Japan modern history.docVIP

Japans Modern History: An Outline of the Period Modern Japanese history can be divided into four periods: 1600-1868: The period of the Tokugawa sh?guns; feudal political order with economic and social change occurring in a gradual manner. This period saw growing urbanization, the spread of popular education and the rise of the merchant class. 1868-1890:The early Meiji period; rapid modernization and dramatic change of political, social, and economic institutions; meeting the challenge of the West by following its model. 1890-1945: Imperial Japan; constitutional policy with the emperor as reigning monarch; industrialization, urbanization, and an increasingly mobile society; drive for international status and world power, including imperialism in Asia and finally war with the United States. 1945-present: Contemporary Japan; democratic reform under Allied occupation; stable political democracy, high economic growth in the sixties and seventies followed by political instability and recession in the early nineties. Background to the Meiji Restoration: By the middle of the nineteenth century, Japans ruling Shogunate was a weak, feudal order, unable to control all its own domains, much less defend the nation against a threat from the Western powers. This threat materialized in 1853 with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and a squadron of the U.S. Navy demanding that Japan open commerce with the West. The result was a series of unequal treaties in which Japan was forced to concede special economic and legal privileges to the Western powers. Beside Japan lay China--weak and humiliated, an example of what could befall a great Asian nation unable to defend itself against Western imperialism. Determined that Japan should not share Chinas fate, and convinced that modernization depended on abolishing the feudal order, a group of middle-ranking samurai overthrew the military government of the Sh?gun in 1868 and set Japan peaceably on a course of radical modernization perhaps