THE QUESTION “WHAT WAS Meiji?” can be answered, at the superficial level, in three statements. First, Meiji was the reign name of Mutsuhito, the teenager who came to Japan's throne in 1867. Second, it was the label applied to an 1868 coup – the Meiji Restoration – in which the Tokugawa family was overthrown after 268 years in power. Third, it connotes the era (1868–1912) over which Meiji reigned, a time that began with leaders saying “everywhere there is confusion” and ended with a Beijing newspaper praising the emperor as a “hero of a generation” who had changed the Japanese “dragonfly” into a “dragon or tiger,” At the core of each of these statements was a single characteristic, transformation, meaning that “Meiji” may be characterized quite simply and accurately as the era, presided over by the Emperor Meiji, when Japan changed so rapidly that, in the words of the expatriate Basil Hall Chamberlain, “to have lived through the transition stage of modern Japan makes a man feel preternaturally old.”

None of these characterizations is, however, as simple as it sounds. Meiji the Man was simultaneously phlegmatic and forceful, assertive and passive. Meiji the “Restoration” may have been a simple coup d’etat or it may have been the start of a revolution; historians still have not reached agreement. And while everyone agrees that Meiji the Era involved dramatic change, the nature and meaning of that change varied from day to day and place to place. Sometimes it brought progress; sometimes its effects were cruel; sometimes it made life better, sometimes worse; sometimes the path tended toward democracy, often toward autocracy. If the aim of this essay is to seek as clear an understanding of the nature of Meiji as possible, the best approach may be to examine the ways it affected four major actors of the late nineteenth century world: the domestic elites, for whom everything was about national power; the Western imperialists, for whom Meiji Japan posed unprecedented challenges; the nations of Asia, who found both inspiration and threat in the Meiji evolution; and Japanese commoners – a massive group usually overlooked by scholars – for whom the era was all about jobs, income, and a changing sense of self.