Editor's Note: This article was originally written for Japan Society's previous site for educators, "Journey through Japan," in 2003. Change was the currency of the Meiji era (1868–1912). From the day the teen-aged Mutsuhito claimed power on January 3, 1868 in a relatively tranquil coup called the “Meiji Restoration” (after his reign name) until his death forty-five years later, Japan experienced an evolution so rapid that one Tokyo expatriate said he felt as if he had been alive for 400 years. An isolated, feudalistic island state in 1850, Japan had become a powerful colonial power with the most modern of institutions when Meiji’s son, the Taisho emperor, took the throne in 1912. Both the sources of these changes and the way in which they made Japan “modern” provide the material for one of human history’s more dramatic stories. They also laid the groundwork for the turbulence of Japan’s twentieth century. Sources of the Meiji Restoration To understand the dynamism of the Meiji years, one must begin with the factors in the Tokugawa era (1600–1868) that made Japan a unique and sophisticated nation. The first thing about which historians often comment is the period’s stability. Founded by the warrior Tokugawa Ieyasu at the conclusion of centuries of samurai warfare, the Tokugawa bakufu (tent or military government) ruled for more than 250 years in the city of Edo (today’s Tokyo), during which time the most serious fighting consisted of localized peasant riots. The Tokugawa created a centralized “feudal” system in which more than 200 domains or han maintained fiscal and military autonomy, while their lords served an authoritarian government in Edo. Even the Europeans, who had participated in some of the sixteenth century conflicts, were tightly controlled in these years, with most of them excluded from Japan altogether and the Dutch alone allowed to maintain a limited trading presence at Nagasaki, nearly 1,000 miles away from the capital. It is hardly surprising that observers refer to this period as the “pax Tokugawa.” Undergirding this political stability were unusually high levels of political and educational sophistication that would make rapid, peaceful change possible in the decades after the Restoration. Though critics talk about the inflexibility and inefficiency of the Tokugawa government, the political system nonetheless ranked among the world’s most effective in tying more than 30 million people together and stimulating an energetic national life. Perhaps the most effective feature of that government was the “alternate attendance” (sankin kotai) system that required most of the 250 domain lords to spend every other year in Edo, serving the shogun, and thus stimulated not only national consciousness but an extensive system of roads (for the travel of the lords’ large retinues), towns (for their lodging), trade, and cultural diffusion. The system also encouraged the growth of important national institutions. Thousands of schools tied to temples, government offices, and private scholars gave Japan a literacy rate of perhaps 40 percent for boys and 10 percent for girls in the early 1800s, ranking it near the top of the world. They also provided a leadership class committed to the Confucian ideal of public service. Industry and trade flourished, even as the samurai class and the Tokugawa government languished economically, giving Japan high levels of capital accumulation. And the culture of the cities was among the most innovative in the world, producing a combination of woodblock prints, kabuki theater, novels, haiku poetry, fashion fads, and lending libraries—much of it tied to the geisha or female entertainers who presided over each city’s entertainment quarters. Scholars have noted that Japan in the early 1800s ranked near the world’s forefront in almost every quantifiable level of development. At the same time, a set of specific developments (historians would call them contingencies) made late-Tokugawa Japan ripe for change. Many of the country’s leaders grew quite interested in the ways of the West, as they began learning about the industrial revolution and the imperialist adventures that were bringing countries from China to the Philippines under the European sway. At the same time, American and European seaman began visiting Japan’s ports after the early 1800s, seeking an end to the country’s isolation policy. And perhaps most important, the balance between Tokugawa and domain governments began shifting, with large and distant domains such as Satsuma (in southern Kyushu) and Choshu (on western Honshu) experiencing political and economic growth even as the shogunate sunk ever more deeply into a kind of inflexibility caused in part by old age. Thus, while many regions of the country were full of energy and increasing self-confidence in 1850, the Edo government was in decline, staffed by cautious bureaucrats described by one young official as “wooden monkeys.” In this mix, the Tokugawa decision to open Japan to foreigners in 1854, in compliance with American demands, touched off one of Japan’s most tumultuous periods. With newly arrived Westerners demanding trade, showing off new customs (including the scandalous tendency of women to accompany men to public events), practicing the forbidden Christian religion, and taking sides in Japan’s political disputes, the country’s political life changed irrevocably. Opposition to the Tokugawa arose from several quarters. At one level, lower-ranked samurai called shishi or “men of spirit” began agitating for the ouster of the Westerners almost as soon as Matthew Perry and his followers had been admitted. They were too much on the outside to topple the government, but their terrorist acts disrupted the tranquility of political centers in ways that had not been seen for centuries. More directly threatening to the Tokugawa were the growing challenges after the late 1850s from establishment scholars and