Was Japan an evil country?
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Japanese cruelty towards their fellow human beings was not confined to the 20th century! Any library in the world should give you some answers.
Japan was looking to Europe from the late 1800th up to ww2 for inspirations when it came to changing the country. They tried to keep their samurai traditions, but also industrialise and look for inspirations when it came to how to govern a industrialised country. So, in the end it became a unique mixed bag of old traditions (samurai), religion (emperor = god), a modern military, imperialism (nothing new here, copied and inspired from the western countries) and a goverment that almost looked like any other government, but it wasn't (since they were all serving a god, and any minister that was unpopuler had a high risk of being assassinated, especially in the 1920's). Remember, that Japan transformed from a pre-industrialised country (1880) to a country that beat the Russian empire in naval combat only 15 years later. My point is, it's a bit simplistic to call Japan evil during ww2, did the military do evil acts? Absolutely. But I would say it's more interesting to understand how Japan ended up in the situation they were in from 1937 and onward. Japan was a country out of control (the government didn't have power over the military, and the generals didn't always have control over the soldiers).
Another View
"
Throughout the centuries, the cultural ethos of a particular social class has stamped its image indelibly on Japanese history. The tenth and eleventh centuries were the Age of the Aristocrat, when noble families in Kyoto amassed fortunes, took their leisure in palatial mansions, and ushered in a golden age of high culture by becoming both patrons and practitioners of tanka poetry, courtly gagaku music, and other patrician arts. Samurai turned the medieval period into the Age of the Warrior, adding martial arts and the virtues of bravery, courage, and loyalty to the lexicon of Japanese self-identity. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the merchants and artisans of Edo and other cities forged an Age of the Commoner, and playwrights for the Kabuki theater, wood-block print designers, and haiku poets created new art forms that both identified the values of the merchant class and made up what we now consider as primary hallmarks of traditional Japanese culture.
In similar fashion, the twentieth century belonged to the middle class. That particular social formation began to take shape at the turn of the century, and during the next two decades the nascent middle class quickly assumed a national importance by embracing modernity, introducing new models of family organization and fresh conceptions of gender roles, and asserting itself as cultural arbiters in regard to housing, fashion, recreation, and consumerism. As a consequence, even though its numbers remained small in the pre-World War II years, the new middle class significantly influenced how all Japanese thought about themselves and how they expressed their aspiration to be regarded as an integral member of the international community of modern, cosmopolitan societies. Not surprisingly, given its ambitions to cultural leadership, the middle class also became the prism through which noted foreign critics viewed Japan and judged its progress in achieving modernity.
By the end of the Meiji period (1868-1912), decades of rapid industrialization and energetic participation in a rapidly expanding global economy gave Japan one of the world’s strongest and most vital economies. Those same processes called into being a complex socio-economic structure that included a small but vibrant urban middle class. Although the term middle class never was defined precisely, scholars have tended to use occupation, income, and education as the standards by which to define a category of salaried professionals who could be distinguished from persons who farmed, engaged in manual labor, or ran small-scale commercial enterprises. In general, surveys conducted in the 1910s and 1920s routinely included male government officials, military officers, policemen, teachers, doctors, company executives, and bank employees as the core of the middle class. Another characteristic of economic modernity in Japan was that working women became increasingly conspicuous within the ranks of white-collar employees. By the early 1920s, a wide range of occupations were open to women who possessed a high school or college diploma, including those of teacher, bus conductress, telephone switchboard operator, typist, office worker, department store clerk, midwife, nurse, and even doctor after Japan’s first medical college for women received full accreditation midway through the Taishö period (1912-1926).
The overall size of the middle class and the proportion of working women expanded dramatically throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Although reliable statistics are scarce, scholars estimate that the middle-class population of Tokyo swelled from roughly 6 percent of the city’s work force in 1908 to nearly 22 percent in 1920, when approximately 8.5 percent of Japan’s total population of 56 million persons fell into the middle class. Concurrently, by 1922 approximately 3.5 million of Japan’s 27 million women worked outside the home, slightly more than one-quarter of them in middle-class occupations. Moreover, the trend lines arched upward. By 1926 there were 57,000 female nurses, in contrast to just 13,000 in 1911, and the number of female white-collar workers in government offices doubled between 1926 and the end of the decade.
