Summary of Events Prior to the Resoration and Beyond

adapted from Professor Barbara Mori's syllabus: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~bmori/syll/Hum310japan/MeijiText.html

The Meiji Restoration

For two centuries Japan had been locked away from the outside world. By 1615, after a century of civil war, the powerful Lord Tokugawa had defeated his enemies and declared himself Shogun, ruler of all Japan. Tokugawa divided society into four ranks: at the bottom were the merchants; then came the artisans; just above them were the farmers, who gave up half their rice harvest to those at the top, the Samurai. Only Samurai had the right to carry swords. The law of the land set them apart. The Tokugawa Shogunate was a kingdom built for war that began to crumble after 200 years of peace. It was the most orderly place imaginable. It was a completely schematized society where everybody knew who he was and what he had to do. But, in fact, because it was so idealized and so orderly and so tidy, that history got away from it. The Samurai were the elite class in the Tokugawa system. But they had not been allowed to raise its swords for 200 years. In the course of time, they had become civil servants, bureaucrats, their swords rusting, propped up against their desks, as they kept the accounts for their lords. Many of these Samurai ceased being able to make a reasonable living so they went into debt to the merchants. The merchants, who were at the very bottom of the Confucian hierarchy, began to have more and more power over the Samurai who were in their debt.

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 the merchants turned the world of the Samurai upside down. Japan was a society about to explode. The coming of the West struck a spark that forced Japanese to look at their society with new eyes. In 1853, four American war ships steamed up the bay near Edo. Commanded by Commodore Perry, the Americans had come to open up Japan. They wanted water and coal for their whaling ships and for plying the China trade. The Japanese were astounded at the power of Perry's vessels. They called them black ships for the ominous smoke that billowed from their coal engines. The ships sent a clear message. If the Japanese didn't open up their country, Perry would open it by force. Most Japanese had never seen a westerner. In the first portraits of Perry and his men, they marveled at the strange-looking barbarians from across the sea. On shore, Perry showered his hosts with gifts, including a toy locomotive which the Japanese studied with fascination.

The impact of Perry's visit was extraordinary--all those strange, huge black ships and strange people, the red-faced foreigners. It was as if they came from Mars. Of course they brought machines with them. Japanese had never seen such technology before. They were fascinated. The British, Russians, French, and Dutch quickly followed Perry into Japan. Overrun with strange foreigners, the Shogun government opened the Institute for the Investigation of Barbarian Books in order to gather and analyze information from abroad. To some, the arrival of the westerners was a direct attack on the values of traditional Japan. In southwestern Japan--the remote provinces of Satsuma and Choshu--were centers of anti-western thought. A type of highly idealstic samurai called Shishi, or men of high purpose, began to emerge. They believed that Japan was sacred ground and that the emperor, now a figure-head in the ancient capital of Kyoto, was a God. The Shishi were furious that the Shogun had signed an agreement with the foreign barbarians without the emperor's consent. The initial Japanese response to the west was xenophobic, anti-western. The slogan popular at the time was "SONNO-JOI" [Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians]. Japan was understood as sacred territory and these fools were not to be allowed in, regardless of Perry's show of force. This was not all talk on the part of the Shishi. They were activists who murdered prominent foreigners--a translator for the Americans, a British diplomat, etc. They knew that by doing so, they would create problems for the Bakufu whom they felt was selling Japan out. They even directly attacked western ships.

The response from the west was immediate and devastating. With modern cannon, they bombarded home capitals of the Shishi in Satsuma and Choshu. Today the battlements remain from the walled city of Hagi, the old Choshu capital. Much of the town looks much as it did over 100 years ago. Here Samurai retreated within their city walls to find a way to expel the hated but well-armed barbarians. It is a story that lives on today in the lessons taught to Hagi school children: How a radical teacher from Choshu found a solution that would change forever the history of Japan and how its young students went on to become the leaders of a new nation. Today, the teacher is revered in Hagi as one of Japan's great heroes. His name was Yoshida Shoin (1830-1859).

