The Meiji Restoration was a period of Japanese history which occurred in the late 19th century when practical imperial rule was restored to Japan during the reign of Emperor Meiji following the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the Boshin War of 1868-1869. Japan's political and social structure changed as a result of the revolution, and Japan rapidly industrialized and adopted Western ideas and production methods.
Background[]
Tokugawa society[]
19th-century samurai
By the mid-19th century, the decline of Chinese civilization hautned East Asia. Consumed by famine and rebellion from within, China was also attacked from without, by British gunboats, forcing the country to open to Western trade. Scarcely noticed, apart from Dutch traders, was Japan. For two centuries, Japan had been locked away from the outside world. By 1615, after a century of civil war, the powerful lord Ieyasu Tokugawa had defeated his enemies and decalred himself shogun, ruler of all Japan. Tokugawa divided society into four ranks, with the merchants at the bottom, then the artisans, the farmers, and, at the top, the samurai. The farmers gave half of their rice harvests to the samurai, and only the samurai had the right to carry swords.
Japanese merchants
The Tokugawa Shogunate was built for war, but it began to crumble after 200 years on peace. The samurai elite had not been allowed to raise its swords, and many of them were forced to become civil servants, keeping the accounts of their lords. Many others went into debt to the merchants due to their inability to make a living, and the merchants came to have more power over the indebted samurai. Merchants, once scorned under the Confucian hierarchy, became more powerful as Japan's barter economy gave way to a new money economy. The hustle of merchants turned the world of the samurai upside-down.
Opening of Japan[]
Foreigners in Japan
The coming of the West struck the spark for a societal explosion. In 1853, four American warships steamed up Tokyo Bay, commanded by Matthew Perry. The Americans came to open up Japan, as they sought water and coal for their whaling ships. The Japanese nicknamed the ships the "black ships" for the ominous smoke that billowed out of their coal engines, and it became clear that Perry would open up the country by force if the Japanese refused. The Japanese marveled at the strange-looking "barbarians" from across the sea, and, onshore, Perry showered his hosts with gifts, such as a toy steam locomotive which the Japanese studied with fascination. The British, Russians, French, and Dutch quickly followed Perry into Japan. Overrun with strange followers, the Tokugawa Shogunate opened the Institute for the Investigation of Barbarian Books.
To some, the arrival of the Westerners attacked Japan's traditional values, and, in the southwest, the remote provinces of Satsuma and Choshu became centers of anti-Western thought. There, samurai called ishin shishi ("men of high purpose") believed that Japan was sacred ground, and that the Emperor in Kyoto was a god. They were furious that the Shogunate had signed a treaty with the "barbarians" without the Emperor's consent, and they chanted sonno joi, meaning "Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarian." Shishi murdered prominent foreigners such as an American translator and a British diplomat, and other shishi attacked Western ships. The West immediately responded, bombarding the home capitals of the shishi in Satsuma and Choshu. The story of the sonno joi resistance was still taught to children in Hagi, Choshu, commemorating Yoshida Shoin, the schoolteacher who had inspired his schoolchildren to become the leaders of the young nation. Yoshida defied the Shogun's orders and rode out to Perry's black ship to learn the secrets of the barbarian, leading to his exile to Hagi to teach.
A Japanese caricature of the West
Yoshida conveyed a key lesson to his students: "To drive the barbarians from our shores, we must learn to use their guns." This saying gave rise to another, "Japanese spirit, Western technology." One of Yoshida's students, Hirobumi Ito, would go on to become Japan's first Prime Minister. Ito and others were convinced to travel abroad and learn the secrets of Western civilization, arguing strenouously for reform before trying to confront the barbarians. The Japanese visits to the West were strange for both sides, with American tabloids printing caricatures, and Japanese visitors writing poems on the strange appearances and languages of the West.
