Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 544, A Day in the Life of Meiji Japan, Part 2.

We left off last week with a discussion of school and work life in the Meiji period, and we're going to pick up right where we left off.

But I want to spend some time talking about another job, so to speak,

that was new and distinct in the Meiji era. You see, one of the defining features of Meiji

Japan was the imposition, in 1873, of universal conscription, subjecting all adult men to service

in the Army or the Navy, but more likely the former than the

latter. The imposition of conscription proved challenging to say the least, both because of the

long-standing social hierarchies of the feudal era. Samurai were not thrilled about commoners

honing in on their turf, and not a lot of commoners were too enthused about giving up their lives and jobs to go fight,

and because some unfortunate phrasing in the original text of the ordinance that the people of

Japan were paying back an obligation to the state in the form of attacks paid in blood,

meant rumors began to swirl that the government was literally planning to steal people's blood.

As you might imagine, the vampiric implications of this phrasing didn't go over super well,

and resulted in riots in a few places in the countryside.

In reality, that blood tax phrasing actually comes from post-revolutionary France,

when the Jacobin and Napoleonic-era

mass conscriptions were replaced with a lottery system that you could pay your way out of

or find a substitute to replace yourself with. Despite these initial speed bumps, conscription

did work at creating a military that could both suppress domestic dissent against

the new order and win Japan's overseas wars, helping the new state build up its imperial

prestige. By 1900, the practice and the new career it offered, so to speak, were embedded

in the fabric of Meiji life.

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