IT IS HARDLY new to suggest that one of the more distinctive features of Meiji Japan was the highly pragmatic efforts of its leaders to adapt foreign methods and institutions to Japanese society, to balance, as it were, the uniquely Japanese with a number of typically universal features of civiliza tion. Nor was such balancing and adaptation new to Meiji Japan. Similar efforts had occurred at least as far back as the fourth- and fifth-century tomb period, again in Nara and yet again in the days of the Ashikaga. But never before had the determination to balance been carried out with such intensity; never had it been compacted so massively into such a brief pe riod of time.

To read the history of these years is to study a constant series of clashes, sometimes dynamic and sometimes disruptive, sometimes con scious and sometimes less so, between the traditional and the modern, the particular and the universal, the Japanese and the Western. It was a strug gle experienced in some measure by every single individual who significantly influenced the period's history. Ōkuma Shigenobu from Hizen, for example, might well have been a strictly Japanese type, given his unwillingness ever to leave his homeland to travel abroad; yet it was this very patriot who in so many ways led the parade of economic Westerniza tion as finance minister in the 1870s. Itō Hirobumi, in contrast to Ōkuma, went abroad several times, but on one of his most publicized trips, the 1882 mission to Europe to study Western constitutional systems, his primary aim was to find a means of legitimizing a distinctly Japanese form of con stitutionalism. The very individuals supporting the erection of a social pavilion, the Rokumeikan, for Western-style dances and entertainment in the early 1880s would in those same years help prepare an important set of “Imperial Precepts to Soldiers and Sailors” aimed at reinforcing such tradi tional values as loyalty and valor. Whether consciously or unconsciously the Meiji leaders always seemed to be struggling to incorporate both the Japanese and the universal into a single new way of national life.