The Coup, the Imported Empire, the Twin Ghosts —and From Tokugawa Realism to the Postwar Constitution

Introduction — One Point of Arrival

In the first essay of this series, “When Was ‘Japanese Tradition’ Invented?”, I demonstrated that most of what is now called “ancient Japanese tradition” is in fact a modern invention — imported from the West during the Meiji period and dressed up as “tradition.”

In the second essay, “Whom Were They Really Fighting?”, I showed that the women activists who fought in modern Japan were not battling some longstanding Confucian patriarchy native to Japan. They were fighting brand-new patriarchal-Christian modern norms that the Meiji government had just imported from the West. They were running in parallel with the women’s movements of the world.

In this third essay, I want to descend one level deeper.

The very discourse of “Meiji Restoration” and “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika) is itself a piece of carefully designed political propaganda. To answer this directly, I will dissect, as a question of systemic structure, the origin of the Meiji state (a coup), its design philosophy (a copy of the operating system of Western imperialism), the two ghosts that survived it into the postwar period (the right-wing return to “tradition” and the left-wing absolutism around Article 9), and the alternative timeline Japan was originally on the verge of following — Tokugawa realism.

This is not a so-called “masochistic view of history.” It is not a moral verdict on who was wicked. It is a cool-headed systems audit — how the system was designed, how it ran, how it self-destructed, and how it still affects contemporary Japan.

1. The Meiji “Restoration” Was Not Progress — It Was a Coup

The Name Itself Is Propaganda

The very word “Meiji Restoration” is a framing device that pushes the interpretation of a set of events in a specific direction. At the time, people called this transformation “goisshin” — “the great renewal.” Fixing the term as ishin, taken from the classical Chinese Book of Songs, lent it the gravitas of “a justified renewal of the mandate of heaven.”

In recent English-language historiography, the political character of this naming has been explicitly thematized. Britannica’s entry on the Meiji Restoration writes:

The restoration event itself consisted of a coup d’état in the ancient imperial capital of Kyōto on January 3, 1868. … Although proclaimed as a restoration of imperial rule, political power in practice was exercised by a small group of reformist leaders, many of them young samurai from feudal domains (hans) historically hostile to Tokugawa authority, notably Chōshū, in far western Honshu, and Satsuma, in southern Kyushu.

Origins (a historical journal project of Ohio State and Miami University) goes further: “the Restoration’s misleading ‘bloodless revolution’ moniker.”

In other words, in Japan studies in the English-speaking world, the “Meiji Restoration” is already recognized as a coup. The problem is that, in Japan itself, school education and the media continue to cover this fact with the propaganda vocabulary of “renewal,” “progress,” and “liberation.”

The Evidence That It Was a Coup

If we follow the events of 1867–1868 chronologically, it becomes obvious that this was not “historical necessity” but armed seizure of power.

In October 1867, Tokugawa Yoshinobu returned governing authority to the emperor (taisei hōkan). This was a political ambush against the Satsuma-Chōshū factions — especially Ōkubo Toshimichi, Saigō Takamori, and Iwakura Tomomi — who had been preparing to overthrow the shogunate by force. Yoshinobu’s plan was to set up a council of daimyō (a kind of assembly) under the emperor, and to lead it himself. It was a remarkably peaceful and rational plan for transition to a modern state.

But this peaceful transition would have prevented Satsuma and Chōshū from seizing power. On December 9, 1867, they used military force to seal off the Kyoto Imperial Palace, placed the young Meiji Emperor in their custody, and pushed through the “Restoration of Imperial Rule” (ōsei fukko) by decree. At the same day’s Kogosho Conference, they unilaterally decided to strip Yoshinobu — who was not even present — of his court rank and his territories (jikan nōchi).

Saigō Takamori went further still, dispatching rōnin units led by Sagara Sōzō into Edo to commit acts of arson, looting, and even shootings at the imperial residences, in order to provoke the shogunate. This is a textbook coup tactic: “goad the other side into striking first, and then label them as rebels.”

