The Emergence of Meiji Japan
The Emergence of Meiji Japan

Author: Marius B. Jansen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-09-29

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780521484053

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This paperback edition brings together chapters from volume 5 of The Cambridge History of Japan. Japan underwent momentous changes during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This book chronicles the hardships of the Tempo era in the 1830s, the crisis of values and confidence during the last half century of Tokugawa rule, and the political process that finally brought down the Tokugawa regime and ended centuries of warrior rule. It goes on to discuss the samurai rebellions against the Meiji Restoration, and national movements for constitutional government which indirectly resulted in the Meiji Constitution of 1889. The significance of Japan's Meiji transformation for the rest of the world is the subject of the final chapter, in which Professor Akira Iriye discusses Japan's drive to Great Power status. 'Constitutional rule at home, imperialism abroad', became new goals for early twentieth-century Japan.

The Meiji Restoration
The Meiji Restoration

Author: Robert Hellyer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1108478050

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This volume examines the Meiji Restoration through a global history lens to re-interpret the formation of a globally-cast, Japanese nation-state.

To Stand with the Nations of the World
To Stand with the Nations of the World

Author: Mark Ravina

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-09-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190656107

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The samurai radicals who overthrew the last shogun in 1868 promised to restore ancient and pure Japanese ways. Foreign observers were terrified that Japan would lapse into violent xenophobia. But the new Meiji government took an opposite course. It copied best practices from around the world, building a powerful and modern Japanese nation with the help of European and American advisors. While revering the Japanese past, the Meiji government boldly embraced the foreign and the new. What explains this paradox? How could Japan's 1868 revolution be both modern and traditional, both xenophobic and cosmopolitan? To Stand with the Nations of the World explains the paradox of the Restoration through the forces of globalization. The Meiji Restoration was part of the global "long nineteenth century" during which ambitious nation states like Japan, Britain, Germany, and the United States challenged the world's great multi-ethnic empires--Ottoman, Qing, Romanov, and Hapsburg. Japan's leaders wanted to celebrate Japanese uniqueness, but they also sought international recognition. Rather than simply mimic world powers like Britain, they sought to make Japan distinctly Japanese in the same way that Britain was distinctly British. Rather than sing "God Save the King," they created a Japanese national anthem with lyrics from ancient poetry, but Western-style music. The Restoration also resonated with Japan's ancient past. In the 600s and 700s, Japan was threatened by the Tang dynasty, a dynasty as powerful as the Roman empire. In order to resist the Tang, Japanese leaders borrowed Tang methods, building a centralized Japanese state on Tang models, and learning continental science and technology. As in the 1800s, Japan co-opted international norms while insisting on Japanese distinctiveness. When confronting globalization in 1800s, Japan looked back to that "ancient globalization" of the 600s and 700s. The ancient past was therefore not remote or distant, but immediate and vital.

Politics and Society in Japan's Meiji Restoration
Politics and Society in Japan's Meiji Restoration

Author: Anne Walthall

Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education

Published: 2016-01-27

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1319054129

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In the history of nineteenth-century imperialism, Japan is unique among non-western countries for its ability to fend off foreign domination. In this volume, Anne Walthall and M. William Steele examine how the tumultuous events happening inside Japan in the early nineteenth century contributed to this resiliency against western supremacy. The Introduction familiarizes students with the political and social conditions that contributed to Japan's development in the 1800s and details the events and causes of the Meiji Restoration, known among historians today as the Meiji revolution. The documents, some translated here for the first time, provide students with a range of perspectives on how Japanese people in the nineteenth century thought and acted in dealing with foreign pressure and domestic discord. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, maps, and a bibliography all enrich students' understanding of Japan on the brink of modernity.

The Meiji Restoration
The Meiji Restoration

Author: W. Beasley

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1972-06-01

Total Pages: 534

ISBN-13: 9780804779906

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First, there are questions concerning the role and relative importance of internal and external factors in the pattern of events. Did the activities of the Western powers prompt changes in Japan that would not otherwise have taken place? Or did they merely hasten a process that had already begun? Similarly, did Western civilization give a new direction to Japanese development, or do no more than provide the outward forms through which indigenous change could manifest itself? Was it a matrix, or only a shopping list? Second, how far was the evolution of modern Japan in some sense "inevitable"? Were the main features of Meiji society already implicit in the Tempo reforms, only awaiting an appropriate trigger to bring them into being? More narrowly, was the character of Meiji institutions determined by the social composition of the anti-Tokugawa movement, or did it derive from a situation that took shape only after the Bakufu was overthrown? This is to pose the problem of the relationship between day-to-day politics and long-term socioeconomic change. One can argue, paraphrasing Toyama, that the political controversy about foreign affairs provided the means by which basic socioeconomic factors became effective; or one can say, with Sakata, that the relevance of socioeconomic change is that it helped to decide the manner in which the fundamentally political ramifications of the foreign question were worked out. The difference of emphasis is significant. Finally, have recent historians, in their preoccupation with other issues, lost sight of something important in their relative neglect of ideas qua ideas? Ought we perhaps to stop treating loyalty to the Emperor as simply a manifestation of something else? After all, the men whose actions are the object of our study took that loyalty seriously enough, certainly as an instrument of politics, if not as an article of faith.

