Why was the samurai class abolished?
When the last samurai regime, the Tokugawa shogunate, was toppled in 1868, the newly formed Meiji government that replaced it faced an expensive and entrenched human resource problem. Over the previous 265 years, samurai (the dominant warrior class) had monopolised all military and bureaucratic positions in the roughly 270 or so semi-autonomous domains ruled by hereditary warlords, and in the shogun’s capital, Edo (Tokyo). The Meiji oligarchs, most of them young samurai, decided that the system of hereditary warrior rule was holding Japan back, and set out to create a centralised government modelled on western examples. The government thus abolished the domains, created prefectures run by civilian governors, and took on the costs of paying the newly unemployed samurai. Between one-third and nearly half of the government’s income was spent on paying samurai salaries. During the first half of the 1870s, those salaries were turned into taxed stipends and then into public bonds. In those years, the oligarchs also opened government service to commoners – albeit elite ones – and created a conscript military. Meanwhile, they eliminated samurai privileges that were deemed too backwards, such as having a shaved head with a topknot, and carrying swords in public. Most samurai did not resist these changes – some were even relieved to be free to pursue any occupation they desired – but a violent minority rebelled. Those insurrections culminated in the so-called “rebellion of the south-west” in 1877, the largest, and last, showdown between the Meiji government and ex-samurai – a story loosely retold in the 2003 film The Last Samurai.
Michael Wert, associate professor of east Asian history at Marquette University, and author of Samurai: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021)