Chōshū domain was a powerful feudal domain whose leaders joined forces with Satsuma and other domains to overthrow Japan’s shogunate. Its role in the Satcho Alliance and the Meiji Restoration placed it at the center of a decisive institutional rupture: the restoration of imperial rule was accompanied by the dismantling of the old feudal order and the creation of a centralized state.

From alliance to uprising

In the autumn of 1867, Ōkubo Toshimichi traveled from Edo to Yamaguchi, where he met Chōshū’s leaders on October 14. He proposed that they join forces, march on Edo, and overthrow the shogun. Leaders from Tosa and Aki were already on board; Chōshū’s agreement completed the secret Satcho Alliance.

The alliance’s language of restoring the emperor also served a wider institutional purpose. Ōkubo and his allies argued that government should return to one ruler, but their project was not limited to replacing the shogun with the emperor. It aimed to change Japan’s political and economic institutions. Sakamoto Ryūma, a Tosa treaty signer, urged the shogun to resign to avert civil war and set out proposals that included legislative bodies, government decisions based on general opinion, and new rules for foreign affairs and law.

The Meiji Restoration and civil war

Shogun Yoshinobu agreed to resign, and the Meiji Restoration was declared on January 3, 1868. Emperor Kōmei and, after Kōmei’s death a month later, his son Meiji were restored to power. Satsuma and Chōshū forces occupied Edo and the imperial capital, Kyōto, but feared the Tokugawa family might regain power and re-establish the shogunate.

Ōkubo pressed for the Tokugawas to be permanently stripped of their position and lands. On January 27, Yoshinobu attacked Satsuma and Chōshū forces, beginning a civil war that continued until the summer, when the Tokugawas were defeated. Chōshū’s participation thus helped make the restoration more than a change of sovereign: victory cleared the way for the new regime to dismantle the political arrangements that had sustained feudal rule.

Institutional transformation

After the restoration, the government abolished feudalism in 1869, replacing the three hundred fiefs with prefectures under appointed governors and centralizing taxation. It established equality of social classes before the law, removed restrictions on internal migration and trade, abolished the samurai class, and introduced individual land-property rights and freedom to enter trades. The state also invested heavily in infrastructure and manufacturing.

By 1890 Japan had adopted Asia’s first written constitution and created a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, the Diet, and an independent judiciary. The book presents these changes as decisive in enabling Japan to become the principal Asian beneficiary of the Industrial Revolution. Chōshū’s significance lies in its part in the coalition that seized a critical juncture and opened the political space for those reforms; the account does not attribute the later reforms to the domain alone.