In the late 19th century, Japan underwent a process of modernization and westernization referred to as the Meiji Restoration. This lecture will examine the problems that led to the complete restructuring of Japan's political system, society, and economy. Japan faced many of the same issues as China did, especially with regard to their dealings with Europe's powers. As I discuss these issues, compare Japan's experience with what you know about China's, and consider why Japan's outcome was so different from China's. The Edo period of Japanese history lasted from 1603 to 1868. Primarily an agricultural society, Japan's social and economic system during the Edo period was very similar to European feudalism.
The government at this time was the Tokugawa Shogunate, in which a military ruler took responsibility for the day-to-day governance of the country, while the emperor played a much more ceremonial role. I'll discuss that in a bit more detail in a few moments. For now, the important thing to keep in mind is that during the Edo period, the shogunate government banned most Europeans from Japanese territory, conducting only limited foreign trade.
This coincided with growing European commercial activity in Asia, and in fact, the shogunate came to an end nearly three centuries later largely as a result of an internal dispute over Japan's potential role in the world's economy. The Tokugawa shogunate established its power over Japan through force. For centuries, Japan was divided into feudal domains. In the late 16th century, there were nearly 300 of them, and their allegiance gave the shogunate its power.
In the 1560s, the powerful Oda Nobunaga used his armies to consolidate control over Japan's domains. After his death in 1582, his aide Toyotomi Hideyoshi continued the military campaigns of his former lord, bringing nearly all of Japan under his control. When he died in 1598, Tokugawa Ieyasu, lord of a different domain, seized the moment, defeated the remnants of Toyotomi's army, and established himself as Japan's new ruler.
His armies would finalize the unification of Japan and in 1603 he declared himself shogun, officially establishing the system that would govern Japan until 1868. The Tokugawa Shogunate had a very strict social and political hierarchy. In 1591, Toyotomi divided Japanese society into four classes. In order of importance, they were warriors, farmers and fishermen, artisans and merchants. This system would remain in place until the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and it enforced rigid limits on what activities were appropriate for each class.
The chart here gives a sense of the different roles played by each of the classes under Tokugawa. At the very top of this hierarchy is the emperor, which you might think indicates that the emperor had the most power, but that wasn't the case. The emperor, who was believed to have descended directly from the sun goddess Amaterasu, served principally as a figurehead under the Tokugawa shogunate.
At his court in Kyoto, he was expected to undertake primarily spiritual and ritual obligations. Real political and social power was exercised in Edo, which today is Tokyo, at the court of the shogun. The shogun's place in Japanese politics and society had traditionally been that of a military leader, and under the Kamakura, Ashikaga, and finally Tokugawa shogunates, the holder of that position had usurped...
day-to-day control of Japan from the emperor. The shogun was the highest ranking member of the warrior class. Below the shogun sat the daimyo who had long ruled their domains with a lot of independence. Over time, the roughly 250 daimyo would become increasingly subjugated to the Tokugawa shogun who centralized power over time.
While the shogun might reasonably be compared to a European king during the feudal period, the daimyo were roughly equivalent to the lords of European feudalism. After the daimyo came the samurai who shared much in common with European knights. Japan's approximately 400,000 samurai were highly trained and skilled warriors who were also the most educated class in Japan. Their position allowed them a lot of time to study and in addition to their responsibilities as warriors, they were the shogunate's main and administrative force.
Their education meant that they could serve as clerks, advisors, or secretaries to the shogun or daimyo. In fact, a lack of large-scale warfare during the Edo period meant that the samurai's role as warrior became much more ceremonial over time. Occasionally, the shogun would order the daimyo to reduce the size of their armies, which meant that a growing number of masterless samurai or ronin became a social problem in many Japanese cities.
Under Tokugawa, the daimyo were governed by a special law code that regulated their marriages, forbade them from building ships or having more than one castle, and established specific criteria for their private conduct. According to this law, daimyo families were required to live permanently in Edo, while the daimyo themselves were to alternate residence in Edo one year and in their domain the next. Samurai were bound by a code of honor referred to as bushido.
