Meiji Restoration

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 3rd of January 1868, domain troops seized control of the Imperial Palace in Kyōto in the early hours of the morning, while a court noble named Iwakura Tomomi simultaneously secured the Emperor's approval for what they had just done. By the end of that day, a decree had been issued declaring the restoration of imperial authority in Japan, ending more than two and a half centuries of rule by the Tokugawa shōguns. What followed was not merely a change of government. It was the dismantling of an entire feudal order and the rapid reimagining of Japan in the image of the Western industrial powers.

  The Meiji Restoration raises questions that reward close attention. How did a political system as entrenched as the Tokugawa shogunate collapse so quickly? Who were the men who brought it down, and what did they actually want? And what was lost in the transformation they set in motion?

• 2. The Tokugawa World

  ›

  By 1650, the Tokugawa shōgun directly controlled land capable of producing roughly 4.2 million koku of rice per year, with rice being the standard unit by which domain wealth was measured. His close retainers and family members controlled a combined total reaching 12.9 million koku, out of a national figure of 26 million. The remaining 9.8 million koku, just under 38 percent, was parceled out among about 100 rival tozama daimyō, the descendants of those who had fought against the Tokugawa at the Battle of Sekigahara. Many of those strongest rival domains sat in western Japan, deliberately kept distant from the centres of power.

  Samurai families in the 19th century made up around 5 to 6 percent of a population of 30 million people. Historian Marius B. Jansen describes the political organisation of this system as one of feudal autonomy, where the shōgun extended extensive control to each daimyō over his own domain, while binding them through irregular taxation, movement restrictions, and a system of alternate attendance that forced daimyō to spend every other year in the capital at great expense. Within the samurai class itself, roughly one in fifty was an upper samurai, with the rest divided mostly evenly between middle and lower ranks.

  Historian William G. Beasley traces a persistent tension between the official ideology of meritocratic rule and a rigid class structure that blocked lower and middle-ranking samurai from advancing their positions. Merchant classes that had flourished economically were forbidden from translating their commercial influence into political power. As economic stress accumulated, those structural contradictions would prove impossible to contain.

• 3. Economic Fault Lines

  ›

  The bakufu began showing a small annual gold deficit around 1800; by 1837 that deficit had grown to over half a million ryō. The Tenpō Reforms of 1841 to 1843 were an attempt to address deepening fiscal and political disorder, but their effects were uneven and often corrosive. Senior Rōjū Mizuno Tadakuni introduced sumptuary laws and cut the stipends of samurai retainers, which drove many of them away from their lords or out of the samurai class altogether in search of personal and economic freedom.

  Fixed rice stipends left samurai exposed to market fluctuations and currency debasement. Merchants acting as agents to sell those stipends often kept the profits for themselves. Artisans and farmers, meanwhile, diversified into new goods and crops that were more lucrative than rice, while samurai debts accumulated. The daimyō themselves lived under a system of enforced expenditure by the bakufu, including the alternate attendance system and public works obligations.

  Satō Nobuhiro claimed that by 1827, at least 30 percent of farmers had lost land to wealthier neighbours. The domains responded by seeking ways to increase revenue, including canceling debts owed to their own merchants and renegotiating terms with those under bakufu jurisdiction. Some domains went as far as selling samurai status. The erosion of the official class system was already well underway before a single foreign ship appeared on the horizon.

• 4. Foreign Pressure and the Ideological Response

  ›

  Since 1633, Japan had operated under sakoku, a policy of national isolation enforced by the Tokugawa shogunate that prohibited any person from entering or leaving the country without the shōgun's permission. The non-Catholic Dutch were permitted a limited trading post on Dejima, just off the coast of Nagasaki in Saga Domain, which gave Tokugawa intellectuals a selective and uneven window onto Western developments.

  News of Britain's victory in the First Opium War against the Qing Dynasty, and the terms of the Nanking Treaty of 1842 transferring Hong Kong to British control, spread among the daimyō despite official attempts to suppress it. Fujita Tōko, writing in the wake of that news, insisted Japan should first pursue jōi, the repelling of foreign powers, and then kaikoku, an opening of the country on equal terms. His father Fujita Yūkoku had already applied the phrase fukoku kyōhei, meaning rich nation, strong army, to describe the solution to Japan's dual domestic and foreign threats.

  Appointed to command an American expedition in 1852, Commodore Matthew C. Perry was initially reluctant to accept the assignment. American interests centred on access to China trade routes, the protection of shipwrecked sailors from the lucrative whaling industry, and secure provisioning ports for steamships. Perry's first visit brought him to Uraga, Kanagawa, where he handed over documents requesting an end to Japanese isolation in a ceremony at Kurihama on the 14th of July. When he returned in February 1854, sooner than expected partly because he had learned of a Russian mission in Nagasaki also seeking a treaty, the bakufu was left with little room to manoeuvre. The Convention of Kanagawa, signed that year, opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate, and appointed Townsend Harris as the first American consul to Japan.

• 5. The Shishi and the Fracturing Samurai Class

  ›

  Sakuma Shōzan was a midranking samurai under the daimyō Sanada Yukinori of Matsushiro Domain who coined the phrase Eastern ethics, Western science. He taught over 5,000 students in a school in Edo, drawing them from across the country, and counted Katsu Kaishū and Yoshida Shōin among his most influential disciples. His proposals for military reorganisation and the promotion of talented men were designed to preserve the social order he admired; what they actually produced was a generation of reformers who would help destroy it.

  Yoshida Shōin became one of the most consequential of those disciples. He was a shishi, a man of spirit, one of the low and middle-ranking samurai who fused Mito School scholarship, Neo-Confucian principles of loyalty, and the Shintō revival of the early 19th century into a commitment to the Emperor over the bakufu. Among those who studied under Yoshida were Kido Takayoshi and Takasugi Shinsaku, though both eventually withdrew their support as Yoshida's positions grew more extreme. He was executed in 1859 for planning the assassination of Manabe Akikatsu.

