The American government eventually decided to try to force the doors open. For this purpose, it dispatched under Commodore Matthew C. Perry a fair-sized fleet that steamed in July 1853 into what is now called Tokyo Bay. After delivering a letter from the president of the United States demanding the opening of trade relations, Perry withdrew to Okinawa for the winter, with the promise that he would return early the next year to receive a reply. Edo was thrown into consternation over this sudden crisis, and the remaining decade and a half of Tokugawa rule, known as the bakumatsu, or the “end of the bakufu,” was a period of great unrest. The Japanese were appalled at the size and guns of the American “black ships,” as they called them, and they were amazed by the steam-powered vessels that moved up the bay against the wind. They realized that their own antiquated shore batteries were almost useless against them and that Edo and the coastal shipping which provisioned it lay defenseless.
The government split into two factions—conservatives who advocated resistance to the foreigners and realists who saw that Japan could do nothing but bow to the American demands. In their own indecision, the Edo authorities did a most unusual thing. For the first time in over six centuries of military rule, the shogun’s government asked the opinion of the emperor on an important problem of state. It also invited counsel from the daimyo. Conservative Kyoto and many of the daimyo, most of whom were safely removed from the immediate threat, were of course strongly in favor of repelling the foreigners.
The Edo government was indeed caught on the horns of a dilemma when Perry’s fleet returned to Tokyo Bay in February 1854. The emperor’s court and the nation as a whole demanded a policy that the Tokugawa were quite incapable of carrying out. Under the threatening guns of the American ships, Edo had no choice but to sign a treaty with the United States, opening two ports to American ships and permitting a certain amount of closely regulated trade. The two ports were Shimoda, at the end of a peninsula near Edo, and Hakodate in Hokkaido, both insignificant ports located in relatively remote places, but adequate for the provisioning of American ships. An American consul was also permitted to reside at Shimoda, and it was stipulated that any new concession granted other Western countries would automatically apply to the United States as well, a provision taken from the “unequal treaty” system then being forced on China.
Once the door had been opened a crack, there was no closing it. Within two years Edo had been forced to sign similar treaties with the British, Russians, and Dutch. The Russian treaty added Nagasaki to the open ports and included another element of the Chinese “unequal treaty” system—extraterritoriality, or the right of Western residents in Japan to be tried by their own consular courts under their own national laws. In 1858 Townsend Harris, the first American consul, negotiated a full commercial treaty, which went into effect in 1860. Harris used as his chief argument the threat of the British navy, which was far larger than the American and, he declared, would be used more ruthlessly. The commercial treaty opened six ports to relatively free trade and won permission for the permanent residence of Americans in the great cities of Edo and Osaka.
The British, Russians, Dutch, and French once again followed the American lead and added in 1866 limitations, commonly of 5 percent, on the tariffs Japan would be allowed to impose on foreign imports. This was another key element of the “unequal treaty” system. Foreign merchants were particularly attracted to the newly opened deep-water ports of Yokohama near Edo and Kobe across the bay from Osaka, both of which were in time to develop into great cities. British and French soldiers followed the Western traders to protect them from diehard samurai opponents to their presence. To observers of the time, Japan must have seemed well on the road to the semicolonial status into which China was already falling.
The Granger Collection
American engraving of the White House reception given by President Buchanan in 1860 for the Tokugawa Embassy. The embassy was in Washington to ratify the Harris treaty of commerce.
All Japan was thrown into turmoil by the sudden collapse of the policy of isolation. The differing rates between gold and silver in Japan and the rest of the world produced for a while a serious drain of gold. Textile markets were disrupted by cheap machine-made foreign imports. But, far worse, the credibility of the Edo government had been shattered by its inability to defend Japan and its meek acceptance of foreign policies that most politically conscious Japanese bitterly opposed. Edo had again consulted the daimyo before signing the commercial treaty with Harris in 1858, drawing as before largely negative reactions. There was no choice, however, but to go ahead with the treaties, and under the strong leadership of the chief “hereditary” daimyo, Ii Naosuke, the bakufu attempted to crush opposition by forcing the imperial court to give its assent and placing leading opposition daimyo under house arrest.
