Conclusion: Conservatism, Traditionalism and Restoration

Abstract

This work commenced with the assertion that there is a need to comprehend the Meiji Restoration not so much as an instantaneous event but as a far-spanning movement that had profound roots in the social conditions and intellectual discourse of the late Edo Period. The extent to which early tendencies toward the reconstitution of Imperial rule would have been worked out given the absence of foreign incursions in the early nineteenth century is significant, and largely unanswerable. However, given the spur of foreign encroachments and the palpable inadequacy of the Edo system of government to meet those challenges, the emergence of the Imperial Household as the fulcrum enabling national transformation was emphatic and unequivocal. The Imperial Household possessed what the Shogunate did not: the capacity for charismatic inspiration, a religious dimension that would enable incongruent forces and disparate elements to be recast into a new whole as if they had always been destined to be so conjoined.