Mark Ravina - The Meiji Restoration and the Long Nineteenth Century

History Session 6

What did the Meiji Restoration do in terms of the state?

Dissolved the hereditary power of regional lords to create a powerful, centralized state

What did the new, compulsory public education for children of all classes emphasize?

Vernacular literacy as part of a broad shift away from classical education

What were the rights that the new government guaranteed (in writing)?

Freedom of speechElected national legislatureReform that recognized the voices of commoners at the highest levels of government

What year did the Meiji Restoration occur?

1868

What nation does Ravina draw similarities to and in what year?

Hungary (Budapest) 1848

What did Japan in 1868 and Hungary in 1848 have in common?

The discourses of nationalism and nation-states which made a nationalist revolution seem natural, logical, and inevitable

Given "much 19th century political discourse assumed that all civilized people needed their own nation-states in order to celebrate and express their distinct cultures," what is Nationalism?

A universalist doctrine of extreme particularism

What is Mitani Hiroshi's criticism of historians' analysis of the Restoration?

Historians are quick to describe the Restoration as a nationalist revolution due to foreign influence or as a response to foreign pressure without interrogating what nationalism is

What does Benedict Anderson mean by "modular" nationalism?

The nationalist model can be transplanted to a variety of social terrains to merge with a wide variety of political and ideological constellations

What is Ravina's criticism of Anderson's "module" idea?

That it fails to capture the tension between similarity and difference inherent in nationalist thought

How do national currencies, particularly the uniqueness of each, reflect Ravina's idea of a nationalist "template" (rather than Anderson's "module")?

Each features a national hero or celebrated event in national history, and it varies from nation to nation depending on their own historical context

What years did nation states begin to assert the exclusive right to issue paper money?

Mid 1800s to the early 1900s

What event influenced the United States to adopt new nationalist iconography (on bills for example)?

The Civil War (1861-65)

According to Ravina, what was the ultimate goal of the national iconography of US currency after the Civil War?

To create a post-bellum sense of national unity

When the Meiji government released a new series of national bank notes, what year was it and why?

1873, designed to celebrate the glories of the Japanese past

What Italian event led to the nationalization of currency?

The Risorgimento

What year was the Paris International Monetary Conference?

1867

What was the explicit goal of meetings of new international organizations and agreements regarding currency?

Establishing international norms for currencies, such as decimalization

What strange aspect of the Meiji Restoration can be explained by the transnational aspect of nationalism?

The fact that many Restoration leaders embraced both fierce xenophobia and passionate cosmopolitanism

Who or what inspired Yoshida Shōin's desire to "repel the barbarian?"

The heroes of the ancient Song dynasty and Napoleon

True or false: well into the Meiji era, Japanese readers were not very familiar with European history

True

What did Koseki San'ei's Naporeon den focus on, and what did it not, according to Mark Ravina?

Rather than Jacobinism, Bonapartism, or the basics of republican thought, Koseki focused on national self-determination

What did Paul Cohen say about Chinese and Japanese society?

"China and Japan were "traditional" societies "stuck in time," requiring the "impact of a "dynamic and modern West" to awake from their torpor"