Admiral Togo and Japan’s victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War provided the springboard. Over time, the Japanese spirit took on military elements. Some modernizers even considered making English the new national language and considered a policy of western intermarriage (Harding, 2017).

The government wanted to fuse Western technology with the Japanese spirit. The new Imperial police forces mimicked France’s. Japan’s new navy was modeled after Britain’s navy. The survey led to Japan adopting practices from throughout the West. They also sent people like Soseki to study abroad. The new Imperial government sent researchers to cities in 12 countries to discover what modernization truly involved. Soseki was born into a period that viewed modernization with skepticism even as Japan embraced it. Throughout Soseki’s novels we see the theme of loneliness that looks terribly familiar. The process uses technology–social media, smart phones, automation, and the like–that is just as disruptive to culture as the Meiji period’s break-neck industrialization. Attentionization is the shift toward turning our attention into a resource. His experiences of modernization mirror what we experience today with our own transition into attentionization, if you will. He numbered among the first Japanese to live in a Westernized Japan.

Soseki grew up during the upheaval after the fall of the Shogun and the rise of the Meiji period. Japan’s novelist Natsume Soseki remains relevant for us today.

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