Few countries have broken with their past as sharply as Japan did. That was the price it paid for modernity.
Japan in the mid-19th century had a beautiful, deep, highly refined culture that reached far down the social scale — but it was an ancient culture, not a modern one, artistic rather than acquisitive, helpless against encroaching Western powers that had already colonized much of the non-Western world and were hungry for the rest.
Japan had only to look next door to China to see its own ghastly fate if it failed to match the West strength-for-strength. And so the past was shed. Japan became strong, rich — "Western."