Why “Progress” and “Liberation” Were Needed as Propaganda

Having seized power by force, the new Satsuma-Chōshū government was, in its earliest period, neither domestically nor internationally recognized as a legitimate government. Powerful propaganda was therefore needed to manufacture legitimacy after the fact.

First, the rigid binary of “loyalist army (kangun, justice)” versus “rebel army (zokugun, evil).” The new regime branded those who resisted — Aizu, the northeastern domains, the old shogunate forces who fought to Goryōkaku — as “rebels.” In reality, Satsuma-Chōshū had themselves been radicals committing terror in the name of “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians,” carrying out assassinations and bombarding foreign ships. Once they took power, they transformed overnight into “a modern government respectful of international law” and recast yesterday’s comrades and yesterday’s defenders of constitutional propriety as “benighted evil.”

Second, the darkening of the Edo period and the importation of stage-based progressivism. The Meiji government conveniently deployed the imported framework of social evolutionism: Edo = feudalism, barbarism, backward pre-modernity; Meiji = capitalism, civilization, advanced modernity. Pounding this binary into every classroom installed gratitude into the citizenry: “It is thanks to Satsuma-Chōshū’s coup against the old regime that Japan could modernize.”

2. The Meiji State Was Designed as a Copy of Western Imperialism’s OS

What the Nineteenth-Century Western Powers Actually Were

The Victorian Britain and Puritan-derived United States that the Meiji government took as models in the late nineteenth century may have called themselves the banner-bearers of “freedom and democracy,” but in reality they were the high tide of an imperialism that fused Christian patriarchy with racial-civilizational supremacism.

Their guiding principle was the propaganda of “the civilizing mission” — “the White Man’s Burden.” They classified the world into civilized (white, Christian), half-civilized (Asia), and barbarian (Africa). “It is the duty of the advanced white man to enlighten undeveloped regions through Christian values and capitalism,” they said. This logic of “civilization” was a highly sophisticated political instrument for justifying colonial rule and unequal treaties.

Japan’s Internalization of the Predator’s Logic

What is uncanny is how completely Meiji Japan internalized this predator’s logic and installed it as the operating system of the state. A chapter in a Springer Nature volume, “International Law, State Will, and the Standard of Civilization in Japan’s Assertion of Sovereign Equality,” records this structure with cool precision:

As a result, far from remaining a victim of Western imperialism, Japan became a world power and proceeded to victimize others. In so doing, Japan followed the examples of its peers within the international community.

There is no moralistic accusation here of “Japan as wicked.” There is only a structural observation: Japan followed the examples of its peers in the international community. This is precisely the approach that drives to the heart of history without falling into the trap of the “masochistic view of history.”

The Adaptation of Patriarchy

The Meiji government took the strict Christian patriarchy of the West as its model for governing the nation. Edo-period commoner families, varying greatly by region and class, had been relatively flexible — divorce and remarriage by women were not unusual. The Meiji Civil Code, however, imposed a single rigid “household” (ie) system based on the extreme patriarchy of the samurai class, on every citizen alike.

In tandem with this came the pseudo-familial state ideology of the Imperial Rescript on Education: “The emperor is the patriarch of the nation; the people are his children.” Translating Western Christian patriarchy into the language of Confucian-Shintō loyalty and filial piety, the state created a back-translated system for unified management and mass mobilization of its citizens.

As detailed in the first essay of this series, this was a structural adaptation of the Victorian “Angel in the House” and the nineteenth-century American “Cult of Domesticity.” What is called “Japan’s ancient tradition” is, in its actual content, a translation of nineteenth-century Western norms.

