Tokyo
Tokyo Tokyo Metropolis, one of the 47 prefectures of Japan, has served as the Japanese capital since 1869. As of 2018, the Greater Tokyo Area ranked as the most populous metropolitan area in the world; the urban area houses the seat of the Emperor of Japan, of the Japanese government and of the National Diet. Tokyo forms part of the Kantō region on the southeastern side of Japan's main island and includes the Izu Islands and Ogasawara Islands. Tokyo was named Edo when Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu made the city his headquarters in 1603, it became the capital after Emperor Meiji moved his seat to the city from Kyoto in 1868. Tokyo Metropolis formed in 1943 from the merger of the former Tokyo Prefecture and the city of Tokyo. Tokyo is referred to as a city but is known and governed as a "metropolitan prefecture", which differs from and combines elements of a city and a prefecture, a characteristic unique to Tokyo; the 23 Special Wards of Tokyo were Tokyo City. On July 1, 1943, it merged with Tokyo Prefecture and became Tokyo Metropolis with an additional 26 municipalities in the western part of the prefecture, the Izu islands and Ogasawara islands south of Tokyo.
The population of the special wards is over 9 million people, with the total population of Tokyo Metropolis exceeding 13.8 million. The prefecture is part of the world's most populous metropolitan area called the Greater Tokyo Area with over 38 million people and the world's largest urban agglomeration economy; as of 2011, Tokyo hosted 51 of the Fortune Global 500 companies, the highest number of any city in the world at that time. Tokyo ranked third in the International Financial Centres Development Index; the city is home to various television networks such as Fuji TV, Tokyo MX, TV Tokyo, TV Asahi, Nippon Television, NHK and the Tokyo Broadcasting System. Tokyo third in the Global Cities Index; the GaWC's 2018 inventory classified Tokyo as an alpha+ world city – and as of 2014 TripAdvisor's World City Survey ranked Tokyo first in its "Best overall experience" category. As of 2018 Tokyo ranked as the 2nd-most expensive city for expatriates, according to the Mercer consulting firm, and the world's 11th-most expensive city according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's cost-of-living survey.
In 2015, Tokyo was named the Most Liveable City in the world by the magazine Monocle. The Michelin Guide has awarded Tokyo by far the most Michelin stars of any city in the world. Tokyo was ranked first out of all sixty cities in the 2017 Safe Cities Index; the QS Best Student Cities ranked Tokyo as the 3rd-best city in the world to be a university student in 2016 and 2nd in 2018. Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics, the 1979 G-7 summit, the 1986 G-7 summit, the 1993 G-7 summit, will host the 2019 Rugby World Cup, the 2020 Summer Olympics and the 2020 Summer Paralympics. Tokyo was known as Edo, which means "estuary", its name was changed to Tokyo when it became the imperial capital with the arrival of Emperor Meiji in 1868, in line with the East Asian tradition of including the word capital in the name of the capital city. During the early Meiji period, the city was called "Tōkei", an alternative pronunciation for the same characters representing "Tokyo", making it a kanji homograph; some surviving official English documents use the spelling "Tokei".
The name Tokyo was first suggested in 1813 in the book Kondō Hisaku, written by Satō Nobuhiro. When Ōkubo Toshimichi proposed the renaming to the government during the Meiji Restoration, according to Oda Kanshi, he got the idea from that book. Tokyo was a small fishing village named Edo, in what was part of the old Musashi Province. Edo was first fortified in the late twelfth century. In 1457, Ōta Dōkan built Edo Castle. In 1590, Tokugawa Ieyasu was transferred from Mikawa Province to Kantō region; when he became shōgun in 1603, Edo became the center of his ruling. During the subsequent Edo period, Edo grew into one of the largest cities in the world with a population topping one million by the 18th century, but Edo was Tokugawa's home and was not capital of Japan. The Emperor himself lived in Kyoto from 794 to 1868 as capital of Japan. During the Edo era, the city enjoyed a prolonged period of peace known as the Pax Tokugawa, in the presence of such peace, Edo adopted a stringent policy of seclusion, which helped to perpetuate the lack of any serious military threat to the city.
