Meiji Restoration

The Meiji Restoration (Meiji Ishin) was a political transformation in Japan that began in 1868, when the Tokugawa shogunate, which had governed the country for more than 250 years, lost power to a coalition of samurai from western domains who claimed to act in the name of Emperor Meiji. Over the following decades the new government abolished the feudal domains, dismantled the hereditary class system, built a centralized state, and pursued rapid industrialization and military modernization. The period is usually treated as the starting point of modern Japan, and it is often compared with other nineteenth-century modernization efforts in places such as the Ottoman Empire and Qing China.

The restoration grew out of long-term pressures: a rigid system of domain governance, fiscal strain on the samurai, the arrival of Western warships and the unequal treaties that followed, and a rising ideology of loyalty to the throne. Its immediate course was shaped by the Bakumatsu political struggle and the Boshin War of 1868–1869. Historians still debate whether the events were a restoration of imperial rule, a revolution, or a state-led reform from above, and the answer shapes how the period is understood.

This entry covers the Tokugawa background and the causes of the restoration, the political and military events of 1866–1869, the institutional reforms of the early Meiji state, and its economic, military, educational and cultural programs. It then reviews foreign relations and treaty revision, the main historiographical debates, and the legacy of the period in Japan and in the wider world.

Terminology and the Question of Revolution

In Japanese the events are called Ishin, a word meaning renewal or renovation that derives from a phrase in the Chinese classic Shijing. Late Edo and early Meiji writers also spoke of goisshin, a "great renewal." The English "Restoration" comes from a different term used in the period, ōsei fukko, the revival of imperial rule, which the court proclaimed shortly after the shogun returned his authority in 1867. Ben-Ami Shillony has argued that fukko and chūkō (revival) referred to restoring imperial power, while ishin meant reform, so that the English rendering misleads readers about the scale of change. The name still points to a real transfer. After centuries in which the imperial court held mainly ceremonial and cultural standing, practical political power passed back to the emperor, and the Tokugawa shogunate's authority was formally surrendered.

Historians disagree on what kind of event this was. Thomas Smith called it an "aristocratic revolution" because its leaders were samurai rather than commoners or peasants, and because it replaced one samurai-led government with another instead of responding to a mass popular movement. Some Meiji-era writers, including Fukuzawa Yukichi, described the change as kakumei, revolution, and the phrase "Meiji Revolution" appears in recent scholarship. Dating the process is equally contested. Some scholars begin with the Tenpō-era crises of the 1830s and 1840s, others with Commodore Perry's arrival in 1853, and the endpoint is placed variously at the abolition of the domains in 1871, the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877, or the late 1880s.

The question of how far the events broke with the past is central. The new leaders invoked antiquity while abolishing the highest court and shogunal offices, including the regency and the office of seii taishōgun, and creating new posts beneath the emperor such as prime minister and ministers. The Imperial House survived the transition, and it did not involve the mass dispossession associated with twentieth-century communist revolutions. Interpretations therefore range from a restoration of an old order to a rapid institutional reconstruction carried out in the name of tradition.

The phrase "bloodless revolution" is common in popular accounts, and it has been applied to the period in ways that many specialists regard as too simple. It rests on the fact that the death toll was small relative to Japan's population, and the term has been used to romanticize the Boshin War (January 1868 to June 1869). Casualty figures differ by source. One account gives about 120,000 men mobilized and roughly 3,500 killed, while another gives about 69,000 mobilized and about 8,200 killed. Violence also extended beyond the battlefield. In March 1868, samurai from Tosa killed eleven French sailors in the Sakai incident, and in Kyoto a British diplomat was attacked by samurai shortly afterwards. The later Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 was far bloodier than the Boshin campaigns, which is why critics argue that the "bloodless" label obscures the period's violence.

Japan's imperial loyalists were not a unified movement. Their victory depended on a small coalition of domains, and the new government had to suppress northern resistance, the Ezo Republic in Hokkaidō, and dissident samurai before its authority was secure. These struggles are part of why historians emphasize the contested nature of 1868 rather than treating it as a single decisive break.

The Tokugawa Order and the Bakuhan System

The Tokugawa shogunate ran Japan from Edo, the city later renamed Tokyo, from 1603. Its power rested on Tokugawa Ieyasu's victory at Sekigahara, and it shared authority with the lords of the domains. Power was nominally shared between the Shogunate in Edo and approximately 250 autonomous domains controlled by daimyo. The count was never fixed. Ieyasu's early reallocation of lands is recorded as cutting the total from 295 domains to 267. The shogunate also held land directly. It controlled roughly one-quarter of the country's territory, including major cities, mines and trade routes.

Historians call this arrangement the bakuhan system, a compound of two words: bakufu, the shogunal government, and han, the domains of the lords. Under this system, the han operated autonomously, even maintaining their own military forces and economic self-sufficiency. Each domain nonetheless remained subordinate to the shogun. Until the 1860s, the shogunate's right to mobilize the military contingents of all daimyo went unquestioned, and no han openly defied the bakufu.

The main instrument of control was sankin-kōtai, or alternate attendance. Daimyo were required to make ceremonial visits to Edo every other year, while their wives and children lived permanently in Edo as hostages. The obligation was extended in stages: it was made compulsory for outside lords (tozama) in 1635 and for hereditary vassals (fudai) from 1642. Apart from an eight-year interruption under Tokugawa Yoshimune, the law remained in force until 1862. The travel and dual-household costs also drained domain finances, a point that later becomes central to the economic strain of the period.

Other measures reinforced this oversight. Daimyo faced marriage restrictions, architectural limits and surveillance by official censors, all aimed at containing dissent and reinforcing the Tokugawa house. Lords were also sorted by their relationship to the Tokugawa: kinsmen (shimpan), hereditary vassals (fudai), and less-trusted allies (tozama, meaning "outsiders"). The outside lords were placed with particular care. Their domains were positioned as far from Edo as possible or between fudai domains, so that any sign of rebellion could be watched.

Society was organized by a rigid status order in which the samurai formed the ruling stratum. Only samurai were allowed to carry swords, a privilege that marked their superiority. They received stipends according to rank from the lord of the domain where they lived. Peasants were tied to the land: they were barred from marrying into samurai families and could not sell their land. Artisans and merchants occupied the lower ranks of the formal order, though commercial wealth gradually outgrew their official position.