3. The Independence of the Supreme Command — The Shōwa Military’s Runaway Was a Meiji Design Spec

The Problem with the Conventional Story

About the runaway of the military in the Shōwa period, one often hears: “Meiji and Taishō were a fine modernization, but in Shōwa the military suddenly went mad, ran wild, and led Japan to ruin.”

Structurally, this is an obvious scapegoating maneuver. The legal foundation that allowed the Shōwa military to override the cabinet and the Diet was the “independence of the supreme command” (tōsuiken no dokuritsu), enshrined in Article 11 of the Meiji Constitution: “The Emperor commands the Army and Navy.” This was the very design of the state, drawn up by the Meiji government itself.

Yamagata Aritomo’s Design

A paper by the Institute for Peace Policies, “The Meiji State’s Civil-Military System That Could Not Adapt to Total War — The Independence of the Supreme Command and Irresponsibility That Destroyed the Nation,” traces this design process in detail.

In the very early Meiji period, the civil-military structure was actually a French-style civilian-control type: both military administration and military command were subordinate to the Dajōkan (Grand Council of State), with the Daijōdaijin (Grand Minister of State) holding supreme authority in war direction. This was overturned in 1874 (Meiji 7). During the Saga Rebellion, when the civilian official Ōkubo Toshimichi (Sangi and Home Minister) was given command authority over the army, Yamagata Aritomo (Army Minister) reacted by establishing a General Staff Bureau as an external organ of the Army Ministry. This was the starting point.

Yamagata and the other Meiji oligarchs were terrified that the power they had seized through a coup would eventually be taken from them by the political parties (assemblies) that would inevitably emerge. To prevent that, they deliberately constructed the warped system in which “the military is not under the control of the Diet or the cabinet, but reports directly to the emperor — that is, in practice, to the Satsuma-Chōshū oligarchs themselves.”

As confirmed by a University of Tokyo doctoral dissertation on the imperial military advisory system, in the Meiji era this system was held in check — because Yamagata, Ōyama Iwao, and the imperial princes formed a “multi-angle military advisory system” through personal trust and blood ties.

Automatic Runaway After the Founders Were Gone

But when these powerful oligarchs — the bosses — passed from the scene in the Shōwa period, what remained was only the “legal loophole that need not heed the cabinet.” The military used that loophole, exactly as it was, and ran wild: the Manchurian Incident (1931), the February 26 Incident (1936), the expansion of the Sino-Japanese War, and finally the opening of war against the United States.

The Shōwa military, in other words, simply used as designed the weapon that the Meiji government had forged in order to keep party politics out of the military. This is not “the madness of the military.” This is “the system working exactly as specified.” Not a bug. A spec.

Britannica’s Japanese encyclopedia entry on the supreme command states clearly: “It was the Prussian-style independence of the supreme command that was institutionalized.” That is, this system, too, was an import — a copy of Prussian-German military arrangements.

4. The Imperial OS Ran as Programmed

The OS of the Meiji state had “expansion into neighboring countries (invasion)” built into it as a design spec from the very start. In the international order of the time, to be “equal” with the great powers meant to be a predator that possessed its own colonies.

Datsu-A Ron and Self-Orientalism

In 1885, when Fukuzawa Yukichi published “On Departing from Asia” (Datsu-A Ron), the basic policy of Meiji Japan became explicit: “Refuse Asia’s bad friends (Qing China, Korea), and walk in step with the civilized nations of the West.”

That is: in order to gain entry into the club of “civilized nations,” Japan had to grade the surrounding Asian states as “backward and barbarian,” despise them, and dominate them. The Orientalism that the West had imposed on the Arab world and Africa, Japan now applied to its East Asian neighbors as a kind of self-Orientalism, with terrible accuracy.

The Three-Dimensional Tragedy Seen From Asia

For China, Meiji Japan was both “a traitor who sold out East Asian tradition” (in the First Sino-Japanese War) and “a hope that Asians, too, could beat the West” (in the Russo-Japanese War), and at the same time a distorted modernization tutor. Revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen studied in Tokyo, and much of the political-legal vocabulary of modern China consists of “wasei kango” (Sino-Japanese coinages made in Meiji Japan) that were reverse-imported back into Chinese. The relationship was a tangled mixture of hatred and imitation.

