THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN journalist Edward H. House spent much of his career telling and retelling the story of the 1863–64 Shimonoseki incident, in which ships of four Western nations bombarded Chōshū domain, allegedly in retaliation against earlier Chōshū attacks on the Westerners, then forced Japan to pay a $3 million indemnity. House had two goals: to get the United States to return its share of the indemnity and to correct the standard recollection of the event, which in his view lay unjustified blame on Japan and whitewashed the Western powers’ motives. He succeeded in the former goal but failed in the latter. Getting a nation to return loot, he found, was easier than correcting an entrenched historical narrative.

His experience bears striking resemblance to the exigencies of the last century's mainstream tale of Japanese development in the years surrounding the Meiji Restoration. Efforts to change the narrative – both its content and its contours – have been as endless as House's polemics on Shimonoseki. In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars on the left attacked the Western bias of modernization theory; in the 1980s and 1990s, theorists concerned with gender, sexuality, postmodernism, semiotics, deconstruction, cultural studies – and a host of others – argued for the inclusion of new narrative frameworks and ideological transparency. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the late Tokugawa/Meiji years were being examined from a host of new perspectives; hospital patients, gays and lesbians, factory workers, architectural sites, fishery owners, and local bureaucrats produced more studies than “great men” did, as did discussions on the role of time, place, and power relationships. Harvard University's Helen Hardacre saw this “exercise of breaking down monolithic paradigms of Japan's modern history” as the precursor to a new narrative, “a substitute for a triumphalist interpretation of Japan's modernization.”

That these efforts have had great impact cannot be denied, as this essay will argue below. They have complicated our understandings of the early Meiji years. They have given us new languages and concepts for explaining the era, new understandings of power relationships, new information about once-ignored actors.