Meiji period

The Charter Oath of April 1868 promised deliberative assemblies and the pursuit of knowledge throughout the world. The court moved to Edo, renamed Tokyo ('eastern capital'). In 1869 the daimyō returned their domain registers to the emperor, and in 1871 the domains were abolished and replaced by prefectures governed by officials sent from Tokyo – a peaceful revolution that ended the feudal system at a stroke. Between 1871 and 1873 the Iwakura Mission toured the United States and Europe to study Western institutions.

A split over whether to invade Korea in 1873 led several leaders to leave the government; the greatest of them, Saigō Takamori, led the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, the last major samurai uprising, which the new conscript army crushed. The Freedom and People's Rights Movement pressed for representative government, and in 1889 Emperor Meiji granted a constitution drafted under Itō Hirobumi on Prussian and other German models. It created a bicameral Imperial Diet, first convened in 1890, but vested sovereignty in the emperor and left the military answerable to the throne rather than to the cabinet.

Between 1869 and 1876 the hereditary status system was dismantled. Former samurai became shizoku, a title without privileges; their stipends were converted into government bonds in 1876, and the wearing of swords was banned the same year. Commoners gained freedom of occupation and residence and adopted surnames; the edict of 1871 abolishing the outcaste categories granted legal equality but did not end social discrimination. Universal conscription (1873) replaced the samurai with an army of commoners.

A national school system was established in 1872, and by the end of the period nearly all children attended primary school. The Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890 made loyalty to the emperor and filial piety the moral core of schooling. The Gregorian calendar was adopted from 1873, Western dress and hairstyles spread from officials and the military to urban society, and new newspapers, magazines and translations fed a public hungry for 'civilisation and enlightenment' (bunmei kaika), a phrase popularised by the educator Fukuzawa Yukichi.

Under the slogan fukoku kyōhei ('rich country, strong army') the government laid the foundations of an industrial economy. It introduced a national currency, the yen, in 1871, reformed the land tax in 1873 to provide a stable money revenue, opened the first railway between Shinbashi in Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, and set up model factories such as the Tomioka Silk Mill. Many state enterprises were later sold to private firms, laying the ground for the zaibatsu conglomerates such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo.

Silk and cotton textiles, produced largely by young women from rural families working long hours, became the leading exports, and heavy industry followed with shipyards, coal mines and the state-run Yawata Steel Works (1901). Rapid growth had high social costs: tenant farmers bore the land tax burden, labour conditions were harsh, and pollution from the Ashio copper mine provoked one of Japan's first environmental protest movements, led by the politician Tanaka Shōzō.

In 1868 the government ordered the separation of Shinto and Buddhism, ending a millennium of combined practice and triggering the destruction of many Buddhist temples and treasures. Shrines were ranked and organised around the imperial cult and the Ise shrines; this later came to be called State Shinto. Yasukuni Shrine was founded in 1869 in Tokyo to honour those who died for the imperial cause. The ban on Christianity was lifted in 1873 under Western pressure, and the constitution of 1889 granted freedom of religion within limits set by the state.

The new state defined and extended its borders. Ezo was renamed Hokkaido in 1869 and colonised by settlers, including farmer-soldiers (tondenhei), under a Development Commission; the Ainu lost their land and livelihoods and were subjected to assimilation policies, codified in the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899. The Ryukyu Kingdom was annexed in 1879 as Okinawa Prefecture. Treaties with Russia (1875) and the incorporation of the Bonin Islands fixed other frontiers.

Abroad, Japan imposed an unequal treaty on Korea in 1876. Rivalry with China over Korea led to the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), after which the Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan to Japan, which ruled it as a colony until 1945. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 and victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) – the first defeat of a European great power by an Asian state in modern times – made Japan a recognised great power. Korea became a protectorate in 1905 and was annexed in 1910, beginning thirty-five years of colonial rule marked by the suppression of resistance and assimilation policies. By 1911 Japan had also recovered full tariff autonomy, completing the revision of the unequal treaties.

Meiji culture combined enthusiastic borrowing with a search for national identity. Brick and stone buildings by foreign and Japanese architects, gas lamps and Western-style banquets symbolised modernity; the Rokumeikan hall in Tokyo (1883) hosted balls intended to show foreign diplomats that Japan was civilised. Writers developed a modern literary language close to speech; Mori Ōgai, Natsume Sōseki, Higuchi Ichiyō and the poet Masaoka Shiki, who renewed haiku and tanka, created modern Japanese literature.

In the arts, the Western-style painting (yōga) of Kuroda Seiki competed with a renewed Japanese-style painting (nihonga) championed by Okakura Kakuzō and Ernest Fenollosa. Abroad, Japanese crafts and ukiyo-e prints shown at world's fairs inspired the Japonisme movement in European art.

The Meiji period created the institutions of modern Japan – prefectures, national schools, a conscript army, a parliament, a modern legal code and an industrial base – and its leaders are still widely admired for preserving the country's independence. Emperor Meiji's death on 30 July 1912 was felt as the end of an era, symbolised by the ritual suicide of General Nogi Maresuke on the day of his funeral.

The period's legacy is also contested. The emperor-centred ideology, the military's independence from civilian control and the colonial expansion into Taiwan and Korea set a course that led to the wars of the twentieth century, and the treatment of the Ainu and Okinawans remains part of discussions about minority rights. Even the World Heritage inscription of the Meiji industrial sites in 2015 prompted debate, as some of them later used forced labour during the Second World War.