Rural Japan and the Outside World in Meiji Japan

Abstract

As a historian of nineteenth century Japan tny object in this essay is to concentrate on the issue of social change in the late Tokugawa and early Mciji periods and to relate such social change to the broader issues of changing Japanese perceptions of the outside world. I must begin with the caveat that a number of the issues I attempt to address in this essay remain to be explored further and subjected to the kind of detailed historical scrutiny that historians normally require to confirm their hypotheses. What follows is therefore something of a speculative essay that may well raise as many questions as it answers. The arguments put forth represent my own current effort to wrestle with the broader question of what happened in the Meiji transformation.