Japanese Spirit, Western Technology

The challenge for this thread is for Japan to open up the country, and industrialized, but never Westernize.

Like Example, having trains and modern rifles, but keeping Japanese style, such as the Kimono or Japanese hair styles, in society, or having samurai in most of the army, but having them serve Emperor.

How can they become an empire, while keeping their Edo Japanese Culture?
 
The problem is that Western culture is so defined by Western technological advancement, that it's really impossible to separate the two.

For example, Western fashion, in the modern sense, emerged out of the industrialization of the textile industry. Before that, Western fashion hardly looked more like modern Western fashion than old "Eastern" fashion did. Most modern "Western" clothing is simply "what can we make most easily in a factory that will be cheap and practical to wear". Same with hairstyles. In developed countries, there's usually only a handful of hairstyles that hairstylists/barbers will know how to do at any given time. Because they all go to the same beauty schools and read the same magazines, etc.

Samurai are essentially the same as Western knights. Both the West and Japan transitioned away from the "small amounts of highly skilled guys on horses" model to "massive amounts of less skilled guys with guns" model. You could have Japan ceremonially keep the samurai class, in the same way that Britain still knights people, but there's no way a modern Japan would keep it as a functional thing.

Same is true for political models and such as well.
 
The challenge for this thread is for Japan to open up the country, and industrialized, but never Westernize.

Like Example, having trains and modern rifles, but keeping Japanese style, such as the Kimono or Japanese hair styles, in society, or having samurai in most of the army, but having them serve Emperor.

How can they become an empire, while keeping their Edo Japanese Culture?

The Samurai are no dice, at the very least. The mass proliferation of dependable firearms render heavy armor a very expensive paperweight, and the elite warrior caste isent compatible with a Napoleonic-style army.
 
The challenge for this thread is for Japan to open up the country, and industrialized, but never Westernize.

Like Example, having trains and modern rifles, but keeping Japanese style, such as the Kimono or Japanese hair styles, in society, or having samurai in most of the army, but having them serve Emperor.

How can they become an empire, while keeping their Edo Japanese Culture?

Well, the Western-style clothing and so forth was introduced as part of a conscious Westernisation programme. So, maybe keep Japan more open to foreign contacts for the preceding centuries, and have it avoid falling so far behind that it needs to enact a big catch-up programme in the late 19th century. That way, there'd be less perceived need to adopt Western ways wholesale.

For example, Western fashion, in the modern sense, emerged out of the industrialization of the textile industry. Before that, Western fashion hardly looked more like modern Western fashion than old "Eastern" fashion did. Most modern "Western" clothing is simply "what can we make most easily in a factory that will be cheap and practical to wear". Same with hairstyles. In developed countries, there's usually only a handful of hairstyles that hairstylists/barbers will know how to do at any given time. Because they all go to the same beauty schools and read the same magazines, etc.

I very much doubt this. If you look at past fashion, there's no real clear break at the start of the industrial revolution, nor is there any reason why you can't mass-produce, say, Arab-style ankle-length tunics and turbans. As for hairstyles, those have always been pretty standardised, as any cursory glance at a collection of old portraits will show.
 
The challenge for this thread is for Japan to open up the country, and industrialized, but never Westernize.

Like Example, having trains and modern rifles, but keeping Japanese style, such as the Kimono or Japanese hair styles, in society, or having samurai in most of the army, but having them serve Emperor.

How can they become an empire, while keeping their Edo Japanese Culture?

Japanese cultural style hasn't exactly been rendered unto extinction with westernization. If anything they're one of the few examples of a nation westernizing that didn't throw out their soul while they were at it.
 
The challenge for this thread is for Japan to open up the country, and industrialized, but never Westernize.

Like Example, having trains and modern rifles, but keeping Japanese style, such as the Kimono or Japanese hair styles, in society, or having samurai in most of the army, but having them serve Emperor.

How can they become an empire, while keeping their Edo Japanese Culture?

Its hard if not almost impossible to do, they would have to become, westernized if you are going by that late of a POD. Samurai by the late Edo period were not the nebulous class of warrior aristocrats of the Sengoku era but administrators, of a nation that had largely disarmed. Modernizing would mean Westernizing their armies, simply because the under the laws of the Tokugawa and to a lesser extent the Toyotomi, only the samurai could bear arms, but found themselves gradually taking on the role of administrators.

