History

It is no easy matter for a government seeking to foster rapid economic and social changes to win acceptance of its programs. Too much control by the center assures local resistance; too much dispersal of authority empowers it. The dilemma is a familiar one today, but it is not, of course, a new one. The leaders of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan found it to be the knottiest problem in their efforts to construct a modern state. They needed to exert sufficient central control of local government to assure that their initiatives could be enacted in Japan's villages and that taxes would flow to the center in a predictable and orderly manner. But these goals required the central government to permit a measure of autonomy—to rely on pre-Meiji inter- and intravillage organizations originally devised to guard and insulate the village from the demands of higher authority. Their efforts to resolve the dilemma quickly took on a note of desperation: in the first twenty years of the Meiji era, the g...

... But it was not only the gono who sought to preserve order and avoid the rav-ages of rebellion. ... The combination of ex-traordinary levies in 1866 should therefore have reduced these peas-ants to desperation and led to their participation in yonaoshi and other uprisings.24 This ...

Credit for the swift unification of Japan following the 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate is usually given to the national leaders who instigated the coup and formed the new Meiji government. But is brilliant leadership at the top sufficient to explain how regional separatist tendencies and loyalties to the old lords were overcome in the formation of a nationally unified state? On the contrary, argues James C. Baxter. Though plans were drawn up by policy makers in Tokyo, the efforts of citizens all over the country were required to implement these plans and create a sense of national identity among local populations. Drawing on extensive archival resources, Baxter describes the transformation of the Tokugawa domain of Kaga into the Meiji prefecture of Ishikawa. The result is a richly detailed study that helps explain how Japan achieved national unity without the bloody struggles that have often accompanied modernization and nation-building.

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