The absence of war-inflicted devastation allowed Edo to devote the majority of its resources to rebuilding in the wake of the consistent fires and other devastating natural disasters that plagued the city. However, this prolonged period of seclusion came to an end with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Commodore Perry forced the opening of the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate, leading to an increase in the demand for new foreign goods and subsequently a severe rise in inflation. Social unrest mounted in the wake of these higher prices and culminated in widespread rebellions and demonstrations in the form of the "smashing" of rice establishments. Meanwhile, supporters of the Meiji Emperor leveraged the disruption that t
Aristocracy (class)
The aristocracy is a social class that a particular society considers its highest order. In many states, the aristocracy included the upper class of people with hereditary rank and titles. In some—such as ancient Greece and India—aristocratic status came from belonging to a military caste, although it has been common, notably in African societies, for aristocrats to belong to priestly dynasties. Aristocratic status can involve legal privileges, they are below only the monarch of a country or nation in its social hierarchy. In modern European societies, the aristocracy has coincided with the nobility, a specific class that arose in the Middle Ages, but the term "aristocracy" is sometimes applied to other elites, is used as a more generic term when describing earlier and non-European societies; the term aristocracy derives from the Greek ἀριστοκρατία (aristokratia from ἄριστος "excellent," and κράτος "power." In most cases, aristocratic titles are hereditary. The term "aristokratia" was first used in Athens with reference to young citizens who led armies at the front line.
Due to martial bravery being regarded as a virtue in ancient Greece, it was assumed that the armies were being led by "the best." This virtue was called arete. Etymologically, as the word developed, it produced a more political term: aristoi; the term aristocracy is a compound word stemming from the singular of aristoi and the Greek word for power, kratos. From the ancient Greeks, the term passed to the European Middle Ages for a similar hereditary class of military leaders referred to as the nobility; as in Greece, this was a class of privileged men and women whose familial connections to the regional armies allowed them to present themselves as the most "noble" or "best" of society. The status and privileges of the aristocracy in Europe were below royalty and above all non-aristocrats; the French Revolution attacked aristocrats as people who had achieved their status by having been born in a wealthy family rather than by merit, this was considered unjust. In the United Kingdom and other European countries, such as Spain and Denmark, in which hereditary titles are still recognised, aristocrat still refers to the descendant of one of 7,000 families with hereditary titles, many still in possession of considerable wealth.
In the United Kingdom, members of the highest echelon of the aristocracy, the hereditary peers were, until 1999, members of the House of Lords—the upper house of the legislature, the Parliament of the United Kingdom. In 1999, most ceased to be members. However, the Duke of Norfolk, who always serves as Earl Marshal, the hereditary peer who serves as Lord Great Chamberlain, a further 90 Representative Hereditary Peers elected by the Hereditary Peers retained membership. Since 1958, non-hereditary "life peers" have been created, who are automatically members of the House of Lords for life with the right to be known by their title. For example, John Gummer became Lord Deben. However, life peers are not considered part of the aristocracy, nor are knights, unless born into an aristocratic or landed gentry family. Examples include James Douglas-Hamilton, Baron Selkirk of Douglas, Sir Winston Churchill—all born into aristocratic families. Besides the hereditary peers, the gentry are considered part of the aristocracy.
Unlike the Continental untitled nobility, British untitled families that belong to the gentry have no legal recognition of their aristocratic position. Under the rule of the Mughal Empire, the titles for those under a king were borrowed from Persia; these titles of landed aristocracy include jagirdar, thikanadar and zamindar. Many landholding families either held legal or administrative offices, were sometimes considered the Indian version of the Nobility of the Robe; the princes appointed officers, such as dewan and other state level ministers, to run their administrations, who were considered members of the regional nobility. Most of these officers were either relatives of the princes who appointed them, or were themselves substantial landlords under the sovereignty of the Princely States, most held hereditary titles. Sometimes, educated men belonging to the British Imperial Services were appointed to the high offices of the Princely States, but their positions were not hereditary and they were seen as career bureaucrats rather than noblemen by their employers.
