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Explore Japan's 19th-century journey from feudal bureaucracy to modernity, facing financial challenges, cultural developments, and encounters with the West that led to social upheaval and the Meiji Restoration.
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Introduction • First half of the 19th century the shogunate continued to combine beurocracy with feudal contsraints • Government was running into financial problems • Japanese intellectual life and culture developed • Japan became more secular • Schools expanded
Terakoya – taught reading, writing, and Confucianism to ordinary people • By 1859, literacy was 40% of men and 15% of women – far higher than anywhere else • Confucianism remained the major ideology • There were rivals – nationalists – who insisted on only Japanese style education and the Dutch Studies – who kept alive the knowledge of the Dutch and studied western books
In the 19th century commerce expanded • By 1850 growth came to a halt • Technological constraints • Rural riots aimed at the wealthy peasants, merchants, and landlord controls
Isolationism • Japan feared outside influence • In 1853, Matthew Perry, and American arrived at a port in Edo askeing to open trade • He threatened bombardment – very similar to the British in China • In 1854, Perry returned and won two ports • The shogunate saw no alternative than to open their ports…
Crisis Follows • Samurai began attacking foreigners • Civil War broke out in 1866 • The Samurai defeated the Shogunate • The crisis ended in 1868 when a reform group proclaimed a new emperor named Mutsuhito – but commonly called “Meiji” or Enlightened One