For Korea, Meiji Japan was “the country that did to us exactly what the West did to it (the Black Ships) — and brought it to our shores” (the Ganghwa Island Incident). Japan claimed to be “helping Korea’s independence and modernization,” but in the end it swallowed the country whole (Annexation, 1910) and forcibly enrolled it into the patriarchal system centered on the Japanese emperor.

Taiwan became Japan’s first colonial showcase, where Japan would prove to itself and others that it was “a civilized nation on par with the Western powers.” Japan built modern infrastructure — railways, sanitation, education — and broadcast the propaganda that “thanks to Japan, Taiwan modernized.” But this was, in essence, a perfect copy of imperial colonial rule, constructed on top of violent military suppression.

In India, Rabindranath Tagore was overjoyed at Japan’s victory over Russia and called Japan “the light of Asia.” When he later visited Japan, however, he openly and severely criticized its growing militarism to its face. For Indian intellectuals, Japan came to be seen as “the country that threw away its chance to be Asia’s liberator and chose instead the road of becoming the West’s enforcer.”

In Southeast Asia, Phan Bội Châu of Vietnam led the Đông Du (“Go East”) movement, hoping to learn from Japan in order to liberate his homeland. The Meiji government, prioritizing diplomatic relations with France, expelled him and his comrades. Later, during the Greater East Asia War, the Japanese military advanced under the propaganda of “liberating Asia from white rule,” but what it actually delivered on the ground was harsh military rule even crueler than the white powers it replaced — looting of resources, and the forced bowing toward the imperial palace. The Japanese family-state patriarchy was being pushed onto the rest of Asia.

A Nested Structure of Domination

Layer these Asian perspectives onto one another, and a clearly nested structure emerges.

The first tier — the predator at the source — was the Western powers (Britain, the United States, France, and others), dominating through the propaganda of “the civilizing mission.” The second tier — the predator’s copy — was Meiji Japan, dominating through the propaganda of “civilization and enlightenment” and later “the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” The third tier — the prey — was China, Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and India.

What Meiji Japan did to other Asian countries was a derivative form of Western imperialism. Behind it was a structural choice: “in order not to fall to the side of being preyed upon by the West, we must become predators ourselves.” This is not the moralistic claim that “Japan was evil.” It is the systems-level observation that “this was the necessary consequence of the strategy Japan chose.”

5. The Two “Meiji Ghosts” That Survived Into the Postwar Period

With the defeat of 1945, the Meiji system was, in one stroke, broken and force-quit. And yet, looking at the discourse of contemporary Japanese society, we hear the duet of two ghosts of the Meiji government, surviving in changed forms.

The First Ghost — The Right’s “Return to Tradition”

The first ghost is the conservative movement to “overcome the masochistic view of history” and “return to Japanese tradition.”

Most of what they nostalgically defend as “Japanese tradition” — male-only imperial succession, same-surname marriage, the sanctification of State Shinto — is not ancient tradition. As the first essay in this series detailed, it is “Meiji-made modernity” — the Meiji government’s translation of nineteenth-century Western values into Japanese.

Out of defensive reflex against the “rule changes” of contemporary geopolitical risk and globalization, they are desperately trying to reboot the very OS — the Meiji OS — that once lifted Japan to “first-rate nation” status. Behind the soothing rhetoric of “overcoming the masochistic view of history” and “escape from the postwar regime” lies a collective regression — a refusal to verify the continuity of history, and an attempt to sanctify once more, and reinstall, the very Meiji blueprint that once led Japan into self-destruction.

