ABSTRACT
The story line is a familiar one. Japan in the Tokugawa period was a small country, isolated from the rest of the world under the despotic and oppressive rule of a feudal lord known as the shogun, and hierarchically divided into the four separate classes of samurai, peasant, artisan, and merchant. Then in 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry arrived to open Japan, which responded by modernizing into a strong and prosperous modern nation-state.
