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The Second Transition: Early to Mid-Meiji in Kanagawa Prefecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Neil L. Waters
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Extract

It is no easy matter for a government seeking to foster rapid economic and social changes to win acceptance of its programs. Too much control by the center assures local resistance; too much dispersal of authority empowers it. The dilemma is a familiar one today, but it is not, of course, a new one. The leaders of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan found it to be the knottiest problem in their efforts to construct a modern state. They needed to exert sufficient central control of local government to assure that their initiatives could be enacted in Japan's villages and that taxes would flow to the center in a predictable and orderly manner. But these goals required the central government to permit a measure of autonomy—to rely on pre-Meiji inter- and intravillage organizations originally devised to guard and insulate the village from the demands of higher authority. Their efforts to resolve the dilemma quickly took on a note of desperation: in the first twenty years of the Meiji era, the government radically altered the system of local administration four times.

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , May 1990 , pp. 305 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1990

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