True Left

Isolated Medieval Japan

Unfortunately the isolation did not last long. Next thing you know:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rediscovered-footage-empress-teimei-crown-005259673.html

Century-old footage of Empress Teimei and Crown Prince Hirohito was recently discovered at a university in Ise, giving modern viewers an ultra-rare glimpse into an early 20th century Japan.
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The footage shows a modernized Japan with horse-drawn carriages and men and women in Western-inspired attire. The men sporting formal suits and top hats and the women in floor-length dresses with plume-adorned hats stand in stark contrast to the traditional buildings of the time period.

Soldiers are also shown marching in the rigidly postured style of British soldiers, moving forward with even steps in a straight file line.

"When did the current dynasty of Japan get Westernization?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakumatsu

In the morning of July 16, 1863, under sanction by Minister Pruyn, in an apparent swift response to the attack on the Pembroke, the U.S. frigate USS Wyoming under Captain McDougal sailed into the strait and single-handedly engaged the U.S.-built but poorly manned fleet. For almost two hours before withdrawing, McDougal sank one Japanese vessel and severely damaged the other two, along with some forty Japanese casualties, while the Wyoming suffered extensive damage with fourteen crew dead or wounded.

On the heels of McDougal's engagement, two weeks later a French landing force of two warships, the Tancrède and the Dupleix, and 250 men under Captain Benjamin Jaurès swept into Shimonoseki and destroyed a small town, together with at least one artillery emplacement.

In August 1863, the Bombardment of Kagoshima took place, in retaliation for the Namamugi incident and the murder of the English trader Richardson. The Royal Navy bombarded Kagoshima and sunk several ships. Satsuma however later negotiated and paid 25,000 pounds, but did not remit Richardson's killers, and in exchange obtained an agreement by Great Britain to supply steam warships to Satsuma. The conflict actually became the starting point of a close relationship between Satsuma and Great Britain, which became major allies in the ensuing Boshin War. From the start, the Satsuma Province had generally been in favour of the opening and modernization of Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_(era)

Dissatisfied with the pace of reform after having rejoined the Council of State in 1875, Itagaki organized his followers and other democratic proponents into the nationwide Aikokusha (Society of Patriots) to push for representative government in 1878. In 1881, in an action for which he is best known, Itagaki helped found the Jiyūtō (Liberal Party), which favored French political doctrines.

In 1882, Ōkuma Shigenobu established the Rikken Kaishintō (Constitutional Progressive Party), which called for a British-style constitutional democracy.
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Iwakura and other conservatives borrowed heavily from the Prussian constitutional system.
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Five hundred people from the old court nobility, former daimyo, and samurai who had provided valuable service to the Emperor were organized into a new peerage, the Kazoku, consisting of five ranks: prince, marquis, count, viscount, and baron.
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In 1885, noted public intellectual Yukichi Fukuzawa wrote the influential essay "Leaving Asia", arguing that Japan should orient itself at the "civilized countries of the West", leaving behind the "hopelessly backward" Asian neighbors, namely Korea and China.
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The elite class of the Meiji era adapted many aspects of Victorian taste, as seen in the construction of Western-style pavilions and reception rooms called yōkan or yōma in their homes. These parts of Meiji homes were displayed in popular magazines of the time, such as Ladies' Graphic, which portrayed the often empty rooms of the homes of the aristocracy of all levels, including the imperial palaces. Integrating Western cultural forms with an assumed, untouched native Japanese spirit was characteristic of Meiji society, especially at the top levels, and represented Japan's search for a place within a new world power system in which European colonial empires dominated.[9]
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The Emperor issued a proclamation promoting Western dress over the allegedly effeminate Japanese dress.[13] Fukuzawa Yukichi's descriptions of Western clothing and customs were influential.[14] So Western dress became popular in the public sphere: many men adopted Western dress in the workplace
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It inaugurated a new Western-based education system for all young people, sent thousands of students to the United States and Europe, and hired more than 3,000 Westerners to teach modern science, mathematics, technology, and foreign languages in Japan (O-yatoi gaikokujin).

