In the autumn of 1867 a wave of collective frenzy swept through Japan. The old order was already crumbling, the new had not yet arrived. People stopped working, stopped caring. They walked out into the streets and danced.

First you hear a drum. Far off, still around the corner, but already carrying that strange, trembling rhythm – a rhythm no ordinary festival ever beat out. Then footsteps. Hundreds of feet, thousands. The crowd pours into the street and the street disappears – there is only a human river, in which you can no longer tell where one body ends and another begins. A man in the crimson kimono of a courtesan, his face painted white and red. A young girl in a samurai helmet. The helmet only. An old merchant whose neighbours had seen him for twenty years only in a grey, sober haori – dances naked, with a consecrated amulet stuck to his chest. Mothers dance naked with their children, so do monks, servants, moneylenders. Each one has a red paper lantern on the head. Each one shouts the same thing.

The doors of a wealthy merchant's house stand wide open. They were not broken down – they were opened. A human river pours inside. Rice vanishes from the table, sweets vanish, sake jars pass from hand to hand, and the host stands in the doorway and smiles, because a man who at such a moment does not feed the crowd with a smile may by morning no longer have a house. A few months ago this same crowd would have knelt before a shōgunate official. Now the official is hiding indoors and will not come out, because there is no longer any power to protect him. And there is no longer any office to which he could return. The shōgunate knew how to crush rebellions. But rebels wanted something, they had demands one could meet or refuse. And here? What can you offer to crazed crowds who want nothing, who have no leaders – religious or political – who dance, paralyse the state completely, and shout „Who cares!”.

In the history textbook we read: „the end of shōgunate rule and the beginning of Meiji was a turbulent period.” That is no way to learn history – nothing of it will be understood. The shōgunate was the mainstay and guarantor of the entire framework on which the lives of the people of Edo had been built – and when Perry's black ships pulled up to the shore it proved helpless, completely powerless, irrelevant. In the same years the earth shook three times. Tsunami struck twice. Fires and epidemics were counted in the hundreds. Death was everywhere. The price of rice rose ninefold. Each of the millions of dancers had buried someone close, each had lost a home or a livelihood, each had seen a comet above the rooftops and thought: this is it! People walked out into the streets and danced. They danced through the nights, they danced through the days, they danced so long that their feet were rubbed raw and their throats torn from screaming. From hundreds of throats the same refrain came back again and again, half cry, half incantation, in which one could hear both joy and something harder, something on the edge. „Ee ja nai ka.” Who cares. It doesn't matter. Is this fatalism a total surrender, or something else? And is it only a piece of history, or might it return to us in the 21st century? What happened in Japan between May 1867 and February 1868?

„Who cares if we take off our clothes”

„Who cares, the official's katana has snapped”

„Even the magistrate may dance – who cares!”

„Ee ja nai ka!”

Gods Falling from an Empty Sky

It all began with gods falling from the sky. In the summer of 1867, somewhere in central Japan around Nagoya or Osaka (the exact starting point is still disputed), people began to find paper talismans on their roofs, on their doorsteps, in the branches of trees. Most of them were ofuda (御札) – consecrated amulets of the kind issued at shrines, especially at the great sanctuary of Ise, the most important place of worship in the entire country. The phenomenon was named ofudafuri (御札降り), literally „the falling of amulets”.

Amulets were the most common, but in accounts from various regions stranger things appear too: ribbons, small figurines, talismans of foreign shrines, sometimes objects no one could identify. The less it could be explained, the stronger it worked. A miracle does not need logic. It needs witnesses, and there was no shortage of those.

Think what this meant for a person who for the past fifteen years had been watching everything familiar collapse. The world and all its values, those one had believed in since childhood, those that had been sacred, that had shaped a person's life and the lives of his ancestors – all of it had suddenly lost all meaning and sense. And then – a sign of a god falls at your feet. You are not going to the shrine – the shrine comes to you, straight from the sky, onto your own roof. The reaction was instant and everywhere the same. Where an amulet had fallen, a makeshift altar was set up, sacred sake and rice were offered, and then people began to dance. And the dancing did not stop.

It did not begin in the same way everywhere. In Senba, the merchant quarter of Osaka, the madness grew in the summer of 1867 out of an innocent dance of thanksgiving for the harvest, hōnen odori (豊年踊り). Year after year such dances had been an ordinary village amusement. That year the amusement refused to end – it spilled from courtyards into the streets, from the streets into neighbouring districts, then through the whole city and beyond. Elsewhere the spark was the rain of amulets, elsewhere dances for the dead or rain rituals. Everywhere it ended the same way: with a crowd that had lost the ability to stop.

