Abstract
There would hardly seem to be any necessity to write a new history of the Meiji Restoration given the sheer volume of research that already exists on the era in question. My justification for attempting to write a new history is the conviction that there is a need for a critical revision of certain preconceptions that remain deeply entrenched in the current historiography. This is not to denigrate the work done to date—the primary aim is to reassert the significance of particular aspects of Japan’s political history that have, for a variety of reasons, come to fall outside the purview of mainstream commentary.
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Notes
Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (eds), Princeton University Press, 1986.
T. M. Huber, The Revolutionary Origins of Modern Japan, Stanford University Press, 1981,
and G. M. Wilson, Patriots and Redeemers in Japan: Motives in the Meiji Restoration, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Nagai Michio and Miguel Urrutia, Meiji Ishin: Restoration and Revolution, United Nations University, 1985.
Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, Oxford University Press, 2002.
It should be acknowledged that Jansen has come close to providing such an integrated narrative with The Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2000), although it remains an extremely generalized overview that does not substantially revise conventional characterizations of the Meiji period. To this we might also add The Emergence of Meiji Japan, edited by the same author (Cambridge University Press, 1995) but this is essentially a republished selection of chapters from Vol. 5 of The Cambridge History of Japan (originally published in 1989) and in need of further updating in certain regards. There is also W. G. Beasley’s The Rise of Modem Japan: Economic, Political and Social Change Since 1850 (St. Martin’s Press, 1995), which benefits from giving greater attention to the build-up to the Restoration but remains a rework of earlier scholarship.
Richard Sims, Japanese Political History Since the Meiji Renovation, 1868–2000, Hurst, 2000.
Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period, Princeton University Press, 1985.
Tokutomi Sohō, “Ishin Kakumei-shi no Hanmen”, in Kokumin no Tomo, No. 207, 3 November 1893. Regarding the conservate turn in Tokutomi Soho’s outlook, refer to my chapter “Tokutomi Sohō and the Problem of the Nation-state in an Imperialist World” in Dick Stegewerns’ Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan: Autonomy, Asian Brotherhood or World Citizenship? RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.
Gotō Yasushi, “Jiyū to Minken no Shisō” in Iwanami Kōza Nihon Rekishi (Kindai 3), Iwanami Shoten, 1962, pp. 167–183.
Robin Collingwood, The Idea of History, Clarendon Press, 1946, pp. 282–302.
One of the earliest discussions of this perspective is Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan, Stanford University Press, 1959. More recently, there is the excellent collection of essays in seven volumes edited by Michael Smitka, Japanese Economic History 1600–1960. The volume of most relevance here is Japanese Economy in the Tokugawa Era, 1600–1868, Garland Publishing, 1998.
Sakamoto Koremaru, Meiji Ishin to Kokugakusha, Daimeido, 1993.
Asukai Masamichi, Nihon Kindai Seishinshi no Kenkyū, Kyoto University Press, 2002, pp. 326–32.
Karl Mannheim, Conservatism: A contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, Kettler et al. (eds), Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, p. 76.
Barrington Moore’s discussion of the paradoxical outcomes of revolutionary movements remains highly relevant; Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Beacon Press, 1966, pp. 433–52.
Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1988, Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 21–34.
Alistair Swale, The Political Thought of Mori Arinori: A Study in Meiji Conservatism, Japan Library, 2000.
More specifically, under the name of “Yoshida Torajiro” in Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books, Scribner, 1905, pp. 148–64.
Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, John Murray, 1880, vol. II, pp. 236–46.
A classic on this subject, which merits “rediscovery” is Fukuchi Shigetaka, Shizoku to Shizoku Ishiki, Shunshusha, 1956.
This aspect of Japan’s political history is almost uncovered in detail in either English or Japanese; an important Japanese exception is Takii Kazuhiro, Doitsu Kokkagaku to Meiji Kokusei, Shutain Kokkagaku no Kiseki, Minerva Shobo, 1999.
See Nakanome Tōru, Seikyōsha no Kenkyū, Shibunkaku, 1993.
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© 2009 Alistair D. Swale
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Swale, A.D. (2009). Introduction. In: The Meiji Restoration. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245792_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245792_1
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