Today, aristocratic titles like Taluqdar, Rao, Naidu, Thevar, Zaildar, Tarafdar, Nair, [[Madampi |Madampi, Chettiar of are still used in the Indian Subcontinent. Deriving from the pre-colonial states of the region that would become known as Nigeria, the recognised titles of the Nigerian aristocracy range from king to the ubiquitous chief, they give their bearers no political authority in theory, but in practice allow them to serve as immensely powerful patrons of the country's political leaders due to their control of popular opinion within its various tribes. Along with those of their titled relatives and courtiers, they serve as the guiding forces behind Nigerian cultural and religious ceremonies. Titles such as Oba, Mai, Sarki and Obi are used by the dynastic heads, while prince and princess are either used in their English forms or in their native ones by the dynasts of their houses, their privy counsellors, tend to be called either chiefs or elders depending on what their monarch
Europe
Europe is a continent located in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Mediterranean Sea to the south, it comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia. Since around 1850, Europe is most considered to be separated from Asia by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas and the waterways of the Turkish Straits. Although the term "continent" implies physical geography, the land border is somewhat arbitrary and has been redefined several times since its first conception in classical antiquity; the division of Eurasia into two continents reflects East-West cultural and ethnic differences which vary on a spectrum rather than with a sharp dividing line. The geographic border does not follow political boundaries, with Turkey and Kazakhstan being transcontinental countries. A strict application of the Caucasus Mountains boundary places two comparatively small countries and Georgia, in both continents.
Europe covers 2 % of the Earth's surface. Politically, Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states of which the Russian Federation is the largest and most populous, spanning 39% of the continent and comprising 15% of its population. Europe had a total population of about 741 million as of 2016; the European climate is affected by warm Atlantic currents that temper winters and summers on much of the continent at latitudes along which the climate in Asia and North America is severe. Further from the sea, seasonal differences are more noticeable than close to the coast. Europe, in particular ancient Greece, was the birthplace of Western civilization; the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD and the subsequent Migration Period marked the end of ancient history and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Renaissance humanism, exploration and science led to the modern era. Since the Age of Discovery started by Portugal and Spain, Europe played a predominant role in global affairs. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European powers controlled at various times the Americas all of Africa and Oceania and the majority of Asia.
The Age of Enlightenment, the subsequent French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars shaped the continent culturally and economically from the end of the 17th century until the first half of the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, gave rise to radical economic and social change in Western Europe and the wider world. Both world wars took place for the most part in Europe, contributing to a decline in Western European dominance in world affairs by the mid-20th century as the Soviet Union and the United States took prominence. During the Cold War, Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain between NATO in the West and the Warsaw Pact in the East, until the revolutions of 1989 and fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1949 the Council of Europe was founded, following a speech by Sir Winston Churchill, with the idea of unifying Europe to achieve common goals, it includes all European states except for Belarus and Vatican City. Further European integration by some states led to the formation of the European Union, a separate political entity that lies between a confederation and a federation.
The EU originated in Western Europe but has been expanding eastward since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The currency of most countries of the European Union, the euro, is the most used among Europeans. In classical Greek mythology, Europa was a Phoenician princess; the word Europe is derived from her name. The name contains the elements εὐρύς, "wide, broad" and ὤψ "eye, countenance", hence their composite Eurṓpē would mean "wide-gazing" or "broad of aspect". Broad has been an epithet of Earth herself in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion and the poetry devoted to it. There have been attempts to connect Eurṓpē to a Semitic term for "west", this being either Akkadian erebu meaning "to go down, set" or Phoenician'ereb "evening, west", at the origin of Arabic Maghreb and Hebrew ma'arav. Michael A. Barry, professor in Princeton University's Near Eastern Studies Department, finds the mention of the word Ereb on an Assyrian stele with the meaning of "night, sunset", in opposition to Asu " sunrise", i.e. Asia.
The same naming motive according to "cartographic convention" appears in Greek Ἀνατολή. Martin Litchfield West stated that "phonologically, the match between Europa's name and any form of the Semitic word is poor." Next to these hypotheses there is a Proto-Indo-European root *h1regʷos, meaning "darkness", which produced Greek Erebus. Most major world languages use words derived from Europa to refer to the continent. Chinese, for example, uses the word Ōuzhōu. In some Turkic languages the Persian name Frangistan is used casually in referring to much of Europe, besides official names such as Avrupa or Evropa; the prevalent definition of Europe as a geographical term has been in use since the mid-19th century. Europe is taken to be bounded by large bodies of water
Demography of the Empire of Japan
This article deals with the population of the Empire of Japan. See demographics of Japan and demographics of Japan before Meiji Restoration; the population of Japan at the time of the Meiji Restoration was estimated to be 34,985,000 on January 1, 1873, while the official original family registries and de facto populations on the same day were 33,300,644 and 33,416,939, respectively. These were comparable to the population of the United Kingdom and Austria-Hungary. Meiji government established the uniformed registered system of koseki in 1872, called Jinshin koseki; the first national census based on a full sampling of inhabitants was conducted in Japan in 1920 and was conducted every five years thereafter. Per the Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the population distribution of Japan proper from 1920 to 1945 is as follows The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman, it is based on good data for the entire period. Sources: Our World In Data and Gapminder Foundation.
