Japan: From Backwater to World Power

Change was the currency of the Meiji era (1868–1912). From the day the teen-aged Mutsuhito claimed power on January 3, 1868 in a relatively tranquil coup called the “Meiji Restoration” (after his reign name) until his death forty-five years later, Japan experienced an evolution so rapid that one Tokyo expatriate said he felt as if he had been alive for 400 years. An isolated, feudalistic island state in 1850, Japan had become a powerful colonial power with the most modern of institutions when Meiji's son, the Taisho emperor, took the throne in 1912. Both the sources of these changes and the way in which they made Japan “modern” provide the material for one of human history's more dramatic stories. They also laid the groundwork for the turbulence of Japan's twentieth century.