The Second Ghost — The Left’s “Defend Article 9”

And the second ghost is its apparent opposite: the absolute pacifism of the constitutional-preservationist left. Their cry, “Defend the miraculous Article 9 that the world admires,” is, structurally, of one root with the conservative idolization of the national polity (kokutai).

Why? Because both rest on the same fierce “Japanese exceptionalism” — the conviction that “the world is barbarous, but our nation alone is uniquely pure and uniquely sacred.”

The right-wing version says: “Japan, with an unbroken imperial line, is the most superior ‘land of the gods’ in the world, with a unique ‘spirit of harmony’ found nowhere else.”

The absolute-pacifist version says: “Japan, with its ‘miraculous Article 9,’ is the only country in the world that has renounced war — the world’s most advanced peace nation.”

Both arguments begin by dividing the world into binaries (“civilized or barbaric,” “military or peace”) and then insist that “only our country is special, pure, and at the cutting edge of evolution — or in its own sacred sanctuary.” Neither has escaped the framework of the Meiji propaganda (itself imported from the West) of dividing the world into “civilized” and “barbarian.” They have merely swapped the criterion of specialness: the right substitutes “emperor and national polity,” the left substitutes “Article 9 and pacifism.”

Both Are Forms of Reality-Avoidance

What they have in common, more deeply, is a refusal to face the causal chain inside the cool reality of the world system.

The right cannot face the pain of defeat. So it flees into the fantasy that “Japan was not at fault. We were merely twisted by GHQ brainwashing. If we restore the Meiji system, everything will be solved.”

The left cannot face the cool realism that, from the nineteenth-century imperialism of the West right down to today’s geopolitical risk, the substance of international society is a balance-of-power game. So it flees into the fantasy that “if we just keep chanting the spell of Article 9, the outside world will not attack us.”

Neither side can soberly take the crises Japan faces today, or its past failures, and synthesize them as a structural account. Both end up in occult-religious moralism — “if we just purify our doctrine, the country will be saved.” On this point, the two are perfectly identical.

And what is decisive is the mentality of conformity and exclusion that both share. Just as the right brands those who oppose national policy as “non-Japanese” (anti-national), the absolute-pacifist left brands anyone who so much as raises the possibility of revising Article 9, or who tries to discuss defense in realistic terms, as a “war glorifier” (an extremist). Both demand purification within and exclusion of those outside. The very authoritarian instinct — to bind the nation with a single dogma and to enforce thought-stopping and rejection of dissent — is itself the genetic inheritance of the Meiji state.

6. The Lost Timeline — Tokugawa Realism and Its Vision of Co-Evolution

Where, then, is the foundation on which we can escape the fruitless dogmas of left and right, and stand on a truly cool-headed orientation?

Here we have to flip the historical map upside down once more — and look at the true face of the Tokugawa shogunate that Meiji propaganda has painted as “an incompetent that clung in a stupor to seclusion.”

Importing International Law — 1865, the Kaiseijo

Research published by Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo, “Negotiating Knowledge of International Law: ‘Bankoku Koho’ in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan,” confirms a decisive fact:

The Tokugawa Shogunate imported and published it under the title Bankoku Koho in 1865 from Kaiseijo, the Shogunate’s official institution for Western studies. This version of classical Chinese left a great impact on Japanese intellectuals.

That is: three years before the Meiji government even came into being, in 1865, the Tokugawa shogunate had already translated and published modern international law — Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law in its Chinese version by W. A. P. Martin — as Bankoku Kōhō (“The Public Law of All Nations”), and was circulating it among Japanese intellectuals.

What does that mean? It means that the intellectuals of the shogunate were already perfectly aware that the Western powers were invading Asia by military force, while at the same time operating under the rules — at least the public rules — of the Bankoku Kōhō, international law. What they aimed for was not to morph into a militant state (an empire) and invade other nations. They aimed to master international law and to negotiate with the powers as equals on the basis of treaties — through consent.