The new middle-class carved out for itself a lifestyle that stood in visible contrast both to the traditions of the past and the preferences of other contemporary Japanese. For one thing, the middle class created new sorts of family units. Before the twentieth century, the so-called ie— a multigenerational household where grandparents, parents, and children lived under the same roof — had been held up as the ideal family configuration, and in the 1920s most farm families still hoped to have three or more generations share the same hearth. In Japan’s urban centers, however, the preponderance of middle-class families consisted simply of a conjugal couple and their offspring. More specifically, a great deal of social commentary pictured the new nuclear family as consisting of a working father and stay-at-home mom who cared for the growing children.
As more married women entered the workforce, however, some social critics began to valorize dual-career couples who succeeded in their chosen professions while deftly raising two or three well-adjusted children. One of the more prominent spokespersons for that new family orientation was Hani (née Matsuoka) Motoko. A member of the initial graduating class of the prestigious Tokyo First Higher Girls’ School in 1891, Motoko established another benchmark when she became Japan’s first woman reporter, writing for the Höchi shinbun, then the country’s most popular daily newspaper. Not long thereafter, in 1901, Motoko married Hani Yoshikazu, a fellow journalist. The couple soon had two daughters; launched the monthly Fujin no tomo (“Woman’s Friend”), whose paid circulation of three million copies made it one of the most widely read magazines in the Taishö period; and founded a college, the Jiyü Gakuen, which opened in 1922 in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Fujin no tomo featured public intellectuals who trumpeted the Hani’s vision of middle-class modernity. In issue after issue, writers called on Japan’s “new women” to cultivate their talents and abilities and have the courage to pursue careers in such professions as teaching and medicine. At the same time, articles explored issues important to modern wives and mothers, including women’s suffrage, household budgeting, and children’s education. In all, the influential monthly celebrated marriage and family and created the vision of a Taishö Supermom, an idealized woman capable of balancing the demands of a career with a home life. Motoko herself saw the publication as a means to awaken “new visions” and encourage the “genuinely free development of the individual.” Similarly, she often explained, the jiyü in her school’s name meant “freedom” and signified that modern women should be “free” to think for themselves and seek individual self-fulfillment. In her autobiography, Motoko held up herself and her husband as an example of the new middle-class couple. “Our home has been the center of our work,” she wrote, “and our work has been an extension of our home life; the two are completely merged without demarcations of any kind. I am truly grateful for this ideal union that is the very essence of both our work and marriage. Together, we have found our place in life.”
Motoko’s glowing rhetoric about blissful marriages notwithstanding, the middle class included a considerable number of single women. Indeed, more than 10 percent of the female respondents to a survey conducted in Tokyo in the early 1920s identified themselves as unmarried. Many young women, as might be imagined, preferred to hold a job for a few years between school and marriage, while more often than not widows and divorcées had to work to support themselves, and perhaps dependant children or parents as well. But the availability of socially respectable occupations also had made it possible for some women to opt out of marriage all together, yet lead economically stable and emotionally satisfying lives. “I am making no preparations for marriage,” wrote one female telephone switchboard operator to a 1922 survey question, “and I want to learn an occupation that will make me self-reliant.”
Whether single or married, the middle class occupied a physical as well as a psychological space in Japan during the 1910s and 1920s. In Tokyo, most of the new professionals worked downtown, in the Kasumigaseki, Marunouchi, and Ginza districts. Located near the expansive grounds of the Imperial Palace, the Kasumigaseki area rose to prominence in the early decades of the century when the government put up modern brick structures to house the Supreme Court, Metropolitan Police Department, and other bureaucratic agencies. Eye-catching, up-to-date office buildings also sprang up in the Marunouchi district, which was rapidly emerging as the center of big business and corporate Japan. Symbolic of that transformation was the construction of the world’s largest office complex, the Marunouchi Building, in 1923. Other middle-class men and women worked nearby in the Ginza, Japan’s best known center of banking and retailing."
"
Throughout the centuries, the cultural ethos of a particular social class has stamped its image indelibly on Japanese history. The tenth and eleventh centuries were the Age of the Aristocrat, when noble families in Kyoto amassed fortunes, took their leisure in palatial mansions, and ushered in a golden age of high culture by becoming both patrons and practitioners of tanka poetry, courtly gagaku music, and other patrician arts. Samurai turned the medieval period into the Age of the Warrior, adding martial arts and the virtues of bravery, courage, and loyalty to the lexicon of Japanese self-identity. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the merchants and artisans of Edo and other cities forged an Age of the Commoner, and playwrights for the Kabuki theater, wood-block print designers, and haiku poets created new art forms that both identified the values of the merchant class and made up what we now consider as primary hallmarks of traditional Japanese culture.
