Tokyo in the 1870s is a capital that has just changed its name and its century. Samurai lose their swords and stipends; a conscript army drills in the European manner; telegraph wires go up beside the castle moat; a mission of ministers sails round the world to copy what works.
The pressure
American warships arrived in 1853 and forced the ports open. The shogunate that could not stop them fell in 1868, and power passed to young men ruling in the emperor's name. They had watched Britain humiliate China in the Opium Wars. Their slogan is 'rich country, strong army': become a power or become a colony.
Which future
The Meiji leaders want the unequal treaties revised, factories, and an army that can say no. Liberals ask for a parliament and get one in 1890, with the emperor above it. Peasants hoped for a lighter land tax and get conscription.
What survived
Japan beats China in 1894–95 and takes Taiwan, beats Russia in 1904–05, and annexes Korea in 1910. When the Meiji emperor dies in 1912 it is the first non-Western great power, and an empire built on the model of the ones it feared.
Whose story
A model of modernisation, the root of the militarism that followed, or a peasant country taxed to pay for both? Ian Buruma reads one arc from the black ships to 1945; others insist the road to the 1930s was not yet built.