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The Emperor Mutsu Hito and his advisers had not been idle since Bertie had last met them. They realized that the only way to avoid being overwhelmed by the West was to adopt Western techniques, and to unite the country effectively; also that both these things had to be done fast. The loosely structured feudal Japan had to be scrapped and the whole of society remade. The same independent daimyos who had helped the Emperor defeat the Shogun had to give up their local power and their retainers; it proved necessary to subdue one of them, Satsuma, in a short, sharp war, but the others abdicated voluntarily before the immemorial prestige of the Emperor. That monarch then turned himself into an analogue of a Western sovereign, complete with parliament and ministers, and a nobility with five ranks. Of the models available, that of Bismarckβs Germany was preferred, even the court etiquette being based, according to Bertie, largely on that of Berlin. Bertie mentions this without comment; but for us it is easy to see that the Prussian spirit, of all variants of Western culture, was the most likely to appeal to a samurai once he had dropped fealty to his own lord and substituted allegiance to the state. The armed forces were reorganized in a Western style, and armaments industries were established; education was remodelled on the German system; and even the arts gave up their age-old devotion to Chinese styles and began imitating the West instead. This was most notably the case in music. The court adopted European dress. At first Europeans found all this rather quaint, but the Japanese victory over Russia abruptly changed matters.
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