Government of Meiji Japan

The Government of Meiji Japan was the government that was formed by politicians of the Satsuma Domain and Chōshū Domain in the 1860s. The Meiji government was the early government of the Empire of Japan. Politicians of the Meiji government were known as the Meiji oligarchy, who overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate. After the Meiji Restoration, the leaders of the samurai who overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate had no clear agenda or pre-developed plan on how to run Japan. They did have a number of things in common; according to Andrew Gordon, “It was precisely their intermediate status and their insecure salaried position, coupled with their sense of frustrated ambition and entitlement to rule, that account for the revolutionary energy of the Meiji insurgents and their far-reaching program of reform”. most were in their mid-40s, and most were from the four tozama domains of western Japan (Chōshū, Satsuma, Tosa and Hizen). Although from lower-ranked samurai families, they had risen to military leadership roles in their respective domains, and came from a Confucian-based educational background which stressed loyalty and service to society. Finally, most either had first-hand experience in travel overseas, or second-hand experience through contacts with foreign advisors in Japan. As a result, they knew of the military superiority of the western nations and of the need for Japan to unify, and to strengthen itself to avoid the colonial fate of its neighbors on the Asian continent. However, immediately after the resignation of Tokugawa Yoshinobu in 1867, with no official centralized government, the country was a collection of largely semi-independent daimyōs controlling feudal domains, held together by the military strength of the Satchō Alliance, and by the prestige of the Imperial Court in Kyoto. In early March 1868, with the outcome of the Boshin War still uncertain, the new Meiji government summoned delegates from all of the domains to Kyoto to establish a provisional consultative national assembly.