Within ten years of coming to power, the new government had thus cleared away the antiquated Tokugawa political and social system and had achieved unchallenged control over the country. But the development of modern political institutions, a new social order, and a new economic system to support modern military power was a much slower and more difficult undertaking.
The pragmatic new leaders adopted piecemeal elements of Western political organization, trying them out cautiously to see how they would work in Japan. The finance ministry became the core of the government, since it determined the use of funds. A banking system was created, at first along decentralized American lines and later on the basis of the centralized banking system of Belgium. The currency was made uniform, and in 1871 the yen was adopted as the unit of value. In order to make budgeting possible, the land tax, the chief source of revenue, which had been paid in percentages of yield, was shifted to a fixed money tax in 1873, and the payers of this tax were recognized as the outright owners of the land. This measure clearly gave the land to the peasantry, but the fixed money tax as well as military conscription were at first unpopular with the peasants, who broke out in sporadic but localized riots. Another more lasting result of the new tax system was the foreclosure of mortgages in bad years, raising the proportion of tenant-operated land from around 25 percent to 45 percent by the end of the century.
There was an urgent need to develop communications and industry as well as a strong military if Japan was to fend off the Western powers and the deluge of foreign manufacturers, against which the tariffs fixed by treaty gave little protection. The new government laid telegraph lines throughout the nation to facilitate communication and control and, in 1871, created a postal system. It improved ports and made a start on railroads in 1872 with a line between Tokyo and its port of Yokohama, a distance of 19 miles. It initiated an ambitious program of development in the northern frontier island of Hokkaido, which was still occupied largely by Ainu subsisting on hunting and fishing. It developed a modern munitions industry so that Japan could be independent of imported Western weapons. It also developed mines and built pilot plants in various industries.
The bakufu and some of the daimyo domains had already experimented with strategic industries such as munitions and shipbuilding on a small scale, and also with some consumer industries, such as cotton spinning and weaving. The new government expanded these efforts. It built pilot plants that led the way in the mechanization of silk reeling and the industrialization of cotton spinning, cotton weaving, the making of bricks and glass, and a number of other light industries. Some leaders hoped that jobs in the new factories might help alleviate the economic distress of unemployed samurai. Most of these industrial efforts, however, lost money because of the new government’s lack of experience and the initial small scale of the operations.
The new leaders clearly realized that to succeed in all these efforts, Japan would have to learn a great deal about the technology, institutions, and ideas of the West and would also have to develop an educated public capable of supporting a modernized economy and society. The first decades of the Meiji period were essentially a time of learning from the West and adopting those elements of Western civilization the Japanese felt would be of use to them. It was a period comparable only to the era over a thousand years earlier when Japan had imported Chinese civilization, but this time the process of learning from abroad was more rapid and systematic. Students, including even a few girls, were carefully chosen on the basis of their capabilities and sent to study in countries selected with equal care. The Japanese intended to learn from each Western country that in which it particularly excelled. For example, they sent students to England to study the navy and merchant marine, to Germany for the army and medicine, to France for local government and law, and to the United States for business methods. The world was one vast schoolroom for them, but they themselves chose what and where they would learn and how they would use this knowledge to change life in Japan.
A few Japanese, including some of the leaders in the new government, had gone abroad even before 1868, and some of the other leaders went after 1868 for observation and study. From 1871 to 1873, Iwakura himself led a delegation consisting of about half of the top leaders, who first went to the United States and then to Europe. The mission was not successful in its primary objective—persuading the foreign powers to modify the “unequal treaties” forced on the Tokugawa regime—but it did gain a clearer idea of the West and what would have to be done to win security and eventual equality.
At first the new government was heavily dependent on hired Western experts, but these could be attracted only by salaries high even by Western standards, because Japan was not considered an attractive place to live. Hundreds of missionaries, mostly from America, provided free instruction in the English language and numerous other fields. Although the old ban on Christianity was not officially dropped until 1873, American Protestant missionaries had entered Japan as early as 1859, and they founded many pioneer schools. While the missionaries continued to teach gratis, the government replaced as quickly as possible its expensive foreign experts and teachers with Japanese trained by these experts or by students who had returned from abroad. Before the end of the century, foreigners in the government or in government schools had become a rarity, except in the field of Western languages.
Translations of Western works and books written by Japanese about the West were also important sources of information on the Occident. The greatest popularizer of Western lore was Fukuzawa Yukichi, who traveled to the West several times, starting with a bakufu mission in 1860, wrote immensely popular books, such as Seiyo jijo (Conditions in the Occident), and founded a school that in time grew into Keio University, one of Japan’s two most prestigious private institutions of higher learning. During the 1870s and early 1880s, there was a virtual craze for almost everything Western, which was expressed in the slogan bummei kaika, “civilization and enlightenment.”
