The Meiji Restoration: Causes, Timeline and What Changed

In 1860, a Japanese official traveling in America wrote home that the hotels had running water on every floor and nobody seemed to know his rank. Eight years later the government he served no longer existed. Within 40 years, the country that had banned foreign ships had beaten a European empire in a war.

The Meiji Restoration was the 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate and the transfer of authority back to the emperor. It ended 265 years of military government and seven centuries of rule by samurai, and it launched the fastest industrialization any country had managed to that point.

Meiji Revolution

What was the Meiji Restoration?

On January 3, 1868, a coalition of domains from southwestern Japan seized the imperial palace in Kyoto and declared that the 15-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito had resumed direct rule. The shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, had already offered to resign the previous November. He fought anyway, lost the Boshin War over the following 18 months, and the last resistance ended in Hokkaido in June 1869.

The emperor took the era name Meiji, meaning enlightened rule, and the Meiji era ran from 1868 until his death on July 30, 1912. The Restoration itself refers to the transfer of power in 1868 and 1869. Everything after that is the Meiji era's program of reform.

Who was Emperor Meiji?

Emperor Meiji

Mutsuhito became emperor in February 1867 at 14, when his father died. He had been raised in the Kyoto court, a world of ritual and poetry with no administrative role whatsoever, and he inherited a position that had held no political power for around 700 years.

He moved to Edo in 1868, which was renamed Tokyo, meaning eastern capital, and took up residence in the old shogunal castle. In public he wore a Western military uniform, which was itself a policy statement. How much he decided personally is still debated. The men who ran the government in his name were a small group of samurai from the Satsuma and Choshu domains, most of them in their thirties.

What caused the Meiji Restoration?

Perry and the unequal treaties

Commodore Matthew Perry sailed four US warships into Edo Bay in July 1853 and demanded that Japan open to trade. The shogunate had no answer to steam-powered warships. It signed the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854, then the far more damaging Harris Treaty in 1858, which opened five ports, fixed tariffs at levels Japan could not change, and granted foreigners extraterritoriality, meaning they were tried under their own laws.

Britain, France, Russia and the Netherlands signed similar terms within weeks. Undoing these treaties became the central goal of Japanese foreign policy for the next 50 years.

The bakuhan system could not respond

Japan under the Tokugawa was governed through the bakuhan system, a division between the shogunate in Edo and roughly 270 semi-autonomous domains, each run by a lord with his own retainers, finances and army. It kept the peace for two and a half centuries, and it made a unified national response to foreign pressure almost impossible.

When the shogunate signed the 1858 treaty without the imperial court's approval, it broke its own legitimacy. Domains that had been shut out of power since 1600, above all Satsuma and Choshu in the far southwest, now had a constitutional argument for opposing it.

Sonno joi and the turn to modernization

The rallying cry was sonno joi, revere the emperor and expel the barbarians. Young samurai assassinated foreign merchants and government officials under that slogan through the 1860s.

Then two things happened. British ships bombarded Kagoshima in 1863 in retaliation for a killing, and a combined Western fleet destroyed Choshu's shore batteries at Shimonoseki in 1864. Both domains learned the same lesson in the same year: expelling foreigners was impossible with the weapons they had. They kept the first half of the slogan, dropped the second, and started buying rifles.

Meiji Restoration timeline

• 1853: Perry arrives in Edo Bay with four warships

• 1858: The Harris Treaty opens five ports on terms Japan cannot revise

• 1866: Satsuma and Choshu form a secret alliance, brokered in part by Sakamoto Ryoma

• 1868: Imperial rule is declared in January, the Boshin War begins, Edo becomes Tokyo

• 1869: The last shogunal forces surrender in Hakodate. Domain lords return their registers to the emperor

• 1871: The domains are abolished and replaced with prefectures. The Iwakura Mission departs for the United States and Europe

• 1872: Compulsory elementary education is introduced, and the first railway opens between Tokyo and Yokohama

• 1873: Conscription replaces the samurai as the basis of the army. The land tax is reformed

• 1876: Samurai are banned from wearing swords and their stipends are converted into bonds

• 1877: The Satsuma Rebellion, the last samurai uprising, is crushed

• 1889: The Meiji Constitution is promulgated

• 1890: The first Imperial Diet convenes

• 1894 to 1895: Japan defeats China, gains Taiwan, and begins recovering treaty rights

• 1904 to 1905: Japan defeats Russia, the first modern victory of an Asian power over a European one

• 1911: Japan regains full tariff autonomy, ending the unequal treaties

• 1912: Emperor Meiji dies and the era ends

How did the Meiji Restoration change Japan?

The end of the samurai class

The government that samurai created abolished samurai. Domains became prefectures in 1871, hereditary stipends were converted to government bonds in 1876, and conscription in 1873 gave commoners the right to bear arms that had been a class monopoly.

Around 1.9 million people lost their legal status and much of their income within a decade. Some moved into the bureaucracy, the officer corps and business. Others rebelled, culminating in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, which was put down by a conscript army made up largely of farmers.

Industry built from the top down

Woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshitora depicts Emperor Meiji and his followers parading from Kyoto to Tokyo.

The slogan was fukoku kyohei, enrich the country and strengthen the military. The state built model factories, shipyards, mines and railways, then sold most of them cheaply to private operators in the 1880s when the budget could not sustain them.

That sell-off created the zaibatsu, family-held conglomerates that came to dominate the economy. Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Yasuda each ended up spanning banking, mining, shipping and manufacturing.

The first railway opened between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, 18 miles of it. By 1912 Japan had over 5,000 miles of track.

Woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshitora depicts Emperor Meiji and his followers parading from Kyoto to Tokyo.

Steam train, an 1875 print by Utagawa Hiroshige III.

Silk, textiles and the women who made them

Circa 1904, Japanese women feeding silkworms in a textile factory during the Meiji Era

Silk paid for the machines. By 1893 it was Japan's largest export, at 42 percent of all exports, and around 800,000 women were working in textile mills by 1913.

Artwork portraying working women during the Meiji Era

The conditions were harsh. Girls were recruited from farming villages on contracts that advanced money to their parents, housed in company dormitories and worked 12-hour shifts. Tuberculosis spread through the dormitories. The reform-era image of women's advancement and the reality of the mill floor were two different things, and both are part of the period.

Education, the constitution and the state

Compulsory elementary education arrived in 1872, and literacy climbed fast. The government hired foreign specialists on contract, the oyatoi gaikokujin, at extraordinary salaries to teach engineering, law, medicine and military science, then replaced them with Japanese graduates as quickly as it could.

The Iwakura Mission sent about half the senior leadership abroad for nearly two years from 1871, studying constitutions, factories and navies. What they brought back was selective. The 1889 constitution followed the Prussian model, giving the emperor sovereignty and the elected lower house limited powers. It was the first constitution in Asia, and it held until 1947.

Why was the Meiji Restoration important?

Japan is the only country outside Europe and its settler offshoots that industrialized in the 19th century without being colonized. That is the short answer to why the period gets studied everywhere, and why it still turns up as the worked example in theories of modernization.

The unequal treaties were fully revised by 1911. Victory over China in 1895 and Russia in 1905 made Japan a recognized power and the model that reformers across Asia pointed to. It also started an empire, taking Taiwan in 1895 and annexing Korea in 1910, and built the military institutions that carried the country into the 1930s. Both outcomes come from the same reforms.

Where to see the Meiji era in Japan today

Meiji Shrine, Tokyo

Meiji Shrine

Meiji Jingu enshrines Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken. It was completed in 1920, destroyed in the 1945 air raids and rebuilt in 1958. The forest around it, about 170 acres, was planted from scratch with 100,000 donated trees and is now self-sustaining woodland in the middle of Tokyo. Entry is free and the grounds open from sunrise to sunset.

Meiji-mura, Inuyama

Meiji-Mura

The best single site for the period. Meiji-mura is an open-air museum outside Nagoya in Aichi holding more than 60 relocated Meiji-era buildings, including the entrance hall of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, a Kyoto streetcar that still runs, and a working steam locomotive.

Adults pay ¥2,500, high school students ¥1,500, and elementary and junior high students ¥700. Hours shift by season, generally 9:30 to 17:00 in spring and fall with shorter hours in winter. Give it most of a day, since the site covers about a kilometer of hillside.

Sakamoto Ryoma Memorial Museum, Kochi

Sakamoto Ryōma Memorial Museum

Sakamoto Ryoma brokered the Satsuma-Choshu alliance that made the Restoration possible and was assassinated in Kyoto in December 1867, a month before it succeeded. He is the romantic figure of the period in Japanese popular memory. The museum above Katsurahama beach charges ¥500 for adults outside special exhibitions, with students free, and opens 9:00 to 17:00.

Kyoto Imperial Palace

Kyoto Imperial Palace

The buildings you walk past date from an 1855 reconstruction, and this is where the declaration of imperial rule was made in January 1868. The Kyoto Imperial Palace grounds are free and no longer require advance permission, though the palace closes on Mondays.

Silk Museum, Yokohama

Yokohama Silk Museum

Yokohama was the treaty port through which almost all of that silk left the country. The Silk Museum on the waterfront covers the whole chain from cocoon to kimono, with live silkworms in season. Admission is ¥500 for adults, ¥300 for high school students and ¥150 for elementary students, open 9:30 to 17:00 and closed Mondays.

Mitsubishi Minatomirai Industrial Museum, Yokohama

Mitsubishi Minatomirai Industrial Museum

Less history than hardware, this is the technology museum of the company that grew out of a Meiji-era shipping venture, with a Shinkai 6500 submersible and rocket engines on display. Adults ¥500, middle and high school students ¥300, elementary ¥200, and free for visitors 65 and over. It closes Tuesdays and Wednesdays and takes cash only.

Mitsui Memorial Museum, Tokyo

Mitsui Memorial Museum

Housed in the 1929 Mitsui Main Building in Nihonbashi, a granite-columned bank headquarters that survived the war. The collection is the Mitsui family's art, and the building itself is the point, since it is what zaibatsu money looked like at its peak. General admission is around ¥1,000 for adults and varies by exhibition, open 10:00 to 17:00 and closed Mondays.

Planning a Meiji-era trip

Tokyo and Yokohama cover the story in two days. Meiji Jingu and the Nihonbashi banking district in the capital, then the treaty port waterfront, the Silk Museum and the foreigners' cemetery in Yokohama, half an hour apart by train. A short Tokyo and Yokohama route covers that ground without adding extra travel days.

Add Meiji-mura if you have a day near Nagoya, and Kagoshima or Hagi if you want the domains where the whole thing started. Kyoto gives you the palace and the Kawaramachi backstreets where Sakamoto Ryoma was killed, both within a short walk of each other.

If you would rather have the logistics handled, our trip planners build routes around this kind of history.

Start at Meiji-mura if you only pick one. Standing inside a relocated Meiji schoolhouse next to a Frank Lloyd Wright lobby explains the period faster than any museum case, because you can see the country deciding what to keep and what to import, building by building.