BHIE 142 History of Modern East Asia: Japan (1868-1945) Solved Question Paper June 2026 for IGNOU BA General and BA Honours History

Introduction. The Tokugawa shoguns ruled Japan from 1603, when Tokugawa Ieyasu took the title of shogun, until 1868. Two and a half centuries of internal peace, a controlled foreign policy and fast-growing towns produced a rich intellectual life. Ideas sponsored by the regime sat alongside ideas that quietly questioned it, and both shaped the Japan that the Meiji leaders inherited.

1. Neo-Confucianism as official learning. The bakufu adopted the Zhu Xi school of Neo-Confucianism to justify a fixed order of samurai, peasants, artisans and merchants. Hayashi Razan advised the early shoguns, and his family ran the academy in Edo that later became the official Shoheiko school. Loyalty, hierarchy and duty were presented as part of the natural order of things.

2. Challenges from within Confucianism. Scholars of Kogaku (Ancient Learning) such as Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai rejected the Song commentaries and went back to the original Confucian classics. Sorai argued that institutions were human creations designed to secure order, an idea that opened space for practical political reform.

3. Kokugaku or National Learning. Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga turned to early Japanese texts such as the Kojiki and the Man’yoshu to recover a native spirit untouched by Chinese learning. Norinaga’s long commentary on the Kojiki and Hirata Atsutane’s later teaching gave new weight to the emperor and Shinto, ideas the anti-bakufu movement later used.

4. Rangaku or Dutch Learning. Through the Dutch trading post at Dejima in Nagasaki, Western medicine, astronomy and geography reached Japan. After Shogun Yoshimune relaxed the ban on Western books in 1720, interest grew quickly. In 1774 Sugita Genpaku and Maeno Ryotaku published Kaitai Shinsho, a translation of a Dutch anatomy text.

5. The Mito school and popular ethics. The Mito domain’s history project, the Dai Nihonshi, and Aizawa Seishisai’s Shinron (1825) linked loyalty to the emperor with defence against foreigners, feeding the slogan sonno joi. For townspeople, Ishida Baigan’s Shingaku gave merchants moral dignity built on honesty and thrift.

6. Urban chonin culture. Edo, Osaka and Kyoto produced a lively townsmen’s culture that peaked in the Genroku era (1688-1704). Kabuki and bunraku puppet theatre, Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s plays, Ihara Saikaku’s stories of merchant life, Matsuo Basho’s haiku and ukiyo-e prints, later by artists such as Hokusai and Hiroshige, reached wide audiences.

7. Education and literacy. Domain schools (hanko) trained samurai, while thousands of terakoya taught commoners reading, writing and arithmetic. The sankin kotai system, which brought daimyo to Edo in alternate years, also carried fashions, books and ideas along the highways.

Conclusion. Tokugawa thought was never a single official creed. Neo-Confucian discipline, nativist loyalty to the emperor, practical Western science and wide literacy together gave Meiji Japan both the ideology and the skills it needed for rapid change after 1868.

Introduction. Between the end of the First World War in 1918 and full-scale war with China in 1937, Japanese industry grew through a cycle of boom, crisis and recovery. Japan ended the period far more industrial than it began, but the gains were shared very unequally between big and small firms and between town and village.

1. The wartime boom and its end. The First World War pulled European producers out of Asian markets. Japanese exports of cotton goods, ships and other manufactures rose sharply, and Japan turned from a debtor into a creditor nation. The boom collapsed with the stock market crash of 1920, leaving many firms with idle capacity and heavy debts.

2. A troubled 1920s. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1 September 1923 destroyed much of Tokyo and Yokohama and left banks holding bad loans. These weaknesses burst out in the financial crisis of 1927, when bank runs followed the collapse of the trading house Suzuki Shoten and the troubles of the Bank of Taiwan. Small banks closed and deposits moved to the big zaibatsu banks.

3. Concentration and rationalisation. Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Yasuda tightened their hold on finance, trade and heavy industry. Electric power spread rapidly, letting small workshops mechanise, and cartels were encouraged. The Important Industries Control Law of 1931 gave legal backing to cartel agreements.

4. The Showa depression. Finance Minister Inoue Junnosuke returned Japan to the gold standard in January 1930, just as the world depression deepened. Prices fell, exports shrank and raw silk, sold mainly to the United States, lost much of its value. Farm households that depended on sericulture were hit hardest.

5. Recovery under Takahashi. In December 1931 Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo took Japan off gold. The yen fell, making exports cheaper, and the state spent heavily, much of it on the armed forces. Japan recovered faster than most industrial countries, and its cotton textile exports overtook Britain’s in the early 1930s.

6. Shift to heavy industry and empire. Steel, machinery, chemicals and shipbuilding expanded quickly. New combines such as Nissan and Nitchitsu invested in Manchuria and Korea, so industrial growth became tied to colonial expansion and military demand. By the late 1930s heavy and chemical industries rivalled textiles as the core of Japanese manufacturing.

Critical assessment. The growth was real but lopsided. A dual structure emerged in which large modern firms paid far higher wages than small factories. Factory wages lagged behind profits, and unions worked under tight police control. Agriculture stagnated, tenancy disputes rose and rural poverty fed support for the militarists. From 1931 the recovery increasingly built a war economy that Japan could not sustain.