11/7/2022 0 Comments Play road rash pc online![]() ![]() ![]() In this respect, until the Meiji Restoration, there had been no nation in the Japanese archipelago. In the terminology of modern international politics, the inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago neither constituted themselves collectively as a unified population subjugated to a sovereign state, nor were they individually subject to any central authority. First of all, the baku-han system was by no means comparable to a nation state, the basic unit of the modern international world. Yet, what was meant by ‘the country’ is far from self-evident. Thus, it has been understood that the country was only opened to the rest of the world when the Tokugawa shogunate collapsed and the new centralised sovereign state was established in 1868. ![]() Prior to it, from the early 17th century, the general agenda regulating diplomatic policies of the feudal confederation of the baku-han system, an assembly of semi-autonomous states, has been portrayed as that of sakoku, meaning ‘the closed country’. The Meiji Restoration has often been described as an event that opened Japan to the modern world. One wonders why the nation has ceased so drastically to be interested in Japan’s modernisation. A half-century later, the lack of public interest in the Meiji Restoration and the subsequent rejuvenation is striking. Some historians highlighted the brutal exploitation and miserable living conditions the rural peasantry had to undergo, without which modern industrial capitalism would never have accomplished the primitive accumulation of capital in Japan others did not hesitate to remind the public of the environmental pollution from which millions of Japanese were suffering in their everyday lives in big cities and agrarian communities all across the country. Of course, some contested this exceedingly self-congratulatory evaluation. Moreover, it gave rise to what was applauded by American proponents of modernisation theory as ‘the only genuinely modern society in the entirety of Asia’. In 1968, there was almost unanimous agreement among the Japanese public that the Meiji Restoration denoted the beginning of a hundred years of exceptional achievement, which had opened up the country to the world, and eventually brought modern civilisation to the inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago. The centennial was regarded as marking the greatest accomplishment in Asia, and virtually every adult in Japan was expected to be proud of it. They discussed the significance of this hundredth anniversary of the modern state of Japan. All the major newspapers devoted much space to articles by historians and technocrats and interviews with elder statesmen and industrial leaders. I recall that the Japanese mass media celebrated the centenary of the Meiji Restoration in a big way fifty years ago, when I had just started university in Tokyo. ![]()
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