The bakuhan arrangement kept the peace for more than two centuries, and the shogunate's authority was rarely challenged openly for much of that time. Its rigidity, however, limited the capacity of both the shogunate and the domains to adapt. Fixed stipends, a status order that did not match economic reality, and a control system that consumed domain resources left little room for institutional change when new fiscal and foreign pressures arrived in the nineteenth century.

Economic Strain and Social Change

Tokugawa finance rested on rice, but the economy was increasingly run on money. Warrior salaries were tied to the grain that each han collected from its villages. Stipends were therefore fixed in volume while the value of rice moved with harvests and market prices. Price swings eroded the real worth of fixed stipends, and the gap widened as samurai households paid for housing, servants, gifts and schooling in cash. Retainers at the lower ranks were most exposed. They borrowed against future stipends and sometimes took up side work, a practice that status norms discouraged.

Debt built up across the system. After the commercial boom of the Genroku period, the inflated economy collapsed in the early eighteenth century, and many samurai and daimyō were so deeply indebted to rice brokers that repayment was effectively impossible. Domain finances followed the same pattern. In 1711 the Date domain, for example, had to borrow a further sum from moneylenders in Edo and Kyoto on top of an existing debt of more than 123,000 ryō, and the debt continued to grow because of high interest rates. By the mid-eighteenth century, both the shōgun and the daimyō were hampered by financial difficulties, while wealth flowed increasingly to the merchant class.

Domains tried a range of fiscal remedies, and most of them deepened social tension. Re-surveys of land to find unregistered rice fields, reforms by the Kansei period, and the issue of paper money were all attempts to restore revenue. The Takatomi domain's ninth lord tried frugality, forestry, paper money and higher peasant taxes, but none of these worked, and in 1868 the domain defaulted on all of its debts as its peasants rose in revolt. Some domains and the shogunate accepted payment in currency rather than rice, a shift that forced peasants to sell crops at market rather than keep them for household use. Historians have noted that the dominant classes' main response to their shortage of funds was to tighten the squeeze on the peasantry.

Rural unrest grew in this environment. One study counts 1,787 instances in which peasants banded together and rebelled across the domains between 1603 and 1868, and village headmen typically led them. The rising role of the market made the countryside more vulnerable to price shocks. Historian Vlastos described a major outbreak in 1866 as a "market-induced 'crisis of subsistence'", and when demand for a product fell, reduced wages or zero income could produce intense suffering. Rice prices were especially volatile in famine years, when rice costs rose sharply, by some estimates 300 to 400 percent.

Urban discontent followed similar lines and was directed at those seen as profiting from scarcity. Protesters often attacked the homes and storehouses of wealthy merchants, moneylenders, and village officials accused of hoarding rice during famines. These attacks show how economic hardship turned into a challenge to local authority. Officials were seen as failing to protect ordinary people, and the regime's claim to rule through moral order lost credibility.

The same commercial forces that fed the crisis also strengthened groups outside the formal order. Merchants accumulated capital and, through lending and trade, gained influence over the very lords they financed. Wealthy rural families and village elites, who handled tax collection and land dealings, grew more literate and economically active. Their rising wealth and education made the four-class status hierarchy, which placed samurai above merchants, look increasingly out of step with actual social power. This tension between formal rank and economic reality would shape the political arguments of the 1850s and 1860s.

Isolation, Foreign Pressure and the Opening of Japan

From the 1630s the Tokugawa shogunate regulated foreign contact through a small set of controlled channels, a system later labeled sakoku. The term is often translated as "closed country", but the arrangement was closer to managed access than to total exclusion. Trade with China went through the port of Nagasaki, where the Chinese had a residential area, and the only European presence permitted was the Dutch factory at Dejima. Trade and diplomacy also ran through Tsushima to Korea, Satsuma to the Ryukyu Kingdom, and Matsumae to the Ainu of Ezo. Chinese junks arrived in far greater numbers and generated the bulk of Nagasaki's foreign trade revenue, while the Dutch mattered more for information than for volume.

The Dutch connection gave Japan access to Western knowledge. The term "rangaku" literally means "Dutch studies", as Dutch was the only Western language accessible to the Japanese at the time. Scholars working from Dutch texts developed medicine, astronomy, cartography and military technology, and a translation of a Dutch anatomy text, published in 1774, is a well-known early example. The Dutch also filed regular reports on world affairs, which gave the shogunate strategic intelligence about events abroad. Through these reports, news of the Opium War and the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) reached Edo and reinforced a growing awareness that Qing China had been defeated by a naval power. Officials who had long treated China as a cultural model now had to consider the military threat from the West.

Pressure from the United States came in 1853. Commodore Matthew Perry's squadron, carrying a letter from the administration of President Millard Fillmore, anchored in Edo Bay in July, and after Perry threatened to continue on to Edo and burn it if necessary, he was allowed to land at Kurihama and deliver his letter. The shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi was old and ill, and his government was divided over how to answer. Perry returned in early 1854 with a larger fleet, and the negotiators, led by Hayashi Akira on behalf of Abe Masahiro's administration, concluded the Convention of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854. Signed under threat of force, it effectively ended Japan's policy of national seclusion by opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American vessels. It also guaranteed the safety of shipwrecked Americans and provided for a consul at Shimoda. The text was reluctantly endorsed by Emperor Komei, which was itself a significant precedent, since the court had not been consulted in any formal sense before. Britain, Russia and the Netherlands soon obtained comparable agreements.

The more consequential settlements came in 1858, when the shogunate concluded the Ansei treaties. The Harris Treaty with the United States was signed on the deck of the USS Powhatan in Edo Bay on July 29, 1858, and similar agreements followed with Britain, France, Russia and the Netherlands. These treaties opened five treaty ports to foreign commerce, giving the Western powers privileges such as fixed tariffs, extraterritoriality, and most favored nation status, none of which were reciprocated. Extraterritoriality meant that foreign residents were tried in their own consular courts rather than under Japanese law. Import duties were set at low fixed rates, and by 1866 they stood at about 5 percent for most goods, which left Japan unable to use tariffs to protect domestic producers. The treaties did ban the opium trade, and the negotiators prevented mixed residence and the establishment of large-scale foreign concessions in Japanese cities, confining foreigners to small treaty ports such as Yokohama.

The treaties were signed without the imperial assent that many domain leaders and court nobles expected, and the shogunate's authority was exposed in consequence. Many Japanese considered the treaties a humiliating blow to their country, and the question of how to revise them became one of the central political goals of the following decades. The crisis linked foreign policy to domestic legitimacy: opposition to the shogunate increasingly centered on the charge that it had failed to defend the country, and the slogan of expelling the barbarians gained wide support among activists in the imperial capital of Kyoto.