In 1871, a group of Japanese politicians known as the Iwakura Mission toured Europe and the US to learn western ways.
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Domestic commercial activities and limited foreign trade had met the demands for material culture until the Keiō era, but the modernized Meiji era had radically different requirements. From the onset, the Meiji rulers embraced the concept of a market economy and adopted British and North American forms of free enterprise capitalism.
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As Western imports became popular, demand for Japanese art declined within Japan itself.[36]
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The Meiji era saw a renewed interest in lacquer as artists developed new designs and experimented with new textures and finishes. Foremost among these was Shibata Zeshin,[44] who has been called "Japan's greatest lacquerer".[45] The appeal of his highly original style was in the choice of motifs and subject matter rather than embedded gold and silver. He placed lacquer panels in frames, imitating Western oil paintings.[46]
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The career of porcelain artist Makuzu Kōzan is an archetype for the trajectory of Meiji art.[53] He was passionate about preserving traditional influences, but adopted new technologies from the West.[53] He was an entrepreneur as well as an artist, organizing a workshop with many artisans[54] and actively promoting his work at international exhibitions, travelling extensively in Europe.[55] As his career went on, he adopted more Western influences on his decoration[56]
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Gradually, Western music became an integral part of the Japanese culture where the importance of Western music was undertaken as a part of a social project. The military bands played prominent role in the society. That included public concerts of Western music, which were held in a famous Rokumeikan Hall and Hibiya Open-Air stage in Tokyo, performing marches, patriotic music and European composers’ works
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The great impact in the choral music development was made by Ukrainian musicians: conductors Yakov Tikhai (served in the Orthodox mission from 1874 to 1886) and Dmytro Livovsky (served in the Orthodox mission from 1880 to 1921). They organized the first traditional choirs in Holy Resurrection Cathedral in Tokyo (known as Nikolai-do), taught music in Tokyo Theological Seminary, completed and published the first musical score collections, educated the first Japanese choir conductors and music teachers.
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The educational field also was a major way for adopting Western-style music.[67] The educational reforms were led by Isawa Shūji (1851-1917) and Luther Whiting Mason (1828-1896). In 1880, the Music Research Institute in Tokyo (Ongaku Torishirabe Gakari), headed by Izawa Shuji, was founded. The Institute had three main tasks: 1) to introduce compulsory music teaching in schools, to introduce Western-style songs;

Meanwhile, it was OK for shipwreck survivors to be "white":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normanton_incident

The Normanton incident (ノルマントン号事件, Norumanton-gō jiken) was a set of reactions and events surrounding the sinking of a British merchant vessel named Normanton off the coast of what is now Japan's Wakayama Prefecture on October 24, 1886. When the Normanton ran aground, the ship's officers appear to have seized the lifeboats for the Europeans alone. Among the Asians aboard (Indian and Chinese crew, and the Japanese passengers) there were no survivors. Uproar in Japan obliged the British Consular Court to revisit its initial exoneration of the captain and to accept there had been criminal misconduct. But no compensation was offered. In Japan, the incident was widely interpreted as a further illustration of the humiliations visited upon the country since her forced opening to the West in the 1850s, and it led to new and persistent calls for the revision of the "unequal treaties".
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On the evening of October 24, 1886, the 240-ton British cargo ship Normanton, registered to the Madamson & Bell Steamship Company, left Yokohama Harbor laden with both goods and 25 Japanese passengers for the port of Kobe. En route she was caught in heavy wind and rains all the way from Yokkaichi in Mie Prefecture to the Cape of Kashinozaki in Wakayama Prefecture, where the vessel was wrecked. She ran aground on an offshore reef and was lost.[2] The ship's captain John William Drake and all of his European crew (consisting of Britons and Germans) escaped the sinking ship in lifeboats,  leaving the remaining crewmen (twelve Indians and Chinese) and the 25 Japanese passengers aboard to escape by themselves.[3] Drake and his European crewmen were picked up by coastal fishermen who took them in.[2]

As usual, the "non-whites" (being Eurocentrists) helped the "whites", while the "whites" (being ethnotribalists) left the "non-whites" to drown.

On October 28, Inoue Kaoru, Minister for Foreign Affairs for Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi's first cabinet, received a telegram from Matsumoto Kanae, Governor of Wakayama Prefecture, briefly outlining the events surrounding the shipwreck. He was alarmed by the fact that all the Japanese passengers were lost, and ordered an investigation of the situation on the spot.[2] However, Japanese officials were hindered in their efforts to verify the facts of the incident by the legal barriers imposed by the unequal treaties.
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Public opinion in Japan was outraged over what was perceived to be a miscarriage of justice.[5][6] An example of public sentiment at the time was found in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun (forerunner of the Mainichi Shimbun, founded in 1872.) The paper reported in an outrage that, "If the Captain and the more than 20 seamen under him were able to be rescued, it makes sense that at least one or two Japanese passengers would have been saved along with them. However, the ugly truth is all of them were lost." In another article, they claimed that, "If the passengers had been Westerners, they would have been rescued immediately. These men were left to die because they were Japanese".[7]

The Japanese were Westernizing heavily by then. It didn't matter. They were still "non-white". Here is a picture of Inoue:



His Western clothes and hairstyle didn't help his investigation!

The North China Herald in Shanghai called the decision of the Board of Enquiry a "farce", a "miscarriage of justice" and a "complete whitewash".[8]

"White" being the operative term.

Foreign Minister Inoue had been a staunch supporter of the country's Europeanization by hosting elaborate balls at the Rokumeikan

Did it help him in the end?