This chapter surveys Japan’s era of civilization and enlightenment (bunmei kaika), roughly the first decade of the Meiji era (1868–1912). It interprets bunmei kaika as a revolutionary attempt at Westernization intended to overcome the disruption wrought by the globalizing effects of Western imperialism. The chapter covers four categories: first, politics and war, including the Iwakura Mission, the political crisis of 1873, the movement for freedom and peoples’ rights, the invasion of Taiwan, the Saga Rebellion, the incident at Kanghwa Island, the Shinpūren Rebellion, and the civil war of 1877; second, thought, including intellectual societies, the ideas of civilization and the nation, religion, language, and the public sphere; third, society, including household registration, taxes and allowances, the military, education, gender, and law enforcement; and fourth, culture, including the emperor, clothes, food, transportation, and time. It stresses disorder as integral to these transformations of the 1870s.

The collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the subsequent rise of the Meiji government were accompanied by the Japanese archipelago’s first large-scale conflict in two centuries. Warfare was not merely a consequence of the social and political upheaval of the restoration era. Rather, organizational reforms and the adoption of new technologies helped accelerate the collapse of the shogunate and shaped the manner of the modern state’s consolidation. Rather than recounting campaigns and battles, this chapter focuses on three interlocking sets of themes: technology, social change, and gender. Each theme relates to a particular story of the restoration era: the replacement of traditional Japanese arms by gunpowder weapons; the decline of the samurai and the rise of the conscript soldier; and the effacement of warrior masculinity by the ideal of the patriotically subservient “serviceman” (gunjin).

Considered in a global context, the Meiji Restoration was a nationalist, bourgeoise revolution. At the heart of many Meiji reforms was the creation of a new national identity. The Meiji government abolished hereditary status distinctions, replaced regional institutions with a powerful central administration, and promoted the cultural and political unity of the Japanese people. The government also advanced the core institutions and mechanisms of capitalism: the alienation and partibility of land, tax collection in cash rather than kind, stock markets, bond markets, and public banking. The Meiji Restoration also needs to be considered in the context of imperialism. The Meiji leadership confronted an international order bifurcated between an elite tier of nation-states with colonial holdings and a subordinate class of subjugated colonial possessions. That context made imperialism a logical component of the Meiji state-building project. As a nascent world power, Japan required its own colonial empire.