The Emergence of the ‘Political Culture of Confucian Literati ’ in 19th-Century Japan: Rethinking the Meiji Restoration in the East Asian Context

Abstract | The history of the Meiji Restoration has been studied primarily from a Eurocentric and modernist perspective that stresses the ‘Western impact. ’ Yet a closer inspection of Japan during the early and mid-19th century illuminates a different and significant trend, namely the growing influence of Confucianism. This trend suggests a necessity to reconsider the political history of Bakumatsu (late Tokugawa Shogunate) Japan and the Meiji Restoration. From the late 18th century to the early 19th century, Japanese society witnessed the rapid increase of schools, study groups, and private academies that heightened the fever for Confucian education among samurai. Lower-and middle-class samurai, who had hardly been involved with politics, became interested and participated in it. I call this phenomenon as samurai’s ‘assumption of the role of Confucian literati (shika) ’ in the sense that ordinary samurai became similar to the Confucian literati (shidafu) of China and Chosŏn. Samurai’s political participation coincided with the proliferation of the practice of writing appeal letters to the ruler and the growth of academic networks and factions. These phenomena were characteristics of what I conceptualized as the ‘political culture of Confucian literati (shitaifuteki seij