1The Tokugawa order and how it decayed

The system. After victory at Sekigahara (1600), Tokugawa Ieyasu became shogun in 1603. His family held about a quarter of Japan's land directly and controlled the rest through some 260 domains. The fudai lords, Tokugawa allies, ran the government; the tozama ("outer") lords, the defeated of 1600, were excluded from it. Alternate attendance (sankin kōtai) made every lord spend every other year in Edo and leave his family there as hostages, which kept the lords loyal and drained their treasuries. Society was fixed in law into samurai, peasants, artisans and merchants, and from the 1630s contact with the outside world was limited to Dutch and Chinese traders at Nagasaki, a policy later called sakoku, "closed country".

A rice system in a money economy. Two centuries of peace brought roads, cities and commerce. Edo had about a million people. Taxes were still assessed in rice, and samurai were paid in rice stipends, but they had to live in towns and buy with money. When rice was cheap and goods dear, the samurai lost out. Domains "borrowed" part of their retainers' stipends and fell into debt to Osaka merchants; many lower samurai lived poorly, while merchants, officially the bottom class, grew rich. That gap between legal rank and real wealth bred resentment among exactly the men who later made the Restoration.

The countryside. Population stopped growing after about 1720 at roughly 30 million. Peasant protests (ikki) became more frequent through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Tenpō famine (1833–1837) killed many thousands, and in 1837 Ōshio Heihachirō, a former shogunal official, led a rising in Osaka itself, the shogun's commercial capital. The Tenpō Reforms (1841–1843) tried to cut spending and push people back to the land; they failed and their author was dismissed.

Who reformed better. While the shogunate's reforms failed, some outer domains succeeded. Satsuma repaid its debts on terms that amounted to a near-default and profited from a sugar monopoly and trade through the Ryukyu Islands; Chōshū reorganised its finances in the 1840s. Both came to the 1850s with money, large samurai bands, and a 250-year-old memory of defeat by the Tokugawa.

Decline is not the same as collapse. The Tokugawa had survived famine, debt and riots before; what changed in the 1850s was that a foreign threat attacked the regime's one claim that could not be argued away, its ability to defend Japan.

2Stagnation, new ideas and the demand for modernisation

Rangaku, "Dutch learning". Through Nagasaki, Japanese scholars studied western medicine, astronomy and gunnery from Dutch books. In 1774 Sugita Genpaku and colleagues published a translation of a Dutch anatomy text after seeing that its drawings matched a dissection better than Chinese medical books did. Rangaku taught a minority that the West was technically ahead, and supplied the translators, doctors and gunnery experts of the 1850s and 1860s.

Kokugaku, "national learning". Scholars such as Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) studied Japan's oldest texts to recover a Japanese way before Chinese influence. They taught that Japan was uniquely ruled by a line of emperors descended from the sun goddess. They did not attack the shogun, but they made the emperor the centre of what Japan was.

The Mito school. In the domain of Mito, itself a branch of the Tokugawa family, Aizawa Seishisai wrote the New Theses (1825), warning of western designs on Japan and calling for national unity around the emperor. The slogan sonnō jōi, "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians", came from this school. It was meant to strengthen the shogunate. After 1858 it was turned against it.

The demand for rapid modernisation. By the 1850s a group of thinkers argued that Japan must learn western technology fast to survive. Sakuma Shōzan summed it up as "Eastern ethics, Western science". His pupil Yoshida Shōin of Chōshū tried to stow away on Perry's ship in 1854, ran a small school whose students included Takasugi Shinsaku, Itō Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomo, and was executed in 1859. Fukuzawa Yukichi travelled with the shogun's missions to the United States (1860) and Europe (1862), and his Conditions in the West (1866) was a best-seller.

The shogunate modernised too. It opened a naval training school with Dutch instructors at Nagasaki (1855), an institute for western books (1856), and with French help a shipyard at Yokosuka (from 1865) and a French military mission (1867). The last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, began serious reforms in 1867. This matters for the argument: the regime did not fall because it refused to change. It fell because its rivals changed faster and claimed the emperor.

3The influence of the United States

Why America came. The United States wanted coaling stations for steamships crossing to China, safe treatment for shipwrecked whalers, and trade. In July 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry brought four warships, two of them steam frigates, into the bay below Edo, delivered a letter from President Millard Fillmore asking for friendship, coal, provisions and trade, and said he would return for an answer.

The shogunate's choice. The chief councillor, Abe Masahiro, did something no shogunate had done: he circulated the letter to the daimyō and asked their advice. Most answers were hostile to opening the country, and few were practical. Asking at all admitted weakness, and invited lords who had been excluded from government for 250 years to have a say in it.

The Treaty of Kanagawa (31 March 1854). Perry returned in February 1854 with a larger squadron. The treaty opened Shimoda and Hakodate to American ships for supplies, promised good treatment for shipwrecked sailors, allowed a US consul at Shimoda and gave the United States any privilege later granted to another country (the most-favoured-nation clause). It was not yet a trade treaty.

