To Dare Even More Boldly: Knowing Your Country's Place in the World; The Meiji Restoration Saves Japan
In the late nineteenth century, a great power saved itself by mastering the brave analytical art of looking in the mirror. The Meiji Restoration in Japan (1868-1912) led to numerous advances in Japan’s social and political structure, dramatically turning the country’s fortunes around.
Whereas Japan had begun the period as a hopelessly out-of-touch declining power, ripe for Western domination, it ended the era as the greatest regional force in Asia. The key to this sea change was their leaders’ ability to see the world as it was, warts and all, and Japan’s specific place in it.
Japanese society, characteristically conservative and traditionalist, found itself surprisingly open to such a radical modernising process. Critically, it had been made painfully clear to the Japanese elite that they were lagging behind the Western world in terms of power when American Commodore Matthew C. Perry finally opened Japanese ports to international trade, as he arrived in the closed society in large warships and with armaments that far outclassed the technology of the Empire.
When Perry’s ‘Black Ships’ arrived in Edo (soon to be renamed Tokyo) Harbour in July 1853, the country was an isolated, feudal state. His dramatic and forcible opening of Japan to the outside world ended the traditional Japanese foreign policy of Sakoku, whereby for 250 years foreigners had been put to death for entering the country, as were Japanese caught leaving it.
Perry’s appearance also highly discredited the Shogunate, the hereditary warlords who had run Japan for centuries, as ordinary Japanese came to see how out of date and out of touch their rulers truly were. Knowing they couldn’t possibly win a military conflict with the Americans, the Shogun was forced to sign a series of ‘Unequal Treaties’ (as the Japanese rightly called them), giving up their power to levy tariffs on goods and also the right to try foreigners in their court system.
The origins of the coming Meiji Restoration can be found in the profound dissatisfaction amongst many nobles and samurai with the Shogun’s humiliating capitulation to the foreigners, a blot on the country’s honour they grievously felt. Japan’s fundamental geopolitical weakness had been made all too apparent.
Leaders of the Meiji reform movement (named after the sitting emperor) wanted to strengthen their country so that Japan would not become another plaything of the Western powers, a goal it shared with the Chinese government of the time but would be far more successful in achieving. The Meiji Restoration amounted to a very conservative revolution: Traditional Japanese culture and values would be preserved, paradoxically, by adopting Western technology and modernisation techniques. That this high-odds reform effort was crowned with success can largely be put down to its leaders’ ability to bravely assess Japan’s real, faltering structural position in the world, and then to decisively act to improve it.
The key figure who made the Meiji Restoration work is the rather mysterious Sakamoto Ryoma (1836-1867), whose diplomatic genius in 1866 brought together the powerful, traditionally warring heads of the Satsuma and Choshu provinces in western Japan. These reformist elements allied in their efforts to challenge the ruling and out-of-touch Tokugawa Shogunate.
While there are frustrating gaps in his life story, there can be no denying Ryoma’s organising genius or his centrality to the success of the Meiji movement. Ryoma was born into the lowest rank of the nobility (samurai); as a boy, he showed little scholarly inclination. However, Ryoma did achieve early notoriety as a master swordsman, which earned him official permission to travel more widely than was generally sanctioned at the time under the Shogunate’s highly restrictive laws.
Convinced that things could not go on for the country as they had, in 1864 he fled to Satsuma, an emerging centre of anti-Tokugawa resistance. As he has left his home province without permission, a sister of his killed herself, believing that Ryoma had brought dishonour on his family in illegally leaving his Tosca clan. For Ryoma, there could be no turning back from his act of defiance.
Quickly rising through the ranks of the growing anti-Tokugawa forces, it was precisely because he belonged to neither province but was a sympathetic and neutral outsider that Ryoma was able to skilfully bring about the alliance between the Satsuma and Choshu regions, which had previously been intractable enemies.
Realising that the rebellious provinces must almost instantly establish their armed forces to overthrow the Shogunate, Ryoma is often considered the father of the Japanese Imperial Navy, as he established for Satsuma and Choshu a modern naval force that was to hold its own against the established navy of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Critically in 1866, the forces of Choshu defeated the Shogun’s army. The omnipresent master diplomat Ryoma then played a key role in talks that led to the voluntary resignation of the last Shogun (Tokugawa Yashinobou) in November 1867, bringing about the Meiji Restoration, as oligarchs from the two rebellious provinces—the Genro—dominated politics throughout the reformist period.
However, not long after this moment of supreme triumph, the invaluable Ryoma was dead, struck down on December 10, 1867, by pro-Tokugawa assassins at an inn in Kyoto (the killers were never caught). Ryoma had been a transitional figure in Japanese history. As a member of the feudal aristocracy who had risked his life countless times in service of a cause that would lead to its abolition, Ryoma embodied these contradictions in the fact that he preferred to wear traditional samurai dress, but always coupled with modern western footwear.
The Genro Face the World
At first Ryoma’s rebel movement—which arose primarily in response to the humiliation Perry had visited upon the Shogun—was strongly chauvinist in character. A radical political movement called Sonno Joi, which was part of the anti-Tokugawa forces, adopted the slogan, ‘Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians.’ However, after receiving critical military support from the British, upon coming to power the Genro abandoned this utopian objective, not because they had come to love foreigners, but because they saw in the clearest-eyed way possible that strategically it was unachievable, as the West was simply too strong.
If they couldn’t beat the foreigners, the Meiji reformers chose to join them. For the Genro crucially understood Japan’s perilous position in the world, and determined to improve it. Rather than expelling outside influences, the Genro instead chose to learn from them how to modernise, paradoxically all in the effort of preserving Japanese society. Instead of outright chauvinism, the Meiji reformers adopted an overall policy of modernisation, with an eye to improving Japan’s position in the world, so as to renegotiate the ‘Unequal Treaties’ with the Western states from a position of strength.
In just two generations—a blink of an eye in terms of Japanese history—the country was transformed from a feudal society into the foremost power in Asia, one with a modern market economy. For the first time, the central government in Tokyo exercised direct control throughout all its far-flung provinces. Feudalism itself was abolished, with the samurai class being gradually (and mostly peacefully) pensioned off.
The country as a whole successfully underwent a crash course in industrialisation. Out of nowhere, the Japanese constructed shipyards, iron smelters, factories, spinning mills, a national railway, and modern communications. With the abolition of feudalism, the Japanese people were allowed to move about their country far more freely, which led to a massive migration from the countryside to industrial cities, where they could earn more lucrative wages.
These basic and profound political and economic changes allowed other reforms to flourish. The army was radically modernised with the introduction of conscription in 1873. Profound land reform was introduced. The Meiji reformers established a dominant national language, hyojungo, as the norm, replacing the mishmash of local and regional dialects that had held sway under the Shogunate. Schooling was made compulsory, and all Confucian class distinctions were abolished. This all happened so quickly that it was almost as if Japan had gone to bed a feudal society and awoken a modern great power.
The Genro’s heroic efforts at reform were thoroughly validated by the two shock victories of Japan’s armed forces in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), which left the country as the undisputed rising regional power in Asia.
By having the rare intellectual bravery to look in the mirror following the country’s humiliation at the hands of Commodore Perry—and the will to fundamentally reform, changing their very structural position in the world—the Genro had taken a country falling apart at the seams and in just over two generations left it a world power, in defiance of all the odds. Seeing where they were in the world allowed the Genro, with such great success, to see where they needed to go.