Meiji Restoration (1868): Japan's Leap into the Modern World

The Meiji Restoration was the political revolution of 1868 that overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate and restored formal power to the emperor of Japan. Proclaimed in Kyoto in January 1868 by samurai leaders from Satsuma, Choshu and allied domains, it opened an era of reform in which Japan built a centralised state, a conscript army, modern industry and a constitution within a single generation. The Restoration turned a divided feudal country into Asia’s first industrial great power.

Background: the late Tokugawa crisis

For more than two and a half centuries Japan had been ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1603. The emperor lived in Kyoto with ceremonial dignity but little power, while some 260 to 280 domains, each governed by a daimyo (feudal lord), administered most of the country under the shogun’s supervision. Strict limits on foreign contact, the policy later called sakoku, restricted trade to the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki and to Korea and the Ryukyu Islands through intermediary domains.

By the nineteenth century the system was under strain. Samurai incomes stagnated, peasant uprisings grew more frequent and the shogunate struggled with debt. The decisive shock came from outside. In July 1853 the American Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay with steam-powered warships, and the Perry Expedition forced the shogunate to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa in March 1854. Treaties of 1858 with the United States and European powers opened ports, fixed low tariffs and gave foreigners extraterritorial rights.

The fall of the shogunate, 1858-1868

The treaties were signed without the emperor’s approval and caused fury. The slogan sonno joi, “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”, rallied young samurai. The shogun’s chief minister, Ii Naosuke, who had signed the 1858 treaty and purged opponents, was assassinated outside Edo Castle in March 1860. Anti-foreign violence followed, and Western navies retaliated by bombarding Kagoshima in Satsuma in 1863 and the Choshu forts at Shimonoseki in 1863-1864.

These defeats convinced Satsuma and Choshu that expelling foreigners was impossible and that Japan needed Western arms and a new government. In 1866, with the mediation of Sakamoto Ryoma of Tosa, the former rivals concluded a secret alliance. That year a shogunate expedition against Choshu failed.

The young Emperor Mutsuhito, later known as Emperor Meiji, succeeded his father Komei in February 1867. In November 1867 the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, offered to return his governing authority to the throne, hoping to keep a leading role in a new council of lords. On 3 January 1868 Satsuma and allied troops seized the gates of the imperial palace in Kyoto, and the court proclaimed the restoration of imperial rule, abolished the shogunate and demanded that Yoshinobu surrender his lands. The result was the Boshin War, in which forces loyal to the new government defeated the shogun’s supporters by June 1869.

Building a new state

On 6 April 1868 the government issued the Charter Oath in the emperor’s name, promising deliberative assemblies and that “knowledge shall be sought throughout the world”. Edo was renamed Tokyo (“eastern capital”) in September 1868, the reign name Meiji (“enlightened rule”) was adopted in October, and the emperor moved to Tokyo, which became the capital.

The leaders then dismantled the old order. In 1869 the daimyo returned their domain registers to the emperor, and on 29 August 1871 the domains were abolished altogether and replaced by prefectures run by governors appointed from Tokyo. The four hereditary status groups were legally merged, outcast status was abolished in 1871, and commoners could take surnames and choose their occupations.

From 1871 to 1873 the Iwakura Mission, with nearly half the government’s leaders, toured the United States and Europe to study Western institutions. It returned convinced that Japan needed patient internal development before it could challenge the Western powers.

The great reforms of the 1870s

A rapid series of measures transformed the country:

• Education: the Education Ordinance of 1872 set out a national school system, and primary attendance rose steadily over the following decades.
• Army: the Conscription Ordinance of January 1873, shaped by Yamagata Aritomo, required three years’ service from men regardless of class, ending the samurai monopoly on arms.
• Taxation: the land tax reform of 1873 replaced rice dues paid to lords with a money tax of 3 per cent of assessed land value, giving the state a stable income.
• Calendar and communications: Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar from 1 January 1873; the first railway, from Shimbashi in Tokyo to Yokohama, opened in October 1872, alongside a national postal service and telegraph lines.
• Industry: the state founded model factories such as the Tomioka silk mill (1872) and mines and shipyards, many later sold to private companies that grew into the zaibatsu conglomerates.

