now and again to produce these volumes,

kind of like a report on international affairs, that they were put together, take to Edel, present to the Shogun. These were found by historians a while back, and they were in mint condition. And at first, historians were saying, wow, they must have been treated with such reverence. Brilliant. It turns out they weren't read. Just stick them in the archive. They're just not well-thumbed because people weren't interested.

So it's a funny old period. It made sense for the Japanese to do this, to insulate themselves from particularly European interference. But all the action that you've just talked about, the Japanese had only the tiniest idea of that French Revolution, American Revolution. they were either ill-informed or they got the Dutch version, which was kind of warped to Dutch interests, I think. Did the Dutch not, by the early United Century, you sort of bring muskets and rifles and be like, lads, this is what you're missing out on?

Was that not an alarm bells ringing in Japan? Well, this is another funny thing, I think, for Japan. So they had had firearms since the middle of the 16th century, the Portuguese brought them. But then after that, there's more or less zero innovation for two and a half centuries. which from the point of view of ordinary Japanese people is just as you might have wanted it. Because if you're not innovating, it means that you're not having to fight any wars. If you think about the speed at which drone innovation happens now, right?

It's not a good sign. Yeah, the British and French are innovating fast because they want to kill each other in ever-increasing numbers. Yeah, exactly. Whereas Japan, their firearms, they're getting dusty somewhere. They might get taken out and played with. Or the armour, the samurai armor, now you wouldn't have it in a place in your house where you might in a hurry put it on and rush out to fight. You just have it polished up and on display somewhere.

You'd never expect to have to put it on. And we talk about the shogunate, remind us, so there's an imperial... There's still emperors through this period. Yes. But they're just puppets. Exactly that. So the emperors are there in Kyoto.

Their job basically is to perform rituals for the gods, maybe write a bit of poetry, and that's pretty much it. They're actually watched quite carefully by the Tokugawa, because if anyone was going to try and launch a rebellion against the Tokugawa, they would probably try and get hold of the emperor as a figurehead. So they keep a close eye on them, but the emperors have no real role.

Most Japanese people would know more or less nothing about them. All the action is in Edo. And why does this period of stability and peace come to an end? Is it internal or is it an arrival of people from outside as it external? Or is it a mixture of both? I think it's one of those classic mixture of both type situations. I think if you imagine there's lots of people in Japan growing up doing, Japan at the center of a world map, right?

in this period, you've got the Russian Empire spreading itself to its east in the direction of Japan. You've got the United States building up, spreading itself towards the Pacific. So California becomes the 31st state in, what, 1850. So there's a sense in which Japan really can't hide anymore. People are interested. And then, of course, you've got the British and others in China. So... Yeah, right. Of course, along the coast, places like Hong Kong, but many more ports along the coast. Yeah, exactly. So China is having, obviously, a terrible time at the beginning of its century of humiliation, as they now call it. So Japan, yeah, there's nowhere to hide anymore.

People are becoming really interested in Japan, almost not so much for what Japan has, but a sense of, well, as a big colonial power, if we don't claim it, someone else is going to claim it. And so the first, really, to have any success with knocking on the door, as it were, of Japan, are the Americans. 1853. By this point, so California is there as part of the US, you can now get, from California to Japan across the Pacific on a steamship in about 18 days.

So for the Americans, it's their doorstep, right? That's how they think about Japan, I think, at this point. And that's just the world turned up. I mean, that's just unimaginable, right? Through Japan's thousands of years of history, the idea that people have come from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, vast distances, and yet here they are. In 18 days, that's crazy.

And that Japan can be thought about as their backyard. That's what technology has made possible, much to the detriment of Japan, I think. So the Americans actually send some of these extraordinary steamships. In the summer of 1853, they arrive off Japan under the command of this guy called Commodore Matthew C. Perry. And the Japanese are maybe terrified as putting it a bit strongly, but they'd never seen that kind of technology before. These huge, great black ships spewing smoke out of their funnels.

And Commodore Matthew C. Perry comes ashore. And he's an interesting guy. His mission, basically, from his president, Millard Fillmore, is to persuade the Japanese to at least say that if American sailors, you know, wailing vessels, whatever it might be, end up shipwrecked in Japan, they'll be taken care of. If they need to take on fuel,

if they need to take on food, whatever it might be, that they'll be given that. Because Japan's policy at this point is, if you see a foreign ship, turn it away. Fire on it, if you have to. That's how strong their policy is. So the Americans at least want that. And Commodore Matthew C. Perry

does a bit of homework on the Japanese, including in New York City Public Library and his view of the Japanese and it's all about character at this point because the Japanese aren't that well known to the Americans his big generalisation I think is the Japanese only understand action and force words aren't going to have much effect

he sees the Dutch at Dejima as being a bit of a doormat I think for the Japanese across these centuries treated quite badly and so he turns up two great military bands on the shore in Japan not far from Edo playing Hail Columbia.

