samurai of western Japan who had helped establish the new government, but had returned to Satsuma in protest against the policies of his colleagues. Saigo and his followers found themselves in open rebellion against Tokyo in 1877. The peasant army was dispatched against them, and the Satsuma conservatives soon learned that samurai armed with swords were no match for peasant soldiers, well-armed and well-drilled. The Satsuma rebellion of 1877 was the last gasp of a fast dying feudal society. In less than ten years the young reformers had rid themselves of this antiquated social and political system and had cleared the ground for more modern and more efficient political institutions.
The leaders of the new Japan realized full well that they could not stop merely at removing the old system. Theoretically, they had engineered a “Restoration” of the imperial rule of the seventh and eighth centuries, and they actually did revive many of the ancient names of offices and of governmental organs, but they knew that this was only theory and nomenclature. What they really desired to do was to establish a strong nation like the leading Western powers, and so naturally they looked to the West for new patterns of society and government.
The Tokugawa in their last years had been sending envoys and students abroad to learn the techniques and sciences of foreign lands, and the new government greatly expanded this program for studying the occidental world. The forty-five years of the Meiji period were essentially a time when the Japanese studied, borrowed, and gradually assimilated those elements of Western civilization which they chose to adopt. This