) From this it would appear that the Dutch scholars' work in
enlightening the nation upon the subject of foreign scientific
attainments was anathema, but a conclusion of that kind must not
be hastily arrived at. The cry, "Away with the barbarians!" was
directed against Perry and the envoys of other foreign Powers,
but there was nothing in that slogan which indicates a general
unwillingness to emulate the foreigners' achievements in
armaments or military tactics. In fact, for a number of years
previous to 1853, Satsuma and Choshu and other western clans had
been very busily engaged in manufacturing guns and practising
gunnery: to that extent, at any rate, the discoveries of the
students of European sciences had been deliberately used by those
men who were to be foremost in the Restoration.

This passage gives the key to the spirit which has animated modern Japan
down to the present day.

The Restoration was, to a greater extent than is usually realized in the
West, a conservative and even reactionary movement. Professor Murdoch,
in his authoritative _History of Japan,_[47] says:--

In the interpretation of this sudden and startling development
most European writers and critics show themselves seriously at
fault. Even some of the more intelligent among them find the
solution of this portentous enigma in the very superficial and
facile formula of "imitation." But the Japanese still retain
their own unit of social organization, which is not the
individual, as with us, but the _family_. Furthermore, the
resemblance of the Japanese administrative system, both central
and local, to certain European systems is not the result of
imitation, or borrowing, or adaptation. Such resemblance is
merely an odd and fortuitous resemblance. When the statesmen who
overthrew the Tokugawa regime in 1868, and abolished the feudal
system in 1871, were called upon to provide the nation with a new
equipment of administrative machinery, they did not go to Europe
for their models. They simply harked back for some eleven or
twelve centuries in their own history and resuscitated the
administrative machinery that had first been installed in Japan
by the genius of Fujiwara Kamatari and his coadjutors in 645
A.D., and more fully supplemented and organized in the succeeding
fifty or sixty ye