Making reform and stability compatible with each other: elite redeployment in Meiji Japan

Nineteenth-century Japan remains a void in the literature on institutions and growth. Developmental institutions evolved in Japan after the Meiji Restoration despite the absence of political participation. Authoritarian change agents usually face a trade-off between reform and stability: they have coercive power to remove underproductive institutions, but at the risk of inviting instability, as politically influential deprivileged elites may engage in counteraction to recover what they perceive as their entitlement. Many authoritarian regimes, thus, coopt elites by allowing them access to rent, but such buying-off inevitably compromises institutional improvement. How did Meiji Japan overcome this dilemma and liberate major fiscal and administrative spaces for productive players who generate wealth and increase the size of the economic pie for society? This article presents a model that it calls ‘elite redeployment’ to answer this puzzle. In lieu of elite bargains in participatory polities in Europe, the revolutionary authoritarian regime in Japan coercively deprivileged traditional elites and redeployed those with financial or human capital among them in productive institutions. By doing so, the Japanese authoritarian change agents dismantled the incumbent institutions in an irreversible manner and swiftly built new institutions such as modern administrative, educational, financial, and commercial sectors, while maintaining stability.

Japanese Woodblock Prints From the Second Half of the 19th to Early 20th Century in the Context of the Influence to the Western Art

There are known periods of development of Japanese traditional ukiyo-e engraving: from its origin in the 17th century and its flourishing in the 18th — first half of the 19th century to the “decline” in the second half of the 19th century. The period of Meiji Restoration (1868–1912) was marked by the opening of Japan after more than two hundred years of self-isolation, acquaintance with Western achievements in the field of industry, science and art. The article discusses the search of combination of Western and national traditions by Japanese artists. Familiarity with the new artistic language and intention to introduce it into the space of traditional ukiyo-e engraving became the basis for the masters of this period. Changes in the field of traditional genres are noted: instead of images of actors (yakusha-e), beauties (bijinga) and landscapes (fukeiga), there were appeared images of foreigners with their manners (yokohama-e), Japan’s modernization (kaika-e), as well as the battle genre (senso-e) dedicated to the events of the Japanese-Chinese (1894–1895) and Russian-Japanese (1904–1905) wars. These attempts to transform the national art allowed to form the ground for the creativity of young masters in the 20th century, who brought traditional engraving to a new level.

Kinship in Contemporary Japanese Society : An Overview

The paper seeks to analyse the salient features of the kinship structure in Japan and how it plays it is significant role to form the traditional Japanese values. The paper also tries to analyse the changing nature of the kinship system in contemporary Japanese society from its traditional family (IE) system. The paper follows the qualitative method of research where the data has been collected from both academic and non-academic sources. By analysing the kinship structure of different periods in Japan, the paper finds that during the IE family system of the Tokugawa period, Japan gives less weight to kinship relations than other Asian countries. The feeling on son, either related to blood or adopted, marks the major distinction with other societies to find out the kin and non-kin. Following the IE system, the paper finds another two major events behind the weaken kinship structure in Japan: the emergence of koseki since the Meiji restoration and the rise of corporate culture during the contemporary period. Social Science Review, Vol. 37(2), Dec 2020 Page 105-124