small but intellectually vigorous group of students of the European sciences arose, working through the medium of the Dutch language, which they learned from the Dutch at Nagasaki. Within a few decades, a Dutch-Japanese dictionary was compiled and a text on anatomy translated into Japanese. By the middle of the nineteenth century Japanese scholars were well versed in such Western sciences as gunnery, smelting, shipbuilding, cartography, and medicine. Few in number, they formed a valuable nucleus of scholars to take the lead in scientific work on a much larger scale when opportunity finally offered itself.
The development of a strong national consciousness during the Tokugawa period was another element in setting the stage for Japan’s modernization. By the nineteenth century the Japanese were definitely a nationalistic people, and their possession of a fully developed spirit of nationalism perhaps best explains the success and speed with which they transformed their country into a modern nation-state.
As in western Europe, nationalism in Japan was the result of long, slow growth. Why it should have appeared so early and developed so fully in Japan, long before it became significant in other Asiatic lands, is an interesting question. The main reason may have been that the Japanese throughout their history felt themselves to be completely overshadowed by China but still distinct from it. There was no denying that China was the cradle of civilization in the Far East, a far older and greater country than Japan, and that Japan was no more than a small and, for long, a backward offshoot of Chinese civilization. The Koreans and