The nation, however, seethed with discontent and unrest over the national humiliation to which Edo had bowed. Unruly samurai, declaring themselves ronin, or “masterless samurai,” attacked Westerners, killing Harris’s secretary in 1859 and burning down the British legation in Edo in 1863. Another group, largely from Mito, one of the major “related” Tokugawa domains, waylaid Ii Naosuke in 1860 at a gate to the Edo castle and assassinated him. Still more flocked around the emperor’s court in Kyoto, seeing in the emperor a symbol for united resistance to Tokugawa policies, and raised the double battle cry of sonno, “honor the emperor,” and joi, “expel the barbarians.” After Ii’s death, Edo’s control over the country rapidly disintegrated. Even the system of “alternate attendance” at Edo was abandoned in 1862, and the shogun humbly proceeded to Kyoto for consultations when summoned by the imperial court.
In some domains, extremist samurai gained control over the local administrations and attempted to use the power of their domains to influence national policies. At first they advocated various schemes to bring the imperial court and the bakufu closer together for greater national unity, but gradually their movements became openly revolutionary against the Tokugawa. Two leading but rival domains in these efforts were Choshu in the extreme western end of Honshu and Satsuma in southern Kyushu. Both were among the largest domains, had cherished anti-Edo feelings since their forced submission to the Tokugawa in 1600, had relatively large samurai populations because of the reduction in their geographic size at that time, were still quite cohesive feudal units because of their relatively remote geographic positions, and happened to be financially solvent and therefore could afford to purchase new Western arms.
The bakufu desperately but belatedly attempted to strengthen itself, dispatching missions abroad, introducing Western military technology, and attempting to reform its administration and economic position. However, Choshu, Satsuma, and a few other domains were also beginning to reform their military establishments. Though violently antiforeign, Satsuma and Choshu had learned through bitter experience that the Westerners could not be driven away by a militarily backward Japan. A British fleet destroyed the Satsuma capital of Kagoshima in 1863 in retaliation for the assassination of an Englishman near Yokohama the year before. In 1863 American and French ships and in 1864 a whole allied fleet demolished the Choshu forts near Shimonoseki at the western end of the Inland Sea because these forts had been firing on Western vessels in response to an order from the imperial court, then under Choshu influence. Satsuma at once proceeded to build up a modern navy with British assistance, and Choshu speeded up the modernization of its forces, experimenting with mixed rifle brigades made up of both samurai and peasants.
In 1863 the extremist Choshu forces were driven out of Kyoto in the first actual fighting in Japan for two and a quarter centuries, and the next year the bakufu still had the strength to marshal an army that forced Choshu to submit temporarily to its policies. A second expedition in 1866 against renewed Choshu resistance failed miserably, however. Meanwhile Choshu and Satsuma had secretly joined forces and, with the aid of some other domains, notably Tosa in Shikoku, and a few ra
dical court nobles, this revolutionary coalition seized control of the imperial court late in 1867 (or on January 3, 1868, according to the Western calendar).
The shogun had himself come from the “related” Mito domain, which for a long time had been a hotbed of pro-imperialist sentiment. Perhaps because of this background, he refused to put up a determined fight for Tokugawa supremacy, though some forces loyal to the bakufu did battle in his behalf outside Kyoto and then later within a part of Edo and in some domains to the north, while the new Tokugawa navy held out for another year in Hokkaido. On the whole, however, the coalition of Satsuma, Choshu, and their allies, using control over the person of the emperor as their justification, took over the whole country with surprising ease and remarkably little bloodshed. The Tokugawa bakufu, which had seemed firmly established a mere two decades earlier, had become so flabby with age and so hopelessly outdated both administratively and ideologically during two centuries of slow change that, when finally challenged by a few determined opponents, it collapsed suddenly and completely.
