The Meiji Restoration

How Japan Remade Itself in a Generation

von Herbert Aylesford

264 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

In January 1868 a small group of provincial officials took control of an imperial palace in Kyōto, had a decree read out in the name of a boy of fifteen, and called what they had done a restoration. Within three years they had dissolved the domains they came from. Within eight they had taken the warrior class's stipends, its swords and its standing, leaving it a name in the household registers and no income.Herbert Aylesford follows that undoing from the founding of the Tokugawa order in 1603 to the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912, through the paper the period left behind: tax registers and stipend rolls, factory inspections, school returns, and the petitions of villages that were never consulted. A domain treasury, a conscripted farm boy, a girl recruited for a silk mill, a classroom opened against the parents' wishes. Ieyasu, Saigō Takamori and Itō Hirobumi are present as the records carry them, not as the makers of a legend.So are the people the new state counted without asking. The Ainu lost the basis of their economy to laws that opened Hokkaidō to settlers. The kingdom of Ryūkyū was annexed and renamed Okinawa. Villages in Taiwan and Korea were surveyed, taxed and policed by officials who answered to the emperor and not to a parliament.Much of what is now believed about the era was made by the era itself, the ancient code of the warrior above all. This book keeps the record and the telling apart.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175867504
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 20.09.2026
• Größe: 203 x 127 mm
• Verlag: Independently published