In similar fashion, the twentieth century belonged to the middle class. That particular social formation began to take shape at the turn of the century, and during the next two decades the nascent middle class quickly assumed a national importance by embracing modernity, introducing new models of family organization and fresh conceptions of gender roles, and asserting itself as cultural arbiters in regard to housing, fashion, recreation, and consumerism. As a consequence, even though its numbers remained small in the pre-World War II years, the new middle class significantly influenced how all Japanese thought about themselves and how they expressed their aspiration to be regarded as an integral member of the international community of modern, cosmopolitan societies. Not surprisingly, given its ambitions to cultural leadership, the middle class also became the prism through which noted foreign critics viewed Japan and judged its progress in achieving modernity.
By the end of the Meiji period (1868-1912), decades of rapid industrialization and energetic participation in a rapidly expanding global economy gave Japan one of the world’s strongest and most vital economies. Those same processes called into being a complex socio-economic structure that included a small but vibrant urban middle class. Although the term middle class never was defined precisely, scholars have tended to use occupation, income, and education as the standards by which to define a category of salaried professionals who could be distinguished from persons who farmed, engaged in manual labor, or ran small-scale commercial enterprises. In general, surveys conducted in the 1910s and 1920s routinely included male government officials, military officers, policemen, teachers, doctors, company executives, and bank employees as the core of the middle class. Another characteristic of economic modernity in Japan was that working women became increasingly conspicuous within the ranks of white-collar employees. By the early 1920s, a wide range of occupations were open to women who possessed a high school or college diploma, including those of teacher, bus conductress, telephone switchboard operator, typist, office worker, department store clerk, midwife, nurse, and even doctor after Japan’s first medical college for women received full accreditation midway through the Taishö period (1912-1926).
The overall size of the middle class and the proportion of working women expanded dramatically throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Although reliable statistics are scarce, scholars estimate that the middle-class population of Tokyo swelled from roughly 6 percent of the city’s work force in 1908 to nearly 22 percent in 1920, when approximately 8.5 percent of Japan’s total population of 56 million persons fell into the middle class. Concurrently, by 1922 approximately 3.5 million of Japan’s 27 million women worked outside the home, slightly more than one-quarter of them in middle-class occupations. Moreover, the trend lines arched upward. By 1926 there were 57,000 female nurses, in contrast to just 13,000 in 1911, and the number of female white-collar workers in government offices doubled between 1926 and the end of the decade.
The new middle-class carved out for itself a lifestyle that stood in visible contrast both to the traditions of the past and the preferences of other contemporary Japanese. For one thing, the middle class created new sorts of family units. Before the twentieth century, the so-called ie— a multigenerational household where grandparents, parents, and children lived under the same roof — had been held up as the ideal family configuration, and in the 1920s most farm families still hoped to have three or more generations share the same hearth. In Japan’s urban centers, however, the preponderance of middle-class families consisted simply of a conjugal couple and their offspring. More specifically, a great deal of social commentary pictured the new nuclear family as consisting of a working father and stay-at-home mom who cared for the growing children.
As more married women entered the workforce, however, some social critics began to valorize dual-career couples who succeeded in their chosen professions while deftly raising two or three well-adjusted children. One of the more prominent spokespersons for that new family orientation was Hani (née Matsuoka) Motoko. A member of the initial graduating class of the prestigious Tokyo First Higher Girls’ School in 1891, Motoko established another benchmark when she became Japan’s first woman reporter, writing for the Höchi shinbun, then the country’s most popular daily newspaper. Not long thereafter, in 1901, Motoko married Hani Yoshikazu, a fellow journalist. The couple soon had two daughters; launched the monthly Fujin no tomo (“Woman’s Friend”), whose paid circulation of three million copies made it one of the most widely read magazines in the Taishö period; and founded a college, the Jiyü Gakuen, which opened in 1922 in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Fujin no tomo featured public intellectuals who trumpeted the Hani’s vision of middle-class modernity. In issue after issue, writers called on Japan’s “new women” to cultivate their talents and abilities and have the courage to pursue careers in such professions as teaching and medicine. At the same time, articles explored issues important to modern wives and mothers, including women’s suffrage, household budgeting, and children’s education. In all, the influential monthly celebrated marriage and family and created the vision of a Taishö Supermom, an idealized woman capable of balancing the demands of a career with a home life. Motoko herself saw the publication as a means to awaken “new visions” and encourage the “genuinely free development of the individual.” Similarly, she often explained, the jiyü in her school’s name meant “freedom” and signified that modern women should be “free” to think for themselves and seek individual self-fulfillment. In her autobiography, Motoko held up herself and her husband as an example of the new middle-class couple. “Our home has been the center of our work,” she wrote, “and our work has been an extension of our home life; the two are completely merged without demarcations of any kind. I am truly grateful for this ideal union that is the very essence of both our work and marriage. Together, we have found our place in life.”