Most of the domains and the great bulk of the Japanese people passively watched, irresolute, unconcerned, or financially paralyzed, while a small group of able young samurai from western Japan, mostly from the lower ranks of that class, together with a handful of court nobles who never before had been involved in political power, seized control of the remains of the central government. Edo had for so long been the real political capital of Japan that the new leaders made it their own headquarters. In the autumn of 1868 it was renamed Tokyo, or “eastern capital,” and the emperor and his court were moved to the great Edo castle the next spring. The new government was supported by the military power of Satsuma, Choshu, and their allies—only a small minority of the hereditary warrior class of Japan—but had as its chief financial base the land tax from the huge shogunal realm, which it appropriated largely for itself. It also resorted to forced loans from rich merchants, as the shogun and daimyo had done when in need.
To create an effective new administration on the ruins of the discredited and bankrupt bakufu, however, was no easy task. The chief assets of the new leaders were their control of the imperial symbol of political legitimacy, the armies of the few domains they personally controlled, and the political paralysis that gripped the other domains and the shogun’s realm. The new leaders had already learned that trying to “expel the barbarians” was an objective they would have to abandon, at least for the present. They soon signaled this change in attitude by having the emperor receive the representatives of the foreign powers in audience in the spring of 1868. The other slogan of the revolution, sonno, or “honor the emperor,” remained central to their cause, however, since it was the only justification for their rule. They built their regime around the emperor, doing everything in his name, even though he was only fourteen years old at the time. In 1868 they changed the name of the “year period” to Meiji, meaning “Enlightened Rule,” a name posthumously given to the emperor when he died in 1912, and the whole revolution and the tremendous changes that followed came to be known as the Meiji Restoration.
In theory the movement “restored” the imperial rule of antiquity, but nothing of the kind actually took place. While paying utmost deference to the emperor, the group of young samurai and court nobles who were in actual control ruled in a collegial manner, as had become customary in Japan, and they took their models for innovation not from ancient Japan but from the contemporary West. They did revive ancient court titles and the names of old institutions, but the resurrection of such names did not signify their restoration as functioning institutions. The real changes they made were the abandonment of the feudal structure of Tokugawa society and government and the piecemeal adoption of Western institutions of modern centralized rule.
All these changes were made under the motto of fukoku kyohei, “a rich country and strong military,” because it was clear that until Japan was militarily powerful on the basis of its own economic strength, it could not expect to “expel the barbarians,” even in the modified sense of winning military and economic security from the West and diplomatic equality with it. The whole tenor of the effort was expressed in a Five Articles Oath (also called the Charter Oath), which the new leaders had the emperor issue on April 8, 1868. In it he promised that “evil customs of the past shall be broken off,” careers shall be opened to all people equally, and “knowledge shall be sought throughout the world.”
In traditional Japanese style, the chief posts in the new government were given to high court nobles and the daimyo of the domains who had cooperated in the overthrow of the Tokugawa, but these men were mainly figureheads. Below them were the real leaders—the samurai and younger court nobles who had actually carried out the revolution. The main figure among them until his death in 1883 was the court noble Iwakura Tomomi, the oldest of the group at forty-three. The rest were mostly young samurai, among whom Kido Takayoshi of Choshu and Okubo Toshimichi and Saigo Takamori of Satsuma were the most prominent. For the most part these men occupied posts as councilors and as vice ministers in the new ministries that were being formed. Falling back on the old Japanese technique of collective leadership, they made their important decisions through consultation and consensus, whatever the formal structure of government might be. Not once did any of them attempt to acquire dictatorial power for himself, quite unlike most of the revolutions that have occurred in modernizing countries in more recent times.
