Japan and Modernity

Name

Course

University

Tutor

Date

Japan and Modernity

For more than two hundred and fifty years Japan which is group of islands had kept itself isolated from the rest of the world . Foreigners had been forced out and Christianity which was spreading fast in other parts of Asia was outlawed in this nation .Occassional attempts by the foreigners to contact this nation was met with a lot of resistance from the authorities . All this began to change in 1853 when United States president sent an envoy to Japan

to obtain a treaty . Japan had a lot of resources including the coal deposits which America needed at this time it found it self set up within the American idea of being the stepping stone to the China . By the time this envoy was leaving Japan in 1854 Japan had signed several treaties with the Western nations such as America , Britain Russia and France . This marked the beginning of the open policy for this nation though it was not very well embraced , there were still some opposition . It also marked the process was modernization in this country . This process was equated with westernization in some quarters explaining the reason why it met some resistance in some instances . It meant introducing new systems into a culture that was perceived to be isolated and hard to embrace new concepts (Jansen ,M 1995 165

Military was the among the first to be affected by the modernization process .It was during the beginning of the Meiji...