Chapter 1 Notes
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Background and Historiography
-In 1868 a group of young samurai overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate -Their aim was to restore direct imperial rule and create a new government -This was the Meiji restoration of 1868 -Their slogan was "rich country, strong army" -They wanted to achieve modernization and be accepted by the west -They emulated the west -The Meiji revolution greatly altered Japan's society, economy and government -They promised political democracy -They abolished the rigid traditional class system -The Imperial Charter Oath of April 1868 promised that all classes high and low would unite -A new tax system was enforced -Education was compulsory -Constitutional government was promised in 1881 -The main point of the Meiji restoration was not to establish a political democracy but to strengthen the country -The leading figure in democracy during the Meiji restoration was Fukuzawa Yukichi -The Meiji government didn't allow true democratic expression -the 1890 Meiji constitution was a document that would fundamentally shape the political order and political culture for the next five and a half decades -The largest controversy of the Meiji restoration was the question of whether the Japanese government should be modeled on the English or the German government -The resulting constitution was made in 1890 -The document said that the emperor had virtually no limits on his power -The test of this Japanese government was first tested in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 -Japan focused on keeping Korea free from foreign domination -Japan established colonial rule on Taiwan in 1895 -Ten years later Japan was victorious over Russia -Japan extended colonial rule to Korea after the Russo-Japanese war -An early Japanese Meiji businessman said "The secret of success in business is the determination to work for the sake of society and mankind as well as for the future of the nation, even if it means sacrificing oneself" (1967) -in the early 1900s the government enforced a series of social welfare and labor laws -When world war one broke out in 1914, Japan declared war on Germany -In 1915 Japan issued the twenty-one demands to China -In 1923 crisis hit Japan again in the form of an Earthquake -The government used this form of crisis to round up Left-wing intellectuals -Japan entered the mid-1920s as a nation of flux -In 1925 Japan finally answered popular political demands with the passage of a bill extending suffrage to all adult males -The government also passed the Peace Preservation law, which made the government more powerful in controlling the population -In the early 1930s and 1940s Japan practiced aggressive policies in Asia especially in its colonies -Japan bombed pearl harbor in 1941 -During the war the Japanese government imposed an even tighter control over its population -When the occupation ended in 1952, Japan regained its sovereignty Historiographical Overview of Modern Japan -In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nationalists all over Asia hoped to learn from the Japanese -Japan was a model for Asia -Japans modernization was completely unique -The arrival of the west to Japan happened in 1853 in the form of the US commodore Matthew C. Perry -Without the assistance of the west, Japan's modernization would not have started -A lot of developments occurred during the Tokugawa period, 1600-1868 -The end of World War II ushered a whole new generation of western scholars on Japan -Until the mid-1980s and early 1990s western scholars started assessing Japan's record -Japan lost millions of Asian lives during Japan's military aggression between 1894 and 1945 -Between 1931 and 1945, Japan itself lost 3 million people in the war -Between 1925 and 1952, Japan underwent fundamental changes -In Korea after 40 years of Japanese colonial rule it left the country divided -Vietnam became colonized by the Japanese after the French in 1940 -The years between 1925 and 1952 shows the critical link between the Meiji era goals and the ultimate emergence of democracy |