Choshu Expeditions
Punitive expeditions were launched by the Tokugawa shogunate against the domain of Choshu (located in present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture) in 1864 and 1865. The first was a limited success, the second a bitter failure—and a major factor in the fall of the shogunate in the Meiji Restoration of 1867–1868.
Choshu, a domain long hostile to the Tokugawa government, initially drew the ire of the shogunate in the early 1860s when pro-imperial reformers took control of the domain's capital, Kyoto. In 1863 troops from the domains of Satsuma and Aizu carried out a coup d'état at the court, driving Choshu forces out of the city. Choshu troops marched on Kyoto the following year and were roundly defeated. Spurred to action, the shogunate, by November 1864, had amassed a punitive force of 150,000 samurai from several domains around Choshu's borders. After scattered fighting, Choshu agreed to a limited surrender the following January. Conservative Choshu power holders ordered the execution of three "house elders" and the dissolution of the mixed samurai/peasant rifle troops that had attacked Kyoto. But the radical leaders of the mixed units refused to disband and instead fought the domain government in the Choshu Civil War of 1865. The war brought to power a reformist government committed to the shogunate's overthrow. It was staffed by many lower-ranking samurai who would play prominent roles in national government after 1868, such as Ito Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomo.
In 1865 Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi led a second expedition to topple the new Choshu government but found circumstances quite different from those of two years earlier. Several domains that had participated in the first expedition refused to contribute troops to the second, and Choshu completed a secret alliance with the powerful Satsuma domain before the shogunate forces arrived to fight. Buoyed by this alliance, as well as the purchase of some 10,000 Western rifles (some from the recently ended American Civil War), the outnumbered Choshu forces easily defeated the shogun's troops. The defeat made it clear that the Tokugawa family's hegemony was over. In 1867–1868 Choshu and Satsuma installed the boy emperor Mutsuhito as the head of a new national government in what is called the Meiji Restoration.
Further Reading
Craig, Albert M. (1961) Choshu in the Meiji Restoration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Huber, Thomas M. (1981) The Revolutionary Origins of Modern Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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