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Sonno joi (尊皇攘夷) was a
Japanese political
slogan meaning "Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians".
The origin of the slogan are in
Takenouchi Shikibu's theory of absolute loyalty to the
Emperor (尊皇論 sonnoron), with the implication of being less
loyal to the ruling
Tokugawa Shogunate. Expelling the barbarians, on the other hand, was a
counterreaction to the
Treaty of Kanagawa, which opened Japan to foreign trade in
1853. Under military threat from Commodore
Matthew Perry's black ships, the treaty had been signed under duress
and was vehemently opposed in
samurai quarters.
The slogan was adopted as the battle cry of the rebellious provinces of
Choshu and
Satsuma. The Imperial court in
Kyoto unsurprisingly sympathized with the movement and in fact rather
ineffectually ordered the Shogunate to sonno joi in
1863. Masterless samurai (ronin)
rallied to the cause, assassinating Shogunate officials and Westerners,
and culminating most famously in the murder of the British trader
Charles Richardson.
But this turned out to be the zenith of the sonno joi
movement, since the Western powers responded by demanding heavy
reparations and then bombarding Satsuma capital
Kagoshima when they were not forthcoming. While this incident served
to further weaken the shogunate, permitting the rebel provinces to ally
and overthrow it in the
Meiji Restoration, it also clearly showed that Japan was no match for
Western military might.
It is worth noting that the slogan was never actually government or
even rebel policy; for all its rhetoric, Satsuma in particular was a large
trading partner who purchased guns, artillery, ships and other technology
from the West. After the symbolic restoration of the
Meiji Emperor, the slogan was quietly dropped and replaced with
another:
fukoku kyΕhei (富国強兵), or "rich country, strong military", the
rallying call of Japan's wildly successful
Meiji Era and the seed of its actuions during
World War II.
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