On Sep 15, 12:33 am, Charlie Springer
regnirps.com> wrote:> On Sun, 14 Sep 2008 10:28:24 -0700, Bruce McFarling wrote
> (in article
> <41ba5d54-a935-405e-9f52-e289525b4...@
m36g2000hse.googlegroups.com>):
>
>> And indeed, what the Meiji Restoration brought an end to was the
>> Tokugawa Shogunate which itself had brought the end to the part of the
>> Feudal Period that is so kewl for teh movies. The Shogunate, of
>> course, saw the rise of all those cities and all that commerce that
>> provided the platform for the industrialization of the Meiji
>> Restoration period.
> Do you think a peasant wasn't still pretty much a peasant? Who owned the
> land? Who worked the fields?
Prior to the Meiji Restoration, the theory of land ownership was that
all land belonged to the Emperor, who lent the use of land to feudal
lords, who in turn lent their use to individual farmers. That is a
feudal system. After the 1873 land reform, land could be privately
owned, mortgaged for improvements, etc.
Prior to the Meiji Restoration, population was divided into the Four
Divisions of Samurai, Farmers, Artisans and Merchants (though there
was an de facto fifth class performing tasks considered unclean under
Shintoism and Buddhism). The Meiji Restoration saw the progressive
elimination of the top layer of Samurai, the domain lords or daimyo,
when in 1871 the last of the daimyo lords had to return their domains
to the Emperor, with the domains restructured as prefectures,
nationwide conscription in 1873 eliminated the status of the samurai
as the sole division allowed to bear arms, and the stipends paid to
samurai were eliminated by 1876.
> I know, things were changing. I recall one of
> japan's most popular soap operas was about a woman whose life entails those
> changing times. Can't remember the name. Onna or something like that.
> Anyway, Land reform, legal reform, monetary reform. Nothing? Just incidental?
The occupation reforms were quite substantial and quite important. Its
just historically silly to suggest they were the end of a Japanese
Feudal system that had come to an end decades previously. Indeed, some
of the things that MacArthur reforms addressed were problems *created
in* the Meiji period, that had not existed under Feudal Japan ... the
universal conscription that was the death knell of the Samurai as a
feudal warrior class was also the foundation of Japanese Imperial
expansion in the early 20th century.
