Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · CHAPTER 3 ·
Meiji Restoration and Boshin War
Chapter 3 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000: “The Fall of the Shogunate”
Within ten years of the 1858 treaties the shogunate fell, as opponents rallied under “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”. After Western fleets bombarded Kagoshima and Shimonoseki in 1863–64, Satsuma and Chōshū turned to modern arms, and the decisive battle came at Toba–Fushimi in January 1868.
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The map above is the world of Japan, June 1868 — The Boshin War: the north in arms.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The shogunate, the military government that had ruled Japan behind a figurehead emperor since 1603, fell within ten years of the unequal treaties of 1858, which opened its ports to Western trade on Western terms, because its opponents found a loyalty higher than loyalty to the shogun. Their slogan, “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians” (sonnō jōi), turned the powerless emperor into a rival centre of authority, in the way a constitution can become a weapon against a government that seems to break it. Young samurai, members of the hereditary warrior class that staffed every office, murdered officials and attacked foreigners, and in 1863–64 Western fleets struck back: British warships shelled Kagoshima, capital of Satsuma, and seventeen allied warships destroyed the forts of Chōshū at Shimonoseki. These were domains, the semi-independent territories of great lords, something like states in a loose federation, and defeat taught both that expelling the West was impossible, so they kept the loyalty to the emperor and dropped the hostility to foreigners, buying rifles and steamships instead. In 1866 the old rivals made a secret alliance, and Chōshū’s new army of samurai and commoners beat a shogunal invasion, which showed that the shogun could no longer discipline even a single domain.
A palace coup and a short civil war ended the shogunate, yet at first they changed far less of Japan than the word “restoration” suggests. On 3 January 1868 Satsuma and Chōshū troops seized the palace gates in Kyoto and proclaimed the restoration of imperial rule, and at Toba–Fushimi later that month they routed the shogun’s army. The map of June 1868 shows both the victory and its limits. Red marks only the former shogunal lands the new government took over directly: the plain around Edo, Kyoto, Osaka, Kai, Nagasaki and Sado. Grey-tan marks territory still run by its lords, Satsuma and Chōshū included, and the hatched north is an alliance of more than thirty domains that fought on until Aizu fell in November. The Meiji Restoration, named after the new emperor’s reign title, changed who stood at the top of the state. It left most of Japan in the hands of its lords, which is why the deeper revolution was still to come.
The full story
Terror and the emperor’s name gave the opposition its power after 1860. The young activists known as shishi, “men of high purpose”, were mostly samurai, members of the hereditary warrior class, from Chōshū, Tosa and Satsuma, outer domains whose lords ran them almost like independent states, and much like the student radicals of later revolutions they assassinated officials they called traitors and foreigners they called barbarians. Because whoever controlled the powerless court could issue orders in the emperor’s name, Chōshū’s leaders took over the court’s politics in Kyoto and pushed the emperor to order the expulsion of foreigners by 25 June 1863. Chōshū obeyed by firing on ships in the strait at Shimonoseki, while Satsuma faced Britain over the killing of a British merchant at Namamugi. The Western powers punished them swiftly. A British squadron burned much of Kagoshima in August 1863, and in September 1864 an allied Western fleet silenced Chōshū’s batteries in two days. Expulsion had been tested against the most powerful navies in the world, and the domains most committed to it were the first to learn that it could not work.
Defeat converted the radicals into modernisers, and Chōshū shows how the conversion happened. Its leaders had already formed the Kiheitai, a militia that trained samurai, farmers and townsmen together with modern rifles, much as a modern army recruits on ability whatever a soldier’s birth. When conservatives briefly seized the domain after its defeats, Takasugi Shinsaku used these mixed-class units to retake it in early 1865. Satsuma, led by Saigō Takamori and Ōkubo Toshimichi, was buying British ships and arms through Nagasaki, and in March 1866 the Tosa activist Sakamoto Ryōma brokered a secret alliance between the two former enemies. That summer the shogunate sent a huge but divided army against Chōshū and lost on every front, and the arrow across the strait shows Chōshū carrying the war into the domain of a lord loyal to the shogun at Kokura. A shogun who could not defeat a single domain could no longer claim to protect the whole country.