The above figures include Hokkaidō, the northernmost island, sparsely populated, with area similar to the state of Maine. In Japan proper, the population of major cities was as follows: In 1937 Japanese demographers projected the Japanese population in 1980 to reach 100,000,000, in accordance with observed growth rates. Japan annexed Taiwan after the First Sino-Japanese War, while victory in the Russo-Japanese War gained Japan the Kwantung Leased Territory and Korea; these acquisitions increased the area controlled by Japanese to 262,912 square miles. The total population of the Empire of Japan, including Taiwan and Karafuto was 64,940,034 on Dec 31, 1908, which could be broken down as follows: Japan proper: 51,742,486 Korea: 9,918,566 Taiwan: 3,252,589 Karafuto: 26,393And the population of concessions as of Dec 31, 1908, was as follows: Kwantung: 427,117 Railway Zone: 28,307The census population in 1940 was: Japan proper: 73,114,308 Korea: 24,327,326 Formosa: 5,746,959 Karafuto: 339,357 Kwantung: 1,889,123 South Seas Mandate: 161,792 Total: 105,226,202 In terms of cities, the population of major cities: The population of Manchuria in early 1934 was estimated at 30,880,000.
These numbers included 30,190,000 Chinese, 590,760 Japanese, 98,431 other nationalities. The Chinese numbers included 680,000 ethnic Koreans. In 1937, shortly after the foundation of Manchukuo, the government launched a twenty-year colonization program, with the goal of increasing the population through the immigration of 1,000,000 Japanese families between 1936 and 1956; this was in addition to the Japanese military garrison of 300,000 men in 1937. Between 1938 and 1942 a contingent of young farmers of 200,000 arrived in Manchukuo. In Shinkyō Japanese made up 25% of the population. By 1940, the total population of Manchukuo was estimated at 36,933,000, which included 1 million Japanese civilian and 500,000 Japanese military personnel; these figures exclude that of the Kwantung Leased Territory and Dalian, which were included within that of the Japanese overseas territories. Taeuber Irene B. and Beal, Edwin G. The Demographic Heritage of the Japanese Empire, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 237, World Population in Transition, pp. 64–71 Population of Japan, Statistics Bureau Kindai Digital Library at the National Diet Libray of Japan Imperial Japan Static Population Statistics as of December 31, 1908 Japan Registered Population Tables as of January 1, 1874 DSpace at Waseda University Kokudaka and population Table Boys, Anthony FF, World Population, 2000 Wendell Cox Consultancy New York Times, Mar 2, 1921 Asian Population Statistics
National Diet Building
The National Diet Building is the building where both houses of the National Diet of Japan meet. It is located at Nagatachō 1-chome 7-1, Tokyo. Sessions of the House of Representatives take place in the left wing and sessions of the House of Councillors in the right wing; the Diet Building was completed in 1936 and is constructed out of purely Japanese materials, with the exception of the stained glass, door locks, pneumatic tube system. The construction of the building for the old Imperial Diet began in 1920; the Diet met in temporary structures for the first fifty years of its existence because there was no agreement over what form its building should take. German architects Wilhelm Böckmann and Hermann Ende were invited to Tokyo in 1886 and 1887, respectively, they drew up two plans for a Diet building. Böckmann's initial plan was a masonry structure with a dome and flanking wings, similar to other legislatures of the era, which would form the core of a large "government ring" south of the Imperial Palace.
