The Meiji Restoration clearly is an enormously complex event. Yet it may lack
some of the drama, color and political violence of major transformations elsewhere.
But that still leaves us with an obligation to try and understand it as an historical
event as best we can. Consider the following discussion on how to approach the
Meiji Restoration.
The process by which the old Tokugawa regime was overthrown was, by comparison
with other revolutionary overturns, a relatively simple matter:
Most of Japan, divided into units that were either too small or too
indecisive to take effective action, simply stood by and watched, while
a small group of dynamic young samurai, many of humble birth, seized
control of the han governments of Satsuma and Choshu, then with the
connivance of a few friendly nobles won control of the court, and finally,
through daring use of the military power of Satsuma and Choshu, won
mastery over the whole nation. (Fairbank, Reischauer, Craig, p.226)
The real problems were to follow the seizure of power. It is by no means
clear that, beyond a fairly general commitment to “modernisation”
of Japanese society, the group of young samurai who now effectively ruled
Japan knew what they were then going to do. As events would prove, they
were themselves not united in their aims. Rather, as they gradually strengthened
their power over the next decade, they were to clarify their goals. Between
1868 and 1877 the Meiji revolution went through a series of step-by-step,
incremental policy changes; in the process, a new kind of Japanese polity
emerged. In the course of this evolution, the victors in the new regime
would more than once have to employ the state’s ultimate resource,
armed force, to secure their position.
This statement gets to the heart of the matter. The Meiji Restoration
was not "revolutionary" in the traditional sense of being aimed at
a specific social class, but, at the end of the day, the "aristocratic"
samurai leaders acted in a revolutionary manner once they proceeded to reorganize
the Japanese polity. How are we to explain this behavior?
Below are a number of links to the topic of the Meiji Restoration. Most are
not theoretical nor highly analytical which is why I recommend the readings
by George M. Wilson that we will be doing, the classic article by Thomas Smith,
as well as the Colin Barker pages on Marxist interpretations of the Restoration
from which the above quotation comes. Nevertheless, here are a number of links
you may like to peruse:
One possible approach to the characterisation of the Meiji Restoration would
be to treat it as a case of revolution, but of a particular kind. The argument
for treating it as a revolution is that an existing dominant social class
was displaced from power, and an existing set of production relations was
replaced by another. Yet the Japanese revolution was not a “social revolution”.
Theda Skocpol (1979) makes a useful set of distinctions:
Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s
state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried
through by class-based revolts from below. Social revolutions are set
apart from other sorts of conflicts and transformative processes above
all by the combination of two coincidences: the coincidence of societal
structural change with class upheaval; and the coincidence of political
with social transformation. In contrast, rebellions, even when successful,
may involve the revolt of subordinate classes – but they do not eventuate
in structural change. Political revolutions transform state structures
but not social structures, and they are not necessarily accomplished through
class conflict. And processes such as industrialisation can transform
social structures without necessarily bringing about, or resulting from,
sudden political upheavals or basic political-structural changes. (Skocpol,
1979, p.4)
On Skocpol’s criteria, since the events in Japan lack the element of
“class upheaval," they do not amount to a social revolution. Yet
they also amount to more than a political revolution, since the Meiji Restoration
eventuated in more than a change in the structure of the state alone: the
social structure itself was transformed in significant ways, through legal
enactment. In Trimberger’s phrase (1978) the revolution in Japan was
a “revolution from above”. A section of the existing bureaucracy
took over state power, using both force and persuasion; having dispossessed
sovereignty from the hands of its former masters, it reorganised state power
and wielded it for itself.
This “revolution from above” was more than simply a “coup d’état”
or “palace revolution”, for it had a definite social character.
The new Japanese state leaders systematically and purposefully destroyed the
principal legal and political supports of the previous tributary mode of production
and set Japanese society on a new road of development. Trimberger suggests
that what occurred in Japan from 1868 onwards may be properly compared with
the “revolution from above” led by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, or with
the “military revolutions” in Egypt or Peru. Others have pointed
up parallels also with the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony
(Bendix 1967, Landes 1965). More controversially, parallels could also be
drawn with Stalin’s industrialisation of Russia–-though there the
state and social structure that was reshaped by a section of the ruling bureaucracy
was a decayed popular state that had emerged from another full-blown social
revolution.