Modern Samurai would require an evolving Japan to work, which goes against your challenge, but it would be nothing more than a professional army in spirit.
 
I very much doubt this. If you look at past fashion, there's no real clear break at the start of the industrial revolution, nor is there any reason why you can't mass-produce, say, Arab-style ankle-length tunics and turbans. As for hairstyles, those have always been pretty standardised, as any cursory glance at a collection of old portraits will show.

I don't know what you wear, but I don't dress like a medieval peasant. I wear t-shirts (invented during the 20th century to make mass production easier, as it uses as little fabric as possible), I wear underwear (also an industrial era invention, self-explanatory), and I wear blue jeans (an industrial era invention as well, to make the most effective clothing for the working man as possible, in the cheapest dye available at the time). Likely a Japan that industrialized first would invent fairly similar things, even if there are minor aesthetical differences.

Hairstyles have always been standardized, but they became much moreso with the advent of capitalism. This reached its peak in the 1950s, but the trend towards two or three practical hairstyles for men, and a few slightly longer ones for women was an inevitable product of modernization.
 
I don't know what you wear, but I don't dress like a medieval peasant. I wear t-shirts (invented during the 20th century to make mass production easier, as it uses as little fabric as possible), I wear underwear (also an industrial era invention, self-explanatory), and I wear blue jeans (an industrial era invention as well, to make the most effective clothing for the working man as possible, in the cheapest dye available at the time). Likely a Japan that industrialized first would invent fairly similar things, even if there are minor aesthetical differences.

Fashion always changes, and has done since well before the industrial revolution. The fact that clothing has changed since the 17th century doesn't at all mean that the precise changes that occurred were inevitable. As for your specific examples, the fact that they followed the start of the industrial revolution by some 150 years makes any claim of causation dubious. (And as a matter of fact, underwear predates the industrial revolution.)

Hairstyles have always been standardized, but they became much moreso with the advent of capitalism.

Citation very much needed.

This reached its peak in the 1950s, but the trend towards two or three practical hairstyles for men, and a few slightly longer ones for women was an inevitable product of modernization.

Just try looking at ancient Roman portraits; the hairstyle basically remains the same from at least the middle Republic to the fall of the Empire. I think that having a single common hairstyle for upwards of six hundred years counts as pretty standardised by any reasonable definition.
 
Fashion always changes, and has done since well before the industrial revolution. The fact that clothing has changed since the 17th century doesn't at all mean that the precise changes that occurred were inevitable. As for your specific examples, the fact that they followed the start of the industrial revolution by some 150 years makes any claim of causation dubious. (And as a matter of fact, underwear predates the industrial revolution.)



Citation very much needed.



Just try looking at ancient Roman portraits; the hairstyle basically remains the same from at least the middle Republic to the fall of the Empire. I think that having a single common hairstyle for upwards of six hundred years counts as pretty standardised by any reasonable definition.

I mean you could just as easily say "look at Qing China, all the men had one hairstyle!". There's always exceptions, but for the most part standardization of anything, not just hairstyles, was much more difficult in the past because travel and communication was more difficult.

And yes obviously the industrial revolution was a long process. I encourage you to read about it, it was a pretty fascinating thing.
 
I mean you could just as easily say "look at Qing China, all the men had one hairstyle!". There's always exceptions, but for the most part standardization of anything, not just hairstyles, was much more difficult in the past because travel and communication was more difficult.

You could also try looking at ancient Assyrian, Egyptian, medieval, or early modern portraits, and you'll see uniform hairstyles.

And yes obviously the industrial revolution was a long process. I encourage you to read about it, it was a pretty fascinating thing.

So far, you haven't provided any actual evidence of a causal link between the industrial revolution and modern European fashions, still less any evidence that modern European fashions were inevitable given the industrial revolution.
 
The Keio Reforms and Boshin War showed that the samurai could adapt into a modern fighting force. It also showed the problems with a samurai army. Not enough samurai, and the manpower that was avaliable was primarily enlisted in feudal domain armies rather than the national army.
 
Japan also want to be Accepted by other modern countries. That would be difficult to do if they still far different from Western culturally and socially. Their reformed legal system, ban on homosexuality and concubinage, meat-eating, etc is so they can be more accepted.
 
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