How far have global influences changed the nature of the Japanese nation-state?

politically


socially


and economically?How far have global influences changed the nature of the Japanese nation-state?
OMG, you're kidding, right?


Prior to WWII, Japan was like this anime cartoon about an ancient warrior and a geisha girl.


Okay, it wasn't THAT bad but you get the idea.


Today it is high tech everything, including high tech toilets.


It went from this busy little mechanically industrial island to this high electronics, computerized, mega high business power.


Some of the top high fashion designers are from Japan, giving Paris and Milan a run for their money in what is in and what is out in high fashion.


The Japanese stock market is a monster and on the other side of the world where the day begins. London, New York, and Chicago play hell all day catching up to what Japan did hours before.


Socially the Japanese are a combo of European and American social functions and entertainment.


Japan is a trend setter now .... and the rest of the world is trying to play catch up.


Look what they have done to the auto industry, a market once dominated by Europe and America for years.





Japan seemed to have taken the best of their own world, gathered the best of everyone else's, and I mean, only the best, then they super concentrated everything like orange juice ... and have now become an economic mega super power that their great grandparents during WWII could never have even DREAMED of.





And to think, once upon a time they wanted to take over the world. How silly of them.How far have global influences changed the nature of the Japanese nation-state?
Japan and its people are an amazing state, once it could not stop keeping out all global influences in the mid to late 1800's the Emperor decided to do the exact opposite which became known as the Meiji Restoration, industrializing Japan. At the end of the 1800's Japan conquered Korea and Taiwan from the Chinese and the island Sakhalin from Russia, which was very humiliating because people of Asian descent were thought of as inferior in those days. Japan was decades ahead in the motoring business and was on a fast track to becoming very powerful economically, some people called it the 'Japanese Miracle'. All western nations had a very big head start economically but Japan went from zero to the second largest economy in the world today in a short space of time.
The NATURE of the Japanese NATION-state... Some report?


I could offer some hints.





politically:





-Japan imported the constitutional monarchy system from Germany and the cabinet parliamentary system from the UK. however, Japan had been ruled by the political powers other than the emperor, including the regency and the shogunate, for almost all of its history.





-According to the advice of the US, Japan adopted ';the symbolic emperor system'; after its defeat of the WWII. But the emperor had already been virtually the spiritual leader rather than the political one, as the head priest of the Shintoism.





-So the Japanese built the western-style building on the traditional Japanese foundation, it can be said.





socially:





-The first step of the westernization came in the early Meiji era. At that time many western articles including electricity, railway were introduced. However, the attitude of the Japanese for the westernization was to accept what is needed for the industrialization or modernization of the Japanese society, so its influence on the Japanese lifestyle was limited.





-The second step came when Japan defeated the WWII. The Japanese had been shown the dominant power of US over Japan, so the Japanese adopted the US's way in every field of the Japanese lifestyle. It is just recently that the Japanese has started to review excessive Americanization.





economically:





-When Japan opened the trade with foreign countries in the mid-19th century, Japan had already been a medium-developped economy. However, Japan needed to accelerate the economic growth in order to retain independence. In the early Meiji era, the Japanese government established model factories across the country, invited engineers and scholars from the Western countries, and promoted the investment from the private sector. Japan achieved the industrial revolution during the early 20th century and became one of the most industrialized economies in the world.





-The Japanese economy became all but destroyed during the WWII. The Japanese government concentrated the budget and the resources on the heavy industry including iron manufacturing, automobile, ship building to reconstruct the Japanese economy. It was in 1968 that Japan became the second largest economy in the free world.





-Nevertheless, as it is already mentioned, Japan had already been the medium-developped economy when it opened trade. And manufacturing had been rooted in the whole country then. In other words, ';the soup of organic matter'; had already existed in Japan.





Please do double-check yourself.
I think you should probably look at MacArthur's time as Proconsul of Japan after WWII, during which America essentially created the Japanese State.





And did a pretty good job doing it too