IN HIS WORK ON JAPAN E. H. Norman first concentrated on the period from the final decades of the Tokugawa to the end of the Meiji era. It was only later that he began to explore problems outside these limits. The Japanese polity with which Norman was concerned underwent a series of convulsions set off by the collapse of the Bakufu-han system and aggravated by the seeming open-endedness or fluidity of the proliferating changes of the early Meiji period. Gradually a relatively flexible structure was erected which was successful in adapting these changes to its own purposes and was able to moderate the pace of change, to institutionalize it, indeed, to convert it from a threat to stable governance into a condition which ensured sound administration. In short, structure was functionally related to change. Spirit? Well, that was another matter. With this structure, at any rate, the first phase of Japan's modernization was complete. To place Norman's work in perspective it must be seen against the backdrop of this early modernization or, as Norman alternatively thought, under the heading of state-building taken in its broadest sense. This, to be sure, represents a reduction of the term modernization-unconscionably overburdened of late-to its earliest, pristine meaning. Looked at more deeply than in its popular usage as a vague term covering advances in transportation or in labor-saving technology, modernization can be taken to represent all the changes in the eighteenth century that transformed human societies, and that, to early unsophisticated observers, seemed to be associated with that manifest revolution in state-building which everywhere was attended by technological innovation. Modernization in this sense is really a typology, and its major constituent is political centralization seen as the result of a process. This process, examined more closely, appears to rest on the elimination of administrative pluralism and to batten on major economic transformation to which technological innovation is functionally related. Economic transformation, in turn, describes a progression from a predominantly agrarian base to one shared with industry or-depending on how far the process of modernization has gone-to a base exclusively industrial. This economic transformation engenders a great social upheaval in which society is wrenched from its rural, relatively static orbit and is