🚂Article 5 │ Meiji Japan’s Westernization and the Building of a Modern StateIn the not-quite-thirty years between the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894, Japan rebuilt itself as a Western-style modern nation-state. The apparatuses to which karate would later be connected — school physical education, the conscription system, budō, and the university — were all designed in this period. This article surveys what that rapid Westernization actually involved, and the logic behind it, in a form accessible to readers outside Japan.
🧭Orientation for readers new to Japanese history
- The Meiji Restoration (1868) ended more than two and a half centuries of rule by the Tokugawa shogunate and returned formal authority to the emperor. The new government set out to remake Japan as a Western-style nation-state. The reign that followed is the Meiji period (1868–1912), and Japanese dates are often given by this era name; here they are always paired with the Western year.
- “Unequal treaties.” The treaties Japan was forced to sign in the 1850s denied it two things every sovereign state expects: the right to try foreigners in its own courts (they enjoyed extraterritoriality) and the right to set its own customs duties (tariff autonomy). Undoing them was the central foreign-policy goal of the entire Meiji period.
- “Hired foreigners” (oyatoi gaikokujin, 御雇外国人). Foreign specialists — engineers, jurists, officers, doctors, teachers — hired at high salaries to help build modern institutions, and generally dismissed once Japanese could take over. They are the human face of Meiji “institution-importing.” </aside>
The Eve of the Restoration — The Unequal Treaties and the Anxiety to Be “Civilized”
In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry, commanding the United States East India Squadron, arrived off Uraga and pressed the Tokugawa shogunate to open the country. The Japan–US Treaty of Peace and Amity followed in 1854, and the Japan–US Treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1858; similar treaties were then concluded with the Netherlands, Russia, Britain, and France. These were unequal treaties that granted foreigners consular jurisdiction (extraterritoriality) and stripped Japan of tariff autonomy.
The shogunate collapsed, and in 1868 forces centered on the Satsuma and Chōshū domains proclaimed the “Restoration of Imperial Rule” (ōsei fukko), establishing the new Meiji government. For the leaders of the Restoration, the overriding tasks were that Japan must not be colonized and that the unequal treaties must be revised. The danger was concrete. Qing China had been defeated by Britain in the Opium War (1840–42) and by Britain and France in the Arrow War (the Second Opium War, 1856–60), and ports such as Shanghai and Tianjin had been forced open as treaty ports and foreign concessions. India had passed under direct British rule, and Vietnam was under mounting pressure of French colonization. That Japan might suffer the same fate was an entirely real possibility.
“Rich Country, Strong Army”; “Encourage Industry”; “Civilization and Enlightenment”
Against this crisis the Meiji government raised three slogans:
- Fukoku kyōhei (富国強兵, “rich country, strong army”): build up economic and military power.
- Shokusan kōgyō (殖産興業, “encourage industry, promote enterprise”): foster modern industry.
- Bunmei kaika (文明開化, “civilization and enlightenment”): adopt Western civilization and modernize society and culture.
The “civilization” (bunmei) invoked here was the Western standard of the day, accepted more or less as it stood. Fukuzawa Yukichi’s An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 1875) divided the world into the “civilized,” the “semi-developed,” and the “savage,” and argued that Japan must advance from semi-developed to civilized. From a present-day vantage this is Western-centrism itself; but it was the reality as the Japanese intellectuals of the time perceived it.
📝For readers today, it is worth naming the discomfort directly: this three-rung ladder of “savage → semi-developed → civilized” was a hierarchy borrowed from nineteenth-century European thought, and it implicitly measured every society against Western Europe. Meiji reformers did not so much question the ladder as resolve to climb it. Much of what follows — the eager importing of foreign institutions, and also the later assimilation of peripheral peoples — flows from accepting that hierarchy as the rule of the game.
Importing Institutions — The Age of the “Hired Foreigners”
The Meiji government invited specialists from the Western powers in every field and used them to build its institutions. These experts were the oyatoi gaikokujin (“hired foreigners”).
- Law: France first (the draft civil code by Gustave Boissonade), later Germany (civil and commercial codes, and the constitution).
- Army: French-style at first, then a thorough shift to the Prussian (German) model from the mid-1880s.
- Navy: British-style.
- Medicine: German-style (Erwin Bälz, Leopold Müller, Theodor Hoffmann, and others).
- Railways: British-style.
- Postal service: British-style (Maejima Hisoka took it as his model).
- Education: an eclectic French/American blend at first (the Gakusei school ordinance, 1872), later a German/Prussian, state-led system.
- Universities: the German research-university model.
This posture of selecting the best from each country is characteristic of Meiji Japan. Rather than copy a single nation wholesale, it imported, field by field, the institutions of whichever country seemed best suited. What matters for the history of karate is that the army and education both converged on the German model. Prussian-army-style mass drill, and German-style centralized national education, would later furnish the foundation for folding “budō” into school physical education and military training.