The term bushido originated in Japan during the 17th century and translates to English as the way of the warrior, but it wasn't commonly used until the end of the 19th century. Rather than a specific set of rigidly enforced guidelines, bushido derives mostly from a large number of different sources. While there were certainly specific laws passed that regulated samurai behavior, there wasn't one single code of conduct called Bushido.
The core of Bushido was obedience and honor. Samurai were expected to show loyalty to their daimyo even in death. Sometimes they were even required to follow him to the... grave in order to preserve the honor of their domain.
Disobedience was the greatest form of dishonor for a samurai. For grave offenses they might be required to commit seppuku which was the ritualized form of suicide. The ritual as standardized under the Tokugawa shogunate was performed in front of an audience.
After being washed and eating a last meal the samurai would dress in a white kimono and write a jisei or death poem. There could be an entire lecture on just that topic but the general idea was that the poem should adhere to one of the traditional Japanese poetic forms. and were expected to act as a kind of farewell to life. Accompanied by his second, the samurai would then open his kimono and plunge a knife or short sword into his belly, making a horizontal cut. The second's job was to end things quickly before the samurai committing seppuku showed any sign of weakness.
In order to do this, the second would strike off the samurai's head with a single stroke. Over time, as the practice of seppuku became more ritualized, the second would often strike as soon as the samurai picked up his knife. and eventually a knife became unnecessary. A samurai commanding seppuku might hold a fan or other object that symbolized his willingness to go through with the ritual.
The practice of seppuku was unique to the samurai class and unavailable to lower classes as a form of redemption. The samurai made up only about 5% of Japan's population during the Tokugawa shogunate. Meanwhile, approximately 80% of the population belonged to the class just below the samurai, the peasants, which included both farmers and fishermen.
This is an important difference between Japanese and European feudalism. European farmers were at the lowest level of the fetal hierarchy. Japanese culture, in contrast, gave importance to the farmers and fishermen because of their importance in food production. Without them, none of the other classes would survive.
The rigid division between classes meant that a person born into a farming or fishing family would continue that tradition whether they wanted to or not. This also meant that no one from any of the other classes could make a living by farming. This had a surprising effect on some of the lower-level samurai families, too.
Not every samurai received a stipend large enough to maintain himself or his family. and in consequence many low-level samurai had long farmed part-time in order to make up the difference. Under Tokugawa this was forbidden and samurai were largely confined to living in the city.
Along with samurai, Japanese cities were home to craftsmen and merchants. Cities were divided into segregated districts for each of these classes. Artisans were respected because they created useful items.
Merchants were the lowest official class because they didn't produce anything. Below the four official classes were the burakumin who were further subdivided into eita and hinen. The Eita worked as butchers, tanners, and undertakers.
Their jobs were connected to death and therefore considered unclean. The Hinen worked as town guards, street cleaners, and executioners. Other burukumen were beggars, entertainers, and prostitutes. They were forced to live in the most squalid parts of cities.
In some cases, their villages were left off of official maps. There was a great deal of persecution against them during the Tokugawa period, and such treatment continued even after the abolishment of the class system in 1871. Early in the Edo period, Japan continued to develop a robust network of overseas trade, building a large number of warships and commercial vessels. Over time, however, the shogunate began to view foreigners with suspicion. One of the shogun's greatest concerns was the influence of Christianity in certain regions of Japan.
His concern was less religious and more political though. The shogun viewed Christianity as a destabilizing influence, in large part because several daimyo who had converted to Christianity rebelled. As a result, the Tokugawa Shogun determined to end the threat to his power. In 1636, Tokugawa Iemitsu issued the Act of Seclusion, severely restricting Japan's trade with the outside world. While the decision to limit contact with the outside world is often referred to as isolation, Japan maintained a very robust foreign trade throughout the Edo period.