Japan's Emergence as a Modern State
Japan's Emergence as a Modern State

Author: E. Herbert Norman

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0774808233

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Originally published in 1940 by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), this classic work by a leading 20th-century Japanologist has an enduring value. Japan's Emergence as a Modern State examines the problems and accomplishments of the Meiji period (1868-1912).This edition includes forewords by: R. Gordon Robertson, a former member of the Canadian Department of External Affairs; Len Edwards, the present Canadian ambassador to Japan; and William L. Holland, former secretary-general of the IPR; as well as a preface and introduction by Lawrence Woods. Also included are 10 short essays by leading Canadian, Japanese, and American scholars of Japanese politics, history, and economics,

A Concise History of Japan
A Concise History of Japan

Author: Brett L. Walker

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-02-26

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1316239691

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To this day, Japan's modern ascendancy challenges many assumptions about world history, particularly theories regarding the rise of the west and why the modern world looks the way it does. In this engaging new history, Brett L. Walker tackles key themes regarding Japan's relationships with its minorities, state and economic development, and the uses of science and medicine. The book begins by tracing the country's early history through archaeological remains, before proceeding to explore life in the imperial court, the rise of the samurai, civil conflict, encounters with Europe, and the advent of modernity and empire. Integrating the pageantry of a unique nation's history with today's environmental concerns, Walker's vibrant and accessible new narrative then follows Japan's ascension from the ashes of World War II into the thriving nation of today. It is a history for our times, posing important questions regarding how we should situate a nation's history in an age of environmental and climatological uncertainties.

Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan
Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan

Author: Mara Patessio

Publisher: U of M Center For Japanese Studies

Published: 2011-01-07

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 192928067X

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Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan focuses on women’s activities in the new public spaces of Meiji Japan. With chapters on public, private, and missionary schools for girls, their students, and teachers, on social and political groups women created, on female employment, and on women’s participation in print media, this book offers a new perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese history. Women’s founding of and participation in conflicting discourses over the value of women in Meiji public life demonstrate that during this period active and vocal women were everywhere, that they did not meekly submit to the dictates of the government and intellectuals over what women could or should do, and that they were fully integrated in the production of Meiji culture. Mara Patessio shows that the study of women is fundamental not only in order to understand fully the transformations of the Meiji period, but also to understand how later generations of women could successfully move the battle forward. Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan is essential reading for all students and teachers of 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese history and is of interest to scholars of women’s history more generally.

Sakamoto Ry?ma and the Meiji Restoration
Sakamoto Ry?ma and the Meiji Restoration

Author: Marius B. Jansen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780231101738

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Jansen tells the story of the Restoration in the career and thought of Sakamoto Ryoma and, to a lesser extent, Nakaoka Shintaro, each an example of the new type of political leader: idealistic, individualistic, and patriotic.

Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration
Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration

Author: Albert M. Craig

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 9780739101933

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When Commodore Perry arrived in Japan to open the country to Western trade in 1853, he found a medieval amalgam of sword-bearing samurai, castle towns, Confucian academies, peasant villages, rice paddies, upstart merchants, bath houses, and Kabuki. Fifteen years later, Japan was on its way to becoming the only non-Western nation in the nineteenth century with a modern centralized bureaucratic state and industrial economy. This book is a study of the Meiji Restoration that changed the face of Japan. Prominent historian Albert M. Craig tells its story through that of the domain of Choshu-whose role in the formation of modern Japan was not unlike that of Prussia in Germany-during the fifteen crucial years between 1853 and 1868. Whereas previous studies have stressed the role of discontented lower samurai and frustrated rich merchants and peasants in this transition, claiming that they provided the motive power behind the political movements of the Restoration period, this work sharply challenges these earlier interpretations. Craig instead emphasizes the vitality of traditional values in Japan's early reaction to the West and foregrounds the critical contribution of the old society to the formation of the new Meiji state. Choshu in the Meiji Restoration is a seminal work for scholars and students of Japanese history.