Emperor Meiji and the Charter Oath

On January 3, 1868, the Osei Fukko — the restoration of direct imperial government — was proclaimed. The fifteen-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito took the reign name Meiji, "enlightened rule," and reigned from his 1867 succession until his death in 1912. The new government presented itself as restoring imperial authority lost since the twelfth century under successive shogunates, but real power in fact rested with a group of oligarchs, the genro, drawn from Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen; among them Ito Hirobumi, Okubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi, and Yamagata Aritomo stood out. The emperor was invested with a symbolic and sacred authority that formed the basis of the new kokutai ideology of "national essence," and Shinto was promoted as a state religion to reinforce the cult of the emperor.