However, at the time there was public resistance in Japan to Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru's internationalist policies, so the architects submitted a more "Japanese" design as well, substituting traditional Japanese architectural features for many parts of the building. Ende and Böckmann's Diet Building was never built, but their other "government ring" designs were used for the Tokyo District Court and Ministry of Justice buildings. In 1898, Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi interviewed American Ralph Adams Cram, who proposed a more "Oriental" design for the building, featuring tiled roofs and a large enclosure of walls and gates; the Itō government fell as Cram was en route to the United States, the project was dropped. With an internal deadline approaching, the government enlisted Ende and Böckmann associate Adolph Stegmueller and Japanese architect Yoshii Shigenori to design a temporary structure; the building, a two-story, European-style wooden structure, opened in November 1890 on a site in Hibiya.
An electrical fire burned down the first building in January 1891, only two months later. Another Ende and Böckmann associate, Oscar Tietze, joined Yoshii to design its replacement; the second building was larger than the first, but followed a similar design: it housed the Diet until 1925 when another fire destroyed the building. First and Second Building In 1910, the Finance Ministry started a commission in an attempt to take control over the new Diet Building design from the Home Ministry. Prime Minister Katsura Tarō chaired the commission, which recommended that the new building emulate an Italian Renaissance architectural style; this recommendation was criticized by many. The ministry sponsored a public design competition in 1918, 118 designs were submitted for the new building; the first prize winner, Watanabe Fukuzo, produced a design similar to Böckmann's. The Diet Building was constructed between 1920 and 1936 with a floor plan based on Fukuzo's entry; the roof and tower of the building might have been inspired by another entrant, third prize winner Takeuchi Shinshichi, are believed to have been chosen because they reflected a more modern hybrid architecture than the purely European and East Asian designs proposed by other architects.
While the actual source for the "Pyramid" roof remains unclear, Japanese historian Jonathan Reynolds suggests it was "probably borrowed" from Shinshichi although an image of the entry is not provided but instead he thanks fellow historian of Africa studies at Columbia, Zoe Strother, for mentioning that Shinshichi's design resembles the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, a model for some prominent Western designs in the early 1900s, such as John Russell Pope's 1911 award-winning House of the Temple in Washington, D. C. and the downtown Los Angeles City Hall, completed in 1928. Current Building The building assigns jurisdiction over the central entrance, the central hall and the central tower to the House of Councilors, the front courtyard to the House of Representatives, the National Diet Library suboffice on the 4th floor of the central tower to the National Diet Library; the central entrance stands below the central tower. It is characterized by the wide driveway and the entrance doors that are made of bronze and each measure 3.94 meters in height, 1.09 meters in width, 1.125 tons in weight.
These doors for the central entrance, the separate entrance doors for each House building, the bronze doors inside the building were outsourced to and built by Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The central entrance is not for daily use to enter and exit the Diet building and is called “the door that never opens” because of its restricted access; the entrance is used when Diet members attend their first session after a House of Representatives general election or a House of Councilors regular election and when welcoming the Emperor or foreign heads of state into the Diet building. It is used to allow visitors into the building in open house events; the lobby behind the central entrance and right below the central tower is what is called the central hall. The hall has a stairwell that reaches from the 2nd floor to the 6th floor and a ceiling, 32.62 meters high. The ceiling is made of stained glass and has four oil paintings of Japan’s four seasons in the four corners of the ceiling; the paintings each depict Mount Yoshino in the spring, Lake Towada in the summer, Okunikko in the fall, the Japan Alps in the winter.
They were drawn not by art students. In the four corners of the central hall, there are statues of Itagak
Daimyō
The daimyō were powerful Japanese feudal lords who, until their decline in the early Meiji period, ruled most of Japan from their vast, hereditary land holdings. In the term, dai means "large", myō stands for myōden, meaning private land. Subordinate to the shōgun, nominally to the Emperor and the kuge, daimyō were powerful feudal rulers from the 10th century to the middle 19th century in Japan. From the Shugo of the Muromachi period through the Sengoku to the daimyō of the Edo period, the rank had a long and varied history; the backgrounds of daimyō varied considerably. The term daimyō sometimes refers to the leading figures of such clans called "Lord", it was though not from these warlords that a shōgun arose or a regent was chosen. Daimyō hired samurai to guard their land and they paid the samurai in land or food as few could afford to pay samurai in money; the daimyō era ended soon after the Meiji Restoration with the adoption of the prefecture system in 1871. The shugo daimyō were the first group of men to hold the title daimyō.
