1Peasant unrest in the 1870s

What the new state asked of villages. In a few years the government asked farmers for a cash tax instead of rice, their sons for three years in the army, school fees for a school their children had to attend, and acceptance of new rules on hairstyles, calendars and the treatment of outcastes. It also removed the domain lords with whom villages had long bargained.

The risings. Hundreds of protests followed in the 1870s, many of them larger than in late Tokugawa times. The conscription decree of 1872 called service a "blood tax", a phrase meant figuratively that rumours took literally, and in 1873 "blood tax" riots in western Japan attacked government offices, schools and the houses of village officials. Rioters also attacked outcaste communities, angry at their legal emancipation in 1871: resistance to the new state was not always on the side of equality. In late 1876, as the new land tax took effect, risings in Ibaraki and in Mie (Ise) involved tens of thousands. In January 1877, with samurai unrest growing, the government cut the land tax from 3% to 2.5%. A popular verse said that bamboo spears, the peasants' weapon, had poked the tax down to two and a half per cent.

Why it mattered. The protests showed that the oligarchs could be forced into concessions, and also that they would use troops. They were local and leaderless, and the new conscript army, made of peasants' sons, did not mutiny.

2The Matsukata deflation and Chichibu (1881–1884)

The squeeze. To end inflation, Matsukata cut spending and withdrew paper money from 1881 (M2). Rice prices roughly halved between 1881 and 1884, and silk prices fell too, but the land tax was fixed in money. Farmers borrowed to pay it, and moneylenders and banks foreclosed on their land. Tenancy and rural poverty grew.

From economics to politics. At the same time the Freedom and People's Rights Movement (M2) had spread into the countryside, and its local branches of the Liberal Party organised farmers and debtors. A series of violent incidents followed: in Fukushima (1882), where a governor's forced road-building met resistance from local Liberal Party members, at Gunma and Kabasan (1884), and above all at Chichibu.

The Chichibu Incident (November 1884). In the silk-raising district of Chichibu, north-west of Tokyo, indebted farmers formed a Poor People's Party (Konmintō). Its demands were a delay on debt repayments, lower taxes and the suspension of school fees. In early November 1884 several thousand rose, burned moneylenders' records and attacked government offices, declaring their own short-lived authority. Police, military police and army units crushed them within about ten days; leaders were executed. It was the largest rising of the decade.

The historians. Was Chichibu a debtors' riot or a democratic revolt? Roger Bowen (Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan, 1980) argued that the rebels' language of rights and their links to the Liberal Party show genuine popular democratic ideas. Others see local economic despair borrowing a political vocabulary, and note that the Liberal Party's national leaders dissolved the party in October 1884, partly to distance themselves from rural violence. Irokawa Daikichi and the Japanese "people's history" school used village records to recover the farmers' own voices. For the 12-mark question this is a model perspectives debate: what the sources say depends heavily on who wrote them, rebels or police.

3Samurai discontent and the Satsuma Rebellion (1877)

Grievances. About 6% of Japanese belonged to samurai families. In ten years they lost their domains, their status, their monopoly of arms (conscription, 1873), their stipends (converted to bonds, 1876) and the right to wear swords (1876). Some found new careers; many could not live on their bonds.

The Korea debate (1873). While the Iwakura Mission was abroad, the caretaker government led by Saigō Takamori decided to send Saigō himself as envoy to Korea, which had refused to recognise the new Japanese government. Saigō expected to be killed, giving Japan a reason for war, which would give the samurai a purpose. When the mission returned, Ōkubo, Iwakura and Kido blocked the plan in October 1873, arguing that Japan must reform at home first. Saigō, Itagaki, Etō Shinpei and others resigned. The split produced both the People's Rights Movement (Itagaki) and the samurai rebellions.

The risings. In 1874 Etō Shinpei led a revolt at Saga; it was crushed and he was executed. In October 1876, after the sword ban, risings broke out at Kumamoto (the Shinpūren, who attacked with swords and spears), Akizuki and Hagi. All were put down quickly.

