Meiji Restoration

Meiji Restoration, revolution in Japan which toppled the Tokugawa shogunate, “restored” imperial rule, and transformed the country from a feudal into a modern state. The opening of Japan's ports to Western colonial fleets, coerced by Matthew Calbraith Perry and others from 1853 onwards, exposed the weakness of the Tokugawa shoguns, and triggered nationalist unrest, under the slogan sonno joi (“revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”). Radicals inspired by the ideas of Norinaga Motoori saw a solution in the revival of imperial “direct rule”—especially young samurai from the western daimyo fiefs of Choshu and Satsuma, which had never embraced Tokugawa suzerainty. By the 1860s shogunate and daimyo were importing Western technology and proposing new governmental structures to meet the foreign threat. In 1867 pro-imperial daimyo suggested that shogun Yoshinobu Tokugawa should step down and acknowledge imperial authority. Yoshinobu agreed in principle in November 1867, but mistrustful Satsuma radicals seized the imperial palace in Kyoto on January 3, 1868, and proclaimed a restoration under the young Emperor Meiji. Yoshinobu's forces were thrown back from Kyoto, and an “imperial army” of Choshu, Satsuma, and Tosa clan forces secured peaceful surrender of the shogunal capital Edo. Most daimyo stayed neutral, and the civil war ended in 1869. Yoshinobu retired and left government to Takamori Saigo, Toshimichi Okubo, Takayoshi Kido, and other restoration leaders. Confiscated Tokugawa estates comprising some 25 per cent of Japan's arable land were put under their control, providing a springboard for broader policies. In 1869 the emperor moved to Edo, renamed Tokyo (“Eastern Capital”), the new imperial capital. The emperor was used by the new government as a focus of national loyalty and the sanction for the revolutionary changes they introduced. By 1871 the daimyo domains had been surrendered to the throne and standardized into prefectures, and the daimyo pensioned off as members of a new nobility. Mass education and military conscription were introduced, and curbs on Buddhism inspired by the regime's pro-imperial Shinto ideology produced iconoclastic outbreaks. Western experts were imported to create new railways, armies, fleets, and industries, building on pre-Restoration efforts. Samurai discontented with the abolition of their privilege of wearing swords and the taxing of their stipends rebelled, especially in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, which was defeated by the new conscript forces. The Bank of Japan was established, fiscal policy reformed, and civic unrest firmly suppressed. An authoritarian constitution, drafted by Hirobumi Ito and others, was promulgated in 1889, establishing the Diet, but for most of the Meiji era power was exercised by an informal Choshu and Satsuma oligarchy outside constitutional controls. Through the Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War, Meiji Japan won the right to be treated on a level with the Western imperialist powers. Despite an astonishingly fast and successful modernization, the ambiguous constitutional structure, military orientation, and nationalist ideology bequeathed by the Meiji Restoration led Japan to the disastrous imperialist adventures of the 1930s and 1940s.