The new leaders had recognized from the start that an extensive system of popular education was necessary for a modern state. By as early as 1871 they had created a ministry of education, which embarked at once on an ambitious program of universal education for girls as well as boys. Eventually compulsory education was extended to six years, though it took time to train the necessary teachers and develop the necessary facilities. Not until 1907 were all children actually going to school. Beyond the elementary level, the government developed a complex system of secondary and advanced schools, largely for boys, culminating in Tokyo University (founded in 1877) and later other so-called imperial universities, which were to produce the leadership elite.
The educational system, unlike those of the West, was thus almost entirely created de novo, and except for some missionary institutions and private universities that did not compare with the imperial universities in prestige, it was almost entirely in government hands. Thus it was free of the aristocratic aura and religious domination of many Western educational systems of the time and was, in fact, far more rationalized, secular, and state-oriented. Education was regarded primarily as a tool of government needed to train obedient and reliable citizens in the various skills required by a modern state. It was narrowly tailored to meet the national needs foreseen by the leaders: a literate working and military force, a broad group of technicians, and a small elite of leaders.
Within a generation or two, this highly rational system changed Japanese society from one in which prestige and function were largely determined by birth to one in which both were determined almost entirely by education. Thus Japan, still an essentially feudal society in the middle of the nineteenth century, had become much more egalitarian than England by the early twentieth century. A less happy result of central government control of education was its use for indoctrination. Education on the lower levels became increasingly a means for teaching the people what to think rather than how to think. The heavy burden of rote memory work imposed by the wr
iting system may have heightened this tendency. In any case, Japan has the dubious distinction of having pioneered in the modern totalitarian technique of consciously inculcating national obedience and uniformity through a standardized and closely controlled educational system.
All the great reforms and innovations of its first decade of rule put a heavy strain on the new government’s finances. Creating a modern army and navy was vastly expensive. Hiring foreign experts, sending students abroad, and establishing a nationwide educational system required much money. So also did the efforts to develop the island of Hokkaido, new communication facilities, new industries, and mining. The government was saddled with the debts and indemnity payments to foreign powers incurred by the Tokugawa bakufu. The liquidation of the old order through payments to the daimyo and samurai and the heavy outlays for suppressing the Satsuma rebellion of 1877 proved a tremendous financial drain. Unlike countries modernizing in more recent times, Japan found no outside financial or technological aid on which it could depend. In view of the predatory nature of Western imperialism, the Japanese were understandably fearful of foreign loans and used them only very sparingly. Loans, in any case, were obtainable only at high interest rates, because Japan seemed a poor risk to the West. In other words, Japan had to lift itself economically by its own bootstraps.
An accident of history had benefited Japan during the 1860s, its first decade of foreign trade. A silk blight in Europe had created a strong demand for Japanese silk and silkworm eggs. The enterprising peasants of the chief silk-producing areas in the mountains of central Japan rose to the challenge, and as a result Japan developed a favorable balance of trade with the West for a while. In the 1870s, as the artificial stimulus of the European silk blight faded, peasant entrepreneurs, following the government’s lead, adopted the relatively simple process of reeling silk by mechanical power. They thus produced a more uniform silk thread, superior to that of other Asian countries. In time, this small innovation gave Japan the lion’s share of the silk market in the West, and silk was to remain its largest export until well into the twentieth century.
A booming silk trade brought prosperity to some rural areas, and most people were benefited by the inflation that hit the country in the late 1870s, reducing the actual cost of the fixed money tax. This permitted substantial investments in agriculture, which, together with the improvement of transport facilities, the elimination of feudal barriers to trade, and the spread throughout the country of the superior agricultural technologies already developed in the more advanced areas, led to a considerable increase in agriculture production over the next few decades.
The government itself, however, faced financial collapse by the late 1870s. Its paper currency depreciated seriously, setting off a dangerous inflation that, while benefiting the taxpaying peasants, reduced the real tax income of the government and threatened its stability. Strong financial measures, which were obviously called for, were undertaken by Matsukata Masayoshi, one of the samurai leaders from Satsuma, who was appointed finance minister in 1881 and remained in this post for almost two decades. Matsukata carried through a program of stern retrenchment. He slashed the budget and sold off to private interests the government enterprises in Hokkaido and most of the government’s plants in nonstrategic industries. The effort succeeded, and the government got back on a sound financial footing within a few years.