In 1876 samurai stipends were converted into government bonds and the wearing of swords in public was banned. Discontent erupted in several revolts, culminating in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, led by Saigo Takamori, which the new conscript army crushed.

Society and culture: civilisation and enlightenment

Alongside institutional change came a broad movement known as bunmei kaika, “civilisation and enlightenment”. Writers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, whose books on Western countries and on learning sold in huge numbers, urged Japanese to embrace independence of mind, science and practical knowledge. Newspapers multiplied, Western clothing and hairstyles spread among officials and city dwellers, and brick buildings, gas lamps and horse-drawn trams appeared in the Ginza district of Tokyo.

The government hired thousands of foreign experts, known as oyatoi gaikokujin, to teach in schools, build railways and lighthouses, advise ministries and train the army and navy. Britain was the main model for the navy, France and later Germany for the army, and the United States for parts of the education system. Japanese students were sent abroad, and as soon as they could replace them, the foreign advisers were dismissed.

Religion was reshaped too. The new government separated Shinto from Buddhism, which had been intertwined for centuries, and in the early years this unleashed attacks on Buddhist temples. The ban on Christianity, in force since the early seventeenth century, was lifted in 1873 under Western pressure.

Change also brought hardship. The new land tax was heavy, conscription was unpopular, and the deflation of the early 1880s, when the finance minister Matsukata Masayoshi cut spending to stabilise the currency, ruined many small farmers. Peasant protests against conscription, taxes and compulsory schooling broke out in several regions in the 1870s.

Constitution and empire

A Freedom and People’s Rights Movement campaigned from the 1870s for an elected assembly. The government promised one in 1881 and, after Ito Hirobumi studied European constitutions, promulgated the Meiji Constitution on 11 February 1889. It created a two-chamber Diet, first elected in 1890 on a narrow property franchise, while reserving great powers to the emperor and his advisers.

Modernisation brought international recognition and empire. Britain agreed in 1894 to end extraterritoriality, which lapsed in 1899, and Japan regained full tariff autonomy in 1911. Victories over China in 1894-1895 and Russia in 1904-1905 made Japan a great power, and Korea was annexed in 1910. Emperor Meiji died on 30 July 1912.

Key people

• Emperor Meiji (Mutsuhito, 1852-1912): the young emperor in whose name the Restoration was carried out.
• Okubo Toshimichi: Satsuma leader and the dominant figure in the government until his assassination in 1878.
• Saigo Takamori: Satsuma commander in the Boshin War who later led the Satsuma Rebellion.
• Kido Takayoshi: Choshu statesman who helped draft the Charter Oath and abolish the domains.
• Iwakura Tomomi: court noble who plotted the 1868 coup and led the mission to the West.

Myths and facts

Myth: Japan was completely closed before 1853. Trade and contacts continued through Nagasaki, Tsushima, Satsuma and Matsumae, and Japanese scholars studied Western science through Dutch books.

Myth: the emperor took personal control in 1868. The Restoration returned authority to the throne in principle, but power was exercised by a small oligarchy of former samurai and court nobles.

Myth: modernisation meant simply copying the West. Meiji leaders selected models from different countries and adapted them, and they deliberately promoted loyalty to the emperor and a state form of Shinto as foundations of national unity.

Timeline

• 1853, July: Commodore Perry arrives in Edo Bay.
• 1858, July: The shogunate signs a commercial treaty with the United States.
• 1866: Satsuma and Choshu form a secret alliance.
• 1867, November: Tokugawa Yoshinobu offers to return authority to the emperor.
• 1868, 3 January: The restoration of imperial rule is proclaimed in Kyoto.
• 1868, 6 April: The Charter Oath is issued.
• 1871, 29 August: The domains are abolished and prefectures created.
• 1873, January: The Conscription Ordinance is issued.
• 1877: The Satsuma Rebellion is defeated.
• 1889, 11 February: The Meiji Constitution is promulgated.

Why it matters

The Meiji Restoration is one of the most successful examples of rapid state-led modernisation in history. It allowed Japan to escape colonisation and revise its unequal treaties, and it made Japan a model and an inspiration for reformers across Asia. Yet the same centralised, emperor-centred state that built railways and schools also built an army and an empire whose expansion led, in the twentieth century, to war across Asia and the Pacific.