At the Hagi grammar school, first graders recite a saying by Yoshida every day before school. The Yoshida story is legendary. He defied the Shogun's orders and rowed out to Perry's black ships to learn the secrets of the barbarians. For this he was arrested and exiled to Hagi, where he continued to teach. Because of the efforts of Yoshida Shoin the country was opened up and from that point on foreigners could come and go. (quote from school child: "Now we have many things we import from foreign countries, like bread, bananas, and pineapples. They are really delicious. If we hadn't opened the country up, we'd still just be eating rice all the time." ) In this small school house, Yoshida conveyed his key lesson to many of the men who would govern Japan: to drive the barbarians from our shores, we must learn to use their guns. It was the beginning of a new idea, and a new slogan - Japanese Spirit, Western Technology, a phrase coined by samurai scholar-thinker Sakuma Shozan whom Yoshida originally went to assassinate but wound up becoming his student.

As a teacher, Yoshida was much revered. Below, his calligraphy is a quote from mencius to the effect that "Sincerity and Perseverence always Prevail."

Yoshida's ideas lived on in the mind of his student Ito Hirobumi, who went on to become Japan's first prime minister. Yoshida had convinced Ito and others from Satsuma and Choshu to travel abroad and learn the secrets of western civilization. These people argued strenuously for reform before you try and confront the barbarians. If you try and confront the barbarians with Samurai swords and they have canons, they will mow you down! The Japanese visits to the land of the barbarians were strange for both sides. American tabloids printed caricatures. A Japanese visitor wrote a poem: "All is strange. Appearance and language. I must be in dream-land." For centuries it was China that had captured Japanis imagination with a culture that dominated the Pacific. So the Japanese were shocked when they stopped in China on their way home from the West. By the 1860s, the largest port cities were dominated by the western powers. In Shanghai, Chinese fawned over foreigners, and the large French, British, and American firms controlled most of the wealth. The humbling of mighty China propelled the Shishi into action. First the Satsuma-Choshu regions armed themselves - western style. Then, they joined forces to topple the Shogun and take charge of Japan. By the 1860's, as America fought its own war between the states, Japan, too, was plunged into a state of civil war.

Terrorists for and against the Shogun conducted a campaign of assassinations, robbing the country of many of its most prominent leaders. In 1867, Saigo Takemori led an army of the Satsuma-Choshu alliance and defeated the Shogun's army near Kyoto. The Satsuma-Choshu army marched from the old capital, Kyoto, to Edo. They re-named the city Tokyo, or eastern capital. And they brought with them from Kyoto the 16-year old boy emperor. Newly installed in power, the emperor's reign was re-named Meiji or enlightened rule. He became the symbol for a new Japan than 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. It was the emperor's government, but the governing was really in the hands of a very small group of young Samurai - most of them were in their early thirties or late twenties, and most were from Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa and Hizen. An amazing group of bright, young, middle or lower-ranking Samurai bureaucrats. They started from scratch with the task of building a whole nation. These are young men who essentially usurped their position. They controlled the seals of the Emperor Meiji and, therefore, were able to issue orders in his name. Once they are there in the new capital and have an emperor who is only 16 years old - he's not someone they can do too much with (he doesn't know how to ride a horse), but they, in the name of the emperor, begin to think of their new government. From 1868 to 1873 a transformation takes place that no one had envisaged.