Imperial Loyalism and Intellectual Currents

The Mito school began as a large historical project in the Mito Domain, where scholars were commissioned in the 1650s to compile a national history. The school had its genesis in 1657 when Tokugawa Mitsukuni, second head of the Mito Domain, commissioned the compilation of the Dai Nihonshi. Its scholars blended Neo-Confucian orthodoxy with reverence for Japan's imperial tradition. Their core ideas included imperial loyalty and the concept of kokutai (national polity or essence). In the early nineteenth century, Tokugawa Nariaki expanded the school by founding the Kodokan as a clan academy, and the teaching drew in medicine and astronomy alongside Confucian and National Learning texts.

National Learning (kokugaku) developed as a rival to the intellectual order the shogunate had established. Its scholars positioned their work against Sinocentric Neo-Confucian theories that were adopted as the state philosophy by the Tokugawa shogunate. By studying early Japanese texts, they argued for a native past distinct from China and for the antiquity of the imperial house. Their arguments reached political activists in the mid-nineteenth century. Individual followers carried these ideas into action: the Hirata disciple Sakura Azumao became a disciple of Hirata Atsutane, the famed kokugaku scholar, and in 1843 he gave up his Buddhist status and pledged a thousand cherry trees at Kashima Shrine as a sign of devotion to the imperial cause. Nariaki himself also favored returning the emperor to a more prominent role, and in 1853 he composed a memorandum titled "Japan, Reject the Westerners" that urged firm resistance to foreign demands.

The slogan sonnō jōi, "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians," gave these ideas a political program. Kokugaku's work supplied intellectual ammunition for the sonnō jōi movement, which emerged in the 1850s and 1860s as Western powers forced Japan to open to foreign trade. The movement drew together activists from many domains, most of them young samurai who were frustrated by the shogunate's handling of foreign pressure and who saw the court as a source of legitimacy independent of the Edo government. Its loyalist and anti-foreign character made it volatile. Attacks on foreigners and on officials associated with the shogunate spread through Kyoto and Edo, and these incidents drew the imperial court into the center of factional conflict.

Not all loyalist thinkers rejected Western knowledge. Yoshida Shoin, whose academy in Hagi trained many future leaders, studied the Western military science under Sakuma Shōzan and Asaka Gonsai in Edo in 1851. Shoin later observed the Black Ships from afar with his teacher Sakuma Shōzan and was deeply impressed by the advanced Western civilization. Sakuma argued that Japan should adopt Western techniques in military affairs, science and industry while keeping its own moral and social foundations. The formula often associated with this position, "Eastern ethics, Western techniques," reflected a hope that technical borrowing could strengthen Japan without undermining its identity. This combination of loyalism and reform shaped the ideological mix that the Meiji leadership later drew upon, even as its members disagreed sharply about how far imperial authority and foreign models should go.

The Bakumatsu Political Contest

The final years of the shogunate, known as the bakumatsu period, were marked by a contest over who would control the court, the shogunal government and the domains. The decisive shift came in 1866, when the Satsuma and Chōshū domains, which had been bitter rivals, formed a secret alliance. The Satsuma–Chōshū Alliance was mediated by the Tosa samurai Sakamoto Ryōma and was signed in March 1866. It gave the two domains a combined military and political core that could challenge the Tokugawa government on its own terms, and its legitimacy rested on support for a transfer of authority to the emperor rather than simple attacks on the shogun.

The alliance proved its worth in the summer of 1866. When the shogunate launched a second expedition against Chōshū, Satsuma declined to take part and secretly supplied its partner with arms. Chōshū repelled the shogunate's forces, and the failed campaign badly damaged the prestige of the Tokugawa government. The death of Emperor Kōmei at the turn of 1866–1867 then placed a young and untested teenager on the throne, Emperor Meiji. The court, which had long been a sphere of competing factions, now had to decide how far it would rely on the shogunate and how far it would back the domains pressing for change.

The moderate domains of Tosa complicated the picture. Tosa samurai had formed a secret pact with Satsuma in mid-1866, but the Tosa senior counselor Gotō Shōjirō favored a peaceful transfer of power to the court rather than armed overthrow. The proposals traditionally linked with Sakamoto Ryōma, the so-called Eight-Point Plan Aboard Ship, are now widely regarded as apocryphal, but they reflect the broader hope among moderates of a national assembly and a shared government under imperial sanction. Yoshinobu, who had become shogun in 1866, recognized that the alliance of domains could not be defeated easily and that the court was increasingly open to their arguments.

Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu responded in the autumn of 1867 with taisei hōkan, the formal return of political authority to the throne. He submitted his petition in early November, and the court sanctioned it the following day. The gesture was intended to pre-empt an armed assault by the anti-shogunate domains and to preserve a leading role for the Tokugawa in any new arrangement, perhaps as the dominant figure in a council of the domains. Yoshinobu's government, its offices and its armed retainers remained intact, which meant that the resignation left a formal vacuum at the top rather than a real transfer of power.

The anti-shogunate leaders, notably Saigō Takamori and Ōkubo Toshimichi of Satsuma and Kido Takayoshi of Chōshū, regarded this arrangement as unacceptable because it would allow the Tokugawa to dominate the new order. They acted before a Tokugawa-led government could take shape. On January 3, 1868, forces from Satsuma, Chōshū and allied domains occupied the imperial palace in Kyoto, and the next day a decree in the young emperor's name proclaimed the abolition of the shogunate and the establishment of government centered on the throne. Yoshinobu initially accepted the court's terms but later withdrew his acceptance, declaring on January 17 that he would not be bound by the proclamation. This dispute between the restored court and the former shogun's forces set the stage for the Boshin War.

Key Figures of the Restoration

The overthrow of the shogunate was carried out by a small group of samurai from a few western domains, most of them in their twenties or thirties in 1868. Three of them, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi and Saigō Takamori, are commonly grouped as the "Three Great Nobles" of the restoration. Saigō and Ōkubo were from Satsuma, while Kido represented Chōshū, and their cooperation gave the anti-shogunate movement its political and military core.

Saigō's role was largely in the field and in negotiation. In 1866 Saigō, leader of the Satsuma domain, and Kido, leader of the Chōshū domain, formed the Satchō Alliance. Later, he negotiated with Katsu Kaishū, a senior shogunate retainer, and achieved the "bloodless surrender of Edo Castle." Ōkubo was more of an administrator and strategist. After 1868 he took the finance portfolio, while Saigō became a field marshal; both were imperial councillors. Kido, a student of Yoshida Shōin, pressed for constitutional government within the new state and held the education portfolio at one point.

