The Meiji RestorationClass Set



The Meiji RestorationClass SetThe following describes changes made to society during the Meiji Restoration.For each section:What changes occurred during this period? How significant were those changes?What motivated those changes to occur?At the end:Overall, how would you summarize the changes that occurred under the reign of Emperor Meiji.SamuraiTo some extent the new imperial government had been put in power by the samurai—who were the first to rebel against the Shogun. However, the new government and the samurai had very different ideas about how Japan should be run. Many Samurai wanted Japan to return to the old ways—rejecting western ideas and continuing with the feudal system that had existed for centuries. The new imperial government wanted Japan to embrace Western ideas, western government, western industry, and western style. They believed that Japan could only resist the West by copying the West’s society and army.Within a couple of years, the new government had decided that the samurai had served their purpose and were now outdated. A number of laws in the 1870s erased all samurai privileges and forced them to cut their hair in western fashion. One of the most hated by the samurai was a law in 1876 that banned the wearing of swords in public—something they had done for centuries. But the most damaging were two laws—one called for all men between ages 20-25 to serve in the army. This erased the samurai’s monopoly on military service. The other law ended the practice of paying samurai a salary from the central government. Many samurai had relied upon this salary and now had to find jobs—abandoning the old ways.Enraged by this, one samurai named Saigo Takamori rebelled in what would become known as the Satsuma Rebellion. He—along with thousands of other Samurai throughout the southwest of Japan—rose up against the Meiji government. They claimed that the Meiji government too had now lost their way and had been corrupted by the West. The revolt was quite successful at first. The samurai captured several key strongholds of the imperial government. However, the new imperial army gathered its strength and decisively defeated the samurai at the Battle of Shiroyama. Sensing defeat, Saigo Takamori killed himself and his friend—Beppu Shinsuke—cut off Saigo’s head before charging down the imperial army with the last of the satsuma samurai.The Satsuma Rebellion was not the first samurai revolt but it was the largest and the last. After that, the Samurai slowly ernmentThe Emperor Meiji took over the Japanese government at the end of the Boshin War in 1868. He appeared before his people (something that was extremely uncommon for a Japanese Emperor to do) and he announced that the new Empire of Japan would no longer live in isolation and that “knowledge shall be sought all over the world, and thereby the foundations of imperial rule shall be strengthened.”However, after the emperor took power, he allowed it to pass on to others once more. By 1873, Japan was firmly ruled by his cabinet—known as the Meiji Six Society. The Meiji Six Society desired to build a government based on western ideas of ethics and government. They built a modern bureaucracy, abolished the feudal division of society, and even created a legislature (which had no real power). In 1889, Japan got its first constitution which gave limited rights to the people of Japan as well as allowing the Japanese to vote on their representatives (but only if they were male, at least 25, and paid a lot of taxes).Eventually a government would be developed that was an authoritarian oligarchy. The people had some access to power but most of the government decisions were in the hands of a small council of powerful landowners.IndustryOne of the main goals of the Meiji government was to build power enough to resist the west. Much of the West’s power was based on their economic strength and so the Meiji government very purposefully drove Japan to industrialize. They built railroads, they built factories, they built ports, they renovated roads, and they strung up telegraph wire—all in an effort to ease Japan’s path to industry.The growth was remarkable. The coal industry is a great example of the growth experienced during the Meiji Period. At the beginning of Emperor Meiji’s reign in 1868, Japan was producing half a million metric tons of coal a year. By the end of his reign in 1912, they were producing 21.3 million metric tons a year—43 times what was produced in 1868. The growth of the merchant fleet was even more remarkable. At the beginning of his reign, 12 steamships were owned by Japanese people. By the end of his reign, the Japanese owned 1,514 steamships. They also laid 7,000 miles of train tracks during his reign—the island is about 1900 miles long.Much of this new industrial wealth would fall to giant organizations called Zaibatsu that were essentially a combination of noble family and corporation. These were immense companies. The Big Four (Sumitomo, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Yasuda) alone owned 70% of the stocks in Japan’s stock exchange as well as controlling almost 50% of the equipment manufacturing power, 30% of the mines, and around 25% of all commercial ships in Japan. Corruption and violence was common between the zaibatsu and many were dissolved in the 1940s but the influence of the zaibatsu system is still present in the organization of some Japanese corporations.MilitaryThe effort to resist the west was clearest in the military. Before the Empire of Japan, during the Shogunate, Japan had relied upon its samurai for their military strength. These samurai owed loyalty to their lords, who in theory owed loyalty to the Shogun. A new Japanese army was created in 1873 that would be based on universal conscription—the levee en masse—as was now common in Europe. This asked all men between the ages of 20-25 to serve in the army.This army was trained with modern rifles and artillery. Initially the weapons were purchased from America or Britain or France but once Japanese industry caught up, Japan would supply its own weapons. The Japanese army adopted what it viewed as the best principles of western armies such as the German General Staff and by 1880, it was the mightiest army in Asia. The growth in the navy was even more impressive. The Japanese fleet barely existed in 1868. By 1930, it had the third largest navy in the world—just smaller than the US and Britain and just larger than Germany or France.Feeling safe from the West, Japan began to flex its own muscle as an imperial power. Japan defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and forced China to surrender Korea to Japan as well as open ports to Japanese traders and industrialists. They also conquered Taiwan in 1895. In 1905, Japan fought Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and inflicted a humiliating defeat on Russia—who still considered Japan to be a weak non-modernized nation. After Emperor Meiji’s death in 1912, Japan would continue to grow as an imperial power—adding former German Asian colonies after WW1 and conquering much of the Pacific in WW2. ................
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