He chooses his biggest, burliest men from his ships, brings them on side with him, trying to make this big, forceful impression. And he basically says, here's what we want. They are demands. It's sort of a treaty of friendship that he would like, but it's anything but friendly.

He even gives them a little piece of white cloth, and he says, I'm going to come back in a few months' time, once you had a chance to think about our demands, if you don't give us what we want, there will be a war, and you can have this little piece of white cloth to surrender with. And that's that. And he points out to scene.

He says, you know, look at those ships. I've got lots more like that in the Pacific. I've got many more like that back in the United States. So there really is only one answer that you can possibly give us. And there's this lovely image. You know, Japan at this point, woodblock printing is a really big thing. Lovely image by a Japanese artist we think in Nagasaki shows one of these ships with the black hull

spewing this evil-looking black smoke from the top. And both the prow and the stern are given faces, these kind of malevolent demonic faces, this sense that what Japan is now facing is a turning point, unwanted, and that Japan may be potentially in an awful lot of trouble now. And it's the guns on those ships as well. You've got, you know, Tokyo, this beautiful, incredible, wonderful city,

totally exposed to these weapons. I mean, I think this is that classic UFO film where the UFO just lands on top of Washington, D.C., and you're like, okay, wow, that's just short-circuited everything we understand about security. That's what's happening here, right? These ships could lay waste to the imperial capital and there is not one thing you can do about it. Terrifying. Absolutely.

And funnily, now, some of the samurai who come out, they're sent out in a rush to go in Greek, Comedore, Matthew C. Perry, firearms they're holding would be in a museum back in the US or Europe. Probably most of them didn't have bullets in them. A lot of the samurai might not even know really what to do with them. So the fact that you're facing steamship technology, these incredibly powerful guns on these ships with virtually nothing. to their credit, the Japanese work out very, very quickly,

I think the depth of the trouble that they're in and their response, which we talk about in a moment, I think is motivated by the shock of that technological gap. They're not naive about it. They see it immediately. In other cultures where there's... In other cultures where there's been that first contact with these, particularly maritime technology, these suddenly, this gaping...

You are dragged into the modern world in seconds when you see these ships. That led to kind of catastrophic internal divisions, dividing groups who collaborated with outsiders, who saw advantage, who wants to double down on fighting them, whether it's in Mexico and Cortez, all these other cultures and exchanges. What happens in Japan? Because Japan goes on a different journey. Japan actually seems to, well, it evolves quite rapidly.

It sort of ingests some of these ideas and ends up becoming a great power that can go toe to toe with these. European and North American powers. What happens then over the next 50 years? So I think at the beginning, things look pretty bad for Japan. You know, with that mix of internal and external, the internal part of this, I suppose, there are a couple of things going on in Japan

which inform how they respond to the Americans. One is that the Tokugawa Shogunate, born back in 1600, with this epic battle at Sekikajara in October 1600. Great Western Army, great Eastern Army. Eastern Army is the Tokugawa Army. they win. The feudal lords who make up the Western Army don't just go away and think, never mind, didn't work out for us, let's forget about it and move on. In parts of the West of Japan,

for decades and decades and decades, mothers will put their children to sleep with their feet facing Edel as a kind of rebuke. Others have this yearly sort of ritual where they'll all gather, the top leaders of the domain will gather and they'll say, is it yet time to go and crush the Tohagawa? The standard response is, no, not yet. Maybe not yet, that's. Yeah, let's not. Wow, so the West remembers. Exactly.

They have very long memories. And I think that's one thing that's there in the background. This becomes crucially important. The other thing is that what looked like quite a good idea in 1600, which is having a very highly stratified society, samurai at the top, then merchants, sorry, no, samurai at the top, and then artisans and peasants because they're producers. Merchants actually at the bottom, because they're not considered to produce anything.

They kind of deal in the produce. of others. That made a great deal of sense and to have that be quite rigid was smart because Japan had been through so much turmoil before. Actually what has happened by the middle of the 19th century is a lot of samurai officially still at the top but actually impoverished. Classic. Yeah, penniless sort of warrior aristocracy. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. They're trying to put on a good show. Often the facade of their homes will look good. But if you go inside the tatami matting, this rice straw matting is in a terrible state. They might have sold off some armour, even a daughter to a merchant to try and make a bit of money.

