Which country's history includes the Meiji Restoration?

Japan, from 1868 - and restoration is a careful word for a revolution. The emperor had been a ceremonial figure for centuries while shoguns ruled; the reformers who overthrew the Tokugawa presented their coup as restoring imperial authority, which made the most radical change in Japanese history look like a return to tradition.

The speed afterwards is the remarkable part. Within about thirty years Japan had abolished the samurai class, built railways and telegraphs, introduced conscription and compulsory education, written a constitution, and industrialised - deliberately importing foreign experts, sending missions abroad to study Western institutions and then choosing among them, taking the Prussian model for the army and the British for the navy.

The motive was the alternative in plain sight. China had been carved into concessions after the Opium Wars, and American warships had already forced Japan open in 1853. The reformers concluded that a country either modernised or was colonised, and pursued the first with enormous urgency - which also produced an imperial project of its own, in Taiwan, Korea and China, within a generation of having feared being on the receiving end of one.