Motoko’s glowing rhetoric about blissful marriages notwithstanding, the middle class included a considerable number of single women. Indeed, more than 10 percent of the female respondents to a survey conducted in Tokyo in the early 1920s identified themselves as unmarried. Many young women, as might be imagined, preferred to hold a job for a few years between school and marriage, while more often than not widows and divorcées had to work to support themselves, and perhaps dependant children or parents as well. But the availability of socially respectable occupations also had made it possible for some women to opt out of marriage all together, yet lead economically stable and emotionally satisfying lives. “I am making no preparations for marriage,” wrote one female telephone switchboard operator to a 1922 survey question, “and I want to learn an occupation that will make me self-reliant.”
Whether single or married, the middle class occupied a physical as well as a psychological space in Japan during the 1910s and 1920s. In Tokyo, most of the new professionals worked downtown, in the Kasumigaseki, Marunouchi, and Ginza districts. Located near the expansive grounds of the Imperial Palace, the Kasumigaseki area rose to prominence in the early decades of the century when the government put up modern brick structures to house the Supreme Court, Metropolitan Police Department, and other bureaucratic agencies. Eye-catching, up-to-date office buildings also sprang up in the Marunouchi district, which was rapidly emerging as the center of big business and corporate Japan. Symbolic of that transformation was the construction of the world’s largest office complex, the Marunouchi Building, in 1923. Other middle-class men and women worked nearby in the Ginza, Japan’s best known center of banking and retailing."
The early days..
Between the 12th and 19th centuries, feudal Japan had an elaborate four-tiered class system. Unlike European feudal society, in which the peasants (or serfs) were at the bottom, the Japanese feudal class structure placed merchants on the lowest rung. Confucian ideals emphasized the importance of productivity, so farmers and fishermen had higher status than shop-keepers in Japan, and the samurai class had the most prestige of all.
Samurai
Feudal Japanese society had some famous ninjas and was dominated by the samurai warrior class. Although they made up only about 10 percent of the population, samurai and their daimyo lords wielded enormous power.
When a samurai passed, members of the lower classes were required to bow and show respect. If a farmer or artisan refused to bow, the samurai was legally entitled to chop off the recalcitrant person's head.
Samurai answered only to the daimyo for whom they worked. The daimyo, in turn, answered only to the shogun. There were about 260 daimyo by the end of the feudal era. Each daimyo controlled a broad area of land and had an army of samurai.
Farmers and Peasants
Just below the samurai on the social ladder were the farmers and peasants. According to Confucian ideals, farmers were superior to artisans and merchants because they produced the food that all the other classes depended upon. Although technically they were considered an honored class, farmers lived under a crushing tax burden for much of the feudal era.
During the reign of the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, farmers were not allowed to eat any of the rice they grew. They had to hand it all over to their daimyo and then wait for him to give some back as charity.
Artisans
Although artisans produced many beautiful and necessary goods, such as clothes, cooking utensils, and woodblock prints, they were considered less important than farmers. Even skilled samurai sword makers and boatwrights belonged to this third tier of society in feudal Japan.
The artisan class lived in its own section of the major cities, segregated from the samurai (who usually lived in the daimyos' castles) and from the lower merchant class.
Merchants
The bottom rung of feudal Japanese society was occupied by merchants, which included both traveling traders and shopkeepers. Merchants were often ostracized as "parasites" who profited from the labor of the more productive peasant and artisan classes. Not only did merchants live in a separate section of each city, but the higher classes were forbidden to mix with them except when conducting business.
Nonetheless, many merchant families were able to amass large fortunes. As their economic power grew, so did their political influence, and the restrictions against them weakened.