Japan presents us with an example of a transition, accomplished in politics,
from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist mode of production, without benefit
of a social revolution. What the Japanese case shows is that the process of
restructuring the social relations of production in the shift from a “feudal”
or “tributary” to a capitalist mode of production need not necessarily
involve the active political participation of the lower classes. Indeed, the
“social revolutionary” method of transition from pre-capitalist
to capitalist relations is, historically, not necessarily the most common
form. As Skocpol remarks, “social revolution ... (is) a complex object
of explanation, of which there are relatively few historical instances”
(1979, p.5). The masses are not necessarily active ororganised agents in the
process of transformation that initiates capitalist development.
The Norman Thesis
E. H. Norman, a Canadian Diplomat and Scholar, put forth the
earliest and best-known Marxist interpretation of the Meiji Restoration in
in english his book The Emergence of Japan as a Modern State which
originally appeared in 1940 published by the Institute of Pacific Relations.
Given the publication date, a year before Pearl Harbor but well after Japan
had become active militarily on the continent, Norman was asking questions
about whether the roots of Japanese militarism and fascism might be found
in the very nature of the Meiji Restoration. The web page listed below gives
a summary of Norman's arguments though it does not specifically mention him
by name in the text. Nevertheless, the remark that it is based on Norman's
book is added with attribution to D. Rounds of UCLA. My source for this link
did not seem to know who originated this page, but it is a decent representation
of the "Norman Thesis" although not as eloquently written as the
original. See
Norman argues that intrinsic to the Meiji Restoration was the late Tokugawa
"feudal-merchant alliance" which grew out of the decay of Japanese
feudalism and brought the rich merchant class into league with younger, middle-ranking
samurai in order to cooperate in the overthrow of the shogunate. His thesis
of amalgamation and blurring of class lines holds that chonin were
able to buy their way into samurai or near-samurai status while the feudal
class, always on the brink of bankruptcy, depended on the good will and largesse
of the merchant houses in order to keep their operations afloat. Anxious to
increase their their income, the daimyo joined hands with merchants in forming
han monopolies, and hence they became "tinged with the capitalist
outlook." The long-run result of this unholy alliance was a form of absolutism,
or an absolutist, autocratic Meiji state which used its considerable military
and police powers to ensure that the revolutionary energy of the rural and
urban masses, that had been so evident in the urban and rural ikki,
the carnivals, festivals, and millenarian behavior of the "Eijanaika"
movement which Wilson depicts, could never rise to the level of a social revolution
which might be aimed at the feudal or capitalist social classes. If that were
to have happened, Japan would have had a real revolution. . .
Class analysis is central of Norman’s analysis of the transition to
the modern state and the incomplete nature of the Meiji ‘revolution,’
writes John Dower, "but it must be recognized (and usually is not) that
he himself conceived of this in general and flexible terms." (Origins
of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E.H. Norman, 17) Quoting
Norman on "the undisciplined, half-blind but earth-shaking power of the
peasantry," Norman contends that "the Restoration, to a large degreee,
can justly be called the harvest of peasant revolt." Because Norman advanced
a leftist or Marxist-influenced interpretation of the Meiji Restoration, his
work has not had the greatest acceptance in American graduate institutions,
especially not in the 1950s and 1960s. But Norman was much loved and admired
by historians in Japan. During the horror of the McCarthy persecutions of
the 1950s, Norman's name came up repeatedly in U.S. Senate hearings, allegedly
because he had been a member of a leftwing group while a graduate student
at Columbia University. While he was Ambassador to Egypt in the mid-1950s,
during the Suez Canal crisis, he mysteriously committed suicide by jumping
off a building. John Dower wrote a penetrating and insightful 100-page essay
on Norman and the impact of his scholarship in a collection of his writings
that he edited in 1975 because Norman's original work had fallen out of print.
Regrettably, Dower's Origins of the Japanese State: Selected writings of
E. H, Norman (Random House, 1975) is now out of print as well. For a tribute
to Norman and a review of Dower's book, click here.
All page numbers below for quotes taken from Norman refer to Dower's reissue
of Norman's work.
