Abstract
In the 1860s and 1870s, the feudal monarchy of the Tokugawa shogunate, which had ruled Japan for over two centuries, was overthrown, and the entire political order it had commanded was dismantled. This immense political transformation, comparable in its results to the great social revolutions of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries in the West, was distinctive for lacking a major role for mass political mobilization. Since popular political action was decisive elsewhere for both providing the force for social revolutions to defeat old regimes and for pushing revolutionary leaders to more radical policies, the Meiji Restoration’s combination of revolutionary outcomes with conservative personnel and means is puzzling. This article argues that previous accounts fail to explain why a group of relatively low-status samurai—administrative functionaries with some hereditary political privileges but in fact little secure power within the old regime—was able to overcome far more deeply entrenched political actors. To explain this, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between two political processes: the long-standing political relations of feudal monarchy and magnate lords and the unprecedented emergence of independent samurai political action and organizations cutting across domain boundaries. It was the interaction of these two processes that produced the overthrow of the Tokugawa and enabled the revolutionary outcomes that followed it. This article’s revised explanation of the Meiji Restoration clearly places it within the same theoretical parameters as the major revolutions of the seventeenth century and later.
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Notes
In this article, names are given in the traditional Japanese order of family name first. I also follow the historiographical convention of referring to major lords by their personal names, to avoid confusion of the various Tokugawas, Matsudairas, and so on.
The narrative of this paragraph is based on Jansen (1961, pp. 143–50).
There is no good analogy in European history for the coexistence of emperor and feudal monarchy in Japan from the late twelfth century to 1868. This situation was the product of the slow decay of the power of the imperial regime in Kyoto over aristocratic houses and provincial warriors, and the feudal monarchical dynasties (beginning with the Kamakura shogunate) arose to maintain some kind of order among the warriors who increasingly controlled the land in fact if not in law. The supremacy of the feudal monarchy over the imperial court was practically absolute during most of the Tokugawa period.
Of course, this formula, like the French formula of the three estates of clergy, nobility and commoners, paints an incomplete and misleading picture of the social structure, even if it is not entirely inaccurate.
Particularly evocative of this near unanimity is Tōyama’s conversion to the dominant view. The first (1951) edition of his landmark synthetic account of the Restoration argued that the “template” for the Meiji state (i.e., an alliance among lower-status samurai, commoner landlords, and a mercantile bourgeoisie) had been established in Japan in the 1830s–1840s, but this argument received so much criticism that the second (1972) edition removed almost all references to this hypothesis and instead emphasized the decisive role of the foreign threat.
The term “feudal monarchy” is the most accurate and informative term for what the Tokugawa shogunate was because of these two characteristics. To put it another way, it fiscally “lived off its own,” and its rule over the majority of Japan’s territory and population passed through its personal authority over the magnate lords as overlord of the “warrior houses.”
Against the potential accusation that this is a problematically functionalist argument, I would make two points. First, the claim here is not that the political order fulfills functions necessary for the maintenance of abstract entities such as society or the mode of production but instead that political institutions are functional for the interests of concrete groups of elites. Second, the embedding of elites in political institutions is much more direct in pre-capitalist political orders than in modern capitalist states, often extending to the point of the patrimonial appropriation of political powers (Ertman 1997; Adams 2005; Brenner 2007; Lachmann 2009). Thus, although conflicts are endemic (among factions of elites over the state, between the faction that controls the state and other elites), the mechanism linking the functioning of institutions and elites’ interests is relatively straightforward. I thank Richard Lachmann for alerting me to this objection.
I would like to thank Richard Lachmann for suggesting I clarify this point.
It should be noted that an equivalent value of (almost entirely domestic) debt was canceled by the central government on the basis of being too old or having been a de facto forced “contribution” that was never going to have been repaid anyway. The immense debts of the Tokugawa-era ruling class are sometimes described as evidence of the growing power of a mercantile bourgeoisie. However, making massive “loans” that can go decades without being repaid is a dubious sign of class power. In this respect, borrowing was taxation of merchant wealth by other means.
It was quite common for houses without successors to adopt the younger sons of other magnate houses, and the ruling dynasty had several branch houses for precisely this purpose—the Tokugawa of Mito, Kii, and Owari, as well as three cadet lines with their own surnames, including the Hitotsubashi. Yoshinobu’s name is also often read as ‘Keiki’. He retook the surname Tokugawa when he was named heir to Tokugawa Iemochi in 1866.
I would like to acknowledge an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the need to emphasize this point from the outset.
It is worth noting in this context that the “loyalists” often took a quite cynical view of the politics of the imperial court, describing it as “theater” and the emperor himself as a “jewel” that they plotted to “steal” (Tōyama 1991a, p. 102).
This interpretation is an alternative to the claim that the conflict was between more or less economically “dynamic” groups of landowners.
The discussion here focuses on the comparison with the French Revolution so as to attempt to account for the relatively stark contrast with that case. However, it should be noted that in terms of the role of popular unrest and the organization of militias led by subordinate elites as part of the revolutionary movement, the Meiji Restoration is much closer to the English Civil War (Goldstone 1991b, pp. 403, 413).
Japanese historians and some American historical sociologists make much of the focus on local targets and lack of broader political organization in Japanese peasant uprisings. However, these particular “weaknesses” (if one wants to call them that) also characterize the Great Fear (Doyle 1988, pp. 185–203).
The ideological schema of revolutionary movements should not be assumed to be prior to or unconnected with their political means. According to Sewell (1996), the deputies of the National Assemblies in large part improvised the ideological schema of popular revolution only in response to, and in an attempt to regain the initiative from, the fact of effective popular mobilization following the taking of the Bastille.
It is true that early twentieth-century Japan’s very gradual extension of the franchise and increase in parliamentary influence underwent a sharp reversal in the 1930s that was only overcome under the postwar Allied occupation (Scalapino 1953). However, the political history of France from Napoleon’s coup to the establishment of the Third Republic should encourage caution in labeling Japan’s trajectory as an exceptional case of “authoritarian capitalism” requiring a special explanation.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Vivek Chibber, Jeff Goodwin, Richard Lachmann, an anonymous reviewer for Theory and Society, and the participants of the NYU Economic and Political Sociology Workshop for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
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Cohen, M. The political process of the revolutionary samurai: a comparative reconsideration of Japan’s Meiji Restoration. Theor Soc 43, 139–168 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9215-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9215-6