Chapter 12 The Colonial Period 467rassed and angered them. Some began to turn to the emperor at Kyoto as still
representing a spirit mostly lost in Edo. Many felt there were gains to be made
by taking advantage of some of what the West represented—technological
advance, surely, and especially in military technology—though they were
ashamed at the weakness of the shogun in dealing with the foreigners. To the
astonishment of many, the Imperial Court took the rare step of refusing to rat-
ify the treaty and ordered the shogun to drive out the barbarians immediately.
Although the court soon backed away from this posture, and the treaty was
approved, the court’s initial reaction was a sign of the growing disaffection.
Some of the more belligerent domains mobilized against the shogun, led
by Satsuma and Choshu in the south. And in less than a decade from Perry’s
first arrival, two major overseas missions had taken Japanese to America,
Europe, and China. Mid-century Europe and America had already been trans-
formed by the industrial revolution. Japanese were shocked by what they saw.
They were equally shocked by China, which had always been “Greece and
Rome rolled into one” (as Alex Gibney puts it in his documentary “The Meiji
Revolution”), incomparably behind the developments in the West, corrupt in
late-Qing times, and overrun with Europeans who had turned the major
coastal towns into European outposts.
On January 3, 1868, a successful coup brought an end to the shogunate
and restored the emperor as head of state, thus ending the system of dual gov-
ernment that had begun in 1185. The emperor, whose name was Mutsuhito,
was only 16 years old. It was not his coup, and he was not destined actually to
rule, but the transformation of Japanese society would be carried out in his
name. Accompanied by thousands of his Japanese subjects, Mutsuhito was car-
ried to Edo and given the name Meiji, meaning “Enlightened Rule.” Edo was
renamed Tokyo, the “Kyoto of the East.”
The small cadre of elite samurai now set about to dismantle the social sys-
tem of feudal Japan and create a modern nation-state. At that time, there were
about 260 domains that were largely self-governing so long as they acknowl-
edged the ultimate overlordship of the shogun. These domains were competi-
tive and quarrelsome. People in the domains identified themselves first and
foremost as people of Choshu or Tosa, not as Japanese, and their daimyo were
powerful competitors with any potential central power. A Japanese state had to
be built that was strongly centralized before the technological reforms that
were also needed could be brought about.
Pressure was put on sympathetic daimyo to turn their lands over to the
emperor who gave them high government posts as inducements. Other daimyo
were declared to be governors acting under appointment by Tokyo; two years
later their domains were turned into prefectures and the “governors” were
replaced by administrators with new staffs. Care was taken to recruit men of
talent from the former Tokugawa regime or from the old daimyo or samurai
class, wherever good men could be found. The samurai were dismissed if they
proved unassimilable into the new order.