Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · CHAPTER 4 ·
Early Meiji reforms (1868–77)
Chapter 4 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000: “Dismantling the Old Order”
The Charter Oath of April 1868 promised assemblies, but Japan’s new leaders put central power first: the lords surrendered their land registers in 1869, and on 29 August 1871 the domains were replaced by prefectures under governors from Tokyo. The state gained one army, one tax and one school system.
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The map above is the world of Japan, April 1877 — The Satsuma Rebellion.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Within three years of taking power, Japan’s new leaders concluded that the country could not be strong while it was divided into domains, the 260-odd territories that lords called daimyo ran with their own soldiers and taxes, much like semi-independent states in a loose federation. The second stage of the transition therefore dismantled the old order itself. The Charter Oath of April 1868, a five-article statement of aims that worked like a new government’s manifesto, promised assemblies, an end to the “base customs” of the past and knowledge sought throughout the world, yet the leaders’ first priority was central power. In 1869 the lords surrendered their land registers to the emperor, and on 29 August 1871 a decree abolished the domains altogether. Prefectures run by governors sent from Tokyo replaced them, much as a modern state appoints regional officials in place of hereditary local rulers. On the map the grey-tan patchwork of 1869 disappears in a single step and Japan becomes one red state.
The lords accepted abolition because the government took over their debts and paid them handsome pensions, while troops from Satsuma, Chōshū and Tosa stood ready in Tokyo. The samurai, the hereditary warrior class, paid a much heavier price. A conscript army, filled by compulsory service like a modern military draft, replaced them in 1873, and their stipends, hereditary rice salaries that worked like a guaranteed family pension, were converted into government bonds in 1876, the year they also lost the right to wear swords in public. Farmers paid too, through a land tax fixed in money at 3% of each plot’s assessed value, which gave the state a steady income and bore down on households in bad years. Resistance peaked in 1877, when Saigō Takamori, a hero of 1868, led Satsuma’s samurai in the largest rebellion of the era, the hatched south on the map. Conscripts held Kumamoto Castle, and Saigō died at Shiroyama in September. The new state had been built by dismantling the class that created it.
The full story
The new government promised participation in principle and built central authority in practice. The Charter Oath, a five-article statement of aims sworn by the fifteen-year-old emperor in April 1868, worked like a manifesto written by former samurai, the hereditary warrior class. It pledged that assemblies would be convened and “all matters decided by public discussion”, that the “base customs of the past” would be broken and that knowledge would be sought throughout the world. Its vague promise of assemblies reassured the lords, while its last articles licensed sweeping change. In 1869 the lords, led by Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa and Hizen, handed their land and population registers to the emperor. The daimyo, the hereditary lords of the domains, stayed on as appointed governors of their old lands with a tenth of the domain’s revenue as household income, much as a nationalised company might keep its former owners on salary. These steps looked like a formality and established the principle that every acre and every person in Japan belonged to the state.
The abolition of the domains in August 1871 turned that principle into fact, and it succeeded because it was both a buyout and a show of force. Ōkubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi and Saigō Takamori had assembled an imperial guard of about 10,000 men from their three domains, and on 29 August the emperor summoned the former lords in Tokyo and announced that their 261 domains were abolished. More than 300 prefectures replaced them, merged into 72 by the end of the year, each run by a governor from outside, like a regional official appointed by a modern ministry. The government took on the domains’ debts, kept paying samurai stipends for the moment and turned the old lords into wealthy, titled residents of the capital. Many domains were close to bankruptcy, so their lords lost responsibilities they could no longer afford. On the map the patchwork turns a single red in this one step, the real revolution of the period.
The government then remade its subjects one obligation at a time, and each step had a price. Conscription, compulsory military service much like a modern draft, began in January 1873, and since heads of households and those who could pay were exempt, the burden fell on poor farmers’ younger sons. The land-tax reform of July 1873 replaced rice levies with a cash tax of 3% of assessed land value and gave owners title deeds, which secured revenue and made land a saleable commodity. Riots against both measures followed, and protests in 1876 forced a cut to 2.5% in 1877. The samurai lost their stipends, the hereditary rice salaries the domains had paid them, converted into bonds worth five to fourteen years’ income, and their swords. Former samurai rose at Saga in 1874 and in three western towns in 1876, and in 1877 Saigō’s army besieged Kumamoto. Meanwhile an expedition to Taiwan in 1874 and the arrow to Ganghwa Island in 1876 show the new state already using force abroad. The rebellion was crushed by September, ending any chance that the samurai could fight their way back to power.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Why the lords gave up their domains
Historians have been struck by how easily the domains vanished, and they explain it through money, timing and fear. Many domains owed huge sums to merchants and had issued paper money they could not redeem, so the government’s promise to assume these debts relieved the lords of an impossible burden. The lords themselves received generous incomes and titles in a new peerage, which turned them from rulers into rentiers, people who live on investments. Timing mattered too: the decree came before samurai stipends were touched, so most retainers lost nothing at first. Fear of force completed the case. The imperial guard stood behind the decision, and the leaders who announced it were the same men who had won the civil war three years earlier. Some lords were furious; Satsuma’s former regent Shimazu Hisamitsu, who had backed the restoration, is said to have marked the night of the decree by setting off fireworks in protest. Marius Jansen and Mark Ravina both stress how few officials expected abolition to come so quickly. The speed itself prevented organised resistance.
