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191 Conclusion The Tokugawa kubō suffered a great loss of face with Commodore Perry’s arrival and the subsequent interactions with Western powers. The “august glory” of the Tokugawa clan and their Great Peace crumbled midcentury when their inability to persuade foreigners to play prescribed roles became publicly evident.1 The old regime soon collapsed, but it initially broke apart along feudal lines of power. All the daimyo, who for centuries had performed rites of obedience to the Tokugawa in omote interaction, proved in the event to make their own choice as to whether to be an ally or an enemy of the Tokugawa . When civil war arrived, even those daimyo who continued to profess obedience to the Tokugawa included many who hedged their bets by indefinitely delaying troops on such acceptable grounds as “the lord’s illness.”2 In the end a rebel/imperial army, led and primarily staffed by members of the four domains of Chōshū, Satsuma, Tosa, and Hizen, proceeded eastward under an imperial banner. They occupied Edo and then marched northward to defeat in battle the remaining Tokugawa forces and its allied daimyo. In this conclusion we will briefly consider, with particular reference to Tosa domain, the process by which the Meiji revolution destroyed the institutions and ideals of feudal politics and political spaces that have been described in this book. The first few years after the Tokugawa fall saw feudal arrangements continue , with the emperor as nominal head of the new government. A debate ensued over the relative merits of a hōken feudal order and an imperial bureaucratic order of counties and prefectures.3 This ambivalence was already built into the new government because most of the lands confiscated from the conclusion 192 Tokugawa and its allied daimyo were put under direct imperial control and reclassified as prefectures (ken) and urban prefectures (fu) rather than as territories (ryō). Daimyo were allowed to continue to be rulers of their domains, but the oft-used phrase “the unity of fu, ken, and han” reflected the aspiration of the new leaders for unity. On the side of unity, the renaming of daimyo houses and their domains as han in the spring of 1868 was accompanied by an order limiting their autonomy. Daimyo were told to “give up all laws that disturbed the imperial equanimity, even if those laws had stood since the beginning if the Tokugawa era,” because “the holy enterprise of renewing Japan will be made manifest only if all the han and the imperial court put their full efforts into one unified path.”4 The domains began various reforms under the auspices of this order, but they separately chose which of their laws to actually alter. The rules of interaction had changed greatly in the world exterior to the domain, but the inner operations of domains such as Tosa continued to have their own logic and vocabulary that contradicted the outside order from the very start: When the lord of Tosa domain conveyed the new government’s order to his chief retainers, he referred to the domain as a kuni rather than a han, and his government ignored many new imperial policies.5 For example, in 1869 the domain prohibited the circulation of imperial government currency within Tosa so as to force the circulation of domain-issued currency. This must have been a common problem, because the imperial government issued a reprimand to all domains concerning the disregard of its previous orders: “We hear that quite a number of han are still not allowing the circulation of imperial currency. This is outrageous ! The currency is to circulate freely throughout the imperial country.” Tosa officials were in no rush to reply to this reminder, and only in the following year did they permit circulation of imperial currency.6 Such continuation of the political spatial consciousness of the Edo period had to be destroyed before a unified imperial nation could be created. Administratively, 1868 was a mere coup d’etat, placing the emperor in the position of the Tokugawa kubō as nominal head of a continuing Japanese feudal government. Many domain retainers became leaders in the new government, however, and engineered the destruction of the feudal. Key players such as Kido Kōin and Ito Hirobumi from Hagi domain, Ōkubo Toshimichi and Mori Arinori from Kagoshima domain, Sasaki Takayuki and Itagaki Taisuke from Tosa domain , and many others very early on advanced various proposals for the return of domains to the emperor and their reconstitution as...

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