Sakamoto Ryōma, a samurai from the Tosa domain, is a different kind of figure. He did not hold office in the new government, and he was killed in 1867, before the restoration was complete. He helped bring Saigō and Kido together to challenge the Tokugawa shogunate and restore the emperor to power. Tosa's involvement mattered because it drew a moderate domain into the coalition, and Sakamoto is remembered for proposals to create a cooperative political order among the domains.

At the court, Iwakura Tomomi provided the imperial link. A Kyoto native, he had opposed the Tokugawa and later became a central figure in the government. In the early Meiji years he led the Iwakura Mission, which ran from December 1871 to September 1873 and visited the United States and a number of European countries, with the aim of preparing for treaty revision.

The young emperor was the symbolic center of the new order. In January 1868 the fifteen-year-old Mutsuhito was declared restored to power after Satsuma forces entered the imperial palace in Kyoto. He took the reign name Meiji, and his authority was used by the men who governed in his name. Historians often describe the result as an oligarchy, with power passing from the Tokugawa shogun to a small circle of leaders from Satsuma and Chōshū, including Ōkubo, Saigō, and Itō Hirobumi.

Itō Hirobumi, born in 1841 and also from Chōshū, belonged to a younger generation that rose through the new bureaucracy. He later took the lead in designing the constitutional and administrative institutions of the state, including the Meiji Constitution, which was promulgated in 1889. Saigō's career ended differently: he led the Satsuma Rebellion, the largest uprising against the Meiji government, and died at the Battle of Shiroyama. Ōkubo was assassinated in 1878, and Kido died in 1877, so the three men who had led the restoration did not all survive into the period of institution-building.

The Boshin War

The Boshin War (1868–1869) was the armed phase of the Meiji Restoration. It pitted forces loyal to the imperial court against troops still serving the Tokugawa shogunate, and it ended with the shogunate's last holdouts in Hokkaido. Those loyal to the Tokugawa shōgun retreated to northern Honshū and later to Hokkaido, where they founded the Republic of Ezo.

Toba-Fushimi and the Advance on Edo

The fighting began near Kyoto. The Boshin War officially began on January 27, 1868, at the Battle of Toba-Fushimi. Shogunate troops, who outnumbered their opponents, were defeated by an imperial army drawn largely from Satsuma and Chōshū. The engagement showed that the shogunate's forces could not match the imperial side, which had better organization and more modern weapons. Once the shogun's army was broken, a huge Meiji government army of 50,000 men surrounded Edo. The capital's fate was then settled through diplomacy rather than assault. In April 1868, Imperial general Saigō Takamori met with the Shogunate's Army Minister, Katsu Kaishū, to arrange the peaceful surrender of Edo Castle. That agreement spared the city from a prolonged battle. Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu himself submitted, and after Yoshinobu's surrender, he was placed under house arrest, and stripped of all of his titles and lands.

The Northern Alliance and the Siege of Aizu

Surrender at Edo did not end the war. In the spring of 1868, a Japanese military-political coalition was established and disestablished over the course of several months in early to mid-1868 during the Boshin War. This was the Ōuetsu Reppan Dōmei, which brought together domains in the northeast and north-central regions. Its members mobilized in April and joined a northern alliance against Imperial troops in May 1868. The alliance was not a unified command. It was unable to fully act as a single, cohesive unit, and with the fall of Sendai and Aizu, it effectively collapsed. Its defeat came piecemeal. Aizu domain resisted with particular determination; the siege of Tsuruga Castle at Aizu-Wakamatsu lasted a month. The siege began in October, and Aizu was besieged starting that month, leading to the mass suicide of the Byakkotai (White Tiger Corps) young warriors. After a protracted month-long battle, Aizu finally admitted defeat on November 6.

Enomoto's Fleet and the Hakodate Campaign

The last organized resistance came from naval forces. Admiral Enomoto Takeaki, who had refused to hand over his warships after Edo's surrender, escaped to Hakodate in Hokkaido with the remainder of the Tokugawa Navy and a handful of French military advisers and their leader Jules Brunet. The rebels numbering around 3,000 and traveling by ship with Enomoto Takeaki reached Hokkaidō in October 1868. They landed in late October and moved on Hakodate. Sources differ on when the rebel government was proclaimed; one gives December 1868 and another gives 27 January 1869. The Meiji navy then destroyed much of Enomoto's fleet. The Meiji government forces engaged and defeated Enomoto's forces in the Naval Battle of Hakodate in May 1869. The land battle ended the war. In June 1869, the last remnants of the former shogunate's supporters commanded by Enomoto Takeaki surrendered at the fortress of Goryōkaku in Hakodate, Ezo (now Hokkaidō). This signaled the end of the Boshin Civil War, and the Meiji government now controlled all of Japan.

Casualties and Consequences

Estimates of the war's scale vary. One account gives around 69,000 men mobilized during the conflict, and of these about 8,200 were killed. Another gives around one hundred and twenty thousand men were mobilized during the conflict, and of these about three and a half thousand were killed. The difference reflects uncertain record-keeping and differing definitions of who counted as a combatant.

The outcome also shaped the new government's direction. The victorious Imperial faction abandoned its objective of expelling foreigners from Japan and instead adopted a policy of continued modernization with an eye to the eventual renegotiation of the unequal treaties with the Western powers. The war thus removed the shogunate as a rival authority and left the court's government as the sole center of power, with its military reforms and foreign policy developed in the years that followed.

The Charter Oath and the Founding of the New Government

The new leadership announced its direction in the Charter Oath (Gokajō no Goseimon), a statement of five principles that Emperor Meiji promulgated on 6 April 1868 at the Kyoto Imperial Palace. Its first article promised that deliberative assemblies would be widely established and that public discussion would settle major questions. The second called on all classes, high and low, to join in running the affairs of state. The third allowed commoners as well as officials to pursue their own occupations, and the fourth called for an end to evil customs of the past in favor of principles grounded in natural justice. The fifth sought knowledge from across the world to strengthen imperial rule. Because the text was brief and general, it was less a working legal code than a statement of intent, and later reformers interpreted it in very different ways. Its initial circulation was also limited: it was shown to court nobles and daimyo and printed in the government's official gazette, while a separate set of Five Public Notices, posted the following day, addressed ordinary people across the country.

