Examine the early reforms introduced by the Meiji government.

Do you regard them as anti-feudal in

The Meiji Period (1868-1912) brought about the rapid modernization of Japanese economic, political
and social institutions, which resulted in Japan attaining the status of the leading country in Asia and a
world economic and political power by the 20th century. During the first half of the Meiji Period, from
1868 to 1880, the Meiji leaders instituted numerous reforms to achieve domestic stability, promote
industrialization, improve education and establish an effective government structure, including the
promulgation of a Constitution in 1889.

The Meiji Restoration (1867-68), remarks Andrew Gordon, was a little more than a coup d’etat. A
relatively small band of insurgents had toppled the Tokugawa bakufu and stated their intent to restore
direct imperial rule, but this was not likely to occur. Right from the start, the new regime resolutely set
about uprooting the old concepts of government and anxiously looked to consolidate its power in early
1868. The important statement of their strategy and aims was the Charter Oath or the Five-article Oath,
issued in the name of the Emperor on March 14, 1868. It was an expression of the anti-feudal
aspirations of the people, envisaging the need for consulting public opinion and the administration of
affairs for the benefit of the nation and the encouragement of foreign knowledge. Implicit in the Charter
Oath was an end to exclusive political rule by the bakufu and a move towards more democratic
participation in government. As the new regime’s legitimacy increased over time, additional long-range
goals were articulated apart from the Charter Oath.

The aims of the Charter Oath and the reforms were to safeguard Japan’s national sovereignty and work
towards making Japan a great and respected country, equal to the most advanced nations in the world.
The goals of the early reforms in the Meiji period can be encompassed in the slogan of building a ‘rich
country, strong army’ (fukoku kyohei) in Japan.

The first dramatic step towards an integrated national polity was to abolish all the daimyo domains,
thus dismantling a political order in place for 260 years. The new government convinced key daimyo of
prestige and power, especially those of Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen, to voluntarily surrender their
lands back to the emperor. These men were guaranteed respect and a voice in the new order if they
wished. In fact, they were all quickly reappointed as domain governors with handsome salaries. In
August 1871 all domains were abolished and were replaced with “prefectures” whose governors were
appointed from the center. Within just three months, the number of political units was consolidated
dramatically, from 280 domains to 72 prefectures. This decree was accompanied by a large payoff to the
daimyo themselves. They were granted permanent yearly salaries equivalent to roughly 10 percent of
their former domain’s annual tax revenue.

The Council of State was established as the highest political authority in 1868 and the Meiji leaders
monopolized its highest posts. The organization of this council was revised in 1869 and again in 1871.
Later in 1871 it was replaced by a tripartite set of ministries of the Center, Left, and Right, further
subdivided into various functional ministries (Finance, Foreign Affairs, Public Works, and Home Affairs).
A system of civil service examinations was introduced in 1887.
One of the most portentous new departures of the revolutionary years of early Meiji was the decision to
put the emperor at the very center of the political order. The government heaped more and more
symbolic weight upon the emperor and empress.

The second great change of early Meiji - elimination of the status system - was even more remarkable.
By 1876, the economic privileges of the samurai were wiped out entirely. In 1869 the government
reduced the large number of samurai ranks to two, upper samurai (shizoku) and lower samurai (sotsu).
In 1872 a large portion of the lower samurai was reclassified as commoners (heimin), although they
retained their stipends for the moment. In 1873, the government announced that stipends would be
taxed. The next year it announced a voluntary program to convert stipends to bonds. Few samurai
volunteered for this program. The government made this program compulsory in 1876. Gordon suggests
that unlike the well-compensated daimyo, many samurai suffered significant losses.

The other side to the abolition of samurai privilege was the end to formal restrictions on the rest of the
population. At least in theory, this constituted social liberation. In 1870, all non-samurai were classified
in legal terms as commoners (heimin). With some important gender-based exceptions, the restrictions
of the Tokugawa era on modes of travel, dress, and hairstyle were eliminated. Restrictions on
occupation were abolished.

Even before the samurai were fully dispossessed, the Meiji leaders decided they had to renovate the
military from the bottom up. In April 1871 the government created an imperial army of just under ten
thousand samurai recruited from the restoration forces. In 1873 the government decreed a system of
universal conscription. Beginning at the age of twenty, all males were obligated to give three years of
active service and four years on reserve status.