They arose from among the shugo during the Muromachi period. The shugo-daimyō held not only military and police powers, but economic power within a province, they accumulated these powers throughout the first decades of the Muromachi period. Major shugo-daimyō came from the Shiba and Hosokawa clans, as well as the tozama clans of Yamana, Ōuchi, Akamatsu; the greatest ruled multiple provinces. The Ashikaga shogunate required the shugo-daimyō to reside in Kyoto, so they appointed relatives or retainers, called shugodai, to represent them in their home provinces; some of these in turn came to reside in Kyoto, appointing deputies in the provinces. The Ōnin War was a major uprising. During this and other wars of the time, kuni ikki, or provincial uprisings, took place as locally powerful warriors sought independence from the shugo-daimyō; the deputies of the shugo-daimyō, living in the provinces, seized the opportunity to strengthen their position. At the end of the fifteenth century, those shugo-daimyō who succeeded remained in power.
Those who had failed to exert control over their deputies fell from power and were replaced by a new class, the sengoku-daimyō, who arose from the ranks of the shugodai and ji-samurai. Among the sengoku daimyō were many, shugo-daimyō, such as the Satake, Takeda, Rokkaku, Ōuchi, Shimazu. New to the ranks of the daimyō were the Asakura, Nagao, Miyoshi, Chōsokabe, Jimbō, Hatano and Matsunaga; these came from the ranks of their deputies. Additional sengoku-daimyō such as the Mōri, Ryūzōji arose from the ji-samurai; the lower officials of the shogunate and rōnin, provincial officials, kuge gave rise to sengoku-daimyō. The Battle of Sekigahara in the year 1600 marked the beginning of the Edo period. Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu reorganized 200 daimyō and their territories into han, which were assessed by rice production; those heading han assessed at 10,000 koku or more were considered daimyō. Ieyasu categorized the daimyō according to their relation to the ruling Tokugawa family: the shinpan were related to the Tokugawa.
The shinpan were collaterals of Ieyasu, such as the Matsudaira, or descendants of Ieyasu other than in the main line of succession. Several shinpan, including the Tokugawa of Owari and Mito, as well as the Matsudaira of Fukui and Aizu, held large han. A few fudai daimyō, such as the Ii of Hikone, held large han; the shogunate placed many fudai at strategic locations to guard the trade routes and the approaches to Edo. Many fudai daimyō took positions in the Edo shogunate, some rising to the position of rōjū; the fact that fudai daimyō could hold government positions while tozama in general, could not was a main difference between the two. Tozama daimyō held large fiefs far away from the capital, with e.g. the Kaga han of Ishikawa Prefecture, headed by the Maeda clan, assessed at 1,000,000 koku. Other famous tozama clans included the Mori of Chōshū, the Shimazu of Satsuma, the Date of Sendai, the Uesugi of Yonezawa, the Hachisuka of Awa; the Tokugawa regarded them as rebellious, but for most of the Edo period, marriages between the Tokugawa and the tozama, as well as control policies such as sankin-kōtai, resulted in peaceful relations.
Daimyō were required to maintain residences in Edo as well as their fiefs, to move periodically between Edo and their fiefs spending alternate years in each place, in a practice called sankin-kōtai. In 1869, the year after the Meiji Restoration, the daimyō, together with the kuge, formed a new aristocracy, the kazoku. In 1871, the han were abolished and prefectures were established, thus ending the daimyō era in Japan. In the wake of this change, many daimyō remained in control of their lands, being appointed as prefectural governors. Despite this, members of former daimyō families remained prominent in government and society, in some cases continue to re
Itō Hirobumi
Prince Itō Hirobumi was a Japanese statesman and genrō. A London-educated samurai of the Chōshū Domain and an influential figure in the early Meiji Restoration government, he chaired the bureau which drafted the Meiji Constitution in the 1880s. Looking to the West for legal inspiration, Itō rejected the United States Constitution as too liberal and the Spanish Restoration as too despotic before drawing on the British and German models the Prussian Constitution of 1850. Dissatisfied with the prominent role of Christianity in European legal traditions, he substituted references to the more traditionally Japanese concept of kokutai or "national polity", which became the constitutional justification for imperial authority. In 1885, he became Japan's first Prime Minister, an office his constitutional bureau had introduced, he went on to hold the position four times, becoming one of the longest serving PMs in Japanese history, wielded considerable power out of office as the occasional head of Emperor Meiji's Privy Council.
