During the Tokugawa shogunates, Japan aimed at maintaining a static society, and did a pretty fair job of it: contacts with the European world confined to Nagas

During the Tokugawa shogunates, Japan aimed at maintaining a static society, and did a pretty fair job of it: contacts with the European world confined to Nagasaki, firearms excluded, etc. During about the same years, the Americans went from colonists mostly east of the Atlantic fall line to an independent nation that controlled most of the territory where the contiguous 48 states are. I say this not to imply some American superiority, but to point out that training, in those circumstances, was often irrelevant.