political leaders of major domains. The shogunate reacted as aggressively as any regime-under-attack might be expected to, but by the mid-1860s, Choshu was in the hands of an anti-Tokugawa administration, and by late 1868, Shogun Tokugawa Keiki concluded that the best way to preserve order was to resign as shogun and create a system in which he likely would share power as the chief among a council of leaders. His scheme failed, however, and on January 3, 1868, a coup d’état in Meiji’s name brought to power a group of young, visionary samurai from the regional domains.The Transition to Meiji, 1868–1877 Creating a Modern System, 1877–1889 Few would have considered the Restoration era complete, however, until a new political system was in place, a system approved as “modern” by the international powers. Only after creating the new structures noted above and defeating the recalcitrant samurai could the rulers focus their energies in that direction. Before looking at that process, however, a word must be said about the impact of the many changes on the country’s broader populace. If the new system was hard on the traditional samurai class, it was devastating for vast numbers of people: the fishermen, the rickshaw pullers, the construction workers, miners, prostitutes, and newspaper sellers who made the rapid changes possible by doing the hardest work and receiving the least remuneration. The largest such group lived in more than 60,000 villages, where some 28 million farmers (out of a population of 35 million in the late 1870s) provided the country not only with its food but with the bulk of its taxes. The cost of modernizing and expanding the government was placed overwhelmingly on land taxes, which meant that farmers had to bear the brunt, either through direct taxation or in the rents they paid to landlords. When the government’s fiscal retrenchment led to depression in the early 1880s, rice and silk prices plummeted, and bankruptcies soared, pushing many into destitution and thousands into local uprisings against the system. Another group hurt by modernizing policies were Japan’s factory workers, particularly the tens of thousands of girls and women who were forced by poverty into working in the expanding silk and cotton factories. Their willingness to work under inhuman conditions for pittance pay helped Japan compete on the world market; it also produced surprising amounts of resistance, with workers absconding, engaging in work stoppages, and even striking. A more positive result for the general populace was the diffusion of new ideas and practices into every nook of society. The 1870s saw former samurai in the northeast offend the Buddhist spirits by beginning to eat meat; they saw the rise of barbering and dairy-farming in the Tokyo region; they saw the spread of railroads, modern postal networks, fire-resistant brick buildings, a banking system, public schools, language institutes, modern hospitals—in short, every “modern” institution known in the world’s most progressive cities. The arts also changed, as Western style painting took root. Novels and fiction became increasingly popular, though complex characterization would have to wait until late in the century to become the norm. And literate Japanese by the tens of thousands began reading newspapers. While it would take several more decades for modernity to penetrate the countryside, cities were literally transformed by the drive toward international respect and domestic centralization in this first Meiji decade.The driving force in all of this lay with the government during the early Meiji years, but one of that force’s most exceptional features was the role of private, popular groups in shaping the political evolution. Indeed the drive toward creating a constitutional system—which everyone agreed was the essential characteristic of a “modern” state—was fueled by a constant, fierce struggle between popular and official forces. (Refer to the Enactment of the Meiji Constitution.) In the mid-1870s, for example, a vigorous “movement for freedom and rights” (jiyu minken undo), led by both former samurai and commoners, stirred the national political life mightily with rallies and petition drives demanding a national assembly, a constitution, and broader participation in the government. When a financial scandal prompted massive protests against the government in 1881, the officials responded in part by promising that a constitution would be granted within a decade. And when Japan’s first political parties were created in response to that promise, the government seriously set about the task of drafting that constitution.
The Restoration Legacy The third legacy of the Restoration years was the march to modernity. Most students agree that the period between the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars saw a genuine mass society emerge in Japan’s cities. These were the years that gave Japan its first major industrial takeoff, the period that produced mass-circulation newspapers, department stores, publicly treated water systems, social and class divisions, moving pictures, wristwatches, safety razors, increasingly popular public intellectual debates, and beer halls—all the trappings of modern, urban society. (See Sino-Japanese War.) And they were the years in which commoners, called minshu, began to take an active part in the nation’s public and political life. To say that this development represented a mere speed-up of the early Meiji programs is to state the obvious. When the Charter Oath promised in 1868 to seek knowledge from around the world, it set Japan on a course of studying, emulating, adapting—and finally surpassing—peoples everywhere, a path that would bring the Restoration era to fulfillment, even as it launched Japan into the more troubling arena of colonialism and empire. Related Links: Timeline of Religion and Nationalism in Meiji and Imperial Japan Timeline of Modern Japan |