Oguri Tadamasa — A Symbol of “Tokugawa Modernity”

The biography of Oguri Tadamasa (1827–1868) preserved by Japan Reference records the fact that the late-Tokugawa bureaucrats were already pursuing concrete projects of modern nation-building:

Oguri was convinced that the shogunate depended on friendly relations with the Western powers to secure their technology and to develop the country. With French assistance and the help of loans coerced from wealthy Japanese merchants, he initiated a series of infrastructural projects vital for Japan’s modernization, such as the Yokosuka Shipyards … the iron foundry in Yokohama and the development of iron ore mines in Shimonita.

The Yokosuka Shipyards, the founding of a modern navy (the Nagasaki Naval Training Center), the introduction of French-style ground forces — all of these were projects that the shogunate (under Oguri Tadamasa and others) had launched before the Meiji government emerged. Much of what is called “Meiji modernization” was, in fact, the inheritance — or the outright appropriation — of infrastructure and plans laid down under the shogunate.

It is symbolic that Oguri, who urged thoroughgoing resistance against the Satsuma-Chōshū army, was executed in 1868. The “Tokugawa modernity” timeline was cut, quite literally, along with the head of its designer.

The Return of Government — A Constitution Foretold

The taisei hōkan (“return of governing authority”) executed by Tokugawa Yoshinobu in October 1867, together with the subsequent plan for a council of daimyō (an assembly of feudal lords), was, in fact, an anticipation of what would later become the Japanese Constitution’s vision of democratic governance and international cooperation.

Yoshinobu’s intent was: “The age of exclusive Tokugawa rule is over. From now on we place the emperor at the top, and all daimyō — including Satsuma and Chōshū — discuss policy together in an assembly. Japan makes its debut to the world as a modern state under the rule of law.”

Had this soft-landing plan for a modern state succeeded, Japan would have —

— avoided the brutal civil war (Boshin War) of internal slaughter,

— not needed to construct a national unity built on labeling Aizu and the northeast as “rebels” (the original sin of Meiji),

— never had the loophole of “the independence of the supreme command” built into its constitution as a route for military runaway,

— and, above all, never installed the militarist OS for invading its Asian neighbors.

In other words, the curtain that Tokugawa Yoshinobu tried to draw at the end of the shogunate was nothing less than a remarkably mature design for a modern state — one that neither collided with the world nor over-adapted to it through copying, but instead aimed at “co-evolving with the world within international rules.” This was the design that Satsuma-Chōshū (the Meiji government) smashed by violent coup and replaced with a fixed course toward a hard militarist state.

7. The Postwar Constitution Is the 100-Year Resurrection of Tokugawa Realism

Here, finally, every thread connects.

When the postwar Japanese Constitution was born, many took it as “a brand-new ideal handed down by GHQ, with no roots in Japan.” That is exactly why the right loathes it as “imposition” and the left receives it as “a sacred miracle” — and from those two responses two ghosts (each its own version of Japanese exceptionalism) were born.

But if we read carefully what is actually written in the Preamble and Article 98(2) of the Constitution, something else appears.

The Core of the Preamble

The Preamble declares:

We desire to occupy an honored place in an international society striving for the preservation of peace, and the banishment of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance for all time from the earth. … We believe that no nation is responsible to itself alone, but that laws of political morality are universal; and that obedience to such laws is incumbent upon all nations who would sustain their own sovereignty and justify their sovereign relationship with other nations.

“To occupy an honored place in international society” — this is, almost literally, what the Tokugawa officials of the Kaiseijo were aiming at when they published Bankoku Kōhō in 1865. “No nation is responsible to itself alone, but laws of political morality are universal” — this is the structural antithesis of the Meiji government’s Datsu-A Ron, which discarded its neighbors as “barbarians.”

Article 98(2) — The Faithful Observance of International Law

And Article 98(2) states: “The treaties concluded by Japan and established laws of nations shall be faithfully observed.”