There's one domain in Japan, I think it's Morioka, which actually goes as far as produces a price list for merchants, saying, for this amount of money, we'll give you a sword, for this amount of money you can have a piece of armour. For more money, we'll actually give you samurai status. Oh my goodness. So it's sad, and I think ordinary Japanese townspeople have quite a low view of them by this point.

They see them as people who tell big stories about samurai daring do, but they'd be useless in a real battle, because they've never fought one. They just go shopping. They write bad poetry. They visit Geisha. They're not really contributing anything. And yet ordinary people are paying their stipends.

So I think there's an awful lot of anger there amongst ordinary people. And also amongst young samurai. So these young samurai, by the time Matthew Perry arrives, and in the few months after he goes and the shogun is trying to work out what to do, they see the shogun at dithering. And if you think the word shogun comes from a longer word, which means, what does it mean? It means barbarian crushing generalissimo.

So it's a case of you had one job. Yeah, if you're not crushing, if you're not being an absolute legend, crushing barbarians. Exactly. And so the Americans, they seem to, not only did they dither, they then seek the opinion of other feudal lords around Japan.

And again, if you're trying to promote yourselves as being the sort of wise strategists whose job it is to look after Japan's security, to kind of seek advice, to farm out what you might do next. Again, it makes you look... Smells like weakness.

It does. And so Japan, what happens really is in the course of the next few years, really from 1853 into the early 1860s, Japan steadily moves into more and more chaos with especially younger samurai who think that not only the Shogunate getting things wrong, but also that their own senior samurai in their own domains are... Granddad? Granddad is too old.

He doesn't want to have a fight. He's got nothing left in the tank. Do you see what I mean? So a lot of these samurai will leave their domains, go to Kyoto, and some of them, especially in the west of Japan, what they want to do is take hold of the emperor as a kind of figurehead. The emperor, by the time we get to the mid-1860s, he's only a teenager. We'll get him as our man, as our figurehead,

and we will launch a war against the top of God, as the only way of properly responding to the foreigners. So after 250 years of peace, we're back into that more ancient Japanese tradition, which is grab the emperor and then topple, you know, warlordism, get rid of that guy and run Japan in his place. Absolutely, yeah. And it's amazing that the legitimacy of the emperor is so strong that you can do that, even when he's clearly just your puppet.

But it works. You're listening to Dan Snow's history. We're going to be back after this break. I think the other thing that happens in that period, which makes it even more chaotic for the Japanese is, of course, Matthew C. Perry has come back, 1854. The Japanese have to pretty much give him what he wants. I think the logic is actually quite sound.

They say, you know, either we can be proud about this, we can tell them to go away, but look at what's happening in China. That's what they did, and they're not having the best time of it. Instead, what we should do is do this deal, end the policy of national seclusion, which is a big step, but nevertheless, do this deal, get the weapons that they've got. Buy some time, yeah. Buy some time, exactly. And buy some technology.

Yeah, buy some technology so that actually we can become powerful enough to maintain our own security. There's a sense of this being a really rough neighborhood in Asia. this point. But they swallow their pride in a way the Chinese don't. That's interesting. So they're like, let's just, let's do this. We've got to do a dirty deal, but let's make sure we get the technology. Yeah, I think having the example of China actually serves them quite well, because the Chinese and Japanese eyes, for centuries, they are kind of political and cultural big brother. So to see them on their knees is the most stark lesson you can possibly, I think, receive at this point. So that sort of works. The problem then is they give the

Americans what they want, and then as you can imagine, the British want that deal. The French want that deal. The Russians want it. And by the 1860s, so within a few years, a lot of the big players around the world have these deals. They become trade deals. They become highly unequal trade deals. You have lots of foreigners starting to live in Japan, places like Yokohama, now a big city go from being nothing to a kind of thriving treaty port, they call them, where foreigners are allowed to be there. So very like China, it was Shanghai, so worrying, worrying echoes here for the Japanese. It's really worrying. I think worrying for a couple of reasons. One is because trade is really unequal.

Also, if you commit a crime, if you beat someone up or, God forbid, even murder them as an American or as a French person in someone like Ghamer, you'll be tried according to your laws by your own people. And that seems like double standards. Two-tier justice, a phrase of the moment. That makes Japanese people really angry.

