They studied the organizations and techniques of Western governments and militaries, and they modeled their own institutions on them. Leading their list of goals was the need to strengthen the military in order to withstand future Western impositions. The prevention of further loss of sovereignty and the revision of the unequal treaties remained the new Meiji government's most pressing issues for the next twenty years. Japanese nationalists protested the insults against their national sovereignty and led the forces which overthrew the Tokugawa regime. The 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the United States and Japan marked the inclusion of Japan into the unfortunate side of this equation. In the nineteenth century, Western powers saddled non-Western states with a variety of unequal arrangements, from fixed tariffs and extraterritoriality to formal colonization.
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