Conventional present-day interpretations of the Meiji Restoration as the establishment of absolutism or as a bourgeois revolution do not adequately explain this historical event. As Professor Sakata Yoshio has pointed out, it was a product of a political revolutionary process which began as a movement to restore the Emperor (
osei fukko) and led to the collapse of the autocracy of the Tokugawa Bakufu, and a revolutionary social and economic process, or Imperial Renovation (
osei ishin), which developed out of the rich country-strong army (
fukoku and
kyohei) policy. Internal changes resulted from foreign pressures which precipitated a political movement to resist foreign pressure and to maintain Japan's independence. Although in time this was transformed into a social and economic revolution, this does not mean that the accidental condition of external pressure in the Meiji Restoration resolved the social and economic conflicts within the Tokugawa feudal system. In the transition from the
osei fukko to the
osei ishin revolutions an important part was played by the nationalism of lower-ranking samurai who had, as intelligentsia, acquired knowledge of foreign countries.
It is from this point of view that I have surveyed the history of the Meiji Restoration from the movement to destroy the dictatorship of the Tokugawa Bakufu, beginning in the first year of Tempo (1830) with the efforts of Tokugawa Nariaki of Mito
han to reform the Bakufu system and ending in the tenth year of Meiji (1877) when social renovation was firmly established and the Satsuma
han was completely destroyed.
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