There's a lovely woodblock print of this period which shows a sumo wrestler throwing this overdressed foreigner, overdressed European, over his knee and onto the ground. This is how people feel. And you get this. slogan, Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarian. So a current of thought starts to build, particularly with his younger samurai, samurai, saying what we want to do is have the Emperor back in

power, the Shogunate have clearly failed on their brief. They need to be overthrown, got rid of entirely. And with the Emperor as our figurehead, we will modernise, we will stand up to the Europeans and the Americans and others. This is what they try to do. And by 1868, 1869, the Western powers, these younger samurai from some of these Western domains, have got their forces together, they rebrand them the Imperial Army under the Emperor, who's really their puppet,

and they... So they're saying with that, we're hyper-patriotic here, this is Imperial, yeah, we're here to serving the Emperor, yeah. Exactly, and it's got to be a miserable experience being an Emperor in Japan, because you've got centuries behind you of doing whatever you're told by the person with the most weapons nearby, and it's that same old story again. Plus he's a teenager,

I don't think he's the kind of person yet who has much of an established view on things. Although, actually, no, my son has established few things. So maybe that's not quite right. But he doesn't have much gravitas yet, shall we say. And if you think about Japan as being a kind of, it's an archipelago, but crescent-shaped archipelago, these imperial forces basically chase the Tokugawa

all the way round northwards, past Edo, which thankfully is surrendered without a fight. That could have been an awfully bloody battle. A million people. Infrastructure that's highly flammable, you know, wooden paper. Luckily, it gets surrendered by the Tokugawa. chase the Tokugawa forces all the way to the top of Honshu,

the main island, across the water into Ezo, now it's Hokkaido, and for a brief time, you have this funny situation where the Tokugawa holdouts form a republic, because the emperor's now on the other side, right? The only time in Japan's history,

yet anyway, up until the present day, where it's had a tiny little republic, and it survives there for a few months, and then it's wiped out. These imperial forces have much better guns, they have much better weaponry, In fact, British people like Thomas Glover, famous Scottish merchant, is gun running for these young Western samurai

because he thinks they're the future, right? So they're very well supplied, and they take care of the Tokugawa. And there they are. These young samurai, a small group of them, who no one's ever heard of who now control a country. But part of that, as you say there, is they've got this technological edge. They're using these modern European weapons. Okay, first of a thing.

So not for the first time. These weapons have completely upended the political geography of Japan. Does Japan get lucky there? Because that seems like quite a familiar story in this period of exchange between arriving Europeans and Americans and indigenous societies. They get lucky that sort of Americans

or outside powers don't sort of intervene in that. Is it because it's so quick, it's a fait accompli? Because if it had gone on, then that's when typically you'd go, oh, the Americans are going to launch a little force in here to help? And you end up with this foreign boots on the ground during a civil war, which is always so many other places in the world was going to downfall. Yeah, I think the Japanese are really lucky

because for a while there, it looks as though the British and the French want to back different sides in this war. The French are trying to prop up the shogunate, supplying them with weapons, even paying for the uniforms of their men. I think if that war had gone on and had been less conclusive, then you're going to get either side piling in a little bit more, having a state, wanting something in return. Yeah, it could have become quite ugly for the Japanese,

but it's over quite quickly. And I think the attitude that people like the British and the Americans take is with these new people in charge, in Edo, which becomes now Tokyo, means eastern capital. They ship the emperor actually into Tokyo properly as their figurehead. But with those people in charge, the Americans, the British and the rest, can have what they want, which is that they can trade with Japan.

They're open for business. I think so. So Japanese rice, tea, textiles, these sorts of things. the Japanese are able to produce quite quickly. And also the Japanese are a really good, I think, prospect for investment. Given that they want to do this enormous national overhaul, you know, think about that technological gap, an institution gap for all sorts of reasons.

They are playing catch-up with the West. That's a huge investment opportunity, I think. You could build some railways. Yeah, which is exactly what they do. So there's no need and there's no real call for a big territorial grab, I think, in Japan, which is very lucky for the Japanese. Japanese. Yes, they've got a sort of, they've got a counter party that respects the rule of law, respects trade deals. Okay, interesting. So you don't have to invade and secure. Interesting.

What do they do? What do these young, these young new samurai around the emperor, what do they get up to? So they're amazing. They are so pragmatic. They go almost all of them, given that they are in a really precarious position, there's still that risk of rival parties, right, going against them, because no one's ever heard of them. And just because they've got the emperor, on their side, that could quite easily change because the other side I've only got to take the emperor and then make the very same claims for themselves. They are in a vulnerable position.

But what they do, between 1871 and 1873, they go on this massive fact-finding tour. They go all the way around the world. They go to the US, Western Europe. They go to Russia. They go to parts of Asia. Looking to see how things work. How does banking work?

