ABSTRACT
The most important geopolitical event in East Asia at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth was Japan’s replacement of the collapsing Chinese Empire as the region’s leading Asian power. Japan’s rise was the result of the success of Meiji leaders in remaking their country on the model of the West. In the pursuit of this goal, they created virtually from scratch an industrial economy unparalleled elsewhere in East Asia and, indeed, the non-Western world. At the same time, they turned the improvised imperial government of the 1870s into a Western-style constitutional monarchy and nascent parliamentary democracy. In addition, they developed a powerful army and navy, which they employed to build a colonial empire in Northeast Asia through victorious wars against China in 1894-95 and Russia in 1904-5. Supported by most Japanese, the Meiji leadership gained admission to the Western imperialist club and “quit Asia” culturally and psychologically. By the end of the Meiji era in 1912, however, some Japanese were beginning to have misgivings about their identification with the West and the costs of Japan’s headlong rush to modernity.
