The Economic Rehabilitation of the Samurai in the Early Meiji Period

1960 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry D. Harootunian
Keyword(s):  
Japanese History ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Meiji Period ◽  
Meiji Restoration ◽  
Modern Japanese History

The Meiji Restoration of 1868, unquestionably the most important event in modern Japanese history, brought in its wake social and economic changes of a revolutionary nature. With the overthrow of the Tokugawa bakufu, the subsequent abolition of the han system, the equalization of classes, and the establishment of a conscript army, the need for a hereditary military class ceased to exist. Certainly, the presence of a samurai class, numbering approximately 1,800,000, or 400,000 families, stranded in a society in process of divesting itself of all feudal fetters, constituted an acute problem. The continued existence of this vast army of unemployed retainers could have easily hamstrung all efforts to modernize. And it is hardly surprising that the new Meiji leaders realized at the inception of the new regime that if the work of the Restoration was to be completed successfully, it was necessary to work out a satisfactory settlement for the samurai class.

Japanese Reinvention of Self through Hawai‘i’s Japanese Americans

2012 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yujin Yaguchi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Postwar Japan ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
Modern Japanese History ◽  
American Society

This article investigates the relationship between Asian American and modern Japanese history by analyzing the image of Japanese Americans in postwar Japan. Based on a book of photographs featuring Japanese immigrants in Hawai‘i published in 1956, it analyzes how their image was appropriated and redefined in Japan to promote as well as reinforce the nation’s political and cultural alliance with the United States. The photographs showed the successful acculturation of Japanese in Hawai‘i to the larger American society and urged the Japanese audience to see that their nation’s postwar reconstruction would come through the power and protection of the United States. Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i served as a lens through which the Japanese in Japan could imagine their position under American hegemony in the age of Cold War.

Toward a genealogy of the police idea in imperial Japan: a synthesis

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Max Ward
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Police Power ◽  
Meiji Period ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Imperial Japan ◽  
National Police

Abstract This paper explores how Japanese officials and others conceptualized police power at particular junctures in imperial Japanese history (1868–1945). It does so by synthesizing prior scholarship on the Japanese police into a broader genealogy of the police idea in prewar Japan, beginning with the first translations and explanations of police in the Meiji period, the changing perceptions of the police in the 1910s, and the evolution from the “national police” idea in the 1920s to the “emperor's police” in the late 1930s. The essay proposes that the police idea in Japan (and elsewhere) can be read as a boundary concept in which the changing conceptions of police power demarcate the shifting relationship between state and society. Indeed, it is the elusiveness of this boundary that allows for police power – and by extension, state power – to function within society and transform in response to social conditions. Approached in this way, the essay argues that the different permutations of the police idea index the evolving modality of state power in prewar Japan, and thus allows us to reconsider some of the defining questions of imperial Japanese history.

Introduction: Ozu, History and the Everyday

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Woojeong Joo
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Michel De Certeau ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Modern Japanese History

This chapter introduces the scope and purpose of the book. It begins with a survey of the Western theories on the everyday, concentrating on Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin, and suggests central concepts for analysing Ozu’s films such as ‘deviation’ and ‘permeation’. The concept of the everyday is then expanded into the Japanese context by examining the possibility of applying Western ideas to modern Japanese history. Lastly, reviewing the previous Ozu studies in academia, from Richie and Bordwell to Wada-Marciano and Phillips, this chapter introduces and examines the socio-historical approach as the primary methodology of this book.

The Motivation of Political Leadership in the Meiji Restoration

1956 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoshio Sakata ◽  
John Whitney Hall
Keyword(s):  
Turning Points ◽  
National Development ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Authority ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Meiji Restoration

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 constitutes one of the great turning points in Japanese history. Standing as the culminating events of the political struggle which agitated Japan in the years following the forcible “opening” of the country to the Western world, it signaled the end of the Tokugawa hegemony and the establishment of a new central authority under which Japan was to embark upon an era of unprecedented national development. Few episodes in Japanese history have been so voluminously recorded or so thoroughly studied as the Meiji Restoration. The events of the several decades on either side of 1868 have been traced and retraced, and their implications analyzed by succeeding generations of historians both Japanese and Western.

Concise Dictionary of Modern Japanese History.

1985 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 449
Author(s):  
Carol Gluck ◽  
Janet E. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Japanese History ◽  
Modern Japanese History

Conflict in Modern Japanese History, the Neglected Tradition

1983 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikiso Hane ◽  
Tetsuo Najita ◽  
J. Victor Koschmann
Keyword(s):  
Japanese History ◽  
Modern Japanese History
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