Conscription and the land tax: who paid
The two great reforms of 1873 rebuilt the relationship between state and subject, and their costs fell on ordinary farmers. The imperial rescript announcing conscription described military service as a “blood tax”, a phrase borrowed from French usage, and rumours circulated that the state would literally take people’s blood, although historians now see the burden of service as the main grievance; in 1873 several prefectures saw riots in which crowds attacked offices and schools. Exemptions for household heads, heirs and men who could pay 270 yen meant that the army drew on the poorest sons of the countryside. The land tax, set at 3% of assessed value plus local surcharges and payable in cash regardless of the harvest, became the state’s main source of income through the 1870s and 1880s, so a fall in rice prices hit taxpayers directly. Stephen Vlastos’s research on peasant protest shows that rural resistance won real concessions, including the cut to 2.5% in 1877. The Meiji state was financed by the countryside, and its leaders knew it.
Saigō and the end of the samurai
Most members of the samurai class, about two million people including families, adapted to the new order, and only a minority rebelled. Former samurai filled the new bureaucracy, the police, the officer corps and the teaching profession, and some joined the opposition movement for an elected assembly that began in 1874. Others sank into poverty as inflation ate the value of their bonds, and the government created programmes to resettle them in Hokkaido and to fund their businesses. Saigō Takamori’s own path was unusual. He had helped abolish the domains, then left the government in 1873 after his colleagues rejected his plan to go to Korea as an envoy, a mission that many contemporaries, and some historians since, believed was meant to provoke war, and in Kagoshima he ran private military schools with thousands of students. Mark Ravina’s biography presents him as a reluctant rebel, whose students forced the rising in 1877 after government agents tried to remove weapons from Kagoshima’s arsenal. The rebellion’s defeat showed that the conscript army could win, and it transferred politics from the battlefield to the press and the petition.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The domains kept the new state weak. After 1868 the new government still depended on the domains for soldiers and revenue, ruling directly only the confiscated shogunal lands. Its leaders, many of whom had travelled abroad or read Western works, could see that the nation-states threatening Japan raised national taxes and national armies. As long as more than 260 lords kept their own samurai and rice taxes, the government could not build either. The logic of the restoration pointed to abolition from the start.
The unequal treaties made centralisation urgent. The treaties of 1858 could be revised from 1872, and Japan’s leaders believed that the Western powers would only accept Japan as an equal once it had modern laws, courts and armed forces. That required a single government that could legislate for the whole country. Foreign pressure thus provided both a motive for centralisation and a patriotic argument that even reluctant lords found hard to oppose.
Many domains were bankrupt. Decades of borrowing, the costs of alternate attendance and the military expenses of the 1860s had left many domains deeply in debt to Osaka merchants and issuing paper money of doubtful value. When the government offered to assume these obligations and guarantee the lords an income, abolition became a rescue as much as a confiscation. The fiscal weakness of the old order made its peaceful dissolution possible.
The state needed a fixed money income. Under the domains, taxes were collected in rice at rates that varied from place to place and year to year, so no central government could budget. The new leaders needed predictable cash to pay for an army, schools, railways and the samurai stipends they had inherited, which consumed roughly a third of government spending in the early 1870s. A national land tax in money, set on assessed value, was the answer, and it could only be imposed once the domains were gone.
THE TURNING POINT
The domains abolished, 29 August 1871. This is the hinge of Japan’s whole transition, because it changed how the country was governed, which the restoration of 1868 had not yet done. In one afternoon the decree ended a system of semi-independent lordships nearly three centuries old and made possible everything that followed: a national army, a national tax, national schools and a national market. On the map it is the moment the grey-tan patchwork of 1869 becomes a single colour, and in the history of the transition it is the moment a change of rulers became a change of state.
What it changed
One army, one tax, one school system. With the domains gone, the government issued the Education Ordinance of 1872, which aimed at compulsory primary schooling for boys and girls, followed by conscription and the land tax in 1873. These measures built a direct link between the state and every household for the first time. They also created a large, literate and obedient conscript population that the Meiji state would mobilise for industry and war.
Opposition moved from swords to petitions. The defeat of 1877 ended armed resistance by the samurai. Former samurai such as Itagaki Taisuke of Tosa had already petitioned in 1874 for an elected assembly, and after Saigō’s death the Freedom and People’s Rights movement grew into a national campaign of newspapers, speeches and political societies. The government’s critics now demanded a share of power through a constitution.
Japan began to push outward. In the same years the government sent an expedition to southern Taiwan in 1874, fixed its northern border with Russia in 1875 by exchanging its claim to Sakhalin for all the Kurils, and in 1876 forced Korea to open its ports. The red dot at Busan on the map is Japan’s first settlement imposed on a neighbour. Japan was already treating Korea as the West had treated Japan.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Why did Japan’s centralising revolution of 1871–77 cost so much less blood than most revolutions that remove an entire ruling class?
The leaders bought out the most powerful losers: the lords received debt relief, titles and incomes, and the samurai kept their stipends long enough for the change to settle. They used the emperor’s authority to make resistance look disloyal, they acted quickly and in unity, and a credible army stood behind each step. Many domains were also bankrupt, so abolition relieved more than it robbed. Yet the revolution was far from costless. Thousands died in the samurai revolts and perhaps 12,000 or more in the Satsuma Rebellion alone, and peasants paid in riots, conscription and taxes that historians such as Stephen Vlastos have documented. A strong answer weighs these costs against the speed and scale of the change, and it notes that the costs fell on those who could not bargain. The transferable lesson is that transitions go most smoothly when the powerful are compensated, and that the price is usually shifted onto those without that bargaining power.
An interesting fact
No confirmed photograph of Saigō Takamori exists, so his famous image was drawn after his death from his relatives’ features. He was pardoned in 1889, twelve years after dying as a rebel, and in 1898 a bronze statue was unveiled in Tokyo’s Ueno Park showing him in a plain cotton kimono, walking his dog. At the unveiling his widow, Itoko, is reported to have protested that her husband had never looked like that in public. The rebel of 1877 had become a national hero, honoured by the state he had fought.
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