How does democracy work? What does a theatre look like? How do I run a railroad? what do your armed forces look like? And they essentially do a kind of pick and mix. Whoever's got what looks like the best example of a particular institutional bit of infrastructure, they decide to take that, basically.

So the British, they have a navy built on British lines. They even have portraits of Admiral Lord Nelson in Japanese Naval Academies as the kind of, you know, the real hero. Well, they chose well there. They chose well. For their army, it was going to be the French, but they're watching what's happening in Germany. Europe, you have the Franco-Prussian War, so then it makes more sense for a Prussian model.

Looking quite tasty. Yeah. American banking, all these different things. In the space of two years, they hoover up all these ideas. They employ lots of foreign experts as well to try to come into places like Tokyo and school them on what they need to do. Internally, they're quite brutal. If you think that samurai as a class, they've been in charge of Japan for centuries, and that most of these young leaders are samurai themselves. They have no qualms at all about getting rid of the old feudal domains, getting rid of the samurai as a class. They just think these things are outdated now.

What they think you need in the modern world, and they're being pragmatic about, I think, their army and their technology, is conscripts who are biddable and prepared to be canon fodder, basically. A cliche of a... A modern state army. A modern state army, exactly. I think the cliche about samurai is that they might go into battle and they'll be more worried about how they personally look on the battlefield and how they do.

You can't have that kind of me first war making anymore. So they essentially pay these people off. The samurai paid off. Instead you've got a conscript army. Everyone now paying taxes in cash to Tokyo. So you've got your tax base. You've got your conscript army. I think really importantly what they also do is very quickly they establish primary education.

Which means they gather everybody's children by the end of 1890s. everyone's children into schools where they can essentially tell their story of what Japan is going to be and in that way maybe the older generation don't entirely not entirely on board with what Japan's becoming but the younger generation they grow up

and the vision of this tiny clique of leaders becomes the new normal for them and it's incredibly successful in a very short space of time so is there no pushback I mean it's an astonishing revolution this is hundreds of years of trial and error in other cultures just jammed into a a very particular culture in the space of just a couple of decades.

Is there no pushback? There is a bit. What's interesting is a while ago, historians dug up these documents all around Japan, which suggested that after these leaders took power in the late 1860s, people in Japan began to read, either in European languages or in translation, the constitutions from places like the US and France, and they worked out how politics worked in Britain as well. And they sat down and they said, okay,

what kind of democracy do we want in Japan? The decision the Japanese leaders made was we want a kind of mixture of a Prussian-style, you know, top-down state, of course, with the emperor at the top, a mixture of that with a kind of Neo-Confucian arrangement where everyone knows their place and they show a certain amount of respect.

The idea that Japan would become a French-style democracy overnight was thought to be completely ridiculous. It's actually quite interesting to see how these models look from a Japanese point of view. If you're playing catch-up as a brand new country in a rough neighbourhood, one of the things you can't do as far as these leaders were concerned is basically spaff all your energy up the wall by arguing with each other in a democratic system which involves rival parties.

Everybody has to come together, singing from the same hymn sheet, if you're going to progress at the speed you need to progress that. So they said democracy is basically for the birds. We will have a national diet, you know, a national... Consultative assembly. Exactly. So a tiny percentage of Japanese men can vote for these people. And even then, these people, it's kind of a talking shop. The way the Japanese leaders see it, they retain power as this tiny clique. The way they see it is it's a way of making people feel important. And it's a way of getting, I think, a certain amount of buy-in. So that if you're a relatively wealthy Japanese man who reads his newspaper and pays his taxes, you want to feel that your voice is heard a bit, right? And so that's a way of doing that. But the idea that you'd have democracy in a more radical sense, just would be, you know, giving into chaos, I think, as far as they see. So, no wonder they were quite attracted by the Prussian model there.

So powerful emperor, powerful advisors around the emperor, a lot of decision-making power there. But with a little smit-in of representation as well. Yeah. And I suppose, you know, Prussia, Germany, it's another relatively new power trying to knit itself together as Japan is doing this period. So they kind of see, I think, a natural European reflection there of what they're trying to do. but obviously it upsets people so across the 1870s early 1880s when these institutions

are kind of being put together you do get people in Japan who will go around giving lectures saying no we want a British model we want a French model these leaders they're doing generally a good job but we want to say and how things work

I suppose the other thing these leaders do quite cleverly is they got their army which we've talked about they've also got quite quickly a very effective police force who don't mind getting a bit of rough, getting a bit rough if they have to, don't mind putting people in prison, if they have to, so that some of these meetings where, you know, I might go along giving a lecture saying, you know, I think rah, rah, rah, we should have a French-style democracy.