They did maintain strict prohibitions, however, and allowed foreign trade at only four ports. Chinese and Dutch ships could trade at Nagasaki, while the Ainu Koreans and Ryukyu Islanders each traded with one of Japan's domains. All other foreigners were to be put to death immediately.
In addition to restrictions on foreigners coming into Japan, the act of seclusion and subsequent orders also forbade Japanese subjects from traveling abroad. As a result, Japanese knowledge of the outside world was severely limited during the Edo period. While the shogunate did keep abreast of major developments overseas, its leaders were dependent on foreign commerce for that knowledge.
Foreign technology did make its way to Japan via their commercial contacts, as did Dutch medical textbooks which allowed Japanese doctors to learn from European techniques. By the early 19th century, the viability of Japan's seclusion came into question. Similar to China, Japan faced pressure to open itself to European trade in the early 19th century.
And though the shogunate had allowed trade with some European partners, trade routes increasingly brought Europeans and Americans within close distances of Japan. Conflict over how best to respond to the growing number of contacts with outsiders divided the shogunate. One of the earliest documents to grapple with this problem was Shinran, or New Theses, written by Aizawa Seishisai.
Aizawa worried that the constantly probing foreigners would discover Japan's weaknesses unless the shogunate changed his approach to foreign trade and argued that Japan must study the so-called barbarian's nature in order to develop a consistent response to foreigners who might appear on their shores. In the 1830s, the shogunate underwent a series of crises, including famine and other economic struggles. In 1837, there was a short-lived peasant rebellion in Osaka, and the shogunate's response was not to work to alleviate the structural problems that had provoked the peasant's ire. but to institute cultural and moral reforms.
In one set of decrees in the 1840s, for example, the shogunate limited the size of doll that peasant children could have. This kind of petty micromanaging didn't go over very well. Conflict continued throughout the 1840s and in 1853, things came to a head when the American Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Edo Bay with four warships and requested an audience with the emperor.
His request was denied and Perry left with an ominous warning that he would return with a much larger military force. A year later, Perry made good on his word and returned with twice as many ships, turning their cannons on the city and forcing the shogunate to accept a set of treaties called the Perry Treaties. These treaties opened a series of Japanese ports to foreign trade. In 1858, the shogunate in the United States agreed to the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, which was quickly followed by more treaties with European states. Among other things, these unequal treaties as they're known forced Japan to open even more ports to foreign trade.
limited Japan's ability to raise tariffs on imports, and established extraterritoriality for foreigners in Japan. These treaties worsened the divisions within the shogunate, even drawing the emperor in. Without going into too much detail, you should know that the shogun approved the treaties without the emperor's consent.
In normal practice, this wasn't a big deal, but given the climate in which these events took place, it opened the door to more strife. Those daimyo who favored Japan's policy of seclusion openly broke with the shogunate, rallying under the slogan, Sono joi, revere the emperor, expel the barbarian. when the Tokugawa shogun died without an heir in 1858. The fight over his succession became a proxy for the fight over the direction of these policies. The shogun's great counselor, Ihinosuke, forced through his preferred candidate, who would continue the shogunate's policy of openness to the west through the use of threats and coercion.
He even went as far as to threaten the imperial court with destruction if it didn't acquiesce to his choice of shogun. Enemies of the shogunate became even more committed to ousting it and restoring the emperor to real power. Over the course of the 1860s, opposition to the Shogunate intensified. Several foreign military incursions in Japan demonstrated that Japan was incapable of defending itself if there were to be a full-scale invasion by a Western force of any size.
Some of the Daimyo began plotting the overthrow of the Shogunate and in January 1868, the conspirators proclaimed 15-year-old Emperor Matsuhito to be the true ruler of Japan. The shogunate resisted his attempt to remove him from power, but the shogun and his army surrendered to imperial forces in June 1869 after a brief civil war. When Matsuhito took over from the shogunate, The new government declared that the Edo period had ended and they were now in the Meiji or Enlightened Rule period.
