51�Թ�

But the Meiji restoration, as it's known, was no storming of the Bastille.

The truth is that Japan and the West have been busily emulating and exoticizing each other at least since the 1868 Meiji Restoration.

More than a century old, the tree was an exemplar of the Imperial style, a type of bonsai developed for shoguns and feudal lords and named after the Imperial court during the 19th-century Meiji Restoration, an era of cultural transformation that arose following the country’s 214-year-long period of isolation.

After the Meiji Restoration in 1863, the samurai as a class were destroyed and aristocratic fashion shifted to Western styles.

The lantern was created in the middle of the 17th century for the funeral ceremony of Tokugawa Iemitsu, a Japanese shōgun, one of the iron-fisted military leaders who ruled the Japanese islands in the centuries before the 1868 Meiji Restoration elevated the emperor from a ceremonial titleholder to actual power.