Impact of Meiji Restoration to the Socio-Political and Economical Sectors of Japan

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Tokugawa Yoshinobu put his prerogative at the emperor’s disposal, where in fact in the first place, the emperor had no power and authority to rule the country, and then Yoshinobu resigned his position ten days later. This was effectively the restoration of imperial rule, although Yoshinobu retained considerable power. In January 1868, the Boshin War began with the Battle of Toba Fushimi, in which an army led by forces from Choshu and Satsuma defeated the ex-shogun’s army and forced the emperor to strip Yoshinobu of all power. All the external pressures combined with growing internal unrest led to the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogun and the restoration of the Meiji Emperor.

The Reign of the Meiji Emperor

The start of the Meiji Era and the beginning of Japan’s road to modernization, started when the 16 year old emperor Mutsuhito selected the era name Meiji for his reign. When the Meiji emperor was restored as head of Japan in 1868, the nation was a militarily weak country, was primarily agricultural, and had little technological development. It may seem too impossible for a young ruler to restore and fix all the damage done during the previous period but, it is for a fact that Japan may not have become the country what it is today if not because of the effort and leadership of Emperor Meiji to fix and modernize the country.

The Meiji emperor established the tone for his rule in his coronation oath which was written in the history as the Charter Oath of Five Principles. He observed that a representative legislative assembly would be created as soon as was practicable, that feudal customs would be abolished, and that the new government, economic and defense systems would be based on the examples of the Western powers. From this Charter Oath that the emperor had established, it is apparent that the new government is accepting ideas from the west and made those ideas as the basis for the country’s own development. Some might be confused why Meiji was entertaining the Western influence where in fact the goal of his era was to restore and bring back the way the nation used to be before it was altered during the Tokugawa period. Considering the current state of the nation after the Tokugawa wreck havoc, the new government realized that the only way in which Japan would be able to compete with the military and industrial might of the West was to transform itself along western lines. Thus, answering the question lately presented and one must also consider the idea that in a little more than a generation, Japan had exceeded its goals, and in the process had changed its whole society. The country’s success in modernization has created great interest in why and how it was able to adopt Western political, social, and economic institutions in so short a time.

One answer is found in the Meiji Restoration itself. This political revolution "restored" the emperor to power, but he did not rule directly. He was expected to accept the advice of the group that had overthrown the shogun, and it was from this group that a small number of ambitious, able and patriotic young men from the lower ranks of the samurai emerged to take control and establish the new political system. At first, their only strength was that the emperor accepted their advice and several powerful feudal domains provided military support. They moved quickly, however, to build their own military and economic control. By July 1869 the feudal lords had been requested to give up their domains, and in 1871 these domains were abolished and transformed into prefectures of a unified central state.

According to Sumikawa (1999), a Japanese researcher, he said in his paper that the feudal lords and the samurai class were offered a yearly stipend, which was later changed to a one-time payment in government bonds. The samurai lost their class privileges, when the government declared all classes to be equal. By 1876 the government banned the wearing of the samurai’s swords; the former samurai cut off their top knots in favor of Western-style haircuts and took up jobs in business and the professions.

The armies of each domain were disbanded, and a national army based on universal conscription was created in 1872, requiring three years’ military service from all men, samurai and commoner alike. A national land tax system was established that required payment in money instead of rice, which allowed the government to stabilize the national budget. This gave the government money to spend to build up the strength of the nation.

Political Changes

The impact of the restoration of the Meiji emperor can be seen from the very start of the period. When the Tokugawa Shogunates ruled over Japan, the nation was under a feudal form of government and the abolition of this said feudalism took place during the restoration period.

Soon after the restoration of the emperor to power, the new government promised the people it would establish a constitutional government wherein the emperor retained his title as the head of the nation and there was the existence of a prime minister who basically is the one who has the power and authority to govern the country. In 1889, the Japanese Constitution was declared and various liberties and rights of the people, beginning with the right to political participation, were recognized. A year later in 1890, a national assembly, the bicameral Diet , was assembled and the constitutional government was formed. The former samurais of the Tokugawa period, who in the Meiji took the role as genro understood that the adoption of a Constitutional government was essential if Japan was to become a country strong and wealthy enough to rank with the Western powers. Accordingly, it devoted all its energies to achieving such a government.

The Meiji Constitution borrowed from the constitution of the European nations, specifically the German states. The 1889 Constitution was largely the work of Ito Hirobumi , a Choshu man who had studied abroad in Europe. The constitution invested the emperor with full sovereignty, he commanded the military, made peace and declared war, and dissolved the lower house of the parliament when elections were necessary. Effective power however lay with the genro, but the genro’s power was vaguely defined in the Constitution for it seemed to contradict with the emperor’s total sovereignty of the nation. The emperor himself reigned, rather that ruled.

The new system of government had its troubles at first, but the genro was determined to make these new institutions work, for national pride, foreign approval, and political stability. The intervention by the Western powers made the Meiji government realize that their