that it throws a great deal of light on the peculiarities of the modern West as well as on Japan, helping to highlight the differences between these two areas and the rest of the world.
We obviously do not have the time to explain in detail the causal relationship between feudalism and the rapidity of modernization in Japan, still less to consider the other factors involved in Japan’s modernization. I would not for a moment wish to imply that the feudal background was the sole reason for the speed of Japan’s reaction to the West. I can think of at least one other major reason that seems to me as significant, and there are numerous other factors, unrelated to feudalism, which may have been important. But unquestionably the Japanese, emerging as they were from a feudal period, did find it easier to make use of modern Western institutions, which had evolved out of our own feudal past, than did those Asian peoples who had little or no feudal experience behind them.
One obvious way in which the feudal background was an aid in Japanese modernization was through the military orientation of the leadership it had given Japan. The nineteenth century was a period of predatory imperialism, and the challenge of the Western world was posed most crucially on the military front. This challenge the leaders of Japan were better prepared to see and understand than the leaders of the other, less militaristic Asian countries. For example, while the top Chinese leadership, which was essentially civilian, was still playing around with wholly impractical schemes for meeting the military menace of the West, the Japanese leaders saw quite clearly that their only hope was to match the West in ships, guns, and military skills. While even the more progressive Chinese leaders still thought that it would suffice to graft a few Occidental weapons onto the existing Chinese military organization, the Japanese realized that, if they were to equal the West in military power, they would have to scrap their whole feudal military organization and the feudal society on which it was based and start over again on the basis of a citizens’ army.
The advantages of the military orientation that feudalism gave Japan may be obvious enough, but the equally significant advantages of the feudal background in industrialization and the economic field in general are more surprising. In fact, it would be reasonable to assume that a centralized, bureaucratic empire like China would have been better prepared to modernize economically than a feudally decentralized country like Japan. But this was definitely not the case. While China seemed incapable of producing the necessary new class of industrial entrepreneurs and floundered helplessly in its efforts to modernize its economy, Japan produced a host of capable entrepre-
