ABSTRACT

As a watershed of transformation in modem Japan, the Meiji Restoration is comparable with no other event except perhaps the defeat of 1945, for it prescribed the fundamental characteristics of Japanese society thereafter. The topic of this and the following chapter is limited to the ways in which the people 1 of Japan parried the upheavals in their lives at the time. The focus is on the molding during the Restoration period of deep patterns which have continued up to the present to orient the ways in which people live in modernized Japan.