According to Dower’s analysis of Norman, "The development of a money
economy eroded the traditional social structure—first, by creating a
rich-merchant and new landlord-usurer class whose de facto power belied its
de jure status at the bottom of the Confucian class hierarchy; secondly, by
forcing han governments into the new economy through involvement in national
money transactions (particularly the conversion or rice) and the development
of han monopolies; and thirdly, by forging a mutual interdependence between
these two classes through this very mechanism of nascent capitalism, a relationship
in which the economic power of the merchant-landlord group and the political
prestige and experience of representatives of the feudal class complemented
and reinforced one another." (18)
A key conception of Norman’s, then, is that the Restoration was "an
incomplete revolution—"a political revolution carried out from above
which was not permitted to become a social revolution." Dower goes on
to point at that this argument "rests upon the thesis that in the decades
after 1868, the symbiotic feudal-merchant alliance was consolidated into a
ruling-class front which at a certain point deliberately abandoned the attack
on feudalism in order to check the possibility of a continuing revolution
from below." (20)
Norman believes that the Meiji land settlement not only confirmed but strengthened
the position of rural landlords, and that "This restructured feudal-merchant
alliance paved the way for a capitalist economy in Japan, but one that was
distinguished by a close embrace of landlordism, banking, and state subsidy
and protection, with finance capital dominant over but meshed with industrial
capital." This Norman called "hothouse variety"—"a
blend of the old mercantilism with its state protection, and the new-style
monopoly [finance capital]. It produced a strong state, but in the process
sacrificed the possibilities for a more democratic and equitable society.
For such a system required political autocracy to ensure its rapid and continued
growth; it aborted the emergence of an independent industrial bourgeoisie,
which had been the basis for liberalism in the European experience; and it
thwarted the development of pure capitalist relations in the agrarian sector
by fostering a system in which the persistence of high rents made the role
of parasitic landlord more attractive than that of agricultural entrepreneur.
. ."(20-21)
Dower completes this line of argument by observing that:
From the point of view of the Meiji Government, the agrarian settlement
was absolutely crucial, for it was the basis of the land tax which provided
the bulk of government revenue throughout this early period. Creation of
a strong state, in short, depended upon exploitation of the lower classes,
and thus the inevitable response to peasant misery was not to relieve it
but to tighten the appropriate counterrevolutionary control. This latter
objective, as Norman saw it, was implicit in both the conscription law and
the later constitutional system. (24)
The following are some direct quotes from Norman's work, Japan's Emergence
as a Modern State, as reprinted in Dower's book:
The overthrow of the Bakufu was accomplished through the union of
anti-Tokugawa forces, led by the lower samurai and ronin,
particularly of the great western clan, Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, Hizen, together
with a few of the kuge [court nobles], backed by the money-bags of
the merchant princes of Osaka and Kyoto. The leadership in this epoch-making
change was in the hands of the lower samurai, who gradually succeeded the
upper ranks of samurai and feudal lords as the political spokesmen of the
day. (156)
We see then a towfold and mutually interrelated process accompanying the
decay of feudal society: (1) the chonin by their economic power gain
admission to the warrior class through adoption or purchase, and from that
vantage point some of them become the most clear-sighted pilots who as yonin
(or chamberlains) steer the anti-Bakufu forces through the troubled
waters at the end of the Tokugawa period; and (2) the feudal rulers (both
Bakufu and clan), always on the brink of bankruptcy and anxious to
increase their income, chiefly for military purposes, adopt capitalist methods
of production and to a considerable degree they become tinged with the capitalist
outlook.…Already, before the Restoration one notes a blurring and breaking
down of the old class lines, the uneven fusion one wing of the feudal ruling
class, the anti-Bakufu leaders, with the more powerful merchants,
and the absorption of chonin into high official positions as symbolized
by their newly assumed badge of authority, the samurai’s two
swords. This was a portent even in Tokugawa times of that union of the "yen
and the sword" which characterized not only Meiji but contemporary
Japan. (168)
On the subject of pre-Restoration economic reforms, often dubbed the "Tempo
Reforms," especially in Satsuma and Choshu, that were carried out by
the younger, lower-ranking samurai of these clans, Norman writes:
In the economic sphere these reforms, while rescuing the clan finances from
bankruptcy, strengthened rather than weakenedthe monopoly system, and so
placed heavier burdens on the peasantry and artisan class. These clan reforms,
