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Boshin War Soma Xlv Crisis Committee Background Guide BOSHIN WAR SOMA XLV CRISIS COMMITTEE BACKGROUND GUIDE Unto the children, Born in these progressive years At which we wonder, First of all the tales of old, Full in glory, should be told. - Emperor Meiji, Tanka ​ SOMA XLV Boshin War Crisis Committee Background Guide⎟ 2 INTRODUCTION Welcome to the Southern Ontario Model United Nations Assembly’s Boshin War Historical Crisis. This war marked the resurgence of imperial power against the vestige of Tokugawa feudalism. At stake beyond the political and military struggle are the more far-reaching questions of modernisation, social reform, and industrialisation. We hope you are as excited for this year’s crisis as we are. For those of you unfamiliar with Crisis, this committee differs significantly from the other Model UN committees. Instead of representing countries, you represent people, each with your own individual agenda. We try to simulate every aspect of a historical conflict from the economics and politics to religion and military conquest. You will each play the role of someone who lived and held power during the early Meiji Restoration era, and will have a chance to reshape history. As your characters, you will manage taxes and trade, lead armies on campaigns and on the field of battle, and respond to envoys from foreign imperial powers who will have their own interests in Japan. Above all, you will be trying to win the war while advancing your own standing as much as possible. This background guide is meant to provide a general overview of the war and its causes. It is meant to provide a starting point for your position paper research; however in order for your experience to be as fulfilling as it can be, it is necessary that you devote time and effort into conducting your own independent research for this Crisis. It is also highly recommended that you review the political structures of the Edo Period as well as the military technology and strategies in use at the time. We recommend that this research be used in your position papers. Lastly, it is recommended that all delegates read the entire background guide, and especially that they review the sections pertaining to Committee Structure and Procedure. We wish you the best of luck, Helen Kwong Alec Sampaleanu Ernest Li Crisis Director Crisis Director Crisis Head SOMA XLV Boshin War Crisis Committee Background Guide⎟ 3 POLITICAL CONTEXT For over two and a half centuries, fifteen successive members of the Tokugawa clan have ruled Japan as Shogun and de facto rulers, exercising political orders in place of a puppet emperor. ​ The Edo Period, as this period is named, centred around the bakufu government located in the capital Edo, and lasted approximately from 1600 when Tokugawa Ieyasu seized power from the emperor and named himself Shogun three years later, to 1868 when Emperor Meiji proclaimed in the Charter Oath his intention to have personal rule. Each side had its supporters and detractors; and in the aftermath of the so-called Meiji Restoration, shogunal forces broke out in open and hostile opposition against the reformed Imperial Court, leading to beginning of this year’s crisis, the Boshin War. TOKUGAWA DECLINE By the mid-nineteenth century, Tokugawa Japan was in rapid decline. Foreign influence pervaded domestic affairs, while military and economic disasters severely discredited the prestige and prowess of the bakufu. Social fragmentation by the centralisation of power in the shogunate further impaired Japan, as tensions rose between a reactionary bakufu that was reluctant to relinquish its control, a class of commoners and peasants that were displeased with drought and negligence, and a foreign presence that was intent on pressuring the shogunate to Westernise. For centuries, Tokugawa policy focussed on restricting samurai power and preventing mutiny or political insurrection. The most well-known and perhaps the most effective of these was the system of sankin-kōtai (‘alternate attendance’), which forced the samurai to spend alternate years ​ in Edo under the shogun and severed ties between lord and his feudal lands, thereby undermining the ability of the samurai and daimyo to keep watch over a growing peasant class. Dire consequences for the nineteenth century shogunate followed. Economic growth coupled with the absence of a strong bureaucratic class in the peripheries became an ideal condition for the rise of a wealthy and powerful middle class, descended from peasant roots.1 The ambitious provincial élite was soon joined by young nobles who had Western education; in the years before the Restoration, the shogunate was plagued with large and powerful prefectures rising in revolt against the bakufu. Two remedial campaigns sent to Chōshū in 1866 were successful in controlling the volatile crowd, and only served to