On 8 July 1853, four American warships steamed into Edo Bay, trailing black coal smoke that gave them their enduring Japanese nickname: the black ships. Commodore Matthew Perry carried a letter from President Fillmore demanding that Japan open its ports, and he had chosen his props carefully — his paddle steamers moved against the wind, a thing no vessel in Japan could do. For over two centuries the Tokugawa shogunate had enforced sakoku, the closed-country policy, limiting foreign contact to a trickle of Dutch and Chinese traders at Nagasaki. Perry promised to return the next year with a bigger fleet for his answer, and did. The shogunate, knowing what British gunboats had recently done to China in the Opium War, signed the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854. The 250-year seal was broken — and the men who broke it would be swept away by the consequences.
Humiliation followed humiliation. The 1858 Harris Treaty and its successors — the "unequal treaties" — fixed Japan's tariffs and exempted foreigners from Japanese courts. Samurai radicals rallied to the slogan sonnō jōi: revere the emperor, expel the barbarians. But the young hotheads of the Satsuma and Chōshū domains learned a hard lesson when Western squadrons bombarded Kagoshima and Shimonoseki in the 1860s: the barbarians could not be expelled with swords. The goal quietly changed from expelling the West to mastering its methods. In January 1868, Satsuma and Chōshū forces seized the imperial palace in Kyoto and declared the restoration of direct rule by the emperor — the fifteen-year-old Mutsuhito, whose reign name, Meiji, means "enlightened rule". The last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, resisted briefly in the Boshin War, then yielded. Edo was renamed Tokyo, the "eastern capital".
Revolution dressed as restoration
The name suggests a return to the past; what followed was one of history's most radical modernisations, run largely by ambitious ex-samurai in their thirties. The feudal domains were abolished in 1871 and replaced with prefectures. A conscript army made every peasant a potential soldier, dissolving the samurai monopoly on arms; the 1876 Haitōrei edict then banned the wearing of swords, and hereditary stipends were bought out with bonds. Half the government departed on the Iwakura Mission of 1871–73, an eighteen-month tour of America and Europe to study constitutions, factories, schools and armies — then shopped selectively: a navy on British lines, an army first French then Prussian, a German-style constitution, American-style schools. The guiding slogan was fukoku kyōhei — rich country, strong army.
Not everyone came along quietly. In 1877 Saigō Takamori — a hero of the restoration turned defender of samurai honour — led some 30,000 men in the Satsuma Rebellion. The rebellion was crushed within months by the new conscript army, and Saigō died at the Battle of Shiroyama, entering legend as "the last samurai". He was posthumously pardoned, and his statue, walking his dog, still stands in Tokyo's Ueno Park — a rebel commemorated by the state he rebelled against.
Forty years from swords to steel
The pace was staggering. Japan's first railway linked Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872; the Gregorian calendar arrived in 1873; compulsory elementary education, a postal service, telegraphs, a national bank and a flood of hired Western experts followed. In 1889 the emperor granted the Meiji Constitution, modelled substantially on Prussia's, and the Imperial Diet met the next year — Asia's first elected national parliament. Then came the proofs of arrival. In 1894–95 Japan defeated Qing China, taking Taiwan. In 1902 Britain signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, its first peacetime alliance in generations — a striking endorsement. And in 1904–05 Japan fought the Russian Empire, besieging Port Arthur and, at the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, annihilating Russia's Baltic Fleet, which had sailed 18,000 miles to its doom. Admiral Tōgō's flagship Mikasa had been built in Barrow-in-Furness — a fitting emblem of borrowed technology wielded with total conviction. For the first time in the modern era, an Asian power had defeated a European great power in a full-scale war.
The hated unequal treaties were renegotiated away by 1911, completing the project the restoration had begun. When the Meiji Emperor died in 1912, Japan possessed heavy industry, a parliament, an empire and the world's most respected non-Western military — none of which had existed when Perry dropped anchor within living memory of many of his subjects. The transformation awed observers and unnerved neighbours, and the strong-army half of the slogan would eventually outgrow the rich-country half, with consequences that filled the next century. Rarely has one lifetime contained so much: men born into a world of topknots and sword-etiquette died in one of battleships, railways and general elections — a country that, told to open its doors, chose instead to rebuild the entire house.
Quiz nuggets
- Commodore Matthew Perry's "black ships" entered Edo Bay in July 1853; Japan signed the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854.
- The Meiji Restoration of 1868 restored 15-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito; "Meiji" means "enlightened rule", and Edo was renamed Tokyo.
- The 1876 Haitōrei edict banned samurai swords; Saigō Takamori's Satsuma Rebellion was crushed in 1877.
- Japan's first railway (1872) ran from Tokyo to Yokohama, and the 1889 Meiji Constitution was modelled largely on Prussia's.
- At Tsushima in 1905, Admiral Tōgō destroyed Russia's Baltic Fleet — the first modern defeat of a European great power by an Asian nation.