1919 Парис буюу дэлхийг өөрчилсан 6 сар 1-р хэсэг

The prince knew well what message he was conveying. In his lifetime he had seen his country transformed from an insignificant collection of islands in the north Pacific into a major power. It is still difficult for the Japanese, let alone outsiders, to grasp the magnitude of that change. What had been an inward-looking nation ruled by a feudal nobility had been made into a modern power with all the underpinnings: an industrial economy which by 1919 was fast coming to rival that of France; a military that had exchanged its steel swords and pikes for machine guns and battleships; and an infrastructure of railways, telegraphs, schools and universities. The feudal lords, like the prince himself, had become diplomats, politicians and industrialists; their retainers had joined the army or the police.

The prince was a complex, enormously subtle man, as much a hybrid as his nation. His journey to Paris had been one not just of miles but of centuries. He was born in 1849, into a Japan still largely isolated from the outside world. His long family tree, kept with the utmost care, showed marriages with the other great houses and even the imperial family itself By contrast, the Tokugawa clan, which had ruled Japan since the 1600s in the name of an impotent emperor, were vulgar parvenus. He had the usual education for a boy of his class: classical literature, in Chinese as well as Japanese; calligraphy; the traditional instruments and the cultivation of tiny, perfect Bonsai trees. He also shocked his elders when he learned to ride, something considered demeaning for one of his rank. If things had gone in their customary procession, he would have lived out his life in the stifling, enclosed world of the old court, with an honorary position and a wife selected from among the small number of suitable girls. He would never have traveled abroad, because that was forbidden and, more important, unthinkable. He would never have enjoyed real power, because that lay in the hands of the military nobility.713 The Japanese have a myth that their islands are balanced on the back of a giant turtle; when the turtle moves, earthquakes result. In 1853 an earthquake of a different sort came. An aggressive American sailor, Commodore Matthew Perry, acting on behalf of the American government, appeared in Tokyo Bay