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The only exception in the German historians or observers during the postwar years in Germany was the debate on Bismarck's unification of the Reich which prompts the participation of a wide circle of historians and attracting a certain amount of attention among the general public. The Bismarck debate is especially well suited to an analysis of the West German historical profession and its various interpretive outlines. Meanwhile, Japanese historians became involved in a whole range of controversies in the early postwar period that aroused professional interest far beyond the close circle of specialists, and this includes the Meiji Restoration. Bismarck's union of the Reich and the Meiji Restoration did not become the centerpiece of German and Japanese history after 1945, but they had the title since the late nineteenth century.

This chapter describes the Meiji reforms, together with the imperial restoration, that would constitute the Meiji Restoration. It introduces the progress of the anti-Bakufu movement (Tobaku). Then, it covers a coup d'état and a civil war. Next, it deals with the Charter Oath and the imperial restoration. The Charter Oath, the emperor's oath to his ancestral gods, announced at the height of the civil war against the Bakufu forces, embodied the basic principles of the new government that was to be set up. In addition, the creation of the Tenno system is examined. The second coup d'état, of haihan-chiken (to abolish han and create ken), was to strengthen the central government by transforming the feudal han into units of a modern local-government system. Furthermore, the chapter looks at the Iwakura Embassy during 1871–3, land tax reform, a modern education system and a standing army, the Korean issue, the Kanghwa Treaty, and the Seinan Civil War, government sponsorship of industrialization, and the currency reform and foreign trade.

This chapter provides a historical sketch of the nobility. The basic structure of the nobility under study came into formal existence in 1884 as the result of an imperial ordinance called the kazokurei. The embryo had taken shape fifteen years before, which calls us back to the dawn of Japan's modern era, the Meiji Restoration. The Meiji Restoration, launched in 1868, was a turmoil of sociopolitical events and transitions. When the Tokugawa shogunate, which had endured for over two and a half centuries, was defeated in the civil war of 1868–69, it collapsed, together with its feudal system of control. The winning camp thrust the thus-far marginalized imperial throne, then occupied by the sixteen-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito (known posthumously as Emperor Meiji), onto center stage of the political theater as the supreme symbol of legitimacy for the newly emerging order.

This chapter describes the association between status and economic activity in the Tokugawa period and reviews the mechanism by which economic activity was detached from status during the transition to the Meiji order after 1868. To elucidate the relationship between status and economy, it distinguishes between occupation, which refers to the economic activity linked to a household's formal status, and livelihood, or the economic means by which households actually supported themselves. The argument is that the Tokugawa system accommodated the distinction between occupation and livelihood, although at the cost of considerable institutional complexity. The gap between occupation and livelihood was especially stark for many outcastes. The monetization of duty affected all Japanese, regardless of previous status. The widening gap between occupation and livelihood formed the economic background to the arrival of the Meiji Restoration, but economic developments per se did not “cause” the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate.

This chapter explores the way Tokugawa notions of civilization and barbarism were translated into a new idiom in the years immediately following the Meiji Restoration. There is a tendency to see civilization and enlightenment discourse as a stark departure from the ideas and institutions of the Tokugawa period. Three critical differences distinguished the early modern (ka versus i) and modern (bunmei versus yaban) conceptions of civilization and barbarism. The introduction of Meiji standards of civilization and enlightenment entailed a synchronous process of expanding the notion of civilization so that it gradually penetrated into the core of everyday life, while linking barbarism to the urban poor and others whose livelihoods were marked as unsettled. The locus of agency was a central feature of the transformation of civilization across the divide of the Meiji Restoration.

This chapter discusses the history of Japanese painting from Edo to Meiji by focusing on the career of more than a dozen artists regarded as the leading painters of the period. It begins by providing a background on painting and prints during the Edo period and goes on to examine the transition in Japanese painting from Edo to the Meiji period. It then considers the Japanese government’s support of Western art before turning to the activities of the first generation of Meiji artists. It also analyzes the rhetoric of Ernest F. Fenollosa and his former pupil and colleague, Okakura Kakuzō regarding the development of modern Japanese art. It argues that the new generation of painters and their pupils successfully negotiated the Meiji Restoration and that it was they, not the iconic painters and disciples of Fenollosa and Okakura, who were responsible for what is generally regarded as the later efflorescence of modern Japanese painting.

Japan’s present cabinet system inherited legacies from the authoritarian prewar order. Just as prewar cabinets played a subordinate role in executive affairs, postwar cabinets have been challenged to impart tactical direction to government policy. The decision made by American occupation authorities to govern a defeated Japan through the existing civil bureaucracy perpetuated a state of affairs in which cabinet meetings merely ratified decisions made by career bureaucrats. Likewise, the absence of a robust collective solidarity norm is the offspring of a prewar system in which ministers were individually responsible to a divine-right sovereign. In addition, the roots of many of today’s cabinet-related ministries and agencies can be traced to prewar organs. And then there is the human bridge embodied in the twenty-six prewar cabinet ministers who held portfolios in postwar cabinets. To understand these legacies, it is necessary to examine the historical process that produced an anti-Westminsterian prewar cabinet system. The point of departure is the Meiji Restoration that resurrected the Grand Council system and established cabinets dominated by a Satsuma-Chōshū cabal. The analysis then shifts to the failed experiment with “party cabinets” during the era of “Taishō democracy,” which, tragically, devolved into the “techno-fascist cabinets” that steered Japan into the Pacific War.

