The samurai radicals who overthrew the last shogun in 1868 promised to restore ancient and pure Japanese ways. Foreign observers were terrified that Japan would lapse into violent xenophobia. But the new Meiji government took an opposite course. It copied "best practice" from around the world, building a powerful and modern Japanese nation with the help of European and American advisors. While revering the Japanese past, the Meiji government boldly embraced the foreign and the new. What explains this paradox? How could Japan's 1868 revolution be both modern and traditional, both xenophobic and cosmopolitan? To Stand with the Nations of the World explains the paradox of the Restoration through the forces of globalization. Japan's leaders wanted to celebrate Japanese uniqueness, but they also sought international recognition. Rather than simply mimic world powers like Britain, they sought to make Japan distinctly Japanese in the same way that Britain was distinctly British. Rather than sing "God Save the King," they created a Japanese national anthem with lyrics from ancient poetry, but Western-style music. The Meiji Restoration was thus part of the global "long nineteenth century" during which ambitious nation states like Japan, Britain, Germany, and the United States challenged the world's great multi-ethnic empires - Ottoman, Qing, Romanov, and Hapsburg. The Restoration also resonated with Japan's ancient past. In the 600s and 700s, Japan was threatened by the Tang dynasty, as powerful as the Roman empire. In order to resist the Tang, Japanese leaders borrowed Tang methods, building a centralized Japanese state on Tang models, and learning continental science and technology. As in the 1800s, Japan coopted international norms while insisting on Japanese distinctiveness. When confronting globalization in 1800s, Japan looked back to that "ancient globalization" of the 600s and 700s. The ancient past was, therefore, not remote or distant, but immediate and vital.

Examining local politics in three Japanese domains (Yonezawa, Tokushima, and Hirosaki), this book shows how warlords (daimyo) and their samurai adapted the theory and practice of warrior rule to the peacetime challenges of demographic change and rapid economic growth in the mid-Tokugawa period.
The author has a dual purpose. The first is to examine the impact of shogunate/domain relations on warlord legitimacy. Although the shogunate had supreme power in foreign and military affairs, it left much of civil law in the hands of warlords. In this civil realm, Japan resembled a federal union (or "compound state"), with the warlords as semi-independent sovereigns, rather than a unified kingdom with the shogunate as sovereign. The warlords were thus both vassals of the shogun and independent lords. In the process of his analysis, the author puts forward a new theory of warlord legitimacy in order to explain the persistence of their autonomy in civil affairs.
The second purpose is to examine the quantitative dimension of warlord rule. Daimyo, the author argues, struggled against both economic and demographic pressures. It is in these struggles that domains manifested most clearly their autonomy, developing distinctive regional solutions to the problems of protoindustrialization and peasant depopulation. In formulating strategies to promote and control economic growth and to increase the peasant population, domains drew heavily on their claims to semisovereign authority and developed policies that anticipated practices of the Meiji state.

The first book in English in 50 years on a revered samurai warrior–the Japanese Robert E. Lee

One of Japan’s most renowned samurai, Saigo Takamori (1828—1877) helped pull down the Tokugawa Shogunate and restore the Meiji emperor. He then watched in horror as Meiji, in his drive to modernize the country, stripped the samurai of all that made them samurai–the representatives of Japanese tradition, honor, and glory, if also feudal privilege. The Last Samurai takes a revealing look at Saigo, who is as compelling a character to the Japanese as Robert E. Lee is to Americans–a great and noble warrior who followed the dictates of honor and loyalty, even though it meant civil war in a country he’d devoted himself to. In this dramatic story of politics and rebellion, Mark Ravina follows Saigo as he leads an army of samurai partisans toward Tokyo to fight the imperial conscript army. He examines in gripping detail the clash between Saigo’s samurai ideals and impending Japanese modernity–and the reasons why Saigo has been revered for his courage and integrity until the present day.

Mark Ravina (Atlanta, GA) is an Associate Professor of Japanese History at Emory University.