This is not merely postwar idealism. It is a mature, adult realism — a refusal of self-aggrandizing Japanese exceptionalism, and an affirmation that Japan lives inside the rule-system that is international society.

Astonishingly, this idea of “faithful observance of international law” and “co-evolving with the world” did not fall out of the sky after the war. It is the resurrection, a century later, of an idea that had once flourished in the diplomatic line of the late-Tokugawa shogunate — the idea that the Meiji government dismissed and crushed as “musty pre-modernity.”

Two Operating Systems Side by Side

Here, finally, the architecture of this entire essay can be stated clearly.

The Meiji OS. A system that copied the West’s logic of force (imperialism, patriarchy, the independence of the supreme command), and that necessarily collided with the world and self-destructed. As a design spec, it had Asian invasion and total mobilization of citizens built into it. In the Shōwa period, the program ran to completion.

The Constitutional OS — that is, the resurrection of Tokugawa realism. A system that faithfully observes the law of nations (international cooperation, deliberative assembly, fundamental human rights), and co-evolves with the world. The Bankoku Kōhō line of the late Edo period, and the international-cooperation principle of the postwar Constitution, resonate structurally — with the militarist runaway of Meiji-Shōwa sandwiched between them.

Once we dismantle the ghosts of right and left and stand on a truly cool-headed and adult view of history, we can see that the spirit of the Japanese Constitution is, in fact, firmly rooted in Japan’s own historical maturity — in the level of insight the Tokugawa shogunate had already reached.

Conclusion — One Journey’s End, and a New Beginning

What these three essays have traced is, in the end, a careful anatomy of history itself.

In the first essay, we showed that much of what is now called “Japan’s ancient tradition” is, in fact, an adaptation of Western norms imported during the Meiji period — same-surname marriage, the Shinto wedding, ryōsai kenbo, bushido, the modern “sense of chastity,” all of them.

In the second essay, we showed that the women activists of modern Japan were not fighting Japan’s ancient Confucian patriarchy. They were fighting the brand-new patriarchal-Christian modern norms that the Meiji government had just imported from the West — and they were running, at the same historical moment, in parallel with the global women’s movement.

In this third essay, we have shown that the very discourse of “Meiji Restoration” and “civilization and enlightenment” is political propaganda. Its actual content was a coup d’état and a copy of the operating system of Western imperialism. Its ghosts have survived into the postwar period in both right and left forms. And the timeline Japan was originally on the brink of following — Tokugawa realism, with its principle of international cooperation — has, a century later, resurfaced in the Japanese Constitution.

Releasing the Spell of the Meiji OS

Our journey of doubting the propaganda of “civilization and enlightenment” is not merely an exhumation of the original sin of Japan’s modernity.

It is a landing on a different horizon — a horizon of hope, in which we recognize that the legitimate Japanese timeline once envisioned by Edo intellectuals, and then severed by a coup, is something we are now living again through the Constitution, after a hundred-year detour.

This is not just a reorganization of the past. The OS by which the Meiji government copied the style of Western imperialism still goes on running today, generating the structural problems of contemporary Japan — the gender gap, the compulsory same-surname law, the sterile left-right standoff over war responsibility, the rigidity of East Asian diplomacy, the conformity pressure in education. Recognizing this OS as a structure, and dismantling it, is not a verdict on the past. It is preparation for the future.

The Horizon of Co-Evolution

The “Japan” we should reclaim is not the Meiji-translated Victorian world. Nor is it the sanctuary of postwar absolute pacifism.

It is that open horizon on which the intellectuals of Edo, reading the Bankoku Kōhō, conceived of co-evolution with the world. And at the same time, it is the attitude declared in the Preamble of the Japanese Constitution — “to occupy an honored place in international society” — by which Japan defines itself, concretely, in relation to the world.