The shogunate’s last leader tried to save it by giving up its title. Tokugawa Yoshinobu, shogun from early 1867, reformed his army with French advisers and in November 1867 returned his governing powers to the new boy emperor, Mutsuhito, hoping to lead a council of lords. Satsuma and Chōshū decided to strike first. Their palace coup of 3 January 1868 stripped him of land and office, and at Toba–Fushimi about 5,000 of their troops under the imperial banner defeated a shogunal force roughly three times larger. Saigō and the shogun’s negotiator Katsu Kaishū then arranged the peaceful surrender of Edo in May. The north fought on in an alliance of more than thirty domains until Aizu fell in November, and the last holdouts at Goryōkaku in Hakodate surrendered in June 1869. Between about 4,000 and 8,000 people died in the whole Boshin War, named after the year it began, few for a revolution, because most domains chose to join the winning side once the emperor’s banner appeared against the shogun.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Restoration, revolution or coup?
Even the name of these events is an argument. The leaders called them a restoration of ancient imperial rule, which presented radical change as a return to tradition. Japanese Marxist historians in the 1930s split over whether 1868 produced an absolutist monarchy that kept feudal landlords in power or a bourgeois revolution that opened the way to capitalism, and the dispute shaped Japanese scholarship for decades. W. G. Beasley described a revolution carried out by lower-ranking samurai who used the court to seize the state, while Thomas Huber stressed the role of Chōshū’s educated “service intellectuals”. Mark Ravina has more recently argued that the restoration was both nationalist and cosmopolitan at once, because its leaders invoked Japan’s ancient past in order to join a world of nation-states on equal terms. All of these readings agree that a small group of men from a few domains took power in the emperor’s name. They disagree about how far those men intended the sweeping changes that followed, and that question decides whether 1868 is best read as a restoration that turned into a revolution or a revolution that presented itself as a restoration.
Rifles, militias and the end of the samurai monopoly
Both sides in the 1860s bought Western weapons, so equipment alone does not explain who won. The shogunate hired a French military mission in 1867 and owned the largest modern fleet in Japan; Satsuma and Chōshū bought Enfield and Minié rifles through merchants such as the Scot Thomas Glover in Nagasaki. The decisive difference lay in military organisation. Chōshū’s Kiheitai and similar units took recruits from outside the samurai class and trained them as infantry, which gave the domain soldiers who fought for pay and promotion and who did not depend on hereditary rank. Foreign powers watched closely without intervening: Britain’s diplomats, including the young interpreter Ernest Satow, leaned towards Satsuma and Chōshū, and France backed the shogunate, yet all the powers declared neutrality in the war of 1868. The lesson the victors drew was that a modern army required abolishing the rule that only samurai could fight, a lesson that would soon cost the samurai their whole way of life.
The Boshin War and the losers’ history
The Boshin War is often told as the victors’ story, and historians of north-eastern Japan have pushed back. The northern alliance formed in May 1868 included more than thirty domains led by Sendai, and many joined to protect Aizu, whose lord had served the shogunate as military governor of Kyoto and was singled out for punishment. Aizu’s month-long siege produced lasting memories, including the deaths of teenage soldiers of the White Tiger unit and the fighting of samurai women such as Nakano Takeko. Afterwards the Aizu house was moved to a cold, infertile domain at the northern tip of Honshū, where many of its people suffered great hardship. Estimates of the war’s total dead vary from about 4,000 to more than 8,000, a range that reflects different counting of the wounded and the missing. The northern domains were long under-represented in the new government, which was dominated by men from the south-west, and that imbalance shaped Meiji politics for a generation.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The emperor gave the opposition a higher loyalty. Once the court had refused the 1858 treaty, the shogun could be cast as disobedient to the emperor, and loyalty to the throne became a reason to defy him. The Mito school’s ideas about national unity around the emperor, written to strengthen the shogunate, became the activists’ creed. Because the emperor had no army of his own, whoever controlled the court could speak in his name, and this made Kyoto the prize of the 1860s.