Boshin War[]
A Bakumatsu-era assassination
For centuries, it was China which had captured Japan's imagination with a culture that dominated the Pacific. The Japanese were shocked when they stopped in China on their way home from the west, as, by the 1860s, the largest port cities in China were dominated by the Western powers. In Shanghai, the large French, American, and British firms controlled most of the wealth. China's humbling propelled the shishi into action, and the Satsuma and Choshu regions armed themselves Western-style and joined forces to topple the shogun and take charge of Japan. Like America, Japan was plunged into a state of civil war. Terrorists for and against the shogun conducted a campaign of assassinations, robbing the country of most of its prominent leaders. In 1867, Saigo Takamori led an army of the Satsuma-Choshu alliance and defeated the Shogun's army near Kyoto. The Satsuma-Choshu armies marched from the old capital of Kyoto to Edo, renaming the city Tokyo, meaning "Eastern Capital", and bringing with them the 16-year-old boy emperor, who was renamed Emperor Meiji ("enlightened ruler").
History[]
Rise of the Meiji government[]
Villagers shouting eijanaika in Edo
Meiji became the symbol for a new Japan that would transform itself in 40 years from a country of rice paddies to a modern military and economic power that could stand up to the west. The governing was done by a small group of young samurai in their late twenties and early thirties, and they started from scratch with the task of building a whole nation. They controlled Meiji's seals and were able to issue orders in his name, beginning to think of their new government. From 1868 to 1873, Japanese society transformed as the countryside erupted into spontaneous outbreaks of hysteria. Thousands of carefree people danced into Edo and tossed banknotes into the air while shouting eijanaika ("Who cares?"), bizarrely reacting to the confusion in the country. To bring order to anarchy, the Meiji bureaucrats Ito, Saigo, and Okubo Toshimichi created a finance ministry, a tax policy, a defense policy, and an agriculture policy, developing the mechanisms of government for a huge country. The highly forward-looking reforms were made in Tokyo on paper through proclamations of the bureaucracy, and the villagers were forced to pay for the new programs, including education and a national army.
A rebellion against the "blood tax"
Farmers were outraged by higher tariffs and the "blood tax", government officials taking their sons off the land to serve in the army. Their fury exploded in spontaneous rebellions across the country, challenging the progamme of the Meiji leaders. Beyond taxation, the government had to worry about extending a sense of participation and citizenship to people across the country. The government also had to destroy their class system, including the nonproductive samurai, in order to move on. The Meiji oligarchs suspended the samurai class' stipends in rice to compel them to go into business for themselves, but many poor and unemployed samurai could not make the transition. General Saigo argued for a play to employ samurai by invading Korea, but Meiji's more cautious leaders overruled him. Saigo responded by leaving the government, and, when the rice stipends were abolished, he went to war against the government he helped to establish. The Satsuma Rebellion marked the last stand of the way of the samurai; in the greatest battle, at Kumamoto Castle, uniformed conscript soldiers whom Saigo called "dirt farmers" defeated his army. Saigo's forces dwindled to a few hundred men, and he beat a bitter retreat to his home at Kagoshima. There, he committed seppuku, ritual suicide. His death marked the death of the samurai class and the true beginning of the Meiji transformation.
Civilization and enlightenment[]
Japanese citizens posing with lager
The new era had a new slogan: "Civilization and enlightenment," meaning the love of all things Western, such as beer and beef. It also meant that, with the samurai gone, all would be equal under the rule of the Emperor. The restoration of the absolute monarchy enabled the democratization of Japan, with equality of opportunity giving everyone an incentive to improve Japan by modernizing their lives. The writer Fukuzawa Yukichi taught Japanese how to eat and dress in the Western style, and he was fascinated by Western timekeeping, replacing sun dials with clocks. His later brooks brought European and American ideas into Japanese homes, serving as a prophet for Meiji's modern age. Fukuzawa became a national hero, and he was featured on the national currency, the yen, for committing to progress on the national level and success on the individual level. He coined the slogan, "Heaven creates no man above or below another man." Samurai were ordered to hand in their swords and have their top knots cut off, and the last Shogun submitted to a new barber and wardrobe. Throughout the land, hair-cutting became big business, and Fukuzawa was transformed from a samurai to a gentleman.
