the meiji restoration

The Meiji Restoration
From 1866, leading officials from the “outer” han of Choshu and Satsuma especially began to put together an alliance which involved officials from a few other han and a group of nobles at the imperial court. Choshu and Satsuma had been developing their relationships with the western powers, particularly Britain, and using these contacts to strengthen and modernise their armed forces. In these and other han, vigorous new leaderships had arisen, sometimes out of young men who had survived the experience of “extremism” and now developed a new orientation to the problems of Japanese politics. Their nominal lords, the daimyo, “were to remain fairly conservative in their thinking about the future” but “their activist agents and officers were moving towards the abolition of the shogunate and the creation of a new government under the emperor” (Hall, 1970, p.262)

The situation moved towards a climax with two events in early 1867. The emperor died, to b...