Defeat turned the expellers into modernisers. Satsuma and Chōshū were the domains most committed to expelling foreigners, and in 1863–64 they were the ones Western navies punished. The bombardments of Kagoshima and Shimonoseki showed their leaders that coastal guns and samurai swords could not stop steam warships. They kept the goal of a strong, independent Japan and changed the method, buying ships and rifles and sending students secretly to Britain. Defeat made them the most realistic actors in Japanese politics.
Chōshū recruited beyond the samurai. The Kiheitai and similar units, founded in 1863, enlisted farmers, merchants and townsmen alongside samurai and trained them in Western drill. This gave Chōshū an army larger and more motivated than its samurai alone could provide, and it allowed the reformers to win the domain’s own civil war in 1865. In 1866 these soldiers defeated a far larger shogunal army. A domain that broke the rule of birth in its army found it could beat a government that still respected that rule.
The shogunate’s late reforms alarmed its rivals. The shogunate’s own late reforms hastened its fall, because they convinced Satsuma and Chōshū that time was running against them. Under Yoshinobu it began modernising quickly, with French officers training its troops and plans for a stronger central administration, so a reformed shogunate might soon be too strong to overthrow. Yoshinobu’s return of power in November 1867 was meant to keep him at the head of a new council of lords, and his rivals’ coup of January 1868 was designed to stop exactly that.
THE TURNING POINT
Toba–Fushimi, 27–30 January 1868. The coup of 3 January was a palace manoeuvre that could have been reversed; the battle south of Kyoto made it permanent. When the court gave Satsuma and Chōshū the imperial brocade banner, the shogun’s troops became rebels against the throne, and several domains changed sides during the fighting. Yoshinobu fled to Edo by sea and then refused to fight on. Within weeks most of the country’s lords had declared for the court, which is why the map’s red and grey-tan spread so quickly while the hatch stays confined to the north.
What it changed
Edo surrendered and was renamed Tokyo. The negotiated handover of Edo Castle in May 1868 saved a city of about a million from a siege. In September the city was renamed Tokyo, “eastern capital”, and the young emperor moved there the following year. The new government thus took over the shogunate’s capital, its administrators and its archives intact, which made it far easier to govern the country from the old centre.
The victors ruled through domain cliques. Leadership of the new government came overwhelmingly from Satsuma and Chōshū, with Tosa and Hizen as junior partners. Men such as Ōkubo, Kido, Saigō, Itō and Yamagata would dominate politics for decades, a pattern critics called “clique government”. This small, tested group gave the new state a coherent leadership, and it also bred resentment among everyone outside it.
The domains survived the war that ended the shogunate. The restoration removed the shogun and left more than 260 domains in place, including those of the victors. The new government ruled directly only the confiscated shogunal lands, the red patches on the map, and it had to bargain with the lords for soldiers and revenue. Its leaders soon concluded that Japan could not become a strong state while the domains existed, which set up the second, more radical revolution of 1871.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Meiji Restoration made by ideas, by guns, or by the shogunate’s own mistakes?
Ideas mattered because they supplied legitimacy: the cult of the emperor allowed a few domains to present a seizure of power as loyalty, and it made other lords reluctant to fight the imperial banner. Guns and organisation decided the battles of 1866 and 1868, where Chōshū’s mixed-class infantry and Satsuma’s modern equipment beat larger forces. The shogunate’s mistakes opened the door, from Ii’s treaty without imperial approval to the failed expedition of 1866. Historians weight these differently: Marxists stressed social forces, Beasley the ambitions of lower samurai, Totman the shogunate’s own reforms and errors. A strong answer argues that ideas made the challenge legitimate, the shogunate’s weakness made it possible, and military organisation made it succeed, and that without any one of the three the outcome would have been different. The transferable insight is that old regimes usually fall when a rival can claim a higher legitimacy and also field a force willing to act on the claim.
An interesting fact
The last shogunal holdouts in Hakodate set up what they called the Republic of Ezo, and in January 1869 its officers voted to choose their leaders, electing the naval commander Enomoto Takeaki as president. The vote is often described as the first election held in Japan. Among Enomoto’s advisers was a French artillery officer, Jules Brunet, who had resigned from the French military mission to stay with his Japanese students. After the surrender Enomoto was imprisoned, pardoned in 1872, and went on to serve the Meiji government as envoy to Russia and as a cabinet minister.
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