Japan
The peripheral East Asian state that industrialized and joined the great-power system
Also known as: Japan, Japanese, Japan's
The peripheral East Asian state that industrialized after the Meiji Restoration and joined the great-power system. A central actor in T&H's Pacific narrative from 1895 through 1945 (T&H 27).
Quigley's Framing
Japan is Quigley's textbook case of successful late industrialization in a non-Western civilization. The Meiji project — selective adoption of Western military, financial, and administrative technology under tight elite control — is treated as the deliberate counterpoint to China's failure to modernize through the same period. He reads the resulting Japanese great-power state as structurally unstable: an industrial-military apparatus grafted onto a still-feudal social order, generating the ideological contradictions that drove the 1931–1945 expansion.
Strategic Role
In the twentieth-century narrative Japan moves from the 1895 victory over China, through the 1905 victory over Russia, the seizure of Korea and Manchuria, the wider East Asian war from 1937, and the final collision with the United States from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. T&H gives serious attention to the diplomatic mismanagement of the 1930s — both American and Japanese — and to the post-1945 American reconstruction that produced one of the great Cold War success stories. Post-war Japan, embedded in the U.S. security system and the Bretton Woods architecture, becomes the model for later East Asian developmental states.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 27 Quigley
Japan, the peripheral East Asian state that industrialized after Meiji and joined the great-power system.
- weapons-systems-political-stability Quigley
The Meiji project was the selective adoption of Western military and administrative technology under tight elite control.