Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 461, The Empty Throne, Part 4.

You have to imagine that the late 1870s and early 1880s were kind of a weird time for the

young Emperor Meiji. His life, up until that point, had been turbulent enough, of course,

with the violence in Kyoto,

the death of his father, the restoration, and its attendant changes to his life.

But the 1870s, in particular, represented in a sense an even more dramatic break from the past

than what had come before.

Remember that the alliance that had overthrown the Tokugawa shogunate and restored power

to the emperor, so to speak, was primarily one of opposition, to the Tokugawa shogunate specifically.

While the threat of the shogunate endured and with the symbolic power of the emperor

to rally around, there was plenty to hold that coalition together.

But once the shogunate was defeated and power secure for the new government, or at least as secure as any new government can be,

things immediately started to get, well, complicated.

For one reason or another, everyone had agreed the shogunate had to go,

and in some broad sense that power should be restored to the emperor. But what did that mean

in practice? What should the new government look like? What sort of role should the emperor play?

Similarly, broadly within the coalition there was agreement on the utility of Western technology.

After all, most of its members were samurai very familiar with the usefulness of modern guns and artillery.

But how far should the new regime take its embrace of Western technology?

And what about the related question of embracing

Western culture and political structures? Simply put, you see, it's always easier in my experience

to find agreement with others in criticizing things. Agreeing on how things should be instead,

...