The Harris Treaty (29 July 1858). The consul, Townsend Harris, used the news of Britain's and France's war against China to argue that Japan should sign a fair treaty with America before warships forced a worse one. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce opened more ports to trade, let foreigners live in Edo and Osaka, fixed import duties by treaty, and gave extraterritoriality: Americans who broke the law were tried by their own consuls. Within weeks similar treaties were signed with the Netherlands, Russia, Britain and France (the Ansei treaties). These were the unequal treaties: Japan could not change its tariffs or try foreigners without the powers' consent.

The political cost. The emperor, Kōmei, refused to approve the treaty. The shogun's chief minister, Ii Naosuke, signed it anyway, settled a succession dispute against the reformers' candidate, and purged his critics (the Ansei Purge, 1858–1859). In March 1860 samurai, most from Mito, killed him outside the Sakurada Gate of Edo Castle. A shogunate that could not protect its own chief minister in front of its own castle had lost its aura.

4The influence of Britain, France and the other European powers

Trade and inflation. Trade began at Yokohama in 1859. Silk and tea exports boomed, which raised prices at home. Japan valued gold low against silver compared with world markets, so foreign traders exchanged silver for Japanese gold coins and shipped the gold out; the shogunate's answer was to issue smaller coins, which fed inflation. Prices of rice and other goods rose sharply through the 1860s, hurting samurai on fixed stipends and townspeople, and anger at "the barbarians" spread.

Terror and reprisal. Radical samurai (shishi, "men of high purpose") murdered foreigners and officials. In 1862 Satsuma retainers killed the British merchant Charles Richardson at Namamugi; when Satsuma refused to hand over the killers, a British squadron bombarded its capital, Kagoshima, in August 1863. Chōshū obeyed the court's call to expel the foreigners by firing on western ships in the Shimonoseki strait in June 1863; in September 1864 a fleet of British, French, Dutch and American ships destroyed its forts.

From "expel" to "learn". Both domains drew the same lesson: the West could not be expelled with swords, so Japan must get western weapons first. Satsuma made peace with Britain and bought ships and rifles. In Chōshū, Takasugi Shinsaku had formed the Kiheitai (1863), rifle units that mixed samurai and commoners; in 1865 the radicals took over the domain. Five Chōshū students, including Itō Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru, had already gone secretly to London in 1863, and Satsuma sent its own students in 1865.

Rival patrons. The French minister Léon Roches backed the shogunate with loans, advisers and a military mission. The British minister Harry Parkes and his interpreter Ernest Satow cultivated Satsuma and Chōshū; Satow's anonymous newspaper articles of 1866, arguing that the treaties should be made with the emperor and the lords rather than the shogun alone, circulated in Japanese translation. Arms dealers, among them the Scot Thomas Glover in Nagasaki, sold to whoever paid. No power fought the war for either side, but the West shaped who was armed and who looked legitimate.

5The fall, 1864–1868, and the historians

The alliance. In 1864 the shogunate sent an expedition that forced Chōshū's submission, but the radicals then seized control of the domain. Early in 1866, with Sakamoto Ryōma of Tosa as go-between, Satsuma and Chōshū made a secret alliance. That summer the shogun's second expedition against Chōshū was beaten by its rifle units; the shogun Iemochi died, and the campaign was called off. A government that could not discipline one domain could not rule Japan.

The end. In January 1867 Emperor Kōmei died and was succeeded by his fourteen-year-old son Mutsuhito. In November 1867, on Tosa's advice, Yoshinobu returned his governing powers to the emperor, hoping to lead a council of lords in the new order. Satsuma and Chōshū would not allow it. On 3 January 1868 their troops took control of the palace in Kyoto, and the court proclaimed the restoration of imperial rule and stripped Yoshinobu of his lands. At Toba–Fushimi (late January 1868) the outnumbered Satsuma and Chōshū forces, flying the imperial banner, beat the shogun's army. Edo surrendered without a fight in May 1868; the northern domains fought on until autumn, and the last shogunate holdouts surrendered at Hakodate in June 1869. This Boshin War completed the transfer of power.

The historians. Paper 1's third question asks you to examine perspectives, and the causes of the Restoration are one of the great debates in Japanese history.

In Japan the Marxist historians of the 1930s split in two: one school (Kōza-ha) saw an absolutist state that kept feudal remnants, the other (Rōnō-ha) a bourgeois revolution. That debate shaped how the Restoration was taught in Japan for decades, and it is a useful example of how a historian's own time shapes their view, which is exactly what the 12-mark question rewards.

The judgement most examiners reward: the foreign threat did not create the Tokugawa's weaknesses, it made them fatal. Weigh the trigger (Perry, the treaties, the bombardments) against the conditions (debt, the outer domains, emperor-centred ideas), and say which turned which.