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The end of the shogunate in Japan deserved a better telling than Tom Cruise as white savior for a lost cause in The Last Samurai. Watching that movie, I kind of wanted them to lose. And lose they did, because they brought knives to a gunfight. They were really big and very sharp knives, but the guys fighting for the Meiji Empire had rapid-firing rifles, and some putz with a few weeks’ training can kill the shit out of almost any dude who spent his life studying the blade, so long as he keeps his distance.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 3, 1868--
In 1600, after winning the Battle of Sekigahara, the Tokugawa Shogunate came to rule Japan by ending the period of civil wars that had lasted over a century. One of the first things they did was kick out all those dirty foreigners, especially the Christians trying to convert their population. Thus began a period of over two centuries of peace, prosperity, and isolation from western influences. To this day, fewer than 2% of Japan’s population isn’t native Japanese. I’ve been there and they’re very polite, but the country is the opposite of a melting pot.
By the mid 19th century, the shogunate was in decline, and in 1853 the American Navy showed up to negotiate a treaty to open the country to trade. The Japanese took one look at how technologically advanced these foreign ships were and went oh fuck we need to get some of that. And so, there was a revolution to overthrow the isolationist factions of the shogunate and restore imperial rule in Japan and open the country to foreign technology so it wouldn’t be colonized by countries with far superior weaponry.
This was done in the name of Emperor Meiji, who was only 15 years old at the time, and it became known as the Meiji Restoration. The emperor made an official acknowledgement of his line’s return to power on January 3, 1868, but the resistant factions of the shogunate, while weakened, hadn’t given up just yet. War followed within a few weeks. But with foreign assistance and new weapons, the imperial forces prevailed within 18 months. Those fighting on the side of preserving the shogunate did have guns, but Emperor Meiji’s forces had better guns.
As for the “sword to a gunfight” stuff, that happened during the Satsuma Rebellion almost a decade later. Disaffected samurai, who had their value to society made obsolete after the modernization of Japan’s military, decided to go out in suicidal style in September 1877 with a sword-wielding charge against the modern Imperial Army. It went about as well as you might expect, and the samurai class effectively came to an end.
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