In the first half of the 19th century, Japan was an agrarian country of tens of millions of rice farmers, a small minority of merchants, who benefited from their hard work, and the elite class of samurai, who, as peace continued, exchanged their swords for calligraphy brushes, working in a variety of administrative positions. Both the farmers and the samurai were indebted to the merchants and this, coupled with increasing peasant unrest and foreign interventions, threatened to destroy the status quo of the Tokugawa Shogunate. And yet, almost four decades later, the Japanese Empire established itself as a regional power in the Far East, going so far as to defeat the Russian behemoth. How did Japan achieve this? How did it undergo such a transformation from a poor isolationist state into a modern military powerhouse? Today, we are going to answer all these questions and talk about the Meiji restoration and the Russo-Japanese War.