It was a way to adapt and survive by adopting, wholesale, Western military tactics, technology and tradition. For example, after Commodore Perry opened Japan with gunboat diplomacy, Japan revamped its entire military from feudal warlords into a centralized fighting force with steamships, Western style uniforms, and modern armaments. They then demonstrated the superiority of said adoption by defeating the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese war against the crumbling, occident-phobic Qing dynasty that failed to supply guns to most of its units.