People Above the Four-Tiered System
Although feudal Japan is said to have had a four-tiered social system, some Japanese lived above the system, and some below.
At the very pinnacle of society was the shogun, the military ruler. He was generally the most powerful daimyo; when the Tokugawa family seized power in 1603, the shogunate became hereditary. The Tokugawa ruled for 15 generations until 1868.
Although the shoguns ran the show, they ruled in the name of the emperor. The emperor, his family, and the court nobility had little power, but they were at least nominally above the shogun, and also above the four-tiered system.
The emperor served as a figurehead for the shogun, and as the religious leader of Japan. Buddhist and Shinto priests and monks were above the four-tiered system as well.
People Below the Four-Tiered System
Some unfortunate people also fell below the lowest rung of the four-tiered ladder. These people included the ethnic minority Ainu, the descendants of slaves, and those employed in taboo industries. Buddhist and Shinto tradition condemned people who worked as butchers, executioners, and tanners as unclean. They were known as the eta.
Another class of social outcasts was the hinin, which included actors, wandering bards, and convicted criminals. Prostitutes and courtesans, including oiran, tayu, and geisha, also lived outside of the four-tiered system. They were ranked against one another by beauty and accomplishment.
Today, all of these people are collectively called burakumin. Officially, families descended from the burakumin are just ordinary people, but they can still face discrimination from other Japanese in hiring and marriage.
The Transformation of the Four-Tiered System
During the Tokugawa era, the samurai class lost power. It was an era of peace, so the samurai warriors' skills were not needed. Gradually they transformed into either bureaucrats or wandering troublemakers, as personality and luck dictated.
Even then, however, samurai were both allowed and required to carry the two swords that marked their social status. As the samurai lost importance, and the merchants gained wealth and power, taboos against the different classes mingling were broken with increasing regularity.
A new class title, chonin, came to describe upwardly mobile merchants and artisans. During the time of the "Floating World," when angst-ridden Japanese samurai and merchants gathered to enjoy the company of courtesans or watch kabuki plays, class mixing became the rule rather than the exception.
This was a time of ennui for Japanese society. Many people felt locked into a meaningless existence, in which all they did was seek out the pleasures of earthly entertainment as they waited to pass on to the next world.
An array of great poetry described the discontent of the samurai and the chonin. In haiku clubs, members chose pen names to obscure their social rank. That way, the classes could mingle freely.
The End of the Four-Tiered System
In 1868, the "Floating World" came to an end, as a number of radical shocks completely remade Japanese society. The emperor retook power in his own right, as part of the Meiji Restoration, and abolished the office of the shogun. The samurai class was dissolved, and a modern military force created in its stead.
This revolution came about in part because of increasing military and trade contacts with the outside world, (which, incidentally, served to raise the status of Japanese merchants all the more).
Prior to the 1850s, the Tokugawa shoguns had maintained an isolationist policy toward the nations of the western world; the only Europeans allowed in Japan were a tiny camp of Dutch traders who lived on an island in the bay. Any other foreigners, even those ship-wrecked on Japanese territory, were likely to be executed. Likewise, any Japanese citizen who went overseas was not permitted to return.
When Commodore Matthew Perry's U.S. Naval fleet steamed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and demanded that Japan open its borders to foreign trade, it sounded the death-knell of the shogunate and of the four-tiered social system.
Between the 12th and 19th centuries, feudal Japan had an elaborate four-tiered class system. Unlike European feudal society, in which the peasants (or serfs) were at the bottom, the Japanese feudal class structure placed merchants on the lowest rung. Confucian ideals emphasized the importance of productivity, so farmers and fishermen had higher status than shop-keepers in Japan, and the samurai class had the most prestige of all.
Samurai
Feudal Japanese society had some famous ninjas and was dominated by the samurai warrior class. Although they made up only about 10 percent of the population, samurai and their daimyo lords wielded enormous power.
When a samurai passed, members of the lower classes were required to bow and show respect. If a farmer or artisan refused to bow, the samurai was legally entitled to chop off the recalcitrant person's head.
Samurai answered only to the daimyo for whom they worked. The daimyo, in turn, answered only to the shogun. There were about 260 daimyo by the end of the feudal era. Each daimyo controlled a broad area of land and had an army of samurai.
Farmers and Peasants
Just below the samurai on the social ladder were the farmers and peasants. According to Confucian ideals, farmers were superior to artisans and merchants because they produced the food that all the other classes depended upon. Although technically they were considered an honored class, farmers lived under a crushing tax burden for much of the feudal era.
