The Creation of a Modern State
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the rest of the emperor’s long reign, which lasted until 1912, and the name was then given to the emperor as his personal posthumous title. Two and a half centuries of rule from Edo had made the city so definitely the administrative center of Japan that the young reformers moved the imperial capital from Kyoto to Edo in the autumn of 1868 and renamed the city Tokyo, meaning “eastern capital.”
In the early spring of 1869, only a little over a year after they had come to power, the bright young samurai started the task of doing away completely with the feudal system under which they had grown up and which had given their class a dominant place in society. They persuaded the Daimyo of Satsuma, Choshu, and other leading fiefs in western Japan to offer their domains to the emperor, and the other Daimyo of Japan felt morally obliged to follow suit. Thus, at one bold stroke the division of Japan into feudal principalities came to a sudden end, in theory at least. Actually, however, during a brief period of transition, the Daimyo were appointed governors of their old fiefs, with one-tenth of their former revenues as personal salaries. Two years later, in 1871, the fiefs were entirely abolished, and the land was divided into a number of new political divisions called ken, or “prefectures.” This marked the definite end of the Daimyo as feudal lords. The government eventually made an economic settlement with them, giving them fairly generous lump sum payments in the form of government bonds, which helped insure their support of the new regime. The old Daimyo, who had produced few