While Meiji leaders were in agreement on their overall goal of strengthening Japan so that it could resist the West, they did not start off with an encompassing blueprint. Instead, Meiji reforms were devised and adopted piecemeal in stages: first, creating a national army, an income stream, and a national system of education, and abolishing feudalism; then, a constitution, and civil and criminal law codes; and even later, overseas expansion by wars (to be discussed in the next pages). Nor were all of these reforms adopted smoothly and unanimously: there was internal conflict in Meiji Japan,
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