THE MEIJI YEARS mark one of history's most dynamic eras, a time of breathtakingly rapid change in nearly all aspects of Japan's national life. As a result, the men who guided and challenged the national transformation have become the subjects of more than an ordinary amount of scholarly attention. They are usually viewed as giants – individuals with special talents, unique vision, overarching influence, extraordinary administrative skills, even unusual sexual prowess – the stuff, in many cases, of myth and legend. While the more fantastic aspects of these myths are scorned (or, more appropriately, ignored) by scholars, there nevertheless remain several areas in which the “bigger- than-life” syndrome seems to have affected even scholarly analyses of the overall period, thus distorting our understanding of Meiji Japan. I seek, in this discussion, to challenge – or at least to bring into balance – two such areas.

First, there is an unfortunate tendency to dwell on the early Meiji leaders’ special sense of nation. More than their counterparts in other lands, we are told, these men operated in an overwhelmingly national context, basing their arguments and decisions on a single question: What is best for the nation? A leading Meiji historian, Marius B. Jansen, has written in this vein: “The samurai provided Japan with singleminded, nation-directed leadership. The phrase kuni no tame (‘for the sake of the country’) was a constant in political discussions … . The argument was not whether the nation needed building, but how it could be built most rapidly and effectively.”

This theme dominates many of the texts on the era, often to the point of excluding less idealistic motivations. A related generalization is the oft-repeated (or silently accepted) idea that the government's critics, whether on the right or on the left, were inspired to an un-usual degree by unmitigated ideological commitment. Saigō Takamori, for example, is depicted as believing so deeply in the feudal samurai ethic that he felt compelled to resign from office when he saw the government “prostituting” that ethic in 1873.