The prologue to Part II synthesizes the major causes of the resilience of early modern states despite their limited capacities. It explores the conditions that led to the collapse of state–society collaboration in pursuit of good governance. Big historical events – the English Civil War, the Meiji Restoration, and the Taiping Rebellion – forced the state in each case to search for new institutions to safeguard various dimensions of the public interest in the new socioeconomic circumstances and so reestablish its legitimacy.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

This chapter clarifies the nature of interstate relations and challenges the claims that the Chinese tributary system could not adjust to the Westphalian system. The alleged incompatibility between East Asian conceptions of international order and the Westphalian system is overstated. This chapter surveys arguments that intellectual stagnation and a myopic worldview caused Chinese decline and eventual collapse. Instead, it is argued that China engaged in intellectual adjustment to meet the global pressures caused by the imperial colonial powers. This adjustment and change in the collective imagination also carried over into the political realm.

This chapter examines the life of Imai Nobuo, a Tokugawa retainer, to highlight first the level of violence that marked the years leading up to the Meiji Restoration, and second, the motivations and experiences of armed groups, such as one led by Imai, that fought against the Chōshū-Satsuma alliance throughout the Boshin War. The chapter also reveals how following the war’s end, financial support from local and regional entities helped Imai and other Tokugawa “losers” start new lives in Shizuoka prefecture, in Imai’s case initially as a prefectural bureaucrat and later as a tea farmer. Imai’s life thus underscores how personal reinvention in Meiji Japan was made possible by the forgiving stance of regional and central government leaders. Exemplifying the global connections at the heart of this volume, the chapter additionally charts the ways in which US demand for green tea, which expanded in the 1870s, helped to make tea farming a viable profession for Imai and other ex-Tokugawa stalwarts. Overall through the life of Imai, it pinpoints some of the internal and global factors that helped facilitate reconciliation and by implication, nation-state formation in the early Meiji Japan.

This chapter presents an overview of the book’s main arguments as well as summaries of its chapters. It begins with an accounting of recent historiographical trends, primarily in the West but also in Japan, concerning the Meiji Restoration and the creation of the Japanese nation-state. It follows with a brief discussion of the development of the fields of global and world history in the West and Japan. It then details the thematic threads - economic trends, internal conflicts that raged throughout the 1860s, and post-Restoration reconciliation/resolution - that run through the volume, highlighting the ways in which the book shows the immediate and contextual intersections of each with the nineteenth-century world. In its concluding pages, the chapter presents how the book’s three sections - global connections, internal conflicts, and domestic resolutions - are formulated, pointing out ways in which the chapters connect across the span of the volume.

This chapter describes the experiences of a farmer-merchant, Shinohara Chūemon, in the new Yokohama treaty port between 1859 and 1873. By examining the activities, decisions, and fortunes of one individual in the context of the new global space of Yokohama, the chapter offers an interpretation of continuity and change during the turbulent final years of the Tokugawa shogunate. It explores the ways in which the opening and expansion of foreign trade in Yokohama led to far-reaching transformations of Japan’s society, economy and culture. The chapter interprets the transformation of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century as not only a top-down revolution initiated by the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, but also a bottom-up process led by countless individuals in search of greater economic well-being.

Using the lens of military history, this chapter examines the broad significance of the Boshin War. It details how over the course of that conflict, early modern military structures were swept away as lords (daimyo) adopted Western rifle technology and its accompanying modern military systems. Moreover, the nascent Meiji government used mobilization for the war to eventually force all lords to adopt new military practices and methods. In addition, the chapter presents a social history of the battlefield, exploring for example, logistics and how armies were supplied. It also examines the military equipment employed and the shifting nature of battlefield practices and customs, while revealing the ways in which civilians and their communities tangibly experienced the Boshin War, and thus the larger historical moment of the Meiji Restoration.

Western arms played a significant role as a new means of violence leading to the Meiji Restoration and in the ensuing civil war in Japan 1868–69. This chapter explores how industrial arms manufacturing and the global arms trade in the 1860s fueled wars in multiple locations worldwide including Japan. As domains and the Shogunate prepared for battle domestic demand for foreign arms soared precipitously overshadowing any other form of international trade. With their global and regional connections local Western merchants such as L. Kniffler & Co. in Nagasaki and the Schnell brothers in Yokohama supplied several sides in the Japanese conflict with military goods ranging in size from gunpowder to gunboats. Nevertheless, the rifle became the prevalent Western weapon for combat in Japan and it is the rifle that became the centerpiece of military strategy and social reform. Contrary to the prevalent image of arms trading limited to a few young risk takers like Thomas Glover, this study shows the widespread and short-term creation of military goods trade networks through abundant foreign supply and great domestic demand.

This chapter takes up the Tengu Insurrection of 1864–1865 to consider how the Japanese people reacted to the threat of civil war in the years before the Meiji Restoration. It focuses on a small domain, Ōno in Echizen province, to highlight the reactions of domain leaders and subjects to the intrusion of the Mito rebels - loyalist samurai who tried to rid the country of foreigners after the opening of ports. Before their defeat, the Mito rebels marched through several smaller domains that refrained from confronting them due to a lack of military training and resources. Although its leadership had been an early adopter of Western learning and weaponry, the Ōno domain ended up bribing the rebels to make them bypass the domain’s castle town. The chapter details the profound fear of warfare among local commoners and even samurai. In this region far away from the treaty ports, educated commoners were well-informed of current events in other parts of Japan, yet also drew on the cultural memory of the sixteenth-century Warring States period to make sense of the fighting. The chapter emphasizes the open-endedness of thinking about war in Japan on the eve of the age of military conscription.

Hundreds of foreign whaling ships stopped in newly opened Japanese treaty ports between 1855 and the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime in 1868, particularly in the northern harbor of Hakodate. These vessels not only reprovisioned there but also trained the first generation of Japanese sailors in pelagic whaling techniques. Those men, the recipients of northern Japan’s first passports, not only embodied the first permitted travelers overseas but also later launched deep sea fishing initiatives as Japan transitioned from an Asian to a Pacific nation. This chapter traces that trajectory through whaling ships’ logs and records of the Hakodate Magistrate’s office, placing trans-Pacific documents in conversation to explore how maritime activities in the island of Hokkaido connected Restoration era Japan to global flows of human movement.

Besides the United States, the other major site of German overseas engagement in the 1870s and 1880s was Japan. This chapter analyzes the imperial bridgehead created by German scholars sent to Japan as the country opened to the West and as the Meiji government sought to reform its administration, economy, law, military, schools and universities in the 1880s. Prominent among them was Karl Rathgen, who had studied under Schmoller in Strasbourg and came to Japan in 1882. Rathgen would spend the next eight years of his life in Japan, working to build the University of Tokyo, reform Japan’s legal code, and modernize its administration and economy. While in East Asia, Rathgen travelled widely and became witness to the fierce competition for weapons sales and industrial export markets in Japan and China between European and American competitors. He also became acutely aware of the precarious position of the German interests in Asia. As German policy shifted toward China in the 1890s and as Japan became more self-reliant, German-Japanese relations cooled. The First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 led to a rupture in relations and the construction of a Japanese “Yellow Peril.”