Meiji Restoration
The Meiji Restoration was one of the most deliberate and successful acts of state self-transformation in modern history: a ruling elite's conscious decision to dismantle its own social order in order to preserve national sovereignty in the face of Western imperial power. Its urgency was supplied by the 'opening' of Japan. In 1853–1854, American Commodore Matthew Perry had sailed into Edo Bay with steam-powered warships and demanded Japan open its ports, ending 250 years of the Tokugawa shogunate's sakoku (closed country) policy. The resulting unequal treaties granted the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands extraterritoriality and low fixed tariffs, mirroring precisely the concessions that had humiliated China after the Opium Wars. Japan's ruling class drew the explicit lesson: industrialize or be colonized. The Meiji Restoration was a coup against the Tokugawa shogunate carried out in the name of 'restoring' imperial rule to the teenage Emperor Mutsuhito, who took the reign name Meiji — 'enlightened rule.' The shogun surrendered power in November 1867. The new Meiji government's Charter Oath of April 1868 announced its revolutionary program: 'Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule.' Within a generation Japan had abolished the feudal domain system, created a conscript national army on Prussian lines, launched industrial enterprises, adopted a written constitution (1889) modeled partly on Bismarck's German model, and built a modern navy. Japanese officials traveled to Germany to study medicine and law, to France to study art and military administration, to Britain to study the navy. The speed and selectivity of this transformation — preserving the imperial institution and Confucian social discipline while grafting Western technology onto it — produced a state that defeated China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, making Japan the first non-Western power to defeat a European power in modern war.
- Year: 1868 CE
- Category: Political
