1The roles of the Meiji oligarchy and Emperor Mutsuhito

Who governed. A small group of samurai from the victorious domains and two court nobles ran Japan. From Satsuma: Ōkubo Toshimichi, the dominant figure until 1878, and Saigō Takamori. From Chōshū: Kido Takayoshi, Itō Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomo. From the court: Iwakura Tomomi and Sanjō Sanetomi. Men from Tosa and Hizen (Saga), among them Itagaki Taisuke and Ōkuma Shigenobu, held office too. Most were young: Itō was 27 in 1868. Their opponents called the government a Satchō clique (from Satsuma and Chōshū), and that domination lasted into the twentieth century.

How they kept power. They split and recombined. In 1873 Saigō and Itagaki left over Korea (M3); Kido left over the Taiwan expedition in 1874 and returned in 1875; Ōkubo was assassinated in 1878; Ōkuma was forced out in 1881. Each crisis left a smaller and more tightly organised group. In 1885 Itō created a cabinet with himself as the first prime minister, and from the 1890s the surviving leaders, the genrō (elder statesmen), chose prime ministers informally.

The emperor's role. Mutsuhito (reign name Meiji, "enlightened rule") was fourteen when he succeeded his father in 1867. The oligarchs made him the centre of the new state:

• He swore the Charter Oath in April 1868 and moved from Kyoto to Edo, renamed Tokyo, "eastern capital".
• He was shown to his people as no emperor had been for centuries: six great tours of the provinces between 1872 and 1885, a western-style uniform, and an official portrait sent to schools.
• Major policies were issued as his words: the Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors (1882), which made the army loyal to the emperor in person; the Constitution (1889); the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890).
• He occasionally intervened himself. In 1893, when the elected house and the government deadlocked over warship spending, he gave money from the palace's funds each year for six years and asked officials to contribute part of their salaries, which broke the deadlock.

How much did he do? Most historians see the oligarchs deciding and the emperor legitimising. Takashi Fujitani (Splendid Monarchy, 1996) shows how the tours, ceremonies and portraits were designed to make a nation of subjects who saw their emperor. Carol Gluck (Japan's Modern Myths, 1985) shows how the late-Meiji state built the ideology of emperor, family and nation, much of it new though presented as ancient. Donald Keene's biography (2002) gives the man more weight, but even he finds his personal influence hard to trace in the documents. For Paper 1, a print or rescript showing the emperor is evidence of the image the government wanted, not of what Mutsuhito himself thought.

2Remaking the state: the Charter Oath, the domains and the classes

The Charter Oath (6 April 1868). Five articles promised that assemblies would be widely convened and matters decided by public discussion; that all classes would unite to carry out the affairs of state; that common people, as well as officials and samurai, could pursue their callings; that the "evil customs" of the past would be broken off; and that knowledge would be sought throughout the world to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule. It was vague on purpose, to reassure the lords while the Boshin War was still being fought. Its last article became the government's programme; its first was quoted for twenty years by people demanding an elected assembly.

Ending the domains. In 1869 the lords of Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa and Hizen led the others in "returning" their domain registers to the emperor; the lords stayed on as governors. In August 1871, with an imperial guard of about 10,000 men from the three leading domains behind it, the government abolished the domains and replaced them with prefectures run by governors appointed from Tokyo. The lords were pensioned off and moved to Tokyo, and the state took over their debts. There was almost no resistance: many domains were bankrupt.

Ending the four classes. Between 1869 and 1871 the legal class system was abolished: commoners could take surnames, marry across classes and choose their work, and the old outcaste status was abolished on paper in 1871, though discrimination continued. Samurai lost their monopoly of arms when conscription began in 1873. Their stipends, which took a large share of the budget, were cut and in 1876 compulsorily converted into government bonds; the same year the wearing of swords in public was banned. Some former samurai prospered as officers, officials, teachers and businessmen; many became poor. Their resistance ended in 1877 (M3).

Learning from the West. In 1871 Iwakura led half the government on a mission to the United States and Europe (1871–1873). It failed to begin treaty revision but convinced its members that law, schools and industry had to come before any foreign adventure. An education law of 1872 aimed at schooling for every child; conscription, police, a postal service (1871), a national currency, the yen (1871), and a western calendar (1873) followed. The government hired foreign experts, the oyatoi, by the thousand, and replaced them with trained Japanese as fast as it could.

3Land reform, industrialisation and trade

The land tax reform (1873). The government needed a reliable income. It lifted the old ban on selling land (1872), issued land certificates to the people who held land, recognising them as owners, and in July 1873 replaced the domains' rice dues with a national land tax of 3% of the assessed value of the land, paid in money by the owner, whatever the harvest. The survey took until about 1881.

• For the state: a fixed, predictable cash income; the land tax provided most of the government's tax revenue through the 1870s and 1880s, and paid for the army, schools, railways and factories.
• For owners: clear property rights; the tax was set roughly to keep revenue at the old level, so many farmers felt no relief. Riots in 1876 forced a cut to 2.5% in 1877.
• For the poor: a fixed money tax meant that when crop prices fell, farmers had to sell more of their crop to pay it. In the deflation of the 1880s many mortgaged and lost their land, and tenancy rose, from under a third of farmland in the 1870s to about two-fifths by the 1890s. Tenants paid their rent in rice to landlords, who paid the tax in cash and prospered when prices rose.

