Choshu in the Meiji Restoration - Paperbackby Albert M. Craig (Author) When Commodore Perry arrived in Japan to open the country to Western trade in 1853, he found a medieval amalgam of sword bearing samurai, castle towns, Confucian academies, peasant villages, rice paddies, upstart merchants, bath houses, and Kabuki. Fifteen years later, Japan was on its way to becoming the only non Western nation in the nineteenth century with a modern centralized bureaucratic state and industrial economy.