Meiji Restoration

Tokyo, 1885

So, after watching The Last Samurai I thought that it would be super neat to like, go and see actual samurai! I mean, how cool is that?? It would be like, the ultimate dream trip since I would get to meet dreamy samurai!

But, it’s totally not like that.

Like I was hoping I was going to see the swords and the honor and the military might of the samurai, but that’s all gone.

Japan is going through a restoration. Like, they just restored their Emperor to power and took it away from the samurai. I was speaking to a guy and he said that they were focusing on becoming modern and sort of modeling themselves after the west!

He went on to talk about something called Bunmei Kaika or Civilization and Enlightenment. This was so they would look to the west and sort of like, emulate them in an effort to not appear like they were weak and could be taken over easily. The people of Japan didn’t want to become a colony, they wanted to be an imperial power. That’s kind of neat, huh?

Anyways.

Right now the Emperor is in the capital of Tokyo, which used to be called Edo. The government is shifting and is changing. It’s totally not what I expected.

I wanted to see the samurai and their topknots and their swords, but all I’ve bumped into is guys with relatively normal hair styles and military garb! I don’t get it.

I started talking with this one guy who looked awkward and was standing off to the side what was the deal, where did the cool samurai uniforms go, and he just stared. He told me that he wasn’t even part of a samurai family, that he was a farmer! I mean, what gives?

He’s part of the new army. It’s formed mostly from peasant families, with former samurai men in higher positions.

He continued to rattle on about how they were going back to the old traditions of their ancestors in religion and culture. How through their new focus on modernization, they wanted to embrace and support these old traditions so they wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle and forgotten. He said that they were going back many centuries, back to when the purest form of samurai existed, and using their old values and traditions, such as the way of meditation and tea ceremonies and so on. How they were going to follow the ways of bushido as the ancient warriors did so long ago.

But I was like, so confused. I mean, that existed a long time ago, but those guys totally weren’t samurai! They were warriors for sure, but like, that’s a very idealized and invented traditional view of the warriors!

Then he went on to talk about the long history of Shinto, but that’s when I walked away. It was a bit too much to hear him prattle on about how the Emperor was a descendent of Amaterasu.

Wow. This trip was nothing like I expect. I like, totally did not see ANY samurai. No cool battles or swords fights, no duels to the death over their lady loves.

Just saw a ton of people dressed up in military garb. BOR-ING.

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The Meiji Restoration changed Japan in many ways, including the government, economy, and army. The samurai were no longer the head of the government as the bakufu dissolved, and the emperor was ‘restored’ to power. However, in truth, the samurai were not gone. The powerful families still remained in power, as government officials. It was, in fact, the samurais’ idea to dissolve their power base, and they convinced their own daimyo’s to disband.

It was at this time that Japan wanted to be viewed as powerful and not weak, so they made modernization their top priority. When they thought they had become too much like the west, they started to go back and stress old traditions and values, such as the samurai spirit which, now, at this point, all Japanese were said to hold which is in stark contrast to the Tokugawa period and before wherein it was an elite class and that only a few could hold the samurai spirit. They wanted to have a culture that was completely unique and Japanese, thus creating and inventing the traditions of the warrior and bushido, and ignoring all other cultural ties that these concepts had. Instead of ‘restoring’ what was old, they instead ‘created’ what was old.