The state builds industry (1870s). With no capital market and foreign firms ready to take over, the state built the first modern enterprises itself, many under a Ministry of Industry (1870):

• the Tokyo–Yokohama railway (1872), built with British engineers and loans;
• telegraph lines and a postal service;
• mines, shipyards and arsenals;
• model factories, above all the Tomioka silk mill (1872), with French machinery and instructors, which trained young women to run mills elsewhere.

Ōkubo's Home Ministry (1873) promoted agriculture and exhibitions. Most state enterprises lost money.

The Matsukata reforms (1881 onwards). The cost of crushing the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877 was met by printing money, and inflation followed. From 1881 the finance minister Matsukata Masayoshi cut spending, raised taxes and founded the Bank of Japan (1882), stabilising the currency by the mid-1880s. Under a law of 1880 the government sold most of its enterprises, usually cheaply, to private firms with good political connections. Mitsubishi, founded by Iwasaki Yatarō, took over the Nagasaki shipyard; Mitsui took the Miike coal mine and later Tomioka. These family conglomerates, the zaibatsu, became the core of Japanese big business. The price of deflation fell on the countryside (M3).

Private enterprise and textiles. Growth came from textiles. Raw silk was Japan's largest export, produced in thousands of small rural workshops and mills. Cotton spinning took off after the privately financed Osaka Spinning Company, organised by the banker Shibusawa Eiichi, began work in 1883 with steam-powered machinery and round-the-clock shifts. By the late 1890s Japan exported more cotton yarn than it imported. The workers were mostly young women from poor villages on long contracts.

Trade under the treaties. Japan could not protect its industries with tariffs, because the treaties fixed import duties at low levels (around 5% after 1866). It exported silk and tea and imported cotton cloth, then machinery and raw cotton. Escaping the treaties required showing the powers western-style law and government: that is one reason for the codes, the courts and the constitution. In July 1894 Britain signed a treaty ending extraterritoriality from 1899; full control of tariffs came only in 1911.

The historians. Thomas C. Smith (1955) argued that the state's early enterprises, though unprofitable, pioneered technology and trained people the private sector later used. Others stress that the decisive growth, in silk and cotton, came from private firms and small producers, and that the state's direct role has been exaggerated. Later writers on Japan's "developmental state" trace a pattern of close state–business cooperation back to these decades. Paper 1 rewards you for asking which view a source supports.

4The Constitution of 1889

The pressure for it. In January 1874 Itagaki and others who had left the government in 1873 petitioned for an elected assembly. Their Freedom and People's Rights Movement spread through the 1870s, drawing in former samurai, rural landlords and townsmen; local groups even wrote draft constitutions of their own. The oligarchs answered with promises and repression. In 1875 they promised gradual steps towards constitutional government, created an appointed senate and a supreme court, and passed strict press laws. Prefectural assemblies, elected by property-owners, followed in 1878.

The crisis of 1881. Ōkuma proposed a British-style parliament with a cabinet answerable to it, quickly. A scandal over the cheap sale of government property in Hokkaido inflamed opinion. In October 1881 the other oligarchs forced Ōkuma out and issued an imperial promise of a national assembly by 1890. That gave them the choice of model and timing. Political parties formed at once: Itagaki's Liberal Party (1881) and Ōkuma's Constitutional Progressive Party (1882).

Making it. Itō spent 1882–1883 in Europe, mostly studying the constitutions of Prussia and Austria with German jurists, and chose a model with a strong monarch whose ministers did not answer to parliament. He prepared the ground first: a new peerage (1884), the cabinet (1885), and a Privy Council (1888), which he chaired, to review the draft in secret. German advisers, among them Hermann Roesler, helped draft it. The constitution was promulgated on 11 February 1889 as the emperor's gift to his subjects.

What it said.

• The emperor was "sacred and inviolable", the holder of sovereignty, and supreme commander of the army and navy (Article 11); he declared war, made peace and concluded treaties.
• Ministers were responsible to the emperor, not to the Diet.
• The Imperial Diet had two houses: a House of Peers of nobles and appointees, and a House of Representatives of 300 members elected by men over 25 paying at least 15 yen a year in direct tax. That was about 450,000 voters, roughly 1% of the population.
• The Diet passed laws and the budget, but if it rejected the budget, the previous year's budget continued (Article 71).
• Subjects had rights, including freedom of speech, assembly and religion, but "within the limits of law".

Judging it. It was the first constitution of its kind in Asia, and the elected house had real power: from the first Diet of 1890, parties used their control of new spending to fight government after government, and in 1900 Itō himself founded a party to work with them. But sovereignty stayed with the emperor; the cabinet was not answerable to the elected house; the army and navy answered to the throne, not the cabinet, so the military could act beyond civilian control.

The balanced verdict: a constitution designed to protect the emperor's and the oligarchs' power, which nonetheless created an elected body they could not ignore. Name both halves in any answer.