Your thoughts on the Meiji restoration?

Your thoughts on the Meiji restoration?

honestly really sad the nation threw away it's sense of self, just so they could industrialize and have that advantage over their future korean and chinese victims

Survival goes not to the strongest, smartest, or fastest

But the organisms that can adapt to change

sort of agree

japan is really ugly and all their cities are just bland generic concrete skyscrapers

yet pre-industrial architecture is beautfiul

But japan largely preserved its culture, adapted to modern times. The code of bushido, confucian ethics, loyalty to the ruler et cetera.

>it's sense of self
What is that? having rice farming as your largest industry and being ruled by sword wielding asshats with hereditary privilege?

just gonna post some ugly shit they've built there

The tokugawa bakufu was in its death throes long before the meiji restoration. It had become a completely untenable system for farmers and samurai alike.
Japan's sense of self from 500AD onwards was to always adapt and mould foreign influence to its needs. That foreign influence was usually China. Once China got dicked, the West became its main foreign influence.

The last samurai is pure glorified nationalist fiction

BUSHIDO DIGNIFIED
IT'S THE LAST STAND OF THE SAMURAI
SURROUNDED AND OUTNUMBERED

>By the end of his career, Yoshitoshi was in an almost single-handed struggle against time and technology. As he worked on in the old manner, Japan was adopting Western mass reproduction methods like photography and lithography. Nonetheless, in a Japan that was turning away from its own past, he almost singlehandedly managed to push the traditional Japanese woodblock print to a new level, before it effectively died with him.