Under the Tokugawa shogunate samurai were paid fixed rice stipends while merchants at the bottom of the social order ran a growing cash and credit economy, leaving many samurai in debt to rice brokers and drawn to National Learning, which looked past the shogun to the emperor. In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships entered Tokyo Bay, the shogunate asked the daimyo for advice, and unequal treaties granted foreign powers extraterritoriality. Leaders who knew of China’s defeat in the First Opium War chose not to fight, but shishi rallying to revere the emperor and expel the barbarians assassinated the chief minister Ii Naosuke outside Edo Castle.
Western bombardments of Choshu at Shimonoseki and of Kagoshima in Satsuma convinced the radicals to adopt Western arms instead. Sakamoto Ryoma brokered a secret alliance between the rival domains, with Satsuma buying British weapons for Choshu through traders such as Thomas Blake Glover. The last shogun resigned in late 1867, and in January 1868 Satsuma and Choshu seized the palace for the teenage Emperor Meiji. After the Boshin War ended with the fall of the Ezo Republic, domains became prefectures, stipends became bonds, swords were banned in public, and a conscript army crushed Saigo Takamori’s Satsuma Rebellion in 1877.
- Samurai took advance loans against next year’s rice stipends at ruinous interest.
- At Toba-Fushimi imperial troops with Gatling guns and Western artillery routed a larger shogunate army.
- An 1871 edict pressed men to cut off their chonmage topknots, and officials wore Western suits.
- The new government dismantled castles and suppressed Buddhism to build state Shinto around the emperor.
- A 30 percent land tax on peasants, against about 2 percent in Qing China, financed industrialization.
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