Matsukata’s policies naturally caused serious hardships for the people, though the government was now strong enough to quell any resistance. These policies also had the accidental effect of concentrating much of Japan’s nascent industrial resources in the hands of the few persons able to buy them from the government. Since few people had enough money to purchase factories, which in any case were still losing money, the payments received were far lower than the original outlays had been, and in this sense the factories were bargains for the buyers. In terms of the reduced capital costs, many of the factories soon began to bring in profits. In part this may have been the result of more flexible and energetic private management, but it was basically a sign that the Japanese had built up enough skill and experience to begin to overcome the initial difficulties of industrialization. The first substantial success was in cotton spinning in the mid-1880s, and this was followed by surges in one industrial field after another. Japan was well on its way to industrialization by the end of the century, but in part because of Matsukata’s reforms, the financial benefits of this development became concentrated in the hands of a relatively small group of private businessmen, some of whom became the great financial magnates the Japanese came to call the zaibatsu, “the financial clique.”
The industrialists and businessmen of Meiji Japan were not, as one might imagine, simply the descendants of the great urban merchants of Tokugawa days. Most of these proved unable to adapt to the new age. They were too tied to traditional industries and old-fashioned ways of doing business. Only a few, like the house of Mitsui established in the seventeenth century, became an important element in the new economy. Some of the new businessmen came from among the aggressive rural entrepreneurs who had appeared in the later part of the Tokugawa period. For example, after winning samurai status in the closing years of the bakufu, Shibusawa Eiichi, who came from a prosperous peasant business family in the environs of Edo, left government service in the early 1870s to become a leader in the cotton spinning industry, in banking, and in a host of other fields. Others among the new businessmen were persons of obscure origin—talented adventurers who seized the opportunities offered in a time of rapid change. The bulk of the new business community, however, came from the samurai class. Such men took advantage of their greater educational attainments and their connections with samurai in government to forge ahead in the business world. Some of them had had experience as business agents for their daimyo. This was the case for Iwasaki Yataro of Tosa, who, starting in the field of shipping, built up his firm of Mitsubishi until it became second only to Mitsui.
Editorial Photocolor Archive
Woodblock showing the celebration of the electrification of the Ginza avenue in downtown Tokyo.
By the mid-1880s it was clear that Japan had succeeded in making the perilous transition from a feudally organized premodern society to a modern nation. It was strong enough to be safe from further Western encroachments; it was politically stable at home; and it was becoming economically secure from Western domination and even competitive abroad in some fields, such as cotton thread. The magnitude of the achievement was not generally recognized at the time, when the ultimate outcome still seemed far from certain, but now that Japan is indisputably one of the leading industrialized nations of the world and we have seen how hard comparable transitions have proved to be for most other premodern societies, the Meiji transformation stands out as an extraordinary and perhaps unique story.
Japan’s success is by no means easy to explain. Simply giving labels drawn from Western history is of little help and can be very misleading. To call the Meiji Restoration a bourgeois revolution is more confusing than helpful. The rich urban merchants provided loans to both sides in the struggle, but stood timidly aside in the contest between elements of the ruling feudal class. After the contest was decided, they were in large part replaced by a new business community drawn mostly from the samurai class. To compare Japan’s transition to the triumph of absolutism in early modern Europe is even more inaccurate, since the Tokugawa system was already more absolutist than most of the kingdoms of early modern Europe, and the Meiji reforms led to liberalizing trends. To call the Restoration a counterrevolution is equally misleading. It is true that peasant and urban unrest rose to a crescendo in the decades immediately before and after 1868, but popular uprisings, except for the reactionary samurai revolts, which failed, were not aimed at changing the political system, only at correcting specific grievances over unduly heavy taxes or maladministration.
No European precedents are very useful in explaining the causes or effect
s of the Meiji revolution. It was clearly forced on a peaceful, stable Japan by the threat of foreign domination. It was carried out largely by able young men drawn almost exclusively from the lower ranks of the dominant samurai class. It succeeded because of a number of characteristics the Japanese possessed, the relative importance of which is not easily measured. They shared some of these characteristics with their neighbors and others with the peoples of the West, but probably no other people had exactly their particular mix of traits. To sum up, the Meiji Restoration cannot be pigeonholed in some neat compartment of historical theory. Certainly what happened during these decades would not have transpired just at that time in Japanese history without the pressures from the West, but neither would these pressures have produced the results they did without the specific historical experience and qualities of the Japanese people.
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