Emperor Meiji Quotes

When I was a student, there wasn't a single thing we did that was unrelated to others. It was all for the Emperor, or parents, or the country, or society—everything was other-centered, which means that all educated men were hypocrites. When society changed, this hypocrisy ceased to work, and as a result, self-centeredness was gradually imported into thought and action, and egoism became enormously over-developed. Instead of the old hypocrites, now all we've got are out-and-out rogues. Do you see what I mean by that?

He considered China’s interference in Korea to be an intolerable attempt to prevent the spread of enlightenment, and the war itself not merely a struggle between two countries but a “battle for the sake of world culture.”49

Why is our era one of decadence? Why does the world despise vigor and youth and worthy ambitions and single-mindedness?…How long must this age of effete and the contemptible endure? Or is the worst still to come? Men think only of money and women. Men have forgotten everything that should be becoming to a man. that great shining age of gods and heroes passed away with the Meiji Emperor. Will we ever see its like again?

the period from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to the creation in 1900 of a branch of government solely dedicated to shrine administration. In 1868, Shinto finally achieved independence from Buddhism through a government-mandated separation of shrines from temples, and the Jingikan was briefly reinstated. It was downgraded and then abolished, however, as provisions were made for the emperor to begin performing rites based on ancient jingi in the new palace in the capital Tokyo.

Japan, a country that had done its best to have no contact with strangers and to seal out the rest of the world. Its economy and politics were dominated by feudal agriculture and a Confucian hierarchical social structure, and they were steadily declining. Merchants were the lowest social class, and trading with foreigners was actually forbidden except for limited contact with China and the Dutch. But then Japan had an unexpected encounter with a stranger—Commodore Matthew Perry—who burst in on July 8, 1853, demanding that Japan’s ports be open to America for trade and insisting on better treatment for shipwrecked sailors. His demands were rebuffed, but Perry came back a year later with a bigger fleet and more firepower. He explained to the Japanese the virtues of trading with other countries, and eventually they signed the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, opening the Japanese market to foreign trade and ending two hundred years of near isolation. The encounter shocked the Japanese political elites, forcing them to realize just how far behind the United States and other Western nations Japan had fallen in military technology. This realization set in motion an internal revolution that toppled the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Tokyo in the name of the emperor since 1603, and brought Emperor Meiji, and a coalition of reformers, in his place. They chose adaptation by learning from those who had defeated them. They launched a political, economic, and social transformation of Japan, based on the notion that if they wanted to be as strong as the West they had to break from their current cultural norms and make a wholesale adoption of Western science, technology, engineering, education, art, literature, and even clothing and architecture. It turned out to be more difficult than they thought, but the net result was that by the late nineteenth century Japan had built itself into a major industrial power with the heft to not only reverse the unequal economic treaties imposed on it by Western powers but actually defeat one of those powers—Russia—in a war in 1905. The Meiji Restoration made Japan not only more resilient but also more powerful.

As with France, an important consequence of the British Industrial Revolution for China and Japan was military vulnerability. China was humbled by British sea power during the First Opium War, between 1839 and 1842, and the same threat became all too real for the Japanese as U.S. warships, led by Commodore Matthew Perry, pulled into Edo Bay in 1853. The reality that economic backwardness created military backwardness was part of the impetus behind Shimazu Nariakira’s plan to overthrow the shogunate and put in motion the changes that eventually led to the Meiji Restoration. The leaders of the Satsuma domain realized that economic growth—perhaps even Japanese survival—could be achieved only by institutional reforms, but the shogun opposed this because his power was tied to the existing set of institutions. To exact reforms, the shogun had to be overthrown, and he was. The situation was similar in China, but the different initial political institutions made it much harder to overthrow the emperor, something that happened only in 1911. Instead of reforming institutions, the Chinese tried to match the British militarily by importing modern weapons. The Japanese built their own armaments industry. As a consequence of these initial differences, each country responded differently to the challenges of the nineteenth century, and Japan and China diverged dramatically in the face of the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. While Japanese institutions were being transformed and the economy was embarking on a path of rapid growth, in China forces pushing for institutional change were not strong enough, and extractive institutions persisted largely unabated until they would take a turn for the worse with Mao’s communist revolution in 1949. R

Mikao Usui decided to add the Reiki Ideals to Reiki's practice during meditation many years after creating Reiki. The Ideals came in part from the Japanese Meiji Emperor's five principles revered by Mikao Usui. The Ideals , to improve Usui Reiki's moral harmony. Its purpose is to help people realize that it is a necessary part of the Reiki healing process to restore the soul by actively choosing to change oneself. In order to have lasting results for the Reiki healing powers, the client must take responsibility for her or his recovery and take an active part in it. Consequently, Reiki's Usui system is more than using Reiki energy. It must also include an active commitment to self-improvement to make it a complete system. The ideals are both guidelines for a gracious life and practicable virtues for their inherent value.

In order for Japan to become an equal member of the international community, the western perception of time had to be accepted. The western calendar was adopted with much complaint in 1872, with the decision that the third day of the succeeding twelfth month would become the first day of 1873. The decree added: On this day a ceremony…will be held, and the Emperor will inform the sun goddess and the imperial ancestors of the change…. The day will be divided into 24 hours instead of twelve two-hour periods, as hitherto.

After Komei’s death, Prince Mutsuhito was renamed Emperor Meiji, and Edo was renamed “Tokyo.

Meiji Restoration” refers to the fact that the emperor was “restored” to a supreme position

In 1890, Emperor Meiji passed the “Imperial Rescript on Education,