Building the first government structures

The Meiji leaders did not start with a finished administrative design. In the months after the coup of January 1868, the new government's top bodies were reorganized several times, and the leaders argued over how much authority should rest with the emperor's court and how much should be shared through collective deliberation. Early councils were set up on a model of rotating officials and public discussion, and a deliberative body drawn from the domains was created in 1869 to give the new state a forum for debate. Within a few years, however, power had concentrated among a small group of officials from Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa and Hizen, and the structures that emerged in 1871 under the Dajōkan system were far more centralized than the 1868 ideals had suggested. The gap between the oath's language about open deliberation and the practice of narrow oligarchic rule became a persistent theme in the years that followed.

Relocating the capital

The shift of power was also expressed in geography. Edo, the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate, was renamed Tokyo in 1868, signaling that the old shogunal city was no longer the center of government. Emperor Meiji left Kyoto and took up residence in the former shogunal castle, which became the imperial palace. The move placed the monarch in the largest city of the country and within easy reach of the government's offices, merchant networks and foreign legations. It also drew large numbers of people to the new capital, in part because the Charter Oath's call for freedom of occupation and movement made migration to cities easier. Tokyo thus became the administrative and economic hub that would shape the rest of the Meiji period.

Continuity in foreign relations

In its dealings with foreign governments, the new regime chose continuity rather than repudiation. Early in 1868 it informed the foreign representatives in Japan that it would honor the treaties concluded by the shogunate, including the Ansei treaties of 1858 whose terms were deeply unequal. The decision was pragmatic. The leaders needed diplomatic recognition to consolidate their position, and they feared that rejecting the treaties would invite military intervention by the Western powers at a time when civil war was still under way. Maintaining the agreements preserved trade and customs revenue, but it also left extraterritoriality and tariff limits in place, and those restrictions became the central problem of foreign policy in the following decades. The commitment to existing treaties was therefore a source of stability at home and a constraint abroad.

Abolition of the Han System and Class Reform

The dismantling of the han system proceeded in stages. In 1869 the leaders of Satsuma and Chōshū, the domains that had done most to overthrow the Tokugawa, were persuaded to return their domains to the throne, and roughly 260 other domains followed between late July and early August of that year. Kido Takayoshi of Chōshū led this push, with support from court nobles such as Iwakura Tomomi and Sanjō Sanetomi. At first the change was largely formal. The former lords were often reappointed as governors of their own territories, and their retainers' stipends were paid through prefectural offices rather than by the lords themselves, which gradually weakened the personal bonds between lords and vassals.

The decisive step came on 14 July 1871 with the haihan chiken ("abolition of domains and establishment of prefectures"). Around 261 domains were replaced by prefectures administered by governors appointed from the centre. Domain governors were ordered to move to Tokyo, and domain armies were disbanded. The order was enforced by about 10,000 imperial guard troops drawn mainly from Satsuma, Chōshū and Tosa, which made clear that the reform rested on military force held by the new state as much as on consensus among the lords.

The fiscal and social cost of ending the domains fell heavily on the samurai. Hereditary stipends (rice-based and later cash-based) had consumed roughly 30 percent of government revenue in the early Meiji years, so their reduction was central to the state's budget. Reductions began in 1873. In August 1876 the chitsuroku-shobun ("abolition of hereditary stipends") forcibly converted the remaining stipends into government bonds. The face value of these bonds equalled about five to fourteen years of the stipend, paying annual interest of roughly 5 to 7 percent. Many former samurai, whose income had been fixed and whose skills were largely military or administrative, found the bonds could not replace a lifetime of income, and they had to seek work in commerce, agriculture, or the new bureaucracy and army.

The Tokugawa-era hierarchy of samurai, peasants, artisans and merchants was also reorganized by law. In 1869 court nobles and former daimyo were grouped together as kazoku (peers), while the samurai were redesignated shizoku (gentry) and lower-ranking foot soldiers were placed in a separate category. Samurai lost their legal monopoly on bearing arms, and the wearing of swords as a mark of status was prohibited in 1876. Commoners were able to take up occupations and move residence more freely than before, and social mobility increased, though the new legal categories persisted in official registers for decades.

The kazoku became a formal aristocracy in 1884. A Peerage Act issued that year, promulgated under Itō Hirobumi, set out five ranks modelled on European titles: prince, marquess, count, viscount and baron. Although the ranks borrowed the European structure, the titles themselves were drawn from Chinese terminology. Membership was extended beyond former lords and court nobles to individuals who had rendered distinguished service to the state, including military officers, officials and scholars. Some kuge families, such as the Iwakura, were elevated to the highest ranks in recognition of their role in the restoration. The peerage gave the government a loyal group of wealthy families with a stake in the throne, and it provided a foundation for the upper house of the Imperial Diet created later. The kazoku was abolished under the postwar constitution of 1947.

Centralized Government and Constitutional Development

The Iwakura Mission left Yokohama in December 1871 and spent about eighteen months in the United States and Europe, taking much of the new government's senior leadership abroad with it. Leaders of the mission included Kido Takayoshi, Ōkubo Toshimichi and Itō Hirobumi, with Iwakura Tomomi as ambassador. Its purposes were twofold: to prepare the revision of the unequal treaties and to examine Western society. The first aim failed, but the second shaped government policy for the remainder of the Meiji era and beyond. The travelers' observations covered technology, banking systems, political systems, infrastructures, educational systems, and more. Reforms at home continued during the absence, and the return of the mission in 1873 coincided with a serious split over policy toward Korea, which left the leadership divided for several years.

The mission's experience pushed Itō and his colleagues toward a model of centralized authority. They were especially impressed with the constitution of the German Empire, a conservative constitutional monarchy that had a strong military. That preference shaped the later constitutional debates, in which Prussian and German precedents carried more weight than British or French ones.

The cabinet system was introduced in December 1885. The older council structure was replaced by ministries, each headed by a minister, and Itō became the first prime minister. The new cabinet was not answerable to the legislature. Under the constitution, ministers give their advice to the Emperor, and be responsible for it, and all laws, imperial ordinances and imperial rescripts relating to state affairs required a minister's countersignature. This arrangement made the ministers accountable to the throne, not to elected representatives.

Drafting of the constitution was carried out by a small group rather than by the Privy Council alone. Drafted by Itō Hirobumi, a group of other government leaders, and several Western legal scholars, the document was presented as a gift from the emperor. The Privy Council was founded in 1888 as an advisory body to the emperor, and Itō established a supra-cabinet Privy Council led by himself to review it before promulgation. The council deliberated repeatedly on the draft, so its role was to review and approve the text rather than to write it. The constitution was promulgated on February 11, 1889, and it took effect on November 29, 1890.