This chapter analyzes Kano Hōgai’s efforts to confront a new set of challenges brought on by the Meiji Restoration and by the demand for images to display at public exhibitions. Instead of reiterating the traditional emphasis on Hōgai as a heroic actor involved in the creation of a new mode of modern painting, I shift the emphasis toward the changing audiences and markets for the Kano artist’s paintings. I also detail how Fenollosa’s agenda intersects with painting production by Hōgai and other members of Kangakai, the Painting Appreciation Society.

I suggest that exhibitions can serve as a model for re-narrating the history of painting across the Edo to Meiji divide. Rather than presenting the “opening” of Japan to trade and diplomacy with the West as a stark temporal boundary between premodern and modern modes of artistic production, exhibitions enable us to understand such epochal events as opportunities for objects and ideas to be re-framed, and the framing process might then be adjusted or undone outside the temporary space of the exhibition hall. I also point out that historically, the public exhibition has been a fraught metaphor, a global symbolic form that structured and confirmed the originally Western perception of a break between pre- and post-Restoration art.

Examines the numerous changes, many of which were initiated within government, that resulted in Shinto becoming independent from Buddhism and assuming new public roles associated with the perpetuation of indigenous tradition. Examines the process through which Shinto came to be deemed nonreligious, the construction of new shrines in partnerships between government and local communities, and the public funding for shrines. Earlier research has treated the period 1868 to 1945 under the rubric of State Shinto. Critique of that concept produced the idea of “state management” as an alternative. The chapter experiments with that term to explore its advantages and limitations.

This book has examined how the Meiji Restoration had nurtured the sentiment that the revolution was incomplete. It has argued that the calls to action founded on the notion of the “incomplete Restoration” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were (re)productive of the myth of the Meiji Restoration. It has shown how the Meiji leadership embraced a linear conception of time that relegated the past to barbarism in order to overcome “backwardness” and confirm its status as a civilized nation. It has rejected the notion that the eternal return of history is a crisis of temporality and claimed that modern Japanese national identity was formed as a symptom of loss. This concluding chapter suggests that the ideology of economic growth and progress that had once commanded Japanese society in the postwar period seems to have no more evocative power today, especially for many young people.

This chapter examines the development of Japanese as a national language in the early twentieth century. It presents Minae Mizumura's three conditions that had enabled the rise of the Japanese language. First, Japan already had a written language that was quite mature and was held in high regard. Second, the nation enjoyed what Benedict Anderson called “print capitalism” during the Edo period, which enabled the written language to circulate widely. The third condition was the Japanese victory at the end of the Russo-Japanese War. The war held a symbolic meaning as it was the first time that a non-Western nation had defeated a Western power. Mizumura notes that the victory, which had been made possible through the modernization policies enacted through the Meiji Restoration in the late Edo period, established the Japanese language both in name and in practice. She also highlights the novel's critical role in spreading nationalism.

This book explores the ways social groups were constituted and reconstituted over the course of the nineteenth century. It follows institutions across the divide of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and finds important continuities in the context of revolutionary disjunction. It shows both how Tokugawa Japan could not be “modern” and how the same institutions that made the Tokugawa state decisively “premodern” nonetheless prepared the way for the adoption of the structures and technologies of the modern nation-state. It then highlights status as the central institution of the early modern political order. Additionally, it contrasts how the geographies of identity looked as they were conceived with the complexities of their actual operation. The chapters in this book build on one another, but they do not offer comprehensive, monographic coverage of the topics they address, either individually or severally.

This chapter analyzes the significance of the Katoku-maru incident in the history of the “restoration” of the young Meiji emperor in 1868. The incident identifies a network of Chōshū men—operating at the level below that of better-known leaders such as Kido Takayoshi and Takasugi Shinsaku—who supported and contributed to the Meiji Restoration. This is important because it is possible to consider the Meiji Restoration as an event that simply “came” to the Japanese people from on high, driven by court cliques and a small number of samurai. The Katoku-maru incident suggests that the revolution did not just come to the villages; rather, it was campaigned by certain elite households, through their encouragement of radical ideology, their offer of covert lodging and money, and their service as soldiers of the revolution.

In this chapter, I offer a general overview of the evolution of the thought of Kōtoku Shūsui by considering the principal events of his life and the social background for his thought. I begin by considering his idea of revolution and his thinking about the Meiji Restoration, a historical event that he called a “revolution,” even though he lamented that it was a failed and incomplete one. I also examine the reaction of Kōtoku and other early socialists to Western expansion into Asia and the development of capitalism in Japan.

Asakusa grotesquerie must be defined by the tensions embodied in the coexistence of dire poverty with leisure, of resistance with surveillance, of unprecedented (capitalist and anticapitalist) attitudes with older forms of relationships, and of desperation with humor. Although it was a playground for those enriched by capitalism, it was also the home of Tokyo's beggar and vagrant culture. This chapter suggests how Asakusa was not a hermetically closed free space, but a part of the montage of social relationships throughout the Japanese nation during the modern years. An examination of the cultural practices of each group within Asakusa reveals the tense relationship between agency and surveillance within one space, and the series of transformations in social relationships within Asakusa after the Meiji Restoration, the earthquake of 1923, and the onset of the depression in 1927.

This chapter reflects on the relationship between historical narration and political order. It first analyzes a number of histories created in the Tokugawa period and relates their narration to the politics of omote and uchi. It shows that the accuracy of information in most of the Tokugawa histories is the accuracy of recording various omote truths rather than the truth as we moderns would regard it. There is much overlap with modern truth, but certain types of facts are likely to be what we today would call fiction. This was due not to a lack of skill of the historians of those days but rather to their different goals in writing history. The chapter also studies the rapid changes made in historical narration in Japan during the Meiji Restoration and reveals how some aspects of the language of modern history writing were adapted from imperial omote history of premodern times.