It roughly coincides with the Chinese period of self-strengthening and it's a study in contrast to that movement. Whereas the self-strengthening movement sought to improve China's military and support widespread industrialization, it didn't attempt to change the government or social structure. The Meiji Restoration was a fundamental reconfiguration of Japanese government, economy, and society.
At the Emperor's coronation in 1868, he issued the Charter Oath which laid out the basis for his approach to government, emphasizing how it would be different from the shogunate. The oath included five direct statements. In the first, he committed to establishing deliberative assemblies throughout Japan to decide important matters.
In the second, he said that all classes would participate in the administration of government. In the third, he declared that the common people would be allowed to pursue whatever path they wanted instead of being locked into specific rules based on their class. In the fourth, he said that bad traditions would be rejected and replaced by new ones, quote, based upon the just laws of nature. In the fifth, he encouraged the seeking of knowledge throughout the world, quote, so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.
The emperor was still young when he came to power and he relied heavily on his political advisors. This group intended to develop Japan into a modern nation-state and they adopted the new slogan, rich country, strong army, to define their goals. For the Meiji regime, these two items went hand in hand and they led the new government to seek out foreign ideas to both the economy and the military.
One of the first reforms of the Meiji era was the dismantling of the feudal regime. In 1871, the daimyo were stripped of their domains and the entire administrative structure of the country was changed to a prefecture system that remains unchanged since then. This brought a centralized and unified administrative system.
The same year, a national army was formed in the Meiji era. was formed followed two years later by a universal conscription law. This modern army would use modern weapons and tactics adopted from the West and the conscription system helped to smooth over the elimination of samurai privileges while bringing greater unity to the country.
Within just a few years the new army had put down several rebellions throughout Japan and demonstrated its superiority to the old system. The institution of universal education based largely on Western models and knowledge would provide an educated workforce and civil service not limited to the samurai class. Finally, the 1873 tax and monetary reforms would simplify the old system of taxation and provide the new government with much-needed revenue to carry out its plans.
The early period of the Meiji era was a time of rampant westernization. Western dress and architecture grew extremely popular. It got to the point that by 1890, the government decided to reconfigure its education system so that it emphasized traditional Japanese values alongside the western subjects that had been the primary focus of schooling. In addition, the emperor and his advisors instituted a major political reform based on western models. In 1889, the emperor published a constitution that created the imperial diet, a bicameral parliamentary body that would be elected through a limited suffrage system.
In other words, it was a representative body chosen only by the elite. The Meiji regime's economic program prioritized industrialization. During the 1870s and 1880s, the government pushed the development of transportation and communication infrastructure.
They adopted a western-style banking system in 1882 which would support further industrial projects. The government pursued an economic approach referred to as state capitalism, in which the government allowed a free market but also invested in some projects and allowed the development of large monopolies, or zaibatsu. This approach was certainly successful.
By the time the emperor died in 1912, Japan was the dominant power in Asia. The Meiji Reforms strengthened Japan to the point that its leadership felt ready to challenge China for supremacy in Asia. In 1894, the comparative results of the Meiji Restoration and China's self-strengthening were made obvious as Japan goaded China into a fight over Korea and defeated China with relative ease. Over the course of about eight months, Japan demonstrated the impact of its industrialization and military reforms and exposed the total failure of the self-strengthening movement to improve China's ability to defend itself.
The end result of the war was a shift of tributary control over Korea and Taiwan to Japan. In 1904, Russia sought a warm water port in the Pacific, coming into conflict with Japan over control of the Laodong Peninsula, where Russia leased Port Arthur from the Chinese government, but which had come under Japanese control after the First Sino-Japanese War. When negotiations failed, Japan attacked Port Arthur, initiating the Russo-Japanese War. After a year and a half of fighting, Japan was victorious, and Russia had to sign away territory to Japan. This inspired a revolution against the Tsar in St. Petersburg and gave Japan increased influence and control over Manchuria, where its ambitions would eventually lead to another war with China in the 1930s.