Early Japanese Images. Terry Bennett

for peace, the artillery was dismantled and destroyed.

      The display of Western military might at Kagoshima and Shimonoseki did much to discredit the jōi movement, especially at the imperial court, where a coup by more moderate groups had removed Choshu influence and eventually led to the emperor giving his belated approval to the treaties. The Satsuma domain in particular benefited from the lesson in British gunboat diplomacy, and its leaders embarked on a policy remarkably similar to that which the bakufu was attempting to pursue (and which the Meiji government would successfully follow): efforts were made to improve relations with the foreign powers, especially Britain; students were sent to Europe; foreign armaments were purchased; and the clan army and navy were built up along European lines. Likewise, the Choshu domain abandoned its anti-Western stance and, on the initiative of some of its younger samurai, began to reconcile its earlier differences with the Satsuma clan concerning the best means of achieving national unification. In 1866, after Choshu had successfully convinced Satsuma of the need to overthrow the shogunate, a secret military pact was concluded between the two clans. This Satsuma-Choshu alliance represented the first appearance of organized opposition to the shogunate, under the weight of which, in 1867, shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu voluntarily resigned the position his ancestors had held for over 260 years and which he himself had inherited earlier that same year. On January 3, 1868, Satsuma and Choshu loyalists under Saigo Takamori occupied Kyoto and proclaimed the "restoration" of political power to the teenage emperor (to be called Emperor Meiji) and the confiscation of Tokugawa estates.

      The new era name of Meiji (meaning enlightened rule) stood not only for the succession of a new emperor but, on a grander scale, for a new era in Japanese history. What had in fact occurred on January 3,1868, was not so much a "restoration" as a coup d'état, which the Satsuma-Choshu alliance and its supporters carried out in the emperor's name. As coups go, the Meiji Restoration was largely bloodless, especially when compared with the horrors of the recent civil war in the United States. Edo was surrendered to Saigo Takamori with hardly a shot being fired and, after defeating shogunal loyalists in a couple of skirmishes outside Kyoto, the new "imperial" forces encountered additional pockets of resistance only in the north of the country, the last of which, at Hakodate, held out until June 1869.

      Symbolic of the new era was the relocation of the capital to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo, literally eastern capital. The following years saw the abolition of the feudalistic old order and the establishment of a centralized, national government. In 1869 the former class restrictions—under which the population had been organized in the descending hierarchy of samurai, farmer, craftsman, and merchant—were removed. In 1871 the domains and their private armies were abolished and replaced by a pref ectural system administered directly from Tokyo. In the same year the new central government formally "permitted" samurai to discard their distinctive swords; five years later, having gained in confidence, the government issued a firm order prohibiting the wearing of swords by all except members of the police and the new armed forces. In 1873 all adult males, regardless of social standing, were declared liable for conscription into the new armed forces. For the samurai, who had long monopolized the profession of arms, these and other measures, such as the reduction and subsequent termination of their hereditary stipends, spelt their extinction as a class. Some accommodated themselves to the new regime and pursued careers in the new armed forces, the bureaucracy, or, unthinkable less than a generation before, commerce. Others could not and, painfully aware that there was no place for them in the new Japan, they formed a discontented and potentially dangerous underclass.

      Ironically it was samurai from those domains instrumental in the Restoration who felt most betrayed. Between 1874 and 1876 samurai discontent manifested itself in isolated revolts across the former Choshu and Satsuma domains; in 1877, however, the government was faced with a full-scale rebellion in the former Satsuma domain under the charismatic leadership of Saigo Takamori. The conflict raged for eight months. Despite a spirited resistance by the rebel samurai, they proved no match for the government's conscript army, and after a final, desperate stand at Kagoshima the Satsuma Rebellion ended in defeat and Saigo's suicide on September 24, 1877. Any doubt as to the permanence of the Meiji regime was now removed.

      The government could now turn to the task of modernizing the nation. Modernization was not only a matter of national survival in a world dominated by the West but also one of national pride. What the Meiji government desired above all was the abolition of the "unequal treaties," which, it was naively believed, would occur once Japan had convinced the world that she was now an enlightened and civilized nation. Thus, for the first two decades of the Meiji era, modernization occurred at a frantic pace, marked as much by an indiscriminate adoption of Western institutions, customs, and ideas as by an equally indiscriminate disdain for all things Japanese.

      Nothing escaped the attention of the Meiji reformers. After recasting its bureaucracy, armed forces, and other institutions along Western lines, and after encouraging the adoption of outward signs of Western civilization, including Western styles of architecture, dress, and hairstyle, the government also sought to bring Japan more into line with the prudish standards of the Victorian era. Nudity was one particular obsession of the authorities. Whereas the new elite in Japan had learned something of Western notions of shame and decency, the lower classes retained a traditional Japanese indifference to the naked human form, and the government regularly issued ordinances on what could and could not be displayed in public. The centuries-old custom of communal mixed bathing was now prohibited; henceforth, public bathhouses would have to separate the sexes. Grooms, coolies, and rickshaw drivers, who had previously got away with wearing a simple loincloth in the summer heat, now had to cover themselves up. Since tattooing, which had developed into something of an art form, was now frowned upon as a backward custom, and was even banned for a time, the laboring and the other tattooed classes were now doubly obliged to take care of what they exposed in front of foreigners. Such efforts by the functionaries of what some would call "New Japan," both to protect the sensibilities of Western visitors and to prevent the country from being embarrassed by its less "enlightened" citizens, regularly punctuated the national drive toward "civilization" and "enlightenment."

      Things almost went too far. One group of patriotic subjects advocated the use of Roman script, another the adoption of English as the official language of the country. One Japanese intellectual even went so far as to suggest that the racial stock of Japan could be improved by encouraging intermarriage between Japanese females and Caucasian males. However, the most conspicuous manifestation and one that came to symbolize the frantic pace of Westernization as a whole was a building called the Rokumeikan.