Disorder and the Japanese Revolution, 1871–1877

Abstract

This dissertation examines how intellectual disorder produced social and political disorder in 1870s Japan. The simultaneous collapse of the early modern Japanese diplomatic and social systems created unprecedented freedom to know globally, to be individually, and to depart from the past. This freedom, enabled by a revolution into globality, engendered a crisis of justice: it deranged the ideational relationships between the domestic and the foreign; among individual, state, and community; and between past and present. Intellectual contest over who determined these relationships and how people should understand them continually precipitated into armed violence as men fought to realize or combat particular configurations of enlightenment and counter-enlightenment thought. The ideational and militant contest over how to generate equilibrium between freedom and order in a global world was the Japanese revolution. The dissertation takes as evidence the intellectual dimensions of major developments in the political, social, and diplomatic history of early Meiji Japan: the Iwakura Embassy of 1871 and the political instability of the caretaker government it left behind (chapter 1); the diplomatic crises of 1873 (chapter 2); the rise of the Movement for Freedom and Civil Rights (chapter 3); the Saga Rebellion of 1874 (chapter 4); the Shinpūren Rebellion of 1876 (chapter 5); and the civil war of 1877 (chapter 6).