The old layer of Edo — fluidity, coexistence, plurality — and contemporary global movements of liberation — gender diversity, international cooperation, conviviality — resonate structurally with each other, across the patriarchal-Christian modern norms imported during the Meiji period. The moment we perceive this resonance across time and space, the entire landscape of contemporary discourse undergoes a fundamental change.

“Conservative vs. liberal,” “East vs. West,” “tradition vs. modernity” — at a deeper level, the foundations of these binaries are dismantled. What appears in their place is a richer, freer horizon of possibility.

What Oguri Tadamasa saw, what Tokugawa Yoshinobu saw, what the Tokugawa intellectuals who read the Bankoku Kōhō at the Kaiseijo saw — that horizon is, in all likelihood, what they were looking at.

And Tsuda Umeko and her companions, from a different angle, were probably looking at the same horizon.

The timeline that the Meiji propaganda severed, we are now, a hundred and fifty years later, trying to weave back together.

Major References

The Meiji Restoration as a Coup

Aoyama, Tadamasa. The Meiji Restoration as Founding Myth (Meiji Ishin to iu Kenkoku Shinwa). Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan.

Iwashita, Tetsunori & Tokugawa Iehiro (eds.). The Perspective of “Tokugawa Modernity” (“Tokugawa Kindai” to iu Shiten).

Suzuki, Sōichi. The Real Story of the Meiji Restoration (Meiji Ishin no Shōtai).

Britannica. “Meiji Restoration.” https://www.britannica.com/event/Meiji-Restoration

Origins (Ohio State / Miami University). “Japan’s Meiji Restoration.” https://origins.osu.edu/read/japans-meiji-restoration

Japan Society. “The Meiji Restoration Era, 1868–1889.”

The Tokugawa Bankoku Kōhō Line and “Tokugawa Modernity”

Tokyo College, University of Tokyo. “Negotiating Knowledge of International Law: ‘Bankoku Koho’ in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan.” https://www.tc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/weblog/13784/

Beasley, William G. Select Documents on Japanese Foreign Policy, 1853–1868. London: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Cullen, L. M. A History of Japan, 1582–1941: Internal and External Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Japan Reference. “Oguri Tadamasa.” https://jref.com/articles/oguri-tadamasa.96/

The Independence of the Supreme Command and Its Effects on Shōwa

Institute for Peace Policies. “The Meiji State’s Civil-Military System That Could Not Adapt to Total War.” https://ippjapan.org/archives/8945

Britannica International Encyclopedia (Japanese ed.). “Tōsuiken (Supreme Command).”

University of Tokyo doctoral dissertation. “The Imperial Military Advisory System in the Meiji Era.”

Imperialism and Japan’s Position

Suzuki, Shogo. “International Law, State Will, and the Standard of Civilization in Japan’s Assertion of Sovereign Equality.” In Constructing Justice and Security after War. Springer Nature.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Duus, Peter. The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Perspectives From Other Asian Regions

Jansen, Marius B. The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954.

Eskildsen, Robert. Transforming Empire in Japan and East Asia: The Taiwan Expedition and the Birth of Japanese Imperialism. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Goscha, Christopher E. Going Indochinese: Contesting Concepts of Space and Place in French Indochina. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2012.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Nationalism. New York: Macmillan, 1917.

Foundational Works Cited in the Previous Essays (Also Referenced Here)

Hobsbawm, Eric & Terence Ranger (eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Vlastos, Stephen (ed.). Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Hardacre, Helen. Shinto and the State, 1868–1988. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Koyama, Shizuko. Ryōsai Kenbo: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Benesch, Oleg. Inventing the Way of the Samurai. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Fujitani, Takashi. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Gluck, Carol. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

The Japanese Constitution and the Principle of International Cooperation

Ashibe, Nobuyoshi. Constitution (Kenpō). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

Koseki, Shōichi. The Birth of Japan’s Postwar Constitution (Nihonkoku Kenpō no Tanjō). Iwanami Gendai Bunko.

Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.