Opening of the country and the Meiji Restoration

Opening of the country and the Meiji Restoration

The Opium War of 1839–42 was a timely warning to the seclusionists, and the Western pressure on Japan to open the country culminated in Commodore Matthew C.Perry’s success in his gunboat diplomacy of 1853–4. Commercial treaties signed with the USA and other Western powers in 1858 were ‘unequal’ with their stipulations on extra- territoriality and tariff regulation. As soon as foreign trade started in 1859 attacks on foreigners and foreign ships began, and these led to the British bombardment of Kagoshima, Satsuma, in 1863 and also to the destruction of the Choshu forts at Shimonoseki by US, French, British and Dutch naval forces in 1863–4. Yet Satsuma and Choshu were the two great han (territory under a local lord or daimyo) that along with bakufu sent students to Europe to study subjects varying from naval engineering to political economy. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901), the founder of Keio School (later University), who visited Europe on a bakufu mission (1862), was impressed with the wealth and strength of the Western nations as much as with the liberty they enjoyed. The Meiji slogan (Meiji being an era name, 1868–1912) of ‘enriching and strengthening the country’ was a sentiment shared by all other students sent abroad at the time.

It was again Satsuma and Choshu that took the lead in overthrowing bakufu in the civil war of 1867–8 in collaboration with the scheming court nobles who aspired to reassert the imperial power. Thus began the great political and social upheaval called the Meiji Restoration. The Charter Oath of Five Articles (1868), a statement of the principles of the new government, emphasized among others the need of public debate in an assembly, replacement of obsolete customs by acts agreeable to international justice, and search for knowledge all over the world in order to strengthen the imperial polity. This was sworn by the young Emperor not to the people or to the aristocracy, but to his ancestral gods. Japan’s modernization thus began under the aegis as it were of the spirit of imperial Japan.

The Meiji government initiated reform measures to put an end to feudal land tenure and social statuses: a modern system of local government was introduced, a nation-wide system of education adopted and modern conscription enforced, while key factors of industrialization were promoted under state sponsorship and by privatization of government-owned resources.

Entries A-Z 337 One-half of the government ministers went abroad as the members of the Iwakura

Embassy (1871–3), which was encumbered at first with the premature hope of revising unequal treaties. They spent 19 months studying the processes of modernization in the USA and Europe, and Kume Kunitake (1839–1931), the historian and compiler of its record, emphasized that European wealth and power dated from around 1800 and Japan’s progress would take less time. In his account of the Vienna Exposition of 1873, itself an epilogue to the massive record of the embassy’s observation of Western politics, industry and culture, he was quick to perceive that small nations such as Belgium and Switzerland were as impressive as the large, prosperous nations like Britain and France, though elsewhere Bismarck appeared prominently with a German model of development. The choice of models was still open and western ideas poured in.