Westernization During World War I, Russia, And Japan

Westernization is a theme that consistently reappears throughout world history. As countries develop, not only do they face the difficult task of creating their own stability, but as western countries push for international dominance, they struggle with sustaining their identity. In contrast to this, some nations see the benefits of westernization as outweighing its cons, and welcome the western influence with open arms. For some nations, this decision was forced upon them. For others, despite their desire to stay with their cultural originality, economic needs and social pressures forced them to accept the Western style. In the cases of Japan and Russia, these countries were a mix of the two scenarios. Over the period of time beginning in

American Commodore Matthew C. Perry entered Japanese ports with large warships, forcing them to open diplomatic relations with the United States, creating civil unrest all throughout Japan. This sparked the 1868 Meiji Rebellion, led by Emperor Meiji. Under the Meiji government, further westernization took place as they sent students overseas to study in western nations, even girls. Japan continued to grow as a copycat western power. However in 1856, Russia was forced to sign the Treaty of Paris. This allowed the West to show superiority over the Russians, by not allowing their naval ships to enter the Black Sea. This in turn made Russia vulnerable to pirates, also showing the West’s ability to overpower the less developed Russia. Russia soon thereafter realized that leaning towards the western ideals would be a wiser choice than staying strictly to their centuries old traditions. In the early twentieth century the industrial development was at a large increase, high taxes as well as bad living and working conditions gave way to an array of strikes by the people. Although at first glance this may not seem to show much evidence of westernization, the bad conditions as well as strikes mirror that of the prior American Industrial Revolution. The economic boom of both nations left a packed urban society in their wake, a trait

Japan joined the western-based League of Nations created in 1920 in order to encourage international peace and cooperation. Later, they had withdrawn from the League. In 1937, Japan moved on to one achieve its newly found goal of creating colonial empires, in order to obtain countries’ national resources. The first country to be attacked was China. These steps taken by Japan after World War I show the influence of westernization because without opening up its ports to other countries decades earlier, Japan would never have been exposed to the western ideals and goals, in which a main focus is developing colonial empires in order to gain as much power overseas as possible. As per Russia, after World War I, they existed in complete contrast to Japan. While Japan learned to thrive on its own, Russia was in a downward spiral. Loosing enormous amount of people in the war socially and economically devastated the nation. Territory losses were also a wound that still needed to be bandages for Russia post-World War I. Another example of contrast to Japan, this shows no evidence of