The constitution placed sovereignty in the imperial line and described the emperor as holding the legislative power jointly with the Diet. The Emperor exercises the legislative power with the consent of the Imperial Diet. The Diet had two chambers. A House of Peers consisted of high-ranking noblemen appointed by the emperor, and a House of Representatives consisted of representatives elected by the people. Suffrage for the lower house was narrow: only adult men who paid a substantial national land or direct tax could vote, which in 1890 meant roughly one percent of the population. Historians debate how to classify the system, with some describing it as a semi-constitutional monarchy and others as a mixture of constitutional and absolute monarchy.

The first Diet convened in 1890 and quickly became a site of conflict. Its lower house could approve laws and the budget, but the executive was not responsible to it, and this produced repeated disputes over budgets between the cabinet and party representatives. The debates over the powers of parties and the executive shaped Japanese politics for decades, and Itō himself founded a major political party, the Rikken Seiyūkai, in 1900 as party politics grew more prominent in the Diet. The Meiji Constitution remained in force, without formal amendment, until it was replaced in 1947.

Economic Modernization and Industrialization

Early Meiji economic policy aimed to build export earnings and an industrial base quickly enough to close the gap with Western powers. The state did not leave this mainly to private investors. It built demonstration enterprises, then sought to hand them to private operators, and it backed industry with subsidies, loans and technical advice. The clearest example is the Tomioka silk mill in Gunma Prefecture. Japan lacked the technology to construct a mill on its own, so the government recruited French expertise. Leaders of the Meiji government, including Ōkuma Shigenobu, Itō Hirobumi and Shibusawa Eiichi, approached the French embassy in 1870 and were introduced to Paul Brunat, who was given responsibility for the larger facility. Raw silk was the main product for export, and the factory's purpose extended beyond output. Workers from many prefectures were gathered at Tomioka so that they could become instructors, and they returned home to create or revamp local factories modeled on it.

Railways, Telegraphs and Ports

Transport and communications were treated as national infrastructure rather than as local projects. The industrial revolution began around 1870 as Meiji leaders decided to catch up with the West. The government built its first railroads, improved roads, and inaugurated a land reform program. The first line, between Shimbashi in Tokyo and Yokohama, opened in 1872. Telegraph lines and modernized ports were developed in the same period, which allowed the state to move troops, goods and information across the main islands and to connect the country to foreign trade. These projects were expensive, and their financing depended heavily on the revenue reforms described below.

The 1873 Land Tax Reform

The land tax reform was the most important source of stable revenue for the new government. Under the Tokugawa system, tax was paid in rice, and rates varied from place to place. Under the new system, a taxpayer paid taxes with money instead of rice, taxes were calculated on the price of estates rather than the amount of product, and tax rates were fixed at 3% of the value of estates. In return, taxpayers were given title deeds that conferred full rights of ownership. The reform thus combined a fiscal change with the recognition of private land ownership.

The reform was not smoothly implemented. Early reliance on farmers to measure their own plots produced shortfalls, so the government established a land tax reform department in 1875 and began aggressive efforts to install the system. The 1873 revision led to ninety-nine rural protests between 1874 and 1881, mostly over how land values and interim taxes were assessed rather than the rate itself. Rural discontent therefore remained a constraint on the state's fiscal policy.

Banking, Currency and the Gold Standard

Financial institutions were reorganized in stages. The National Bank Act of December 1872 allowed national banks to engage in commercial banking while issuing convertible notes. Starting with Dai-Ichi National Bank in 1873, around 150 national banks were created, most of which later merged into banks that still exist. The banking system proved short-lived in its original form, and the state moved to a central institution. The Bank of Japan Act of 1882 gave the bank the status of a semi-public institution, with shares owned by the private sector and governance designed to make it accountable to shareholders. Its governor was appointed by the government.

Monetary policy took longer to settle. Japan switched to a silver standard in the 1880s, dropping its earlier plan to adopt the gold standard, and the Bank of Japan's first notes were convertible to silver. The shift to gold came later, when the adoption of the gold standard in 1897 integrated Japan into the global economy and attracted foreign investment. This sequence made the currency more predictable for foreign trade and borrowing, and it laid the groundwork for the export-led growth that followed in the late nineteenth century.

Military Reform and the End of the Samurai Army

The new state replaced the samurai levies of the Tokugawa period with a army drawn from the general population. In January 1873 the government issued a conscription ordinance drafted by Yamagata Aritomo, which drew on German and French models. Men aged twenty and over became liable for three years of active service and four further years in the reserves. Yamagata Aritomo crafted the ordinance based on German and French models. All Japanese males over the age of twenty were summoned to serve on active duty in the new Imperial Japanese Army or Imperial Japanese Navy for three years, followed by four years in the reserves. The measure was not a simple administrative change. It ended the principle that military service was a hereditary privilege of the samurai, and it removed the warrior class's claim to be the sole source of armed force.

Resistance came from both ends of the social order. Peasants read the term for conscription, ketsu-eki ("blood tax"), literally and tried to evade service through self-injury, concealment and local uprisings. Former samurai resented being placed in ranks alongside commoners. Many disillusioned and conservative former samurai were angered that their function as a noble warrior class had been removed and replaced with an army of commoners. Between 1874 and 1877 the shizoku launched more than thirty rebellions of various sizes against the Meiji government in Kyushu and western Honshu. The stipend system had also been wound down by 1873, so that military reform, the loss of the sword privilege and the loss of hereditary income reinforced one another.

The Satsuma Rebellion was the largest and last of these revolts. It was a revolt of disaffected samurai against the new imperial government of the Empire of Japan, nine years into the Meiji era. It began on 29 January 1877 and was led by Saigō Takamori, who had been a central figure in the Restoration itself. The rebellion lasted from 29 January until 24 September 1877, when it was decisively crushed, and its leader, Saigō Takamori, was shot and mortally wounded. Sources differ on the size of the forces involved. One account gives about 51,800 imperial army troops against roughly 12,000 rebel infantry, while another gives over 65,000 imperial troops against about 20,000 rebels. Both agree that the government's conscript forces, equipped with modern weapons, decided the outcome at the final battle of Shiroyama. The government's victory validated the new army and ended the samurai as a military class.