I might get yanked off stage by the police and put in prison. Some of these people who are advocating for democracy end up giving their lectures on houseboats in the middle of lakes so the police can't get to them. So they're doing their best, but they're slowly being clamped down on, I think. So those kind of voices more and more get whittled away. How interesting that the voices are coming from that particular area, there aren't the voices of people going, no, this is all nonsense. Let's just go back, let's get back to, you know, let's get back to the 18th century.

We don't need any of this new stuff. Yeah. I guess the world in 1860, 1870, 80, if you're just looking at the world, you think we are on the wrong side of history. I mean, it looked like at that point, steam and electricity and life expectancy gallery. It just shows how powerful that must have been to any observer. It's just like, yeah, I think it looks to me like the Europeans and Americans have kind of cracked it here.

That must have, that was such a dominant narrative. I think it was. When they had that world tour and they came back, the leaders, that tour in the early 1870s, that was their dominant thought. I think they also, though, in places like London, Glasgow, Liverpool, they saw slums. So when they got back, one of the things they wanted to do with their new civil servants. So, you know, in the Tocaga period, all the feudal lords would have these lovely mansions, right, gathered around the Tokugawa main castle in Edo.

Those mansions are now turned into ministries for civil servants. So if you're an up-and-coming young man in this period, what you want to do is go and study law in the new Tokyo University and then get a job as a civil servant. Because given that party politics doesn't really, you know, have much traction in Japan, the real power is civil servants looking at the West, saying, you know, for the most part, okay, what do we need? What are we going to emulate and innovate?

But they're also saying, what do we want to avoid? We need to have cities like Osaka and Tokyo become these industrial centres, but we don't want a big working class who are angry. We don't want an impoverished class living in slums who are also angry. And so these civil servants see themselves. They call themselves shepherds of the people. So they want to look at Europe and then say, okay, here's how you should organise a city. They look at London.

Here's how we might organise Tokyo. Here's what we're going to avoid. Here's how we can try and forestall, right, some of the social problems that Europeans have. I think alongside that, there are, to go back to your question earlier on, there are some in Japan who do say, actually, maybe we need the weapons, but can we draw the line at the weapons? They say, actually, do we want to dress up in suits? You know, do we need to get rid of samurai status?

There are people in various parts. So boring at this point in this country. Yeah, I think there are people who say what we had was actually quite good. There's a lovely example of the tutor to the emperor, steeped in Confucian ideas who says the Westerners only have fact-gathering and technique as their values. They go no deeper as a culture, which I think is really interesting.

If you think about the birth of modern science, the power of all these new technologies, the fact that someone, you know, living in Tokyo who hadn't travelled the world much, nevertheless picked on that as being a Western weakness. Because it's the beginning of this idea that gains traction in Japan. It gains traction later amongst India.

Indian nationalists, it's the idea that everything the West has achieved has been purchased at the cost of the Western soul. Yeah. Right? They're alienated from nature. Where's the poetry? Exactly, yeah. It's there in poetry, literature. And the Japanese see that. So you've got a line of thinking, which I think goes all the way through into the 20th century, which says, as Japanese people, we have to hold on to something and not entirely lose our minds and kind of become an Asian facsimile of Great Britain. that's not what we want.

And I suppose one moment which really encapsulates this, which a lot of people will have seen in the lovely film, Tom Cruise film, The Last Samurai, right, is this great Satsima rebellion in 1877. A really brief sort of overview of it to give you a flavour. One of these leaders, Saigua Takamori, who is, you know, one of the young samurai in charge of the new country, falls out with his friends,

goes home in a huff to Kushu, this southern island in Japan. quite how this happens we don't know but in effect he ends up raising an army marches them towards Tokyo where he plans to have a word with the emperor basically about the direction that Japan has been being taken

but the new army with its conscripts with its new weaponry with its ships that can move troops around Japan very efficiently they just get quite literally mown down they're lovely images for all its faults I do quite like the film The Last Samurai this image of some of these samurai

with rusty old swords running at these, I think they're Gatling guns, you know, these kind of rotating guns that can just fired by a peasant with 10 minutes training, just take them all out. But there is that sense that by losing the samurai, you are losing a little bit of Japan's soul and that you might not be able to get it back.