The armies of the clan-coalition which overthrew the Shogunate were enlarged and reformed on the
French model, while the navy with strong Satsuma influence adopted the English system from the first.
The reforms in the army and navy are discussed in detail in the works of Prince Yamagata Aritomo and
Admiral Count Yamamoto Gombei respectively. This army, originally composed exclusively of ex-
samurai and enlarged by the conscription of 1873, was the core of the future standing army, opines
Norman. Baron Oura Kanetake states that the police system was hurriedly unified and enlarged, being
of vital importance in maintaining law and order in critical transitional years and in serving as the
bulwark of absolutism in its later years.

An imperial rescript of 1882 addressed to soldiers and sailors enjoined youths to serve the emperor with
loyalty and valor. The navy was built up in the 1880s and 1890s. By the mid-1890s, Japan’s military was
strong enough to move from the task of keeping order at home to that of imposing its will overseas.
Military service came to be accepted as the patriotic obligation of Japanese men by most recruits and
their families.

Meiji economic policy, remarks Norman, was a blend of the old mercantilism, with its state protection,
and the new state monopoly. This new monopoly was linked organically to the pre-existing mercantile
monopoly in Tokugawa Japan so that to a large extent the same favored merchant families with banking
interests now became privileged directors of banks and industries. Thus a Japanese economic historian,
T. Nagai, can call the Meiji statesman the last of the mercantilists, while an American authority, H. G.
Moulton considers them to be the first planners of a national economy.
The Meiji leaders, profoundly impressed with the energies unleashed by industrial capitalism and
Western learning, undertook numerous steps to realize the foremost Meiji slogan of building a “rich
country, strong army” (fukoku kyohei). Gordon has rightly pointed out that some initiatives were
indirect measures to build the infrastructure of an industrial economy whereas others were direct
measures to construct and operate mines and factories as government projects. Baron Shibusawa Eiichi
suggests that for the purpose of facilitating exchange and credit as well as centralizing the available
capital, the great financial houses under government advice and protection formed Tsusho Kaisha
(Commercial Companies) and Kawase Kaisha (Exchange Companies), regulated by the Tsushoshi
(Commercial Bureau established in 1869) and replacing the short-lived Shohoshi.

Norman points out that because of the emphasis on strategic industries, the normal order of the
starting point and succeeding stages of capitalist production was reversed in Japan. Before the first
introduction of the cotton spinning machines in Japan in 1866, even before the introduction of foreign
fabrics, engineering works and arsenals had been established. Cannon were cast as early as 1844 in
Mito, and engineering works were established in 1856 for military and naval purposes in southern
Japan. For training in engineering, government technical schools were established with foreign
instructors, while the best Japanese students were sent abroad to master the most up-to-date
technique, to replace foreign advisors on their return. In this way the military key industries were
technically advanced while those industries which were not of strategic value or did not compete
against foreign articles in the international or home market were left in their primitive handicraft stage
of development.

This peculiarity in early Japanese industrialization – the predominance of state control over industrial
enterprise- is reflected in the manner in which the government, while retaining and strengthening its
control over the key industries, disposed of the peripheral or less strategic industries by selling them
into private hands. This change in government industrial policy from direct control to indirect protection
was symbolized in the promulgation of the Kojo Harai-Sage Gaisoku (Regulations or Law on the Transfer
of Factories) on November 5, 1880.

John K Fairbank rightly observes that the industrial growth in Japan, as in other countries, was not a
straight line development. The boom years of the 1880’s were followed by a period of slower expansion,
but Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 set off another upsurge in all the established
industrial fields and in certain new ones such as chemical enterprises.

The most important economic reform of the 1870s was the new tax system which fixed once and for all
the framework within which modern Japanese agrarian relations are confined. Before it was possible to
establish a uniform land tax assessed according to the value of land and not by the feudal system of
sharing the produce between lord and peasant, it was necessary that each piece of land whether
worked by tenant or independent cultivator should have a recognized owner. This was ensured by the
distribution of certificates of landownership known as chiken in 1872. In 1873, the government
announced a new national land tax designed by Okubo Toshimichi which was intended to stabilize state
revenues at a level roughly comparable to the sum total of bakufu and domain taxes. It provided for a
national land survey, conducted in the mid-1870s that matched an owner to every piece of land and
issued deeds. It also assessed the market value of all plots of land. Finally, it set the land tax at 3 percent
of assessed value. This new system gave the government predictable annual revenue. The new tax
system also brought the national government into a direct economic relationship with individual (male)
household heads. It shifted the risk and the opportunity of commodity price changes onto the taxpaying
farmer, infers Gordon.
The legal institutions were reformed along Occidental lines inorder to win acceptance by the west.
Western concepts of individual rather than family ownership of property were adopted, although for
purposes of formal registration of the population the law continued to recognize the old extended
family. Concepts of legal rights, as opposed to the traditional emphasis on social obligation, came to
permeate the new laws. The structure and procedures of the courts were made to conform to those of
the west, and torture as an accepted legal practice was abolished in 1876.