Foreign models shaped the professional officer corps that followed. The army relied heavily on French instruction in its early years: the French government contributed substantial training to Japanese officers, and many were employed at the military academy in Kyoto. Later, German methods became dominant in army doctrine and staff organization, reflecting Yamagata's own study of European systems. Navy development drew more on British practice, a difference that reflected the separate institutional networks each service built. Military expansion proceeded in stages. The 1874 expedition to Taiwan, which was successful and asserted Japan's claims to the Ryukyu Islands, was an early test of the new forces. The larger test came with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 against the Qing dynasty, after which the armed forces of Japan grew rapidly in size and budget.

Education, Society and Cultural Change

The Gakusei, the Education System Order promulgated in 1872, set up a single national school ladder in place of the separate schooling of the Tokugawa period. The country was divided into eight university districts, which were further divided into 32 middle school districts, each accommodating 210 primary school districts. Unlike the class-based schooling offered during the Tokugawa period, the Gakusei envisioned a unified, egalitarian system of modern national education, designed on a ladder plan. Its curriculum and teaching methods were drawn primarily from the United States.

The plan outran the government's resources. It fell short of full realization because of the lack of sufficient financial support, facilities and equipment, proper teaching materials, and able teachers. Local communities bore much of the cost, and rural discontent grew. Discontent had been mounting among the rural people against the Education System Order of 1872, mainly because it had imposed upon them the financial burdens of establishing schools and yet had not lived up to expectations. Attendance rose slowly. It was not until the early years of the twentieth century that almost 90 percent of children were attending elementary school. In the 1880s, the state shifted the purpose of schooling toward loyalty to the emperor, and the Imperial Universities were meant to train westernized leaders for national modernization.

Intellectual life was shaped by Fukuzawa Yukichi, who became the leading advocate of bunmei kaika ("civilization and enlightenment"). His prolific writings, including the bestsellers Seiyō Jijō (Conditions in the West) and Gakumon no Susume (An Encouragement of Learning), explained Western civilization and advocated for social change. In Gakumon no Susume, he famously wrote, "Heaven never created a man above another nor a man below another," arguing that social status was determined by education and practical knowledge (jitsugaku). He also founded a school that became Keio University and the newspaper Jiji Shinpō. Much of his writings were written for mass audiences, and for this he had to create a completely new style of writing, as in Japan at that time, writing was an extremely formal system belonging to the elite. His work thus connected the expansion of literacy with new public debate, a link that also drove the growth of journalism and printed discussion in the period.

Everyday customs were also reformed under the banner of civilization. The government replaced the old lunar calendar with the Gregorian version, which took effect in 1873 and continues in use today. The switch was abrupt. Since there was little time for preparation and December 3 of the 5th year of Meiji became January 1 of 6th year, a great amount of confusion prevailed. Fukuzawa's pamphlet explaining the reform was published on January 1, 1873, the very day the reform took effect, and sold an astonishing 100,000 copies—a rare phenomenon at the time. Dress and hairstyle changed as well: a popular saying held that if you tap a head with hair cropped short (散切り, zangiri), you will hear the sound of civilization. The state also separated Shinto from Buddhism in official ritual and institutions, a policy that reshaped religious life and the public role of the emperor's cult.

Taken together, these measures expanded the reach of the state into households and classrooms. Compulsory schooling, a standard calendar and visible changes in appearance gave the new government a common framework for national identity, while the gap between policy and local practice remained wide for decades.

Foreign Relations and Treaty Revision

Five Western states signed a series of commercial treaties with the Tokugawa shogunate in 1858, and these agreements, later called the Ansei treaties, set the framework that Meiji diplomats inherited. The Ansei Treaties were signed in 1858 between Japan on one side and the United States, Great Britain, Russia, the Netherlands and France on the other. Two features made them the central grievance of the following decades. The first was extraterritoriality: foreign residents became subject only to the legal jurisdiction of their home nations' consular courts. The second was customs policy. The treaties established artificially low tariff rates, restricting an important source of revenue for the Japanese government. Rates were fixed by agreement and could fall as low as 5% in the 1860s, which left Japan unable to use tariffs to protect domestic producers. For ordinary Japanese, the judicial exemption of foreigners was the more visible insult, and it weighed more heavily than the duty schedules.

Revision began in earnest in the late 1880s, and Britain moved first. In 1890 London accepted revision in principle, but only on conditions: Japanese jurisdiction over foreigners would be deferred for five years, and the newly codified laws had to operate satisfactorily for a year before that deadline. The negotiated outcome was the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, which Lord Kimberley and the Japanese minister plenipotentiary Aoki Shūzō signed on 16 July 1894. Aoki had worked with Foreign Minister Mutsu Munemitsu towards the revision of the unequal treaties. The British Foreign Office accepted the deal because it judged that consenting to revision would benefit Britain's broader relationship with Japan. British residents in the treaty ports opposed it, arguing that Japan was not yet civilised enough to be treated as an equal subject of international law. The treaty did not take effect until 17 July 1899, and from that date British subjects came under Japanese courts rather than British consular jurisdiction.

The British agreement set a pattern that other powers followed, though not without friction. The United States objected to a clause on reciprocal rights of residence and property in the British text, and after Japan agreed to include a clause for mutual exemption of laws relating to laborers and labor immigration, a new treaty was signed in November 1894. Japan fulfilled all of the conditions that had been specified within the prescribed period of time, and in 1899 extraterritorial jurisdiction in the Japanese Empire was abolished. Jurisdiction was therefore largely settled by the turn of the century, but the question of customs remained open. While the question of jurisdiction under the treaties had been largely settled, the question of Japan's tariff autonomy remained unresolved.

Tariff autonomy was restored only in 1911. Japan, in a mood of increased confidence after the Russo-Japanese war, ended the earlier treaties with a view to concluding the Anglo-Japanese Tariff Treaty of 1911. The settlement gave Japan control over its duties, but it also involved concessions to Britain, which had been an ally for almost a decade. The United States signed a commerce and navigation treaty with Japan on 21 February 1911, and the same year the Americans accepted Japan's modest increase in import duties. Japanese customs history describes the outcome as one in which the long-sought autonomy over customs duties .

Treaty revision ran alongside Japan's emergence as a regional power, and the two processes reinforced each other. Commercial expansion accelerated after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. The Treaty of Shimonoseki transferred Taiwan to Japan in 1895, and the Portsmouth settlement of 1905 gave Japan leasehold and railway rights in southern Manchuria, reshaping its relations with China and Russia. In 1910 Japan annexed Korea by treaty; the annexation agreement was sealed in August of that year, and Britain automatically lost extraterritorial rights in Korea. Western responses varied with each power's interests, and some, such as Britain, pursued alliance and accommodation rather than confrontation. Japanese leaders watched how the great powers behaved and drew on Japan's growing aspiration to be treated by the Powers as an equal partner. They studied international law, diplomatic practice and the colonial administration of other states, using these models to argue that Japan had earned a place among the powers it had once been required to accept as superiors.