The Satsuma Rebellion (1877). In Kagoshima, Saigō had set up private schools for thousands of former samurai, and the prefecture ran almost independently of Tokyo. In early 1877 the government tried to move weapons out of the Kagoshima arsenal, students seized them, and reports of a plot to assassinate Saigō inflamed the province. In February Saigō marched north with an army of former samurai. It besieged Kumamoto Castle but could not take it, and lost the hard-fought battle of Tabaruzaka in March. Government forces, conscripts with police units of ex-samurai, pushed the rebels back to Kagoshima, and on 24 September 1877 Saigō died at Shiroyama with his last followers.

Consequences.

• The conscript army of commoners had beaten the warrior class: armed samurai resistance was over.
• The war cost so much that the government printed money, causing the inflation that Matsukata's deflation later cured.
• In May 1878 Ōkubo was assassinated by former samurai.
• Opposition moved into politics: the People's Rights Movement grew fastest after 1877.
• Saigō became a legend. Prints showed him as a hero, people claimed to see him in the planet Mars that autumn, and in 1889 he was pardoned. Mark Ravina (The Last Samurai, 2004) shows how a man of complex loyalties became a symbol of samurai virtue, and how the state later used the symbol for its own ends.

4Foreign relations and imperialism, 1868–1894

Treaty revision. Ending the unequal treaties was the government's first foreign aim. The Iwakura Mission (1871–1873) could not even open talks. In the 1880s foreign minister Inoue Kaoru offered the powers foreign judges in Japanese courts in exchange for an end to extraterritoriality, and promoted western dress and dances at the Rokumeikan, a hall for entertaining foreigners. Opinion at home rejected both as humiliating. In 1886 the British captain of the Normanton, which sank with all its Japanese passengers lost while the European crew escaped, was first acquitted by a British consular court and then given only a short sentence, which inflamed opinion against extraterritoriality. Ōkuma's attempt failed in 1889 after a nationalist threw a bomb at him. Success came only when Britain signed in July 1894.

Borders and colonisation.

• Hokkaido. A colonisation office (1869–1882) settled the island with Japanese farmers and soldier-settlers, and the indigenous Ainu lost their land and were pressed to assimilate.
• Sakhalin and the Kurils. The Treaty of St Petersburg (1875) gave Sakhalin to Russia and all the Kuril Islands to Japan.
• The Ryukyu Islands. The kingdom paid tribute to both China and Satsuma. In 1872 Japan made it a domain, and in 1879 abolished it and annexed it as Okinawa Prefecture, removing its king to Tokyo.
• Taiwan (1874). After Taiwanese islanders killed shipwrecked Ryukyuan sailors in 1871, Japan sent about 3,600 troops to Taiwan in 1874. China paid compensation, which Japan took as recognition that the Ryukyuans were its subjects.

Korea. Korea was a tributary of the Qing and kept out western and Japanese contact. In 1875 a Japanese warship provoked a clash near Ganghwa Island; in February 1876 Japan imposed the Treaty of Ganghwa. It opened three ports, gave Japanese extraterritoriality, and declared Korea an independent state, which denied China's claim to overlordship. Japan had imposed on Korea the kind of treaty it was trying to escape itself. Then:

• 1882. Korean soldiers mutinied (the Imo incident) and attacked the Japanese legation; China sent troops and tightened its control.
• 1884. Pro-Japanese Korean reformers attempted a coup (the Gapsin coup); Chinese troops under Yuan Shikai crushed it.
• 1885. In the Convention of Tianjin, Itō and Li Hongzhang agreed that both would withdraw troops and notify each other before sending any back.
• 1890. In the first Diet, Prime Minister Yamagata argued that Japan must defend not only its "line of sovereignty" (its borders) but a "line of interest" around it, meaning Korea.
• 1894. When the Tonghak rising broke out in Korea, China sent troops at the Korean king's request. Japan sent a larger force, seized the Korean palace, and declared war on China on 1 August 1894.

Why imperialism? The historians.

Contemporaries argued it too. An editorial of 1885 in Fukuzawa Yukichi's newspaper, known as "Leaving Asia", urged Japan to treat its neighbours as the West did rather than wait for them to modernise. The French artist Georges Bigot, working in Yokohama, drew a cartoon in 1887 of Japan and China fishing for a fish labelled Korea while Russia watched from a bridge: a foreign observer's view that the rivalry was a scramble between powers.