This Chapter focuses on the situation where acts by the rebels or the government are committed in the context of the insurgent’s struggle for the establishment of a new government. When the rebels are successful, the new government remains responsible for the acts committed by the previous government while fighting the rebels. Also, the acts committed by the rebels during the insurgency are attributable to the State after their victory. When the rebels are not successful, the acts committed by them are not attributable to the State once the insurgency has failed. There are two ‘exceptions’ to this principle involving lawful ‘routine activities’ performed by the rebels and expropriation act committed by them which results in some benefits for the State. The rebels are always responsible for their own wrongful acts. A State is always responsible for its own failure to exercise its due diligence obligation to protect third States and foreigners during the insurgency. Responsibility arises as a result of a State’s failure to discharge its due diligence obligation of vigilance, prevention and punishment in relation to the conduct of rebels.

This chapter examines the life of Imai Nobuo, a Tokugawa retainer, to highlight first the level of violence that marked the years leading up to the Meiji Restoration, and second, the motivations and experiences of armed groups, such as one led by Imai, that fought against the Chōshū-Satsuma alliance throughout the Boshin War. The chapter also reveals how following the war’s end, financial support from local and regional entities helped Imai and other Tokugawa “losers” start new lives in Shizuoka prefecture, in Imai’s case initially as a prefectural bureaucrat and later as a tea farmer. Imai’s life thus underscores how personal reinvention in Meiji Japan was made possible by the forgiving stance of regional and central government leaders. Exemplifying the global connections at the heart of this volume, the chapter additionally charts the ways in which US demand for green tea, which expanded in the 1870s, helped to make tea farming a viable profession for Imai and other ex-Tokugawa stalwarts. Overall through the life of Imai, it pinpoints some of the internal and global factors that helped facilitate reconciliation and by implication, nation-state formation in the early Meiji Japan.

This chapter presents an overview of the book’s main arguments as well as summaries of its chapters. It begins with an accounting of recent historiographical trends, primarily in the West but also in Japan, concerning the Meiji Restoration and the creation of the Japanese nation-state. It follows with a brief discussion of the development of the fields of global and world history in the West and Japan. It then details the thematic threads - economic trends, internal conflicts that raged throughout the 1860s, and post-Restoration reconciliation/resolution - that run through the volume, highlighting the ways in which the book shows the immediate and contextual intersections of each with the nineteenth-century world. In its concluding pages, the chapter presents how the book’s three sections - global connections, internal conflicts, and domestic resolutions - are formulated, pointing out ways in which the chapters connect across the span of the volume.

The farmer-soldier (tondenhei) system was the centrepiece of the Meiji period program to develop and populate Hokkaido. It sought to establish communities of farmer-soldiers in order to accomplish a number of pressing objectives, including the fortification of the vulnerable north, the provision of opportunities for destitute members of the former samurai class, and the establishment of settled agricultural villages in Hokkaido. Established in 1874, it facilitated the relocation of over 7,000 households to Hokkaido before its abolition in 1904. In most historical accounts of Hokkaido’s Meiji period development/colonization, the tondenhei system is given pride of place. The farmer-soldiers are commonly cast as heroic pioneers who engaged in a courageous, and ultimately successful, battle to tame the harsh northern wilderness and protect it from the designs of looming foreign encroachment. In this chapter, I evaluate the contribution of the tondenhei to development and defense. Tracing the fortunes of a large number of farmer-soldiers and their communities across I recover some of the silence on the individual experiences of farmer-soldiers and reveal a mixed record in Hokkaido’s development/colonization. If anything the tondenhei system’s main contribution was to provide a mechanism for reconciling some of the former enemies of the Meiji government.