Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"On March 31, 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry and the "Black Ships" of the United States Navy forced the opening of Japan to the outside world with the Convention of Kanagawa. Subsequent similar treaties with Western countries in the Bakumatsu period brought economic and political crises. The resignation of the shogun led to the Boshin War and the establishment of a centralized state nominally unified under the Emperor (the Meiji Restoration)." [Wikipedia] "Of all the non-European countries only one actually succeeded in meeting and beating the west at its own game. This was Japan . . . The discovery of gold in California, that crucial event in world history in our period, brought the United States squarely into the Pacific area and Japan squarely into the centre of western attempts to 'open' its markets as the Opium War had 'opened' those of China. . . ." [Hobsbawm: Capital, p. 146-53] "It defined him as 'sacred and inviolable,' 'head of the empire' (gensbu), supreme commander (daigensui) of the armed forces, and superintendent of all the powers of sovereignty. . . . This system . . . can be called a kind of constitutionally guided but by no means constitutional monarchy." [Hirohito, p. 7-8]