 By convention the modern period in Japan is considered to have begun with the demise of the Tokugawa shogunate and the formal restoration of the emperor to power in 1868 and continues until today. Although the Tokugawa were gradually losing control for some decades, the precipitating cause for their downfall was the shogunate’s inability to effectively address the incursion of U.S. gunships into Tokyo harbor in 1854 forcing Japan to open its doors to trade with the West. Although a smattering of information about the West had trickled into Japan during its period of closure starting in 1637, the intelligentsia were shocked at how far Japan had fallen behind technologically. Forced to accept severely unfavorable trade agreements first with the United States and then Britain and Russia, Japan realized that it had to modernize quickly or fall victim to Western imperialism. Its hope was that somehow it could achieve that modernization through allocating a balance between “Japanese spirit and Western ingenuity” (wakon yōsai) that is, by finding a way to maintain its fundamental cultural values while adopting Western education, science, and technology. That challenge inspired much of the philosophical thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.