ment had broken down, but because it had lost the confidence of the nation. Even the supporters of Edo had been persuaded by historians and Shinto propagandists to admit the right of the emperor to rule.
The end of the Edo regime came in a surprising way. A son of the Tokugawa Lord of Mito became the new Shogun in 1867, and, as befitted a scion of the family that had championed Japanese historical studies for the past two centuries, he voluntarily surrendered the actual rule of the country to the emperor in the autumn of that year. The year 1868 saw some desultory fighting at Edo and in northern Japan between the supporters of imperial rule and die-hard adherents of the Tokugawa regime, but the end of Tokugawa rule cost surprisingly little bloodshed. Despite its continued efficiency, the Edo system had become so hopelessly unsuited to the mentality of the Japanese nation that, once it started to crack, it collapsed suddenly and completely.
The new imperial government naturally centered around the person of the emperor, for it had been the revived theory of imperial rule which had made the overthrow of the Tokugawa possible. The coup d’état came to be referred to as the “Restoration” of imperial rule, but this did not mean that the emperor himself was to be in control. A boy of fifteen had recently ascended the throne, and although this young emperor grew to be a strong figure in the central government of Japan, eventually being recognized as one of the great men of Japanese history, in the early years of his reign he was too young and inexperienced to be a dominant force.
