One final point should detain us: the changing nature and role of the samurai. Although their original purpose had been to defend the interests of the daimyo, their role steadily broadened as they assumed growing responsibility for the administration and stewardship of their daimyo’s estates, as well as for protocol and negotiations with other daimyo and the shogun. On the eve of the Meiji Restoration they had, in effect, been transformed from a military caste into a key administrative class within Japanese society. Although steeped in the Confucian tradition of efficient administration, their knowledge and predisposition were essentially military, scientific and technological rather than literary and scholastic as was the case with their Chinese counterparts: this orientation and inclination was to have a profound impact on the nature and character of the post-1868 era.
THE MEIJI RESTORATION
In 1853 the relative peace and stability of the Tokugawa era was rudely interrupted by the appearance in Tokyo Bay of Commodore Perry, an American naval officer, at the head of a fleet of black ships, demanding on behalf of the United States — along with various European powers, notably Britain — that Japan should open itself to trade. [137] Japan ’s long period of isolation could no longer be sustained: like so much of the rest of the world in the nineteenth century, Japan could not ignore the West and its metamorphosis into such an expansive and predatory player. In 1858, faced with the continuing threat of invasion, Japan signed the unequal treaties which opened up the country to trade on extremely unfavourable terms, including the imposition of extra-territoriality on its main ports, which excluded Western nationals from the requirements of Japanese law. The unequal treaties represented a major restriction of Japan ’s sovereignty. In 1859 Japan was obliged to lift the ban on Christianity imposed over 300 years earlier.
The intervention of the Western nations, with the British, American, French and Dutch fleets actively involved, was bitterly resented and led to a huge wave of anti-foreigner (or anti-barbarian, as Westerners were known) sentiment. [138] In the face of growing tumult and unrest, the Tokugawa regime was beleaguered and paralysed. During a process lasting two years, culminating in 1868, the shogunate was overthrown by the combined forces of the Satsuma and Choshu clans, and a new government, dominated by former samurai, installed. The samurai were the prime movers in the fall of the shogunate and the chief instigators of the new Meiji regime (named after the emperor who reigned between 1868 and 1912). Part of the price the samurai paid for their new-found power and prominence in a government committed to the building of a modern state was the forfeiture of their old feudal-style privileges, namely their monopoly of the right to bear arms and their previous payments in kind — with the payments being commuted to cash and rapidly diminishing in value. [139]
This dramatic political change — bringing to an end two and a half centuries of shogunate rule — was driven by no political blueprint, goal or vision. In the early stages, the popular mood had been dominated by anti-Western sentiment. However, it became increasingly clear to a growing section of the ruling elite that isolation was no longer a serious option: if Japan was to be saved from the barbarians, it would have to respond to the challenge posed by the West rather than ignore it. The emergent ruling elite, which had previously shared these xenophobic and isolationist sentiments, underwent a remarkable political transformation, rapidly acquiring a very powerful sense of what needed to be done and implementing it with extraordinary speed. A modern imperial state was instituted, with a chief minister ‘advising’ the emperor, but with effective power concentrated in the former’s hands. By 1869 universal freedom of choice was introduced in marriage and occupation. By 1871 the feudal order had effectively been disbanded. In 1873 universal conscription was decreed, rendering the old samurai privilege to bear arms redundant. Almost immediately the government started to establish factories run mainly by former samurai, thereby ushering in a new and very different economic era. [140]
If Japan had previously been shaped and influenced by its exposure to Chinese civilization, the threat from the West persuaded the new ruling elite that it had to learn from the West as quickly as possible if it was to preserve the country’s independence and forestall the fate that had befallen China after the Opium Wars, with its progressive loss of sovereignty. The speed, single-mindedness and comprehensiveness with which the new government went about this task, particularly in the absence of any prior commitment or programme, is a remarkable historical phenomenon. During a breathtaking period of two decades, it drew hugely on Western experience in the construction of a range of new institutions. It sent envoys and missions to Europe and also to the United States in order to study what might be learnt, borrowed and assimilated. [141] This was done in a highly systematic way, with the object of establishing which country had most to offer in which particular area. The results were almost immediate. The education system introduced in 1873 was modelled on the French system of school districts. The navy was based on Britain ’s, the army on France ’s, and later also on Germany ’s. The railways followed the British example but the universities the American. Between 1871 and 1876 around 300 European experts were brought to Japan by interested institutions and government departments to assist in the process of design and construction. [142] The result was a patchwork of foreign influences that — in what became a typically Japanese manner — were somehow articulated into a distinctively Japanese whole.
From the late 1870s the government began to sell off its newly created factories. By so doing, it created a capitalist class. Many were former samurai who used the bonds that they had been given by the government — which had replaced the monetary stipends that they had previously received, which in turn had replaced their former feudal payments in kind — to buy the new companies. From the outset, then, the new capitalist owners had two distinguishing characteristics which have remained a hallmark of post-Meiji Japan to this day: first, they owed their existence and position to the largesse and patronage of the government, thereby creating a powerful bond of obligation; and second, the new owners were by background, training and temperament administrators rather than entrepreneurs.
The Meiji Restoration bore some of the characteristics of a revolution. The purpose was to build a modern state and shed the country’s feudal legacy. The new ruling elite was drawn not from the daimyo but primarily from the samurai, including those sections of farmers that had been latterly incorporated into the samurai class, together with some of the merchant class. There was clearly a shift in class power. And yet, unlike in Europe, the new rising class, the merchants, neither instigated the change nor drove it: in fact, for the most part, they had not come into conflict with the old regime. [143] The leaders of the Restoration, instead, were part of the existing ruling elite, namely the warrior class, whose role had steadily been transformed into one of more generalized administrative leadership. [144] To emphasize this sense of continuity and in order to consolidate popular support and provide legitimacy for the new regime, the samurai restored the emperor to a more central role in Japanese life, an act symbolized by his transfer from Kyoto to Edo, now renamed Tokyo. It was a coup by the elite rather than a popular uprising from below. [145] Thus, although it had some of the attributes of a revolution, it is best described as a restoration, an act that sought to preserve the power of the existing elite in the name of saving Japan from the barbarian threat. It was designed to preserve and maintain as much as transform, its instincts conservative as much as radical. Japan is a deeply conservative country in which the lines of continuity are far stronger than the lines of discontinuity. Even when discontinuity was needed, as in 1868, it was instituted, unlike in France and China — both notable exponents of revolution — by the elite, who, mindful of the need for radical change, nonetheless sought to preserve as much as possible of the old order. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Restoration, certainly in contrast to most revolutions, was relatively bloodless. The ruling elite was to succeed in maintaining the way of life, traditions, customs, family structure, relationships and hierarchies of Japan to a remarkable extent. The Meiji Restoration is testimony to the resilience, inner strength and adaptability of the Japanese ruling elite and its ability to change course when the situation required. [146]
[137] Endymion Wilkinson,
[138] Morishima,
[139] Ibid., pp. 41-2, 74-5, 89–93.
[140] Ibid., pp. 70–71, 75, 90; Benedict,
[141] Robert Kagan,