AH Tropes: "Pulling a Meiji"

Sometimes I get the impression, from reading this forum, that people think Japan went straight from katana waving medieval samurai to aircraft carriers. In reality the Meiji Restoration was the culmination of hundreds of years of indigenous Tokugawa era Japanese development. No, some random band of hunter-gatherers isn't going to "pull a Meiji" and become a first world nation out of the blue. That's projecting lazy Hollywood pop historiography onto our complex reality.
 
"Pulling a Meiji" is less about prehistoric society discovering electricity, tough, than how a counry with a relative technological backwardness compared to Europe does manages to quickly advance as an industrial and geopolitical player up to decisively beating an European empire.
I agree that it took, as any trope, some weird heights sometimes, but let's remember that "tropes aren't bad".
 
That's generally accepted but it's also easier to say than "a fast industrialisation tinted of westernisation which might be built on educational reform and a solid tradition" and it's more precise than "modernisation"
 
That's generally accepted but it's also easier to say than "a fast industrialisation tinted of westernisation which might be built on educational reform and a solid tradition" and it's more precise than "modernisation"
And still leagues better and more realistic than "westernisation" as it implies an indigenous solution, rather than "-random people- copies Europe".
 
And still leagues better and more realistic than "westernisation" as it implies an indigenous solution, rather than "-random people- copies Europe".
Also, to me, it implies widespread progress.
"Modernisation" could be just infrastructure and big projects only benefitting the upper class with the people left in a subsistence economy (Iran in the 50's with the Shah).
Meiji is more like Korea in late XXth century where the rising tide lifts all boats
 
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