So I think there is that concern with Japan losing its past. And it's never really resolved. One way of putting it in a nutshell, I think, is what's the difference between modernising and westernizing? modernising yes westernizing they want to avoid but in practice those two things are so

I think interlocked that Japan really struggles you're listening to Dan Snow's history we're going to be back after this break and continues potentially to do so you know I think I think they do so I'm a big fan of Japanese drama and this period

the Meiji period is always represented as a as a really mixed blessing for the Japanese you often see and it's It's partly because some of the people who play foreigners in these dramas are just Westerners living in Japan, teaching English, getting a bit of a job on the side. So they are quite clunky and embarrassing people. But it gives this impression of the Westerners just blundering into Japan, having no idea about customs and behaving well, and infecting Japan with something that the body politic can never really expel. So I think for the Japanese, it really is a mixed period.

For all its successes, it's a mixed period. But in sort of strategic terms and power terms, Japan doesn't get invaded by Europeans, it remains one of the very, very few places outside Europe to retain its own indigenous, I guess to have some agency in its future. Nearly everyone else is conquered. And indeed, Japan will go on to conquer

and even eventually take on and defeat Europeans. So in hard power terms, it's a success. I think it really is. It's hard to argue decade by decade across quite a long major period. So the major emperor passes away in 1912. And by the time of his death, Japan is a world power. By far and away the greatest power in Asia. I think the way Japan's leaders think about Japan quite early on, actually,

just in the early part of this period, really in the early 1870s, is they have a sense of Asia as being partly over. overrun by white Western power, and they see it in quite racialized terms. And they say what Japan's job is, the first Asian country to modernize, we will build ourselves up and we will gather together a community of Asian nations. They talk about this as quote unquote pan-Asianism, gather them together and we will lead them to steadily push back. Because their vision, I suppose, of Japanese history going back centuries,

is you've got Indian culture in the form of things like Buddhism, made its way through China and Korea into Japan, And lots of Chinese culture has been at the roots of building up Japan, as has Korea. But now all those countries, India, China, Korea are having a bad time of it, right, at the hands of Western colonialism. Korea is in a sort of a confused state. If we as Japan can be the leader of these nations, the place where all the best bits of their culture are gathered together and then combined with Western technology, will be unstoppable. And we will raise Asia up. And I think people genuinely believe that in Japan, in the 1870s, early 1880s.

The trouble with it is that that becomes a very strong ideological basis for kind of doing whatever you want militarily in Asia. And so Japan has a victory over China, 1894 to 5, which is a big shock. We need to fight the Chinese not to liberate them. Yeah, exactly. So they do that with China, a little bit inconclusive, I think. The big thing for Japan, though, I think is the takeover of Korea, the colonisation of Korea, completed in 1910,

really on the basis that we will modernise Korea. We will give them railways. We'll give them banks. So part of our sharing all the wonderful things we've learned is now, unfortunately, we're going to have to invade you and occupy you in order to make you see these benefits. Absolutely. But then I suppose people who are fans of European history in this period

will have heard of the civilising mission. They will have heard of that. We'll have heard the British and the French saying very similar things. And the Japanese do exactly that. they'll sort of plant their flag, they'll have a rhetoric of civilization. They even go to the extent where they send medics and even psychiatrists, right, to Korea after they colonize it in the early 1900s. And some of the psychiatrists write back to Japan and they say, more and more people in Korea

are suffering anxiety and depression. And the Japanese say, brilliant. Depression and anxiety are the sorts of maladies you suffer if you have a civilized and quite complex mind. Okay. You become a warrior. You become a person with many thoughts, you know. It's proof of our successful civilising mission that all Koreans are turning up for help with depression.

So it's amazing that I think the sense of mission there is really real on the part of the Japanese. The difficulty, of course, is once you get into the 20th century and once you have a foothold in mainland Asia, where are you going to stop? Right, and it's that conquest of Korea, or that they fight China over domination Korea, they occupy Korea.

Does that bring them into competition with the Russians? Yes, yeah, it does. If you think about the geography, and if you think about the weakness of China in this period, there is a sense that this part of the world is very much up for grabs. And if the Russians take it, then Korea falls next, most likely to the Russians again. And as one of Japan strategists puts it,

and if you think about the map, this kind of makes sense. Korea, the Korean Peninsula, is a dagger at the back of Japan. For centuries, if you get hold of the Korean Peninsula, it's a short hop to Japan. It's unthinkable that anyone else would have the Korean Peninsula, so that's why they worry about that. But then it's unthinkable that anyone would have Manchuria, other than the Japanese, because then they can get Korea.