The first few years were very uncertain. The Meiji leaders faced a nation in chaos. The countryside erupted in spontaneous outbreaks of hysteria. Only a year before the restoration, thousands of people advanced into Edo, tossing bank notes in the air and yelling, Eijanaika, Eijanaika, "Who cares, What the hell." It was a bizarre reaction by Japan's common folk to the confusion in the country. To bring order to anarchy was the key challenge to the Meiji bureaucrats. The young Samurai Ito, Saigo, Okubo, really had to start building the whole administration. They had to have a finance ministry, a tax policy, a defense policy, an agriculture policy. They were starting from scratch and working out by themselves the mechanism of government for a huge country. What happened was that all of these reforms, which were highly forward-looking, in terms of 19th century politics and society were made in Tokyo on paper. That is to say that they were proclaimed: let there be compulsory education and you, the villagers, will pay for it. Let there be a national army. You, the villagers, will run the draft system. Farmers were outraged by higher tariffs and what they called the blood tax--government officials taking their sons off the lands to serve in the army. Their fury exploded in spontaneous rebellions across the country, challenging the programs of the Meiji leaders. People were very upset, very disturbed. They could solve the farmers problem rather easily. You could cut taxes and keep that sector happy. But there was a wider problem beyond that. How were they going to give everybody in this country a sense of participation? A sense of citizenship? A sense that they were part of the reform movement? The first hardest thing they had to do was to destroy their own class. They had to destroy the Samurai who had lived privileged existence for hundreds of years as a non-productive class. The Meiji oligarchs suspended their stipends and rice and ultimately compelled the Samurai to go into business for themselves. Many Samurai couldn't make the transition. Poor and unemployed, they bitterly resented their loss of privilege. General Saigo who had led the army that toppled the Shogun, wanted to preserve the Samurai class. He argued for a plan to employ the Samurai by invading Korea. When Meiji's more cautious leaders overruled him, he left the government. When they abolished Samurai stipends, Saigo went to war against the government he helped to establish. The Satsuma rebellion marked the last stand in the way of the Samurai. In the greatest battle, Saigo's colorful Samurai lay siege to Kumamoto castle, which was guarded by a new Meiji invention, uniformed conscript soldiers. Saigo called them dirt farmers but now they had the right to bear arms. As the war raged on, Saigo's forces dwindled to a few hundred men. Saigo beat a bitter retreat to his home in Kagoshima where, in true Samurai fashion, he committed ritual suicide. Saigo's death was the death of the Samurai class. It also marked the true beginning of the Meiji transformation. The new era had a new slogan: Civilization and Enlightenment.

Civiliuzation adn Enlightenment

It meant, in a superficial way, the love of all things western--from beer to bustles to beef. It also meant something more profound - a new sense that with the Samurai gone, all would be equal under the rule of the emperor. I think this may sound paradoxical, but the restoration of the absolute power itself enabled the democratization of Japan because with the single, absolutely powerful power at the top, the rest became more or less the same. Equality of opportunity meant everyone suddenly had an incentive to improve their own lives by modernizing Japan. Such was the notion of Fukuzawa Yukichi. Fukuzawa had traveled overseas and he, more than any other, popularized western ideas. His first book, which described his travels in the west, was a run-away best seller, teaching Japanese how to eat and dress western style. Fukuzawa was fascinated by western time keeping. To a country which still kept time by the sun, the clock was a powerful symbol of modernization. His later books brought European and American ideas into Japanese homes.

Fukuzawa Yukichi

Fukuzawa became a kind of prophet for Meiji's modern age. Fukuzawa became a national hero, and is still a national hero. Fukuzawa is on the Japanese currency. He is the national representative of the spirit of Meiji in its early commitment to progress on the national level and success on the individual level. Fukuzawa inspired a generation of youth with a slogan that propelled Japan's progress. "Heaven," he said, "creates no man above or below another man." Samurai were ordered to hand in their swords and have their top-knots cut off. Japan's last Shogun voluntarily submitted to a new barber and wardrobe. Throughout the land, hair cutting became big business and Fukuzawa himself was eagerly transformed from Samurai to gentleman. A popular song of the period rang out, "If you slap a barbered head, it sounds back civilization and enlightenment." At first progress meant aping all things western. Some Japanese wanted to abolish the Japanese language in favor of English. Others proposed inter-marriage with westerners as a way of improving Japan's racial stock. For many citizens, this era meant the beginning of electricity. But it was the explosion of wheels in Japan that truly marked the Meiji transformation. The invention of the rickshaw was as momentous in Japan as the coming of the Model T Ford forty years later. Then came the horse-drawn trolleys and, after that, perhaps the most important of all Meiji machines--the train. A great symbol of Japan's modernization.