A monarchist, Itō favoured a large, bureaucratic government and opposed the formation of political parties. His third term in government was ended by the consolidation of the opposition into the Kenseitō party in 1898, prompting him to found the Rikken Seiyūkai party in response, he resigned his fourth and final ministry in 1901 after growing weary of party politics, but served as head of the Privy Council twice more before his death. Itō's foreign policy was ambitious, he strengthened diplomatic ties with Western powers including Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom. In Asia he oversaw the First Sino-Japanese War and negotiated Chinese surrender on terms aggressively favourable to Japan, including the annexation of Taiwan and the release of Korea from the Chinese Imperial tribute system. Itō sought to avoid a Russo-Japanese War through the policy of Man-Kan kōkan – surrendering Manchuria to the Russian sphere of influence in exchange for the acceptance of Japanese hegemony in Korea.
A diplomatic tour of the United States and Europe brought him to Saint Petersburg in November 1901, where he was unable to find compromise on this matter with Russian authorities. Soon the government of Katsura Tarō elected to abandon the pursuit of Man-Kan kōkan, tensions with Russia continued to escalate towards war; the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1905 made Itō the first Japanese Resident-General of Korea. He supported the sovereignty of the indigenous Joseon monarchy as a protectorate under Japan, but he accepted and agreed with the powerful Imperial Japanese Army, which favoured the total annexation of Korea, resigning his position as Resident-General and taking a new position as the President of the Privy Council of Japan in 1909. Four months Itō was assassinated by Korean-independence activist and nationalist An Jung-geun in Manchuria; the annexation process was formalised by another treaty the following year after Ito's death. Through his daughter Ikuko, Itō was the father-in-law of politician and author Suematsu Kenchō.
Itō's birth name was Hayashi Risuke. His father Hayashi Jūzō was the adopted son of Mizui Buhei, an adopted son of Itō Yaemon's family, a lower-ranked samurai from Hagi in Chōshū Domain. Mizui Buhei was renamed Itō Naoemon. Mizui Jūzō took the name Itō Jūzō, Hayashi Risuke was renamed to Itō Shunsuke at first Itō Hirobumi, he was a student of Yoshida Shōin at the Shōka Sonjuku and joined the Sonnō jōi movement, together with Katsura Kogorō. Itō was chosen as one of the Chōshū Five who studied at University College London in 1863, the experience in Great Britain convinced him Japan needed to adopt Western ways. In 1864, Itō returned to Japan with fellow student Inoue Kaoru to attempt to warn Chōshū Domain against going to war with the foreign powers over the right of passage through the Straits of Shimonoseki. At that time, he met Ernest Satow for the first time a lifelong friend. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Itō was appointed governor of Hyōgo Prefecture, junior councilor for Foreign Affairs, sent to the United States in 1870 to study Western currency systems.
Returning to Japan in 1871, he established Japan's taxation system. That year, he was sent on the Iwakura Mission around the world as vice-envoy extraordinary, during which he won the confidence of Ōkubo Toshimichi, one of the leaders of the Meiji government. In 1873, Itō was made a full councilor, Minister of Public Works, in 1875 chairman of the first Assembly of Prefectural Governors, he participated in the Osaka Conference of 1875. After Ōkubo's assassination, he took over the post of Home Minister and secured a central position in the Meiji government. In 1881 he urged leaving himself in unchallenged control. Itō went to Europe in 1882 to study the constitutions of those countries, spending nearly 18 months away from Japan. While working on a constitution for Japan, he wrote the first Imperial Household Law and established the Japanese peerage system in 1884. In 1885, he negotiated the Convention of Tientsin with Li Hongzhang, normalizing Japan's diplomatic relations with Qing-dynasty China.
In 1885, based on European ideas, Itō established a cabinet system of government, replacing the Daijō-kan as the decision-making state organization, on December 22, 1885, he became the first prime minister of Japan. On April 30, 1888, Itō resigned as prime minister, but headed the new Privy Council to maintain power behind-the-scenes. In 1889, he b
