6 ideas
Peoples can be ranked as barbarian, semi-civilized, or civilized by the degree of their knowledge and virtue, and Japan, China, and Turkey sit in the semi-civilized middle. The ranking is relative and moving rather than fixed: Western nations are the most advanced for now, but they are not a final endpoint, so a nation can climb by deliberately advancing its people's knowledge and virtue.
The outward forms of civilization, such as railways, uniforms, buildings, and laws, are easy to buy and copy. The inner spirit, meaning a people's habits of independent thought, inquiry, and self-reliance, is hard to acquire. Adopting the external forms without first changing that spirit produces an empty shell, so reform should start with the difficult inner change, which then makes the external adoptions take root.
Both virtue and knowledge come in private and public forms. Private virtue, such as personal honesty and restraint, is largely fixed and cannot be passed from one person to another at scale. Knowledge, especially public knowledge applied to society's affairs, accumulates, spreads, and compounds across generations, so the expansion of knowledge rather than moral preaching is the main engine of a civilization's advance.
Historical outcomes are driven by the aggregate knowledge and disposition of the whole population, called the 'spirit of the times,' rather than by the talents of individual leaders or sages. Confucius and Mencius failed politically not from lack of ability but because the general spirit of their era could not carry their ideas. To change a nation's course, therefore, you must raise the level of the many rather than wait for a great ruler.
In Japanese society every relationship was structured as an imbalance of power: ruler over ruled, samurai over commoner, elder over younger. Each person was servile upward and domineering downward, which left Japan with a government but no true nation of engaged citizens. A people without independent individuals cannot sustain an independent country, so dismantling this layered subordination is a precondition for national strength.
When a single power controls both political rule and reverence, as in China's unified imperial authority, thought becomes rigid and no independent reasoning can take hold. Japan's historical split between the sacred emperor and the ruling shogun meant that neither power was absolute. That split created a gap in which competing ideas and freedom of thought could survive, and this multiplicity of forces is what lets a people move toward civilization.