In 1853, four American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay and demanded that Japan — closed to most foreign contact for 220 years — open its ports. The Tokugawa government, which had kept the country at peace through deliberate isolation, had no answer. Within fifteen years it had collapsed. A coalition of young samurai from outlying domains seized power in the name of the long-marginalized emperor and announced, in 1868, that Japan would modernize on Western terms before the West could colonize it. They had perhaps thirty years.
What followed is, by some distance, the most successful crash modernization program in history. The samurai class voluntarily abolished itself. A conscripted national army replaced the warrior caste within a decade. The legal code was rewritten on French and German models. A national rail network, a banking system, compulsory primary education, a constitution, an industrial base — all installed in a generation, mostly by importing foreign experts and then sending Japanese students abroad to replace them. By 1895, Japan defeated China in war. By 1905, it defeated Russia — the first time in the modern era that an Asian power had militarily beaten a European one. By 1910, it had annexed Korea. The price of catching up was becoming an empire of the same kind that had originally threatened it, and the trajectory continued, with appalling consequences, into the 1940s.
Every subsequent state — from postwar South Korea to contemporary China — that has attempted state-led catch-up modernization has studied the Meiji case. It is the proof of concept that a society can, by deliberate effort, telescope two centuries of European industrialization into thirty years. It is also the proof that the price is rarely small.