It was clear that something more than a coalition of a few domains was needed to produce a unified and powerful nation capable of staving off the Western menace and maintaining order in a land smoldering with resentment at the presence of foreigners and the seizure of power by a group of men who were representative of only a small part of the country. The new government had no difficulty in taking over the shogun’s realm and dividing it into centrally controlled prefectures, a system well known from Japan’s own past, but the real tasks were to gain control over the domains, which constituted three-fourths of the country, and to eliminate the class divisions that stood in the way of modernizing the government, the economy, and, most important, the military.
The new leaders began by persuading the daimyo of Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen, a domain in northern Kyushu, to symbolically restore their territories to the emperor on March 5, 1869, and receive them back as lands over which they were now considered to be governors, with one-tenth of their former domain revenues as personal incomes. Most of the other domains quickly followed suit for fear of being discriminated against, and the remainder were forced to accept the new system. Then quite suddenly, on August 29, 1871, the new government abolished all the domains, putting them under centrally appointed governors and paying off the daimyo fairly generously with government bonds; these, of course, would have no value unless the new regime survived. The domains were so demoralized that they put up no concerted opposition, and the daimyo, accustomed to being little more than figureheads, meekly complied. Their bonds became an important source of future banking capital, but they themselves faded away for the most part into genteel and affluent obscurity.
The abolition of the domains, most of which had been well-established political units for several centuries, was achieved with surprising ease, but depriving the samurai of their feudal privileges was a more difficult and dangerous undertaking. They formed a wide stratum of society that monopolized military and political power and enjoyed the privileges of hereditary, even if often niggardly, salaries. In 1871 the government lifted all class restrictions on roles in society and decreed legal equality for everyone, including the semi-outcast elements, once known as eta but now usually called burakumin, who constituted about 2 percent of the population. Then, early in 1873, the government carried out what was in the Japanese context perhaps its most revolutionary reform, decreeing universal conscription and hence putting an end to the concept of a privileged military class. The point was emphasized in 1876 when the samurai were denied the right to wear t
heir swords, which were their badge of class distinction. Largely under the leadership of Yamagata Aritomo of Choshu, a new army of peasant conscripts was built up, at first on the French model and later on the Prussian, and the Prussian innovation of a general staff was adopted by the new army in 1878. Because of Yamagata’s leadership, officers from Choshu were to dominate the army through World War I. To back the army up in maintaining domestic order, an efficient police force was also created. Meanwhile, Satsuma had taken the lead in building a modern navy on the British model, and men from Satsuma remained at its head until well into the twentieth century.
The samurai’s loss of his cherished position as an aristocratic warrior-administrator was accompanied by the loss of his privileged economic status. Hereditary stipends, inadequate though most of them were, had been cut in half in the reform of 1869, and finally in 1876 the government forced those samurai who had not already done so to commute their remaining stipends into lump-sum payments of still further reduced value. Even then the payments to samurai and daimyo constituted an extremely heavy financial burden on the new government. Completely cutting off the feudal aristocracy would have been cheaper in the short run, but perhaps this relatively generous treatment is one reason why modern Japan had no continuing problem with the ancien régime, as did France.
There were, of course, strong reactions to these drastic reforms. Because of their traditions of leadership and education, men of samurai origin virtually monopolized all the important posts in the new government, while others made for themselves new careers in business and intellectual pursuits. But the bulk of the samurai had neither the talents nor the flexibility to adjust to the new conditions, and they sank into obscure poverty. So large a privileged class could not be disinherited without some turmoil. Irreconcilable conservatives among the samurai often defied the new government in its first decade of rule. Significantly, these troubles occurred largely in the same western domains from which the new leaders had come. Perhaps the authority of these men seemed less valid in areas where their relatively lowly origins were well remembered. The final and most serious of the samurai revolts came in 1877 in Satsuma itself. There some 40,000 discontented conservatives rallied around Saigo, who had withdrawn from the government in dudgeon four years earlier. In bloody fighting, the government’s new conscript army managed to crush the rebels, proving to the diehards that the old order had indeed passed.
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