Master the Meiji Restoration: 78 Flashcards from Sakoku to the Satsuma Rebellion

Deck DV6860 — "Japanese Feudal Period & Meiji Restoration" holds 78 cards, and the first thing to fix is the title. Feudal Japan here means the Edo period only, and mostly its last fifteen years: there is no Kamakura, no Ashikaga, no Sengoku, no Nobunaga and no Hideyoshi. Sekigahara is named once (card 14, defining tozama daimyō) and never explained. Study it for what it is — the collapse of the Tokugawa order, 1633 to 1877 — and it gets far easier.

Eight cards that carry the deck

What the 78 cards cover

Institutions and vocabulary: bakufu, shogunate, han system, rōjū, tairō, koku, tozama and fudai daimyō, bushidō, sankin-kōtai, the four-class Edo hierarchy. Ideology: sonnō jōi, fukoku kyōhei, kōbu gattai, kokugaku, the Mito School, the shishi. People: Emperor Meiji, Emperor Kōmei, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, Ii Naosuke, Sakuma Shōzan, Yoshida Shōin, Sakamoto Ryōma, Katsu Kaishū, Saigō Takamori, Kido Takayoshi, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Takasugi Shinsaku, Yamagata Aritomo, Itō Hirobumi, Iwakura Tomomi, Townsend Harris. Events: the Perry Expedition, the 1858 Harris Treaty, the Tenpō Reforms, the Ansei Purge, the Sakuradamon and Namamugi Incidents, the bombardment of Kagoshima, the Shimonoseki campaign, the Hamaguri Gate Rebellion, the Chōshū expeditions, the Boshin War, the Republic of Ezo, the Saga and Satsuma Rebellions, the 1889 Meiji Constitution.

Read the last seventeen cards first

Cards 62–78 are the deck's glossary — bakufu, rōjū, tairō, Edo and its 1868 renaming, the 265 years of the Edo period, Tokugawa Yoshinobu's resignation. The narrative starts at card 1 and uses all of it untaught. Flip the order.

While you are there, note what no front ever defines: shōgun, daimyō and samurai themselves, though they appear in roughly twenty backs. Write those three cards before your first review.

Tag every person by domain

Half the difficulty here is name collision. Satsuma: Saigō Takamori, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Shimazu Nariakira. Chōshū: Yoshida Shōin, Kido Takayoshi, Takasugi Shinsaku, Yamagata Aritomo, Itō Hirobumi. Mito: Tokugawa Nariaki. Add the domain to each hint field — all 78 hints are empty — and cards 52 and 53 stop being a trap: Shimazu Nariakira of Satsuma and Tokugawa Nariaki of Mito are three letters apart and both reforming daimyō of the 1850s.

Four cards to repair

Cards 1 and 77 are the same fact in both directions (3 January 1868); cards 4 and 68 both date sakoku to 1633; cards 57, 60 and 78 each summarise the abolition of feudalism. Keep one of each. And the deck contradicts itself on the Boshin War: card 18 says 1868–1869, card 56 answers "by 1870" — the fighting ended at Hakodate in June 1869, so trust card 18. Card 10 asks what share of the population were samurai families and answers in people: 1.5–1.8 million individuals is nearer 300,000–400,000 households.

Deck code DV6860, 78 cards, in the Flip It library — sign in at flip-it.app to start it.

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