The goal of Meiji leaders was emphatically not to “Westernize” Japan, in the sense of converting it into a European society far from Europe—unlike Australia’s British colonists, whose goal was indeed to convert Australia into a British society far from Britain (Chapter 7). Instead, the Meiji goal was to adopt many Western features, but to modify them to suit Japanese circumstances, and to retain much of traditional Japan. Those adopted and modified Western features were grafted onto a Japanese core retained from Japanese history.