📝Why “Prussia” and “Germany” are used almost interchangeably here. Until 1871, “Germany” was not a single country but a patchwork of states, of which the Kingdom of Prussia was the most powerful. Prussia unified them into the German Empire in 1871. Meiji Japan looked above all to the Prussian/German model of a strong, centralized, monarch-led state — in its army, its constitution, and its schools — which is why the two names appear side by side in this period.
The Abolition of the Domains and Centralization
In 1871 (Meiji 4), the abolition of the domains (haihan chiken, 廃藩置県) dissolved every domain in the country and reorganized them into centrally governed prefectures. The former warriors were reclassified as shizoku (the former-samurai class); hereditary samurai status as a ruling order was dismantled, and equality of the four estates (shimin byōdō) was advanced as a matter of institution. In the same year the Sanpatsu-dattō-rei (散髪脱刀令, the “hair-cutting and sword-removal decree”) was issued — a permissive proclamation allowing men to cut off the topknot and to go without a sword. The wearing of swords was in principle prohibited only later, by the Haitōrei (廃刀令, the “sword-abolition decree”) of 1876 (Meiji 9).
This was an enormous social transformation. The samurai of the Tokugawa era had been the ruling class, and martial arts such as swordsmanship, jūjutsu, and archery had been their professional accomplishment. With the abolition of samurai status, these arts lost their occupational footing. Many swordsmanship schools closed, and the martial arts of the 1870s in fact entered a period of decline.
📝Two decrees that are often confused. The 1871 Sanpatsu-dattō-rei merely permitted men to abandon the topknot and the sword; it forced no one. It was only the 1876 Haitōrei that actually banned the public wearing of swords (with exceptions for the military, police, and certain officials in uniform). The five-year gap matters: the disarming of the samurai was gradual, not a single dramatic stroke.
The School System and National Education
In 1872 (Meiji 5), the Gakusei (学制, the school-system ordinance) was promulgated, and elementary schools were established throughout the country. It took the centralized French school system as its administrative model while also drawing in liberal American content — an eclectic mixture.
The Education Ordinance of 1879 (Meiji 12) introduced American-style local control; the Revised Education Ordinance of 1880 pulled back toward central authority; and in 1886 (Meiji 19) the School Ordinances (the Elementary School, Middle School, Imperial University, and Normal School Ordinances) marked a decisive turn to German-style, state-led education. The model adopted by Mori Arinori, the first Minister of Education, was Prussia.
In elementary schools, alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic, subjects such as shūshin (修身, moral training), shōka (唱歌, singing), and taisō (体操, gymnastics) were gradually established. Physical education centered at first on ordinary gymnastics (futsū taisō — Western-style light and apparatus exercises), but military-style drill (heishiki taisō) was later added. The ground on which karate would eventually be built into school physical education was levelled in this period.
The Constitution of the Empire of Japan and Constitutional Government
In 1889 (Meiji 22), the Constitution of the Empire of Japan (the Meiji Constitution) was promulgated. Modeled closely on the Prussian Constitution (1850), it was a constitutional monarchy founded on the sovereignty of the emperor, while providing for a parliament (the Imperial Diet) and a cabinet of ministers.
The following year, 1890, the Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku chokugo, 教育勅語) was issued. Proclaiming virtues such as loyalty and filial piety, benevolence, learning, and observance of the law, it defined a national morality in the name of the emperor. The Rescript stood at the center of school ritual until the defeat of 1945, and was deeply bound up with budō education.
The Creation of “the Japanese”
For the Meiji state, the greatest task of all was to manufacture “Japanese people.” Until the Tokugawa era, people lived as “someone of such-and-such domain,” or as “peasant,” “samurai,” or “townsman”; a consciousness of being a “Japanese national” was faint. The Meiji government changed this through a set of apparatuses:
- The household register (koseki, 1872).
- The Conscription Ordinance (chōheirei, 1873), which folded all adult men into the army.
- The school system (Gakusei, 1872), which gathered children into classrooms.
- A standard language (developed in the later Meiji period), which suppressed dialects in favor of a common tongue.
- State Shintō, which placed shrines under state management and made them a religious apparatus centered on the emperor.
All of these were devices for creating an “imagined community” of “the Japanese” that transcended domain, region, and status. The people of Okinawa Prefecture, too, became a population to be folded into this new “Japanese.”
📝“Imagined community” is a term from the political scientist Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1983). His point is that a “nation” is not a natural, age-old fact but something constructed — through shared schooling, a common language, newspapers, conscription, and official ritual, ordinary people come to feel kinship with millions of strangers they will never meet. The Meiji apparatuses listed above are a textbook case of exactly this nation-building.
Cultural Westernization and Its Backlash
From the Civilization and Enlightenment of the 1870s to the Rokumeikan era of the mid-1880s, a fashion for extreme imitation of the West spread. (The Rokumeikan era refers in particular to the years from the building’s opening in 1883 to around the resignation of Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru in 1887.) Western dress, ballroom dancing, the knife and fork, and brick architecture spread through the upper classes. At the same time, from the late 1880s, a reaction set in: cultural nationalism (kokusui shugi; Miyake Setsurei, Shiga Shigetaka) and Japanism (Nihon shugi) rose to prominence.