In Tokyo, western fashions were the rage. High society quickly learned the latest steps and Japan's ministers became known as the "dancing cabinet" for the fancy dress balls they hosted for foreign dignitaries. Foreign cartoonists savagely mocked the strivings of the Japanese, and the Japanese struck back at the West in new satirical magazines. While the dancing cabinet whirled to Strauss waltzes in Tokyo, the Japanese countryside remained worlds apart from the changes going on in the city. For many farmers daily life was bitter and hard. They worked with the knowledge that the countryside was paying for progress in the cities, fancy dress balls, splendid new government buildings. Essentially the story of Japan's modernization in the early Meiji period is really the story of providential Japan. The government depended upon the farmers for their products, they depended upon land tax for government revenues, and the farmers were constantly exhorted by the government to buy less and grow more. As one Meiji official said directly to the farmers, "The farmers are the fertilizer of the nation." Farmers endured the abuse of government officials because they now owned their own land. If they worked hard, they reaped the fruits of their labor and the nation progressed. So when the government needed schools, the farmers built them. Education became the cornerstone of Japan's modernization. "Education is the key to success," was the governmentÕs formulation and "improving oneself also served the nation." Even though they had to pay for that education, they knew that their children would get ahead; and the children knew that by their getting ahead, the family's honor would be blessed. The Japanese really saw education as the route to personal betterment and a way to even out and equalize and open opportunity to everybody. As opportunity increased, so did expectations. Those who worked and paid for the nation wanted a say in the way it was run.

Emergence of the Popular rights Movement

A conflict was building between the small group of Meiji leaders and those who wanted democracy and a constitution. Fifty miles from Tokyo in a small mountain village lies a key clue to understanding Japan's modernization. Professor Daikichi Irokawa thinks some farmers worked hard because for the first time they believed they could have a say in running the country. Irokawa's proof was an old village store house stuffed with the dreams of the new middle class. Inside the store house, Irokawa discovered something that demolished the accepted version of Japanese history--it was a people'ss constitution written by a group of middle class farmers. It proved for the first time that modern Japan was not invented by a few Samurai. In early Meiji,people all over Japan were thinking about how to build a new nation. (Japanese Professor:) "This attic was covered with about 200 books--from this shelf to this shelf. Books you won'tt expect to find in a 19th century Japanese farmhouse: Rousseau's The Social Contract and books by Spencer, Locke and John Stuart Mill. Of course, there were Japanese and Chinese books as well. Up here on this shelf I found the constitution wrapped up in a Japanese handkerchief. Nobody had imagined anything like this existed. "Who wrote this draft? About 30 young men of the village. They were farmers--mostly in their 20s and 30s, and there wasn't a single Samurai among them. One hundred fifty articles were devoted to civil rights and the power of sovereignty was vested in the people--not the monarch. "When most people think about the history of that time, all they think about is how Japan's leaders tried to modernize from above down onto the people, trying to limit freedom and equality. But in response to that, the documents I found in that warehouse shows that the Japanese people were trying to modernize from the bottom up, trying to work toward greater democracy and greater freedom." Since Irukawa's discovery, more village constitutions have been unearthed all over Japan, proof that by the late 1870s democratic ideas were sweeping the countryside. Pressure was building on the Meiji leaders to open up the government. It's in this context that without doubt the most important of these government leaders, Ito Hirobumi, entrusts himself (he wrote his own orders and put the emperorÕs seals on them) to write a constitution that vies off the opposition by promising them that within a decade there will be an assembly of elected representatives of the people. Ito's problem, then, is to give them what he promised but to give away as little as he possibly can. Above all, not to give them genuine democracy. By this time, Ito has discovered his idol, Otto Von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor. The man who unified Germany in 1870 and has put together a peculiar form of government. It is a government in which neither the parliament nor the king actually exercises real authority over the Imperial Bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy basically does what it wants to do, and it does so in the name of national welfare--strengthening the state. Ito took the Prussian Constitution and adapted it to the Japanese political stage. In Bunraku, Japan's classical puppetry, puppet handlers are in full view. But dressed in black, they seem to fade away behind the colorful puppets. In the same way, Ito and the oligarchs seem to disappear behind the gaudy symbols of the new parliament and constitution. Politicians came and went, but Ito and the oligarchs stayed in place, discrete but at center stage and in the action. Perhaps the key element in this is the position of the emperor. The emperor is made absolutely sovereign. The constitution is bestowed by the emperor to the people. The importance of this is not that it actually gave power to the emperor, it meant that that the emperorÕs advisors were basically beyond the law. Despite the efforts of Ito and the oligarchs, elements of true democracy slowly began to seep into JapanÕs parliamentary system. The Meiji constitution gradually became the property of the Japanese people. It happened gradually. Even in the Meiji period, by the end of the period, a geisha whose client had not paid, was capable of saying to him that he was unconstitutional. It simply wasn't done to contravene what were then known as the rights and duties of the Japanese subject. The Meiji bureaucrats had secured their power. Now they moved to fortify Japan against the growing might of the western powers.