so far from tending to emancipate the peasantry and in this way create an
internal market for manufactured goods, kept prices up by the monopoly system
and by the practice of commuting rice into money, as well as by levying
fresh extortions which aggravated agrarian distress. Thus it is no coincidence
that the peasant revolts were the most bitter and prolonged in the domain
of these rich, anti-Bakufu clans where merchant capital strong and
where factory industry was beginning to take root on a limited scale. To
suppress such revolts the daimyo had to call on the samurai who,
accordingly, for all their growing economic distress, felt closer to the
governing class than to the rebellious peasantry. (175-76)
Norman goes on to point out "two remarkable phenomena:"
First, the stunting of the growth of a capitalist class and its consequent
dependence on a section of the feudal ruling class, and second, the social
transformation from a feudal to a capitalist economy carried out with a
minimum of social change in agrarian relations. These clan reforms were
accomplished, not through the momentum of popular revolt nor by the participation
of the people’s deputies in the clan government, but by a handful of
military bureaucrats whose political inheritance was autocratic or paternalistic
and whose insight taught them the need both for sweeping military and economic
changes in the face of the foreign menace and for an absolutist centralized
government as the only instrument able to undertake these tasks swiftly
and decisively in the face of continued social unrest. The logic of their
position dictated to them the creed of "a firm hand at the helm"
or in other words an enlightened absolutism. Hence from the first, even
during the transitional years, Japan experienced no liberal era. The only
magnetic force capable of holding together the centrifugal atoms of feudalism
was the Throne, and the only agents in a position to perform the gigantic
task of reconstruction were the clan bureaucrats of the four great "outside"
clans…Here we have returned to the postulate whence we set forth at
the beginning of the chapter, that the political leadership in the Meiji
revolution was in the hands of the lower samurai but that the economic
propulsion behind it was the growing money power of the big merchants, such
as the Mitsui, Sumitomo, Konoike, Ono and Yasuda. (176-77)
Norman is very aware of the real foreign threat that the powers posed to Japan.
He comments:
Like Nehemiah, they had to build with sword in one hand and trowel in the
other. In their anxiety to gain complete national independence and to escape
once and for all from the threat of foreign encroachment, they had to concentrate
on military problems at great sacrifice to social and political reform.
The historical legacy from the Tokugawa society did not permit a social
transformation taking place from below through democratic or mass
revolutionary process, but only from above, autocratically. The new
structure was built from the top downwards, upon the ruins of the old; moreover,
the burden of this tasks as far as government revenue was concerned, was
shouldered by the agricultural community, at whose expense also the accumulation
and centralization of capital was carried out; such being the case, the
government had no choice but to retard the tempo of anti-feudal consciousness
which was sweeping the countryside. The instrument in all this was autocratic
but never so inflexible as to be in danger of cracking. It was only through
an absolutist state that the tremendous task of modernization could be accomplished
without the risk of social upheaval which might attend the attempts to extend
the democratic method in a nation which had merged so suddenly and so tardily
from feudal isolation. …(209)
Norman, then, had found an explanation for how the country in which he was
born and raised, and loved very much, had become a militaristic and autocratic
state: his explanation was rooted in the very nature of the Meiji Restoration.
Although the society had been stirred to its very depth by political events
both before but especially after the arrival of Commodore Perry, and peasant
unrest clearly did its part to weaken the Bakufu, before anything like
a social revolution could get underway, one wing of the ruling aristocracy
joined forces with merchant houses and rural landlords, to place a coalition
of military bureaucrats in charge of the country. Norman would even say that
these men, the leaders of the Restoration, rode upon the crest of the wave
of agrarian uprsings. By the very nature of this coalition, it was bound to
be absolutist and ultimately autocratic, a regime that would suppress expressions
of popular will anytime that it threatened the stability of the state structure
or the forward advancement of the economy. Playing perfectly into their hands
was the existence of a foreign threat (very real and tangible) of colonial
exploitation by the western powers, and a potent political symbol (the emperor)
that could provide the leadership with a cloak of unchallengeable legitimacy,
but a symbol that was also easily subject to manipulation. In other words,
the deck was stacked heavily in favor of the state from the very outset of
the Meiji era.