So there's that kind of series effect or a domino effect where in order to be secure, you have to expand your interests. And this leads Japan, 1904 to 1905, into this famous war against the Russian Empire. the first time, and it happens in quite short order, the first time that an Asian power has had a victory over a white Western power. And it's hard to underestimate the shock, I think, that goes through Europe. And it's a victory not of, you know,

sort of Afghans defeating a British column by using clever guerrilla tactics and the harsh climate. It's a victory of steel and Western-looking battleships and repeating rifles and bar-blowers. You know, it's a conventional war. Yes, which is, I think, what really worries, of people in Europe because in the early days of the major restoration, it was nice and it was funny and it was quite amusing to see the Japanese steadily take on these technologies, these

institutions, even to things like eating beef and knife and fork pushing their food around the plate trying to get used to these things. It was quaint and it was funny. And the Japanese, the fact that they were succeeding as a society kind of based on learning from Europe was great for Europeans because clearly then their model is the most civilized and effective one. But yeah, exactly. Exactly as you say, to see all that used against them successfully, and with a hint, I think by this point, some Westerners have a sense of what gets called the yellow peril. Not just that hordes of Chinese and Japanese migrants might be flooding the West, but a sense, I think, for Japan in particular, that they're modernising on the surface, right?

They look like a modern country, recognizably European or Western, in their dress institutions, technologies. But they have a kind of feudal mindset still. and that if you combine this feudal mindset, which might be quite irrational, might be willing to spill blood with the latest weaponry, what you've got is potentially a very scary enemy. And I think that starts to happen with the Russians, the fact that the Japanese destroy the Russian fleet,

the fact that the Japanese are prepared on mainland Asia, a place called Port Arthur, to sacrifice so many of their own men in a battle that, yes, they end up on top in that war, but that doesn't really establish very much, but that they will throw their men against these weapons. People start, I think, in Europe and the West to worry

about the Japanese and about where they might be heading. And I think, although it worries people in the West, it's also worth coming back to Japan, because, you know, we were talking earlier on about people in Japan being unhappy at the direction of travel. One thing I think people in Japan start to feel is that the Russo-Japanese War

is a war too far. It's a war they didn't really need. to fight. Maybe it's nice to be a colonial power. They've got Taiwan from China, they've got the Korean Peninsula. Taking on Russia, you start to get people in Japan who are kind of left of center in their politics, who are quite pacifist. One famous poet, lovely poet called Yosano Akiko. She writes this poem addressed to her brother who's fighting in the war saying, do not give your life. And she says this really controversial thing captures the spirit of a lot of people in Japan

but it's something you absolutely shouldn't say which is his majesty the emperor himself does not give his life or something to that effect basically you're saying that he's too scared to do it he's not going to put himself in harm's way and yet our sons and brothers are doing it

and so she's absolutely persona non grata in Japan as a result but you start to get that sense actually that overreach might be possible that a period, decades of success in Japan might start to become perverted and that maybe Japan's going down that track. Oh, and then the 1930s happened,

but let's finish this episode by bringing Japan to it. Probably it's, when the future look brightest, you win the Russo-Japanese War, you're allied to the British, British naval, you know, the Japanese officers training of the Royal Navy in Dartmouth and all this kind of stuff. Japan's on the winning side,

of the First World War, it gets more concessions, does it, the end of the First World War? Sort of a few more bits of China. It gets bits and pieces from the old German colonies. Yeah. Yeah. I think some in Europe thought Japan behaved rather badly in the first world, quite opportunistically. You didn't really need to get involved. But yeah, you're right.

It gets a little bit. And so this is probably, I think, if you were a European visiting Japan in, say, the mid-1920s, right, go to somewhere like Tokyo. You're going to see somewhere that has kind of wide, airy streets, trains. trams, people look wealthy. You can eat food from all around the world. You've got theatres, comedy clubs. Some imperial power.

Yeah, you've got radio, gramophone, all these sorts of things happening. And yeah, it's a proper imperial power exporting the best of its civilization all around Asia. It's probably at its peak at that point, I think, because not only has it got all that, but after the First World War,

that vision of Wilsonian internationalism, a lot of Japan's diplomats really believed in that. Although at the end of the First World War, they wanted to have a racial equality clause, put into the covenant for the New League of Nations, they didn't get that. And that became a seed that would flower in rather unpleasant ways later. But other than that, they really saw themselves as a great cosmopolitan international power. And if you were an ordinary person in Japan at this point, they're steadily expanding the franchise, not to women but to other men.

And so there's a sense that democracy is taking root, that being in a political party starts to actually mean something in Japan. So I think that would be its peak in all sorts of ways. And then there's that element for then what happens next. Well, join us another time. We'll be talking about that.

In fact, we have talked about that many times. So thank you very much for coming on and taking us through how Japan rose to the unexpected story of Japan becoming a regionally, even a world power. Absolutely. Thank you very much. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more here?

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