A rural school in Meiji-era Japan
At first, progress meant adopting all things Western, and some Japanese sought to abolish the Japanese language in favor of English, or intermarry with Americans to "improve Japan's racial stock". The era meant the beginning of electricity, and the explosion of wheels in Japan led to the momentous rise of the rickshaw. This was followed by horse-drawn trolleys and then trains, symbolizing Japan's modernization. In Tokyo, Western fashions were the rage, and high society quickly learned the latest steps, leading to Japan's ministers becoming known as "the dancing cabinet". Meanwhile, the countryside remained worlds apart from the changes going on in the city, and many farmers faced bitter and hard daily lives, as they paid for progress in the cities in the form of dress balls and splendid new government buildings. The government depended on the land tax and farming products of provincial Japan, and the farmers were exhorted to buy less and grow more. Farmers endured the abuse of government officials because they now owned their own land, and they were able to reap the fruits of their labor and enable the nation to progress. When the government needed schools, the farmers built them, and education became the cornerstone of Japan's modernization.
Meiji Constitution[]
The drafting of the Meiji Constitution
As opportunity increased, so did expectations, as those who worked and paid for the nation wanted a say in the way the nation was run. Demands for democracy and a constitution grew, so, in a rural warehouse, a group of farmers assembled and wrote a village constitution with 150 articles devoted to civil rights and with the power of sovereignty was vested in the people, and not the monarch. More village constitutions were adopted all across Japan by the late 1870s, and pressure was building on the Meiji leaders to open up the government. Ito Hirobumi entrusted himself with writing a constitution, buying off the opposition by promising them an assembly of elective representatives of the people over the next decade. Hirobumi resolved to not give them a genuine democracy, and he idolized Otto von Bismarck, the unifier of Germany. Hirobumi was inspired by the Prussian-style constitutional monarchy, which empowered the bureaucracy more than it did the Emperor or Parliament. Ito and the oligarchs engineered the creation of the constitution even as politicians came and went.
Japanese workers manufacturing silk
The Emperor was made absolutely sovereign, the constitution was to be bestowed by the Emperor to the people, and the Emperor's advisors were thus made beyond the law. However, elements of true democracy seeped into the parliamentary system. The Meiji Constitution, passed on 11 February 1889, would gradually be co-opted by liberals; if a geisha's client did not pay her, she could accuse him of going against the constitution. The Meiji bureaucrats secured their power, and they fortified Japan against the growing might of the Western powers, adopting the slogan "Rich nation, strong military". Japan decided to export its widely-popular silk to pay for its modernization, introducing the Japanese people to a new economic reality. Japanese farmers continued to live in the same feudal villages their ancestors had lived in, but they found themselves to be part of international economics.
Rise of Japanese militarism[]
Battleship Island
The government absorbed the agricultural surplus and shifted it to the industrial sector, and the state built factories and bought warships until it ran out of money. Ultimately, the government subcontracted the state's goals to the private sector, creating the zaibatsu industrial combines. In Nagasaki harbor, Mitsubishi became one of the first private companies to ally with the government. Mitsubishi transformed from a small fishing company in the 1880s to a major, subsidized shipbuilder for the Imperial Japanese Navy, and businesses were brought into the establishment to serve the national interest. The businesses made national achievements, but the profit they made was private property. The speed of the Meiji transportation was breathtaking, as Japan had modernized in less than 40 years. Family silk farms led to textile factories and then to steel mills. Just fifteen years after Perry had brought a model train to Japan, the Japanese built a real railway from Tokyo to Yokohama. The cost was high, however, as girls as young as 11 years old worked between 12 to 19 hours a day in stifling sweat shops, and conditions were even more severe in heavy industry and the coal mines. The Mitsubishi coal mine on "Battleship Island", off Nagasaki, was choked with scores of dormitories for poor workers and their families. Children joined their mothers and fathers in the shafts of the towering mountain of coal. In 1890, there were newspaper accounts of workers being murdered while trying to escape Battleship Island. When a cholera epidemic broke out, Mitsubishi burned all of the victims, dead or alive.
