Historians of Japan and Japanese politicians have almost uniformly presented the Meiji Period (1868-1912) as a story of success. The success derived from the fact that Japan retained its status as an independent country by learning from the West and becoming a model for its fellow Asians that had experienced various degrees of colonization and subjugation. The challenge of reusing Meiji as a success story to learn from today is the fact that the Meiji period was a very different - even if just as complex - historical context as in 2017.Different times have inspired historians and politicians to focus on different factors and ignore other factors to tell the story of Meiji. In 1945, historians and politicians emphasized how Meiji Japan had authored a constitution and created democratic institutions. They ignored the decisive role of the Japanese expansion in the name of the Japanese emperor, a war economy, and the training of a conscription army, even though contracts to support the US war effort on the Korean Peninsula started the postwar miracle economy. In 1984, when the US-Japan trade war played out, the Japanese National Bank chose to replace Shōtoku Taishi with Fukuzawa Yukichi on the ¥10000 note. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) lived half his life in the Tokugawa period and the other half in the Meiji period. He symbolizes the individual, independent and highly influential intellectual who was also a highly successful entrepreneur. He learned many of his skills and his approach to life and business during the Tokugawa period, when he studied Dutch Studies (rangaku) and English, and participated in the first delegations sent abroad by the shogun, before he applied them to gain personal success in the Meiji Period. Fukuzawa remains on the Japanese bank note with the highest value. In the paper, I argue that the idea of Meiji as a period of success survives, because so many different factors can be fore-fronted or forgotten, such as the fact that Fukuzawa Yukichi’s entrepreneurial success may have its roots in the Tokugawa Period. Japan’s New Development Cooperation Strategy announced in February 2015, explicitly, states Japanese strengths as private sector development – in the interest of international peace and security. The tying of economic and social development to international peace and security was also the basis for the initial UN Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (UNEPTA) launched in 1949, so in that sense the link is familiar. However, the strategy mentions the need to keep ties to economies that have graduated from being developing countries. The case presented as evidence in my paper is the Japanese understanding of network-based business development, which has little if any relation to the Meiji period. However, it is key to understanding the leap from the Meiji period paradigm to today’s situation and the limitations and politics of adapting the histories of one historical period to another. As an historian, I will caution that history does not repeat itself. Tropes and ideas from the Meiji period are used and reused to make sense and predict success out of new chaotic, unforeseeable, and complex situations, but the only thing history teaches us is that each new situation is as complex and unforeseeable as any previous period.