Most of the legal reforms were instituted piecemeal, and a thorough recodification of the laws proved a
difficult and slow task. Drafts, drawn up largely under French influence, were submitted in 1881 and
again in 1888. A complete code, revised largely on the basis of German legal precedent. Finally went into
effect in 1896.

The new leaders clearly saw that an organized system of education was a fundamental aspect of a
modernized society and as early as 1871 created a ministry of education to develop such a system. With
grand language, in 1872 it declared four years of elementary education to be compulsory for all
children, boys and girls: “In a village there shall be no house without learning, and in a house, no
individual without learning.” Observation of European and American societies convinced leaders such as
Kido Koin that mass schooling, like mass conscription, was a fundamental source of the economic and
military power of the West suggests Gordon. Their initial models were primarily American and French,
and the 1872 decree established a system of elementary and middle schools and national universities.
Albert M. Craig observes that the Confucian-oriented domain schools for the samurai and the so called
“temple schools”, where commoners had learned to read and write, all withered away. At the outset,
the government announced that schools were to encourage practical learning as well as independent
thinking.

The elementary schools were to be financed by a 10 percent local surcharge to the national property
tax. In the 1870s angry taxpayers rioted against the policy of compulsory schooling. But eventually, as
with serving in the military, attending school became a well-accepted obligation of the emperor’s
subjects. By the end of the nineteenth century, rates of elementary school attendance reached levels of
90 percent or more.

It is well evident from the above discussion that right from the very beginning the new regime resolutely
set about uprooting the old concepts of government. One must not be deceived by the outward form of
Meiji reform but look beneath it to discover the content of its acts. For instance, even the attempt to
model the constitution upon Taika Reform (646 AD)-a pre-feudal code in the spirit of T’ang political
economy-was a groping after some anti-feudal philosophy of the state points out H. S. Quigley.
Moreover, the fundamental document of the Meiji Restoration, the Imperial Oath of March 14, 1868
was an expression of the anti-feudal aspirations of the masses. The brave attacks launched against
feudalism reached a furious tempo in the years 1870-73 with the recognition of the legal equality of all
classes, the abolition of feudal dress and of feudal barriers, the disestablishment of Buddhism, the
reform of the calendar, the emancipation of the Eta, the rapid introduction of Western thought and
technique, the removal of the feudal ban against the alienation and partition of land and the freedom of
crop and occupation.

That the Meiji government repudiated completely the social policy of the Shogunate and that it boldly
opened up the road for the development of capitalist economy can be seen in the motivation of its
reforms opines Norman. The Law (1872) which swept away the prohibition against the sale in perpetuity
in land, the government policy of buying up of common lands, the freedom of occupation and in the
choice of crop testify to the revolutionary victory of the right to private ownership in land. The
commutation of the land tax into a money tax collected on a national uniform scale indicates a new tax
relationship, namely the impersonal cash nexus between government and governed replacing the old
irregular tax collected in kind according to the crop. Finally all of these measures inevitably guaranteed
the protection extended by the government to the new landlord class in its land-owning rights.

Yet another great task was the unification of the national market. This meant the abolition of clan tariff
barriers and tolls, the unification of the monetary and banking system, the freedom of trade and
occupation, the abolition of the restriction on the growing of crops, all reform measures designed to
allow the development of the national market and the participation of Japanese merchants in the
international market.

Finally, the political unification of the country, achieved through the Hanseki-hokan (return of the land
registers,1869) and the Haihan-chiken (abolition of fiefs and establishment of prefectures, 1871), put an
end to the feudal system wherein the autonomous daimyo exercised absolute sway over the land and
the people inhabiting it through such means as the corvee, the prohibition of the flight of peasants, the
restriction of occupation and of the choice of crop, and the right to seize the produce of the land by
various legal or extra-legal measures.

To conclude, the historical legacy from Tokugawa society did not permit a social transformation from
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.
However, the Meiji government was able to achieve a remarkable degree of success in a relatively short
span of time. In fact, Japanese modernization stands out as the only historical instance of transformative
‘modern’ processes initiated and completed by a sovereign Asian country. It laid the foundation for the
further development of Japan, especially anticipating the trends in the political and economic spheres of
life.