Sinophobic propaganda in Japan
In the port cities of China, the weight of the Westerners' privileges was heavy, and poverty and hunger ran rampant. Young Chinese reformers looked to Japan for a model of successful modernization, studying in Tokyo and Kyoto. Rather than stand up against Western imperialism alongside the other East Asian nations, Japan decided to join the imperialists. The hermit kingdom of Korea had tried to hide itself away from outside powers with China's protection, but, by the 1890s, modernizing Japan wanted rice from Korea and Korea's markets. Japan confronted China over the right to open up Korea, invading Korea in 1894 and provoking a war with China, the First Sino-Japanese War. Much better trained and equipped, Japan's armies drove the Chinese armies out of Korea and drove them into Manchuria. The treaty which ended the war was a humiliation for China; Japan received the island of Taiwan, territory in Manchuria, and the same trading rights in China accorded to Western powers.
Imperial Japan[]
Japanese soldiers firing a cannon
Everywhere Japan looked, the Western Powers continued to flex their muscles, such as in French Indochina and in the Chinese treaty ports. Russia took control of Manchuria and Japan dominated Korea, bringing the two nations to the brink of territorial conflict. In 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack and crippled the Russian fleet, declaring war two days later. Russia thought it would crush Japan, but Japan had spent the last ten years mobilizing, and had built up a confident, disciplined, and well-armed army. Across the barren landscape, Japan threw wave after wave of troops at the Russian machine guns. Despite horrendous casualties, the Japanese were winning the war. 1 million Japanese soldiers went to war, and they saw the war as their own, as they were fighting non-Asians for the first time. When Japan was victorious, people danced in the streets of Tokyo, celebrating the culmination of the Meiji modernization. Japan's victory inspired nationalists throughout Asia, from Mahatma Gandhi in India to China's Sun Yat-sen. Sun Yat-sen even used Tokyo as his base as he plotted the overthrow of the Qing government. However, the Japanese became arrogant after their victory over Russia, believing that it was their destiny to rule over all Asia, eventually leading to World War II.
The Righteous Armies
Even Fukuzawa, who once urged pan-Asian unity, now sounded like an imperialist himself, arguing that Japan should treat China and Korea in the same way that Western nations did. The Treaty of Portsmouth made Korea a Japanese protectorate, and Ito established himself as the first Japanese Resident-General in Korea. This resulted in a Korean rebellion, and the Japanese responded by burning villages and killing over 12,000 Koreans. Ito replaced Korea's king with his young son, who was far more susceptible to Japanese influence. If not in name, Korea was now a Japanese colony.
End of the Meiji era[]
A streetcar in Tokyo, 1912
By 1912, the Japanese themselves had mixed feelings themselves about their fast rise to military and economic power. Natsume Soseki became the poet laureate of this movement, longing for the comfort of lost traditions in spite of the inevitability of modernization. For the laboring classes in Tokyo, the streetcar was the first public conveyance they could afford, but Soseki's works captivated the sense of loneliness that people felt on streetcars despite being surrounded by others, as modernization had rid them of their old traditions. Meiji died that same year, and Soseki called the cannon which announced Meiji's death, "the last lament of the passing of an age." The Meiji era revolutionized Japan, as the Japanese people remade their own character. The nationalism inspired by Meiji would lead to a war in the Pacific and provoke revolutions in Vietnam and Indonesia. The brief era of Western domination would end abruptly as Asians rose to reclaim the region.