Emperor Meiji

Mutsuhito was born in 1852 into a Japan sealed by the Tokugawa shogunate, its 270 domains locked under feudal rule. The forced opening to the West in 1854 set domestic pressure building, and when his father Emperor Kōmei died in 1867, samurai from Chōshū and Satsuma fought the Boshin War to dismantle the shogunate and restore imperial power in the young emperor's name. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 proclaimed the empire and began the transformation: the Charter Oath that year, the Constitution in 1889, the Cabinet in 1885, the Diet in 1890, all shaped by the oligarchs called the genrō. Japan's military proved the shift real, routing China in 1894-95 and stunning Russia a decade later. Taiwan came in 1895, Korea in 1910. He died in July 1912, leaving his son Yoshihito an industrial state where he'd inherited a medieval one.