Historical background

Summary

The opening of Japan to the western powers in 1859, after a 230-year seclusion, was to prove fatal to the Tokugawa Shogunate regime. Shogunal concessions, agreeing to open Japanese ports to foreigners, aroused, especially among the influential feudal lords and their samurai subjects, bitter passions which were embodied in the slogan ‘Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarian’. This extremist slogan and movement, however, did not survive even the first half of the 1860s when two of the strongest domains, Satsuma and Choshu, reversed their anti-foreign stance. These two enlightened domains, situated in the far south-west of Japan where western things and influences entered Japan via Nagasaki, recognised the brutal reality, following the western powers' bombardment of Kagoshima, the capital of Satsuma, and Shomonseki in Chosu territory, that ‘expel the barbarian’ policies were absurd. The union of the two domains, armed with some rudimentary western science, technology and, above all, modern weapons, gathered forces at an astonishing speed to lead the attack on the Shogunate from the autumn of 1867 to the spring of 1868. As the young samurai of Satsuma and Chosu and their allies had to shoulder all the burdens, including those of financial management, in a new administration (the Meiji government), an enormous amount of hitherto pent-up energy of young ex-samurai was released. For the time being, of necessity, the young oligarchs had no option but to rely heavily on the old merchant bankers.