They saw that the west was strong because industry and science produced weapons that Asia did not have. They came up with a new slogan: Rich Nation, Strong Military. To make the nation rich and the military strong, Japan had to find a way to pay for it. That meant finding something that other countries wanted to buy. In Japan, that was silk. Silk exports paid for JapanÕs modernization and it introduced the Japanese people to a new economic reality. It is extraordinary how these Japanese farmers, still living in the same futile villages their ancestors lived in, making the same crop, suddenly found themselves part of international economics. There is a blight in the silk industry in Italy, there's a boom in Japan--they're making a lot of money.

There is a depression in the United States, nobody wants to buy silk stockings anymore. The money they got from this basic crop was the fuel for Japan's transplantation into a new economy, a new civilization. Here we see the government absorbing the surplus from the agriculture sector and transforming it and shifting it to the industrial sector. The government wanted to modernize fast so they tried to do it all themselves. The state built factories, bought war ships. Then, the government ran out of money. The Japanese at this point, I think, here invent one of the great institutions of all time. They decide to subcontract the state's goals to the private sector and this is what leads ultimately to the Zaibatus, where Japan's industrial combines. In Nagasaki Harbor, Mitsubishi was one of the first private companies to form the kind of close relationship with government that continues to spur Japan's economy today. In the 1880's, Mitsubishi was just a small shipping company in a primitive industry. The government wanted Japan to build its own modern ships, but the government didnÕt want to pay for them. The government's solution was to subsidize companies, like Mitsubishi, until they could pay for the new ships. The bureaucracy tried to co-opt the business sector and that is to bring them into the establishment and tame them and use them for the national interest. It's an early version of what we in America call the Military Industrial Complex. Their achievements were national achievements, but any profit they made was private property. That is exactly the case of Lockheed, General Dynamics, North American Rockwell. Their achievements are national achievements, but any profit they make is private property. That's exactly what the Japanese pioneered in the 1880s.

Costs of Bunmei Kaika

The speed of the Meiji transformation was breathtaking. In Europe, the Industrial Revolution took 150 years. Japan went from rice patties to factories in less than 40. Family silk farms led to textile factories and then to steel mills. Fifteen years after Perry gave the Shogun a toy train, the Japanese had built a real railway from Tokyo to Yokohama. Progress was fast but the cost was high. In textile mills, girls as young as 11 years old worked 12-19 hours a day in the stifling sweat shops. Conditions were even more severe in heavy industry, in the coal mines. The worst of these was Battleship Island. It lies four miles outside of Nagasaki Harbor, a ghostly relic of the cost of JapanÕs modernization. During Meiji, Battleship Island was a Mitsubishi coal mine, surrounded by a high wall meant to keep the sea out and the people in. The small island is filled with scores of dormitories, formerly filled with by prisoners, outcasts, and poor farmers. Their quarters were called octopus dens--small, dark cells that came to house entire families. Many children were raised on Battleship Island. In the 1920s a school was built along with a company store. But in the Meiji era, children joined their mothers and fathers in the burning, hot shafts of the islandÕs towering mountain of coal. It was hell. This kind of mine work was true hell. It was a very big problem. Many people tried to escape, but they couldnÕt because it was an island. Records show that when people were caught trying to leave, they met a horrible end.

Around 1890s there were newspaper accounts of miners who were murdered by their bosses when they were caught trying to escape from Battleship Island. Inside the coal pits, temperatures rose to 130 degrees. Men and women worked nearly naked crawling in shafts too low to allow them to stand. When a cholera epidemic broke out, Mitsubishi burned all the victims, dead or alive. This is what happens when a society does this--moves from agriculture to industry. It is a very costly and miserable transition, and Japan did as bad and as well as the rest of these countries, both then and the countries that are doing it now.