Historiography and Competing Interpretations

Interpretations of 1868 have been shaped by the politics of each period that studied it. Prewar and wartime accounts stressed imperial loyalty and national unity. After 1945, critics questioned how conservative and elite the restoration had been, and Kenneth Pyle, reviewing Harry Harootunian's work, noted that many historians regarded the restoration less as a revolution than as a change made in the name of tradition by men who did not foresee its social consequences.

The Marxist Koza–Rōnō Debate

The sharpest early dispute came from Marxist historians of the 1920s and 1930s. The Kōza school argued that the restoration had only moved power within a semi-feudal order, so a bourgeois revolution still lay ahead. The Rōnō school, which included the theorist Uno Kozo, treated the restoration as a bourgeois revolution, which meant the next step was a socialist revolution. The stakes were political as well as academic. The Kōza current was based on official guidelines drawn up by the Comintern and stayed close to the Japanese Communist Party. Its position was consolidated in the multi-volume Lectures on the History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism, published in 1932. Kōza scholars stressed feudal remnants in both the agrarian sector and the political superstructure, particularly the emperor system.

The debate continued after the Pacific War, now over the occupation reforms. The Rōnō faction downplayed the reforms and insisted on developmental continuity between prewar and postwar Japan, while the Kōza faction held that the reforms had placed postwar Japan on an entirely new footing. After the defeat and occupation of Japan, the Kōza school reemerged as the dominant framework in Marxist historiography and Marxist theory.

Modernization Theory and the Continuity Question

Western scholarship offered a different frame. The most common interpretation of the events is based on modernization theory, which developed in the 1950s and sorts societies into 'traditional' or 'modern' categories. Within that framework, the restoration became the hinge between two states, but scholars influenced by the approach also stressed how much carried over from the Tokugawa period. Historians of this view argued that because the event was not especially violent in itself, there was a great deal of continuity between pre- and post-Restoration Japan. Later critics argued that the debate over rupture versus continuity had become unproductive. The continuity-versus-discontinuity debate does little to advance our understanding of history.

Recent Research and Alternative Readings

Research since the 1990s has moved the focus from Edo and Tokyo politics toward local and social settings. Edited volumes on the restoration include sections on governance, local labour, regional history and urban space, which treat the transformation as something worked out in many places rather than decided only at court. One example asks "Whose Restoration?" through a study of a teacher training school in Kagoshima in the 1870s. Other scholars have reframed the process itself. One historian treats the restoration first and foremost as a constitutional revolution, emphasizing the leaders' sustained push toward constitutional and parliamentary government from the late Tokugawa period onward.

Historical interpretation has also been tied to commemoration. In 1966 the Japanese government established a committee to study the Meiji Restoration of 1868. At the time of the 1968 centennial, Japanese society was by no means united in celebrating the Meiji Restoration and its outcomes. These disputes show that the question of what 1868 meant has remained open, with each generation of historians revisiting the balance between imperial continuity, elite agency and popular change.

Legacy and Memory

The most durable legacy of the restoration lies in the institutions and industrial base that the Meiji government built. Between the 1850s and the early 1900s, Japan moved from a feudal society closed to the outside world to an industrial country with a navy capable of defeating the Russian fleet in the Russo-Japanese War. That shift underpinned the rise of Japan as a major economic and military power in the early twentieth century, and it set the terms of its later foreign policy.

Industrial heritage and UNESCO recognition

In 2015 the World Heritage Committee inscribed a group of sites under the heading "Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining." The 23 sites are spread over eleven cities in eight prefectures, and they are mainly related to iron and steel production, cannon forging, shipbuilding and coal mining. Some are early experiments in Western-style production. The Shūseikan complex in Kagoshima, built by the Shimazu domain on Western lines in the early 1850s, included production facilities for iron, ships, and textiles. Hashima, known as Gunkanjima, supported mines that produced the coal for use at the shipyards and the steel works in Kitakyushu.

The nomination presented these sites as evidence of technology transfer. An advisory body described them as the first successful transfer of industrialisation from the West to a non-Western nation. The inscription also carried a condition: the committee asked for measures that would let visitors understand the forced labour of Koreans and others at some of the sites. How fully Japan has carried out that request remains a point of contention.

Commemoration and the 2018 sesquicentennial

The 150th anniversary of 1868 became a test of how the period should be remembered. Although the government of Abe Shinzō had suggested that the anniversary would be a central concern, it held only a brief, restrained ceremony in Tokyo, leaving much of the celebratory work to local governments at sites associated with Meiji leaders. The official "Meiji 150" project framed the period around national unity and rapid development; the Abe administration sought to present the Restoration as a politically convenient success story of rapid industrialization, collective nation-building and national unification in the face of foreign threats.

Historians objected to this framing. Scholars such as Tōyama Shigeki and Yamaguchi Keiji had already criticized the 1968 centennial for clear links between the post-war celebration of Meiji and broader efforts to revive Japanese nationalism. A 2018 critical study pointed to the significant gap between the government's vision of the significance of Meiji and the perspectives that emerge from scholarship on the Restoration period. Outside Japan, Japan studies centers and scholars around the world held events marking the Restoration and reflecting on its role in our understanding and imagining of modern Japan.

Popular memory also shifted. With the Meiji anniversary came a mini Saigō boom in Japan. Interest in the figures who lost out in the transition, including the Satsuma leader Saigō Takamori, grew alongside the official commemorations, which suggests that the period's heroes and defeated were both being reconsidered.

Ideology, the emperor and the wars of the 1930s and 1940s

The restoration's emphasis on the emperor's sovereign role fed into the development of State Shinto and a broader nationalism. This ideological framework later shaped Japan's conduct in the Second Sino-Japanese War and in World War II. Commemorations in the prewar era had already used anniversaries of the Restoration to build national identity, a pattern that postwar historians examined critically when assessing the period's conservative and elite character.

The debates over the 2015 listing and the 2018 anniversary show that the legacy of 1868 remains contested. Some emphasize technological achievement and the building of a modern state, while others focus on the costs borne by workers, colonized peoples and political opponents, and on the ways official memory has been used for present-day purposes.

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