Fifteen Years From Closed Country to Modern State

The Ships Commodore Perry's squadron arrived in 1853 with a demand that Japan open to trade, and the demand was backed by steam warships against which the country had no answer. The shogunate, unable to refuse and unable to defend, signed treaties that were widely regarded as humiliating — extraterritoriality for foreigners, tariffs Japan could not set.

The humiliation is the engine of everything that follows. A government that cannot protect the country from foreigners forfeits the argument for its own existence, and the slogan that spread — revere the emperor, expel the barbarians — was aimed as much at the shogunate as at the foreigners.

The Violent Middle The Bakumatsu years were genuinely dangerous. Rōnin and radical loyalists assassinated officials and attacked foreigners. Kyoto, where the emperor was, filled with armed factions, and the shogunate's police unit, the Shinsengumi, became famous and infamous fighting them in the streets.

The most consequential development was a change of position among the anti-shogunate domains. Satsuma in the far south and Chōshū in the far west both attempted to expel foreigners by force, were shelled by Western fleets, and concluded from the experience that expulsion was impossible and modernisation was the only route to independence. They then did something more surprising: they allied with each other, having been enemies, and moved to bring down the shogunate in order to modernise faster.

The Restoration The last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, resigned in 1867, in what was arguably an attempt to preserve influence under a new arrangement. It did not work; the Satsuma-Chōshū alliance moved to exclude the Tokugawa entirely, and the Boshin War followed.

The fighting was one-sided in the main but not brief. The final act took place at Goryōkaku in Hakodate — a star-shaped fort built on European models, one of the odder pieces of architecture in Japan — where a group of shogunal loyalists declared a short-lived republic and held out until 1869 before being defeated.

Standing at Goryōkaku today, with the fort's geometry visible from a tower above, is the clearest possible image of the period: a European fortification design, built by a Japanese government trying to catch up, defended by men fighting for a system that had already lost.

The Samurai Were Abolished by Their Own Side The most striking outcome is that the samurai class was dismantled by a government the samurai had installed. Within a few years of the restoration, stipends were converted and then ended, wearing swords in public was banned, and the class distinctions of the Tokugawa order were abolished.

The men who did this were themselves samurai, and they had concluded that a hereditary warrior class was incompatible with a modern conscript army and an industrial economy. The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, led by one of the restoration's own architects on behalf of disaffected samurai, was crushed by that conscript army — which settled the argument in the most direct way available.

Where to Stand Nijō Castle in Kyoto is where the shogunate began and ended: Ieyasu's residence in the capital, and the hall where Yoshinobu announced the return of power to the emperor. The nightingale floors that squeak underfoot were a security measure, and they still work.

Goryōkaku in Hakodate is the other bookend. And Shimoda on the Izu peninsula, where the first American consulate was established, has a small walking route through the town that is a pleasant and underused way to stand at the point where the closed country ended.