When I read discussions about how we will be able to rebuild Iraq as a democracy like we did Japan after world war II, I always want to protest that they didn't have Shi'a and Sunni and Kurds, all at war with one another. City-Journal has different concerns.

The truth is very different. In embracing democracy under American occupation, the Japanese drew on a long, if imperfect, democratic tradition. Within a generation of Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 arrival in Uraga Bay, opening the country to the outside world for the first time in 250 years, Japan’s leaders had enacted an ambitious series of reforms, amounting to a social and political revolution. Known as the Meiji Restoration, this revolution from above greatly limited the power of the Meiji emperor, giving Japan a modern central government, new civil and criminal codes, and, from 1889 on, an authentic constitutional system. Though initially just the wealthiest 1 percent elected the new parliament, by the 1920s all adult males had the vote..