worsen their ferment and expose weaknesses in the bakufu.2 Japan under the Tokugawas was thus extremely fragile, especially throughout the 1860s as half-hearted attempts at reform did little to offer solutions for the underlying problems. Peasant unrests in the provinces were becoming more numerous and more frequent, so much that the urgency of reforming various systems—taxation, in particular—became a point of great controversy in the court. The bakufu suffered in the face of near bankruptcy and the shogun’s 1 W. G. Beaseley, Meiji Restoration, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 24 ​ ​ 2 C. Totman, The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu 1862-1868, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980), 317. ​ ​ SOMA XLV Boshin War Crisis Committee Background Guide⎟ 4 personal power over political affairs continued to erode. This was, nonetheless, an opportunity for the emperor to regain personal authority. Emperor Kōmei’s open disapproval of Tokugawa Iemochi’s submission to foreign pressure added further fervour to the anti-shogunate (tōbaku) movement. Their conflict reached an eventual truce after the defeat to rebel forces in Chōsū in 1866, but by this point the events of recent year had already significantly undermined the traditional hierarchy from Tokugawa Japan’s greatest years: the shogunate was clearly unable to resist a strongly-armed resistance, and the imperial court was prepared to regenerate. The deaths in 1866 were followed by a last set of reforms as the bakufu introduced the Keiō Reforms, intended to Westernise aspects of economy, trade, and society. These developments fuelled, however, the conviction of rebels in Chōshū and subsequently Satsuma that the shogunate was acting out of selfish self-preservation, and the reforms were short-lived once the Boshin War began. THE MEIJI GOVERNMENT From its inception, the Meiji government was intended to serve as a departure from the feudalism that persisted throughout Japanese history. Devising a new form of government was, however, a point of consternation. It was a well-known fact by 1868 among intellectuals, many of whom had a Western education, that the Court nobles would be incompetent members of a new bureaucracy, and that the Emperor, after centuries of rule under the guise of greatness, was alienated by an domain that was increasingly difficult to control.3 Thus the Meiji government’s primary goal was to re-establish the prerogative of the emperor and correct abuses that had hitherto been ignored; the emperor needed a strong public presence. In December of 1868, this was formalised into a system of three levels of local administration: cities, prefectures, and domains.4 Nonetheless, in reality, the Meiji political system was more similar than different in character to the Tokugawa feudal state, only that the Emperor was the new Shogun. Moreover, the new political regime did not provide immediate relief from peasant rebellion. Following the trend of growing social unrest from the last Tokugawa years, records suggest that there were 343 incidents of peasant protest between 1868 and 1872 , with 1869 yielding a record number of 110.5 Conditions became more peaceful in 1870 with the revival of agriculture and a successful harvest, though this little to do with policy enacted by the new government.6 Nor did the Meiji Restoration considerably improve on opportunities for great political participation among the peasant class. In many instances, the replacement of feudal lords as intermediate powers with a centralised bureaucracy limited the efficacy of traditional protest methods.7 Thus, although the Meiji Restoration supposedly ended the state of neglect left 3 Beaseley, Meiji Restoration, 326. ​ ​ 4 Ibid., 328. 5 S. Vlastos, “Opposition movements in early Meiji,” in Cambridge History of Japan, edited by M. B. Jansen, ​ ​ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 368. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 372. SOMA XLV Boshin War Crisis Committee Background Guide⎟ 5 by the Tokugawa period, it did so in such a way that change was largely restricted to the upper political class of society. Moreover, even if the agricultural landscape became more peaceful following 1870, the social atmosphere did not. The promulgation of the Conscription Act in January 1873 provoked caused hostility from both samurai and peasant classes: the former, because it displaced them from their traditional role as an élite militia; and the latter, because it displaced them from their land and imposed a further economic burden.8 Furthermore, the idea of a military draft conflicted with the well-established Tokugawa principle of conservatism and rigid social hierarchy. In any case, the Meiji government was hesitant to disturb the existing order; in taxation, raising funds, and wider reform.
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