  The tairō Ii Naosuke had signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce on the 29th of July 1858, defying both the Emperor and the daimyō consensus. His Ansei Purge punished over one hundred political enemies; eight were killed and many more were forced into house arrest. When Ii was himself assassinated in 1860, Jansen writes that many lower and middle-ranking samurai began to see a means to effect changes to their personal and collective position. In Satsuma Domain, Ōkubo Toshimichi led a loyalist group toward conciliation with domain officials. In Tosa Domain, Takechi Hanpeita met with Kido Takayoshi, and among his loyalist party was Sakamoto Ryōma, who left in 1862.

• 6. Alliance and Military Confrontation

  ›

  Sakamoto Ryōma had once intended to assassinate Katsu Kaishū for his perceived pro-foreign beliefs. What happened instead was a conversation that converted Ryōma to Kaishū's plan for rearmament. Ryōma later helped Chōshū loyalists bypass the bakufu's prohibition on domain weapons trade by establishing connections to British merchants through his firm in Nagasaki. On the 7th of March 1866, Sakamoto brought together Kido Takayoshi and Saigō Takamori to formalise the alliance between Satsuma and Chōshū.

  The Second Chōshū expedition, intended to end domain resistance to Tokugawa authority, collapsed when the shōgun Tokugawa Iemochi died mid-campaign, forcing the bakufu to seek a truce. Satsuma regent Shimazu Hisamitsu issued a memorial to the Imperial Court accusing the bakufu of seeking a settlement that risked the safety of the country at large. Shortly afterward, Emperor Kōmei died in February 1867, leaving the teenager Mutsuhito to ascend the throne as Emperor Meiji.

  The new shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu made reform proposals that sparked alarm among the anti-Tokugawa alliance. Sakamoto Ryōma drafted an Eight Point Plan, including provisions for a bicameral legislature, military expansion, law reform, and the return of political power to the Imperial Court. On the 8th of November 1867, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the 15th Tokugawa shōgun, renounced the administrative functions of his office. Ten days later, on the 19th of November, he also resigned the title of shōgun. During the months of November and December, Iwakura Tomomi, Saigō Takamori, and Ōkubo Toshimichi organised a coup within the divided Court with the aim of stripping the Tokugawa house of their fief lands. In the disorder that followed, Sakamoto Ryōma was assassinated.

• 7. Dismantling the Old Order

  ›

  On the 27th of January 1868, Chōshū and Satsuma forces defeated the Tokugawa army at the Battle of Toba-Fushimi. An imperial decree on the 31st of January blamed the Tokugawa for starting hostilities, and Ōsaka Castle surrendered three days later. In May, Iwakura imposed terms requiring Tokugawa Yoshinobu to resign as head of the family and surrender all but 700,000 koku of his lands, which Tokugawa accepted on the 3rd of May. The remnant old bakufu navy under Enomoto Takeaki escaped to Hokkaidō and attempted to establish a breakaway Republic of Ezo, which was ended by loyalist forces at the Battle of Hakodate in May 1869. Tokugawa Yoshinobu was pardoned on the 1st of November 1869, ending the antagonistic relationship between Court and bakufu.

  The Charter Oath, issued on the 6th of April 1868, called for the rejection of past political administration, the enrichment of the country, and the adoption of Western technology. It confirmed centralised national sovereignty without specifying a progressive agenda or a particular form of governance.

  The abolition of the domains was announced to the daimyō assembled in Tōkyō in August 1871 without prior consultation. In January 1872, 302 domains were formally reorganised into 72 prefectures. The daimyō were ordered to move to Tōkyō, separated from their former domains, and granted access to a new aristocracy. In 1873, nationwide military conscription was instituted: every male upon turning 21 would serve four years in the armed forces followed by three years in the reserves. In 1876, the commutation of samurai stipends into government bonds was made compulsory. When Saigō Takamori led the Satsuma Rebellion in resistance, it was put down by the newly formed Imperial Japanese Army, trained in Western tactics.

• 8. Transformation and Its Costs

  ›

  Raw silk was the most important export commodity in Meiji Japan. Exports grew enormously during this period, overtaking China, driven not by the highest-quality silk, which China continued to produce, but by standardised production methods, particularly in silkworm egg cultivation, which yielded consistency suited to mechanised weaving. Revenue from silk exports funded Japanese purchases of industrial equipment and raw materials.

  Coal production grew from roughly 0.6 million metric tons in 1875 to 21.3 million by 1913. The merchant steamship fleet expanded from 26 vessels in 1873 to 1,514 by 1913. The railway network grew from 18 miles of track in 1872 to 7,100 miles by 1914. Japan built shipyards, iron smelters, and spinning mills, then sold them to well-connected entrepreneurs who applied Western technology to produce goods cheaply for international markets.

  The costs of this industrialisation fell heavily on peasant farmers, who paid land tax rates of about 30 percent of harvests, compared to roughly 2 percent in Qing China. The majority of Japanese castles were partially or completely dismantled in the late 19th century, with some exceptions: Hikone Castle was saved by direct order of the Emperor himself after the government had ordered its destruction. During the Meiji era's shinbutsu bunri, tens of thousands of Buddhist religious idols and temples were destroyed. The Dampatsurei Edict of 1871 required men of samurai classes to cut their hair short and abandon the chonmage hairstyle. Shimazaki Tōson's epic novel Before the Dawn later captured many of these tensions, drawing particularly on kokugaku nativism and the hierarchical certainties that the Restoration displaced. The Meiji Constitution of 1889 would remain in place until the Allied occupation of Japan after World War II.