Within this cycle of “Westernization and backlash,” the martial arts began to acquire a new meaning. No longer mere relics of a discarded past, they were re-evaluated as Japan’s own spiritual culture and, in modern dress, reborn as “budō.” That is the theme of the next article: Kanō Jigorō and the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai.
📝The Rokumeikan (鹿鳴館) was a lavish Western-style hall in Tokyo, opened in 1883, where the government hosted balls and banquets for foreign diplomats. The aim was transparently political: to perform Japan’s “civilization” and so soften foreign resistance to revising the unequal treaties. When that strategy failed and Inoue Kaoru resigned in 1887, the brief, glittering “Rokumeikan era” came to symbolize both the height of Westernizing fashion and its limits.
Foreshadowing Militarization
Meiji Japan’s Westernization and nation-building were, at the same time, a prelude to militarization:
- universal military service through the conscription system;
- military drill and moral training within school education;
- State Shintō with the emperor at its apex;
- Prussian-army-style mass drill.
In peacetime these were comparatively mild instruments; in wartime they became the machinery of total mobilization. Through the chain of wars — the First Sino-Japanese War (1894), the Russo-Japanese War (1904), the Manchurian Incident (1931), and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937) — this machinery would run at full power. That karate could be transplanted to the mainland in the 1920s and spread to university clubs, the armed forces, and the colonies was possible precisely because this apparatus was already in motion.
A Note for Western Readers
Meiji Japan’s Westernization is often told as “the model of a successful non-Western modernization.” Japan did, in fact, achieve revision of the unequal treaties (1894–1911) and take its place among the great powers.
But that same process was accompanied by assimilation and discrimination directed at the peoples of the periphery — the Ainu, the Ryukyuans, and later the Taiwanese and Koreans. The apparatus that manufactured “the Japanese” was simultaneously an apparatus that marked off and ranked “those who are not Japanese.” When it is said that karate “was transmitted from Okinawa to the mainland,” behind those words lie the assimilation policy that sought to fold the people of Okinawa Prefecture into “the Japanese,” and the complicated feelings on the Okinawan side in response (see Article 11).
Notes on Terminology
- Meiji Restoration (Meiji ishin, 明治維新). The 1868 transfer of power from the Tokugawa shogunate to a new government acting in the emperor’s name, and the starting point of Japan’s modern state-building.
- Unequal treaties. The 1850s treaties granting foreigners extraterritoriality and depriving Japan of tariff autonomy; their revision (1894–1911) was a defining national goal.
- Fukoku kyōhei / Shokusan kōgyō / Bunmei kaika. The three guiding slogans of the early Meiji state: “rich country, strong army”; “encourage industry”; and “civilization and enlightenment.”
- Oyatoi gaikokujin (御雇外国人). Foreign specialists hired to transfer Western technology and institutions, then released once Japanese could replace them.
- Haihan chiken (廃藩置県). The 1871 abolition of the domains and their replacement by centrally administered prefectures — the cornerstone of centralization.
- Sanpatsu-dattō-rei (1871) vs. Haitōrei (1876). The former permitted men to drop the topknot and sword; the latter banned the public wearing of swords. They are distinct measures five years apart.
- Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku chokugo, 1890). The document defining state morality in the emperor’s name; central to school ceremony until 1945.
- State Shintō (kokka shintō). The Meiji-to-wartime arrangement placing shrines under state authority and centering them on the emperor.
- Rokumeikan (鹿鳴館). The Western-style social hall (opened 1883) emblematic of upper-class Westernization and of treaty-revision diplomacy.
Coming Next
Article 6 takes up Kanō Jigorō’s creation of judo, the modernization of kendo, and the founding of the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai (1895). The very concept of “budō” is an invention of modern Japan.
Bibliography
- Mitani Hiroshi, Meiji ishin o kangaeru [Rethinking the Meiji Restoration], Iwanami Gendai Bunko, 2012.
- Makihara Norio, Bunmeikoku o mezashite [Aspiring to Be a Civilized Nation] (Complete History of Japan, vol. 13), Shōgakukan, 2008.
- Nakamura Masanori, Kingendai Nihon no rekishi [A History of Modern and Contemporary Japan], Iwanami Shoten, 2005.
- Toriumi Yasushi, Nihon kindaishi kōgi [Lectures on Modern Japanese History], University of Tokyo Press, 1988.
- Fukuzawa Yukichi, Bunmeiron no gairyaku [An Outline of a Theory of Civilization], 1875 (Iwanami Bunko ed.).
- Jansen, Marius B. The Making of Modern Japan. Harvard University Press, 2000.
- Gluck, Carol. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton University Press, 1985.