As recently as 2000, J. Nye Jr., a noted scholar of international relations, reiterated the well-known truism that Japan was Asia’s first ‘globalizer.’ Less known or less comprehensible is the actual nature of the Meiji state, which was culturally transformed into what some have described as a hybrid form combining contemporaneous Japanese and Western norms. Other historians, such as F. Braudel, have described the state in terms of the “duality of the traditional, awe-inspiring Emperor’s power and the modern.” The hybrid or dual form of the Meiji state was a ‘cultural construct’ fabricated on the basis of governmental and national/local interaction with the study missions sent to the West during the late Tokugawa and early Meiji eras. These experiences may also be referred to as transnational/local interactions or, in the words of M. Bamyeh, as one of the “historical relatives of transnationalism” and perhaps the greatest such experiment in international history dealing with “culturally meaningful borders.” In this context, the paper attempts to analyze the processes involved in the cultural construction of the Meiji state by drawing upon the experiences of the Iwakura mission to America and Europe (1871-73), which had decisive consequences, both positive and negative, for Japan and its Asian neighbours.