For over 200 years Japan had been a completely closed society until the 1850s when visits from Commodore Perry from the USA forced Japan to open its borders, create Treaty Ports and engage in a fantastic sixty year period of industrialisation. Much of it was done with the importation of foreign experts, mainly from Europe, who developed Japan’s coal, iron, shipbuilding and railway industries, together with silk and textile manufacture and communications. Subsequent disputes with China and Russia gave Japan territories in Taiwan, Manchuria and Korea, which were largely undeveloped. As the Japanese had no history of developing a colonial empire, they largely followed the British model and Japan was often referred to at the time as ‘the England of the East’. Thus whilst they constructed the infrastructure of their new colonies, they also developed education, law and order, museums and commercial activity, as well as the transport infrastructure. After several visits to Taiwan and Korea, and with many illustrations of sites in China, I hope to develop the theme that the Japanese colonial empire, modelled on British ideas, succeeded well until militarism overcame moderate thought in Japan.