During the reign of the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, farmers were not allowed to eat any of the rice they grew. They had to hand it all over to their daimyo and then wait for him to give some back as charity.
Artisans
Although artisans produced many beautiful and necessary goods, such as clothes, cooking utensils, and woodblock prints, they were considered less important than farmers. Even skilled samurai sword makers and boatwrights belonged to this third tier of society in feudal Japan.
The artisan class lived in its own section of the major cities, segregated from the samurai (who usually lived in the daimyos' castles) and from the lower merchant class.
Merchants
The bottom rung of feudal Japanese society was occupied by merchants, which included both traveling traders and shopkeepers. Merchants were often ostracized as "parasites" who profited from the labor of the more productive peasant and artisan classes. Not only did merchants live in a separate section of each city, but the higher classes were forbidden to mix with them except when conducting business.
Nonetheless, many merchant families were able to amass large fortunes. As their economic power grew, so did their political influence, and the restrictions against them weakened.
People Above the Four-Tiered System
Although feudal Japan is said to have had a four-tiered social system, some Japanese lived above the system, and some below.
At the very pinnacle of society was the shogun, the military ruler. He was generally the most powerful daimyo; when the Tokugawa family seized power in 1603, the shogunate became hereditary. The Tokugawa ruled for 15 generations until 1868.
Although the shoguns ran the show, they ruled in the name of the emperor. The emperor, his family, and the court nobility had little power, but they were at least nominally above the shogun, and also above the four-tiered system.
The emperor served as a figurehead for the shogun, and as the religious leader of Japan. Buddhist and Shinto priests and monks were above the four-tiered system as well.
People Below the Four-Tiered System
Some unfortunate people also fell below the lowest rung of the four-tiered ladder. These people included the ethnic minority Ainu, the descendants of slaves, and those employed in taboo industries. Buddhist and Shinto tradition condemned people who worked as butchers, executioners, and tanners as unclean. They were known as the eta.
Another class of social outcasts was the hinin, which included actors, wandering bards, and convicted criminals. Prostitutes and courtesans, including oiran, tayu, and geisha, also lived outside of the four-tiered system. They were ranked against one another by beauty and accomplishment.
Today, all of these people are collectively called burakumin. Officially, families descended from the burakumin are just ordinary people, but they can still face discrimination from other Japanese in hiring and marriage.
The Transformation of the Four-Tiered System
During the Tokugawa era, the samurai class lost power. It was an era of peace, so the samurai warriors' skills were not needed. Gradually they transformed into either bureaucrats or wandering troublemakers, as personality and luck dictated.
Even then, however, samurai were both allowed and required to carry the two swords that marked their social status. As the samurai lost importance, and the merchants gained wealth and power, taboos against the different classes mingling were broken with increasing regularity.
A new class title, chonin, came to describe upwardly mobile merchants and artisans. During the time of the "Floating World," when angst-ridden Japanese samurai and merchants gathered to enjoy the company of courtesans or watch kabuki plays, class mixing became the rule rather than the exception.
This was a time of ennui for Japanese society. Many people felt locked into a meaningless existence, in which all they did was seek out the pleasures of earthly entertainment as they waited to pass on to the next world.
An array of great poetry described the discontent of the samurai and the chonin. In haiku clubs, members chose pen names to obscure their social rank. That way, the classes could mingle freely.
The End of the Four-Tiered System
In 1868, the "Floating World" came to an end, as a number of radical shocks completely remade Japanese society. The emperor retook power in his own right, as part of the Meiji Restoration, and abolished the office of the shogun. The samurai class was dissolved, and a modern military force created in its stead.
This revolution came about in part because of increasing military and trade contacts with the outside world, (which, incidentally, served to raise the status of Japanese merchants all the more).
Prior to the 1850s, the Tokugawa shoguns had maintained an isolationist policy toward the nations of the western world; the only Europeans allowed in Japan were a tiny camp of Dutch traders who lived on an island in the bay. Any other foreigners, even those ship-wrecked on Japanese territory, were likely to be executed. Likewise, any Japanese citizen who went overseas was not permitted to return.
When Commodore Matthew Perry's U.S. Naval fleet steamed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and demanded that Japan open its borders to foreign trade, it sounded the death-knell of the shogunate and of the four-tiered social system.