Although the time of Perry's black ships and the end of the shōgunate was extraordinarily intense, Japan had a pattern of such an outburst of hysteria already inscribed in its memory. Roughly every sixty years a wave of mass pilgrimage to Ise rolled through the country, known as okage mairi (お蔭参り) – „the pilgrimage of gratitude”. The last great wave, in 1830, set in motion close to five million people, out of a population of about thirty-two million. One in seven inhabitants of Japan dropped everything that year and went. Servants slipped away from their masters without permission – this was called nukemairi (抜け参り), „escape pilgrimage” – and along the way they walked in disguise, danced, lost money, rules and shame.

Except that 1867 was not a year in that cycle at all. The next regular wave would have fallen only around 1890. What broke out in the autumn of 1867 was therefore something like a premature birth – the same energy, the same dance, the same sacred fever, but torn out of the calendar, pushed more than twenty years too early by something that could no longer wait. The social body did not hold to term.

Where did those amulets come from in the first place? Some people believed without a shadow of doubt that they were a gift of the gods. Others were more suspicious and they may have been right. In several places people were caught red-handed scattering talismans – wandering priests, young men dreaming of becoming leaders, and merchants too, because some of the „sacred” amulets turned out to be ordinary advertisements for local businesses. The heaven from which signs of the gods were falling had very earthly pockets. But none of this stopped anything. The rain of amulets was only the spark. The fuel had been gathering for fifteen years.

And finding an amulet on your own roof changed everything. Neighbours gathered to look at the sign, someone brought sake, someone struck a drum, children ran off to spread the word through the neighbourhood. By nightfall an altar stood in front of the house, and around it a circle of dancers. The next morning the circle did not vanish – it grew. So from a single scrap of paper on a roof grew the madness of an entire street, and from the madness of a street – the madness of a city.

The City That Did Not Sleep

When the dance got going in earnest, the city stopped sleeping. Not for one night – for weeks. Accounts from various cities agree on one thing: it simply did not stop. People danced by day and they danced by night, some collapsed and others took their place, the drums did not fall silent, and the streets were so densely packed with the shouting, sweating, drunken crowd that ordinary urban life simply ceased.

The first thing to vanish was the order of body and dress. Men put on women's kimonos, women dressed as men. Some painted their faces, others wore the costumes of gods, demons, foxes, priests. Some wore nothing at all. Naked men with faces painted red and white were seen, naked women with swords at their belts, old men decked out like young brides. Nakedness, in the daily life of villages and towns hedged about with a thousand rules, suddenly meant nothing. The very phrase that was being shouted carried this permission within it:

服を脱いでもええじゃないか

(fuku o nuide mo ee ja nai ka)

„Who cares if we take off our clothes”

やってもええじゃないか

(yatte mo ee ja nai ka)

„Who cares if we do it”

(the verb yaru in this context = to have sex; a euphemism still alive today)

The British diplomat Ernest Satow, one of the sharpest Western observers of those years, saw it with his own eyes in Osaka. He remembered crowds in festive dress, dancing and singing the same refrain over and over; houses decked with coloured rice cakes, oranges, little bags, straw and flowers; cloth mostly red, here and there blue and violet; and those dancing people with red lanterns on their heads. Looking on was a man from a country that was at that very moment battering its way into Japan with cannons, and he wasn't quite sure whether he was seeing joy or fear. Or madness.

In this din there was an order of sorts, though it would be hard to call it order. The dances were most often organized by groups of young men, the same ones who in everyday life took care of village and town affairs (Wakamono – more about them here: How the Japanese village took care of itself. Wakamono-gumi – the youth who acted where no one else would come to help. ). They played drums and shamisen, they sang, they clapped in time. Servants were given time off, for who at such a moment would force anyone to work. Gifts were exchanged. People set off on pilgrimages to nearby sanctuaries to give thanks for the amulets, and came back even more feverish. The whole life of the community was for a few weeks lifted out of normal time and thrown into one great, whirling now.

Picture the third day of such a dance. Feet rubbed raw, throats torn from screaming, and yet no one stops, because to stop means to drop out of something larger than yourself. Someone falls in a corner and sleeps for an hour, then comes back. Someone else dances so long that he stops feeling hungry – and in a city where people were dying of hunger, that is no trifle. The body, for years curled up with fear and want, suddenly does the exact opposite: gives everything it has, to the last breath.

The strangest thing was how the dance spread. No one had to be persuaded. A person would leave the house just to look, would stand on the side, tap a foot to the drum – and within a quarter of an hour was inside, with a lantern on the head, shouting the refrain with the rest. The crowd worked like fire in dry grass: it touched the next person, and the next caught from it. A neighbour saw a dancing neighbour and started too, because suddenly standing aside looked stranger than dancing. Within days a city until then suffocating with fear and want became a single whirling organism.

The most important thing, however, was happening not on the street but behind the doors of the rich. The crowd entered the houses of wealthy merchants and moneylenders – the same ones who in recent years had grown rich on inflation while the rest were starving – and there, inside, danced. It ate their food, drank their sake, distributed their stores. The host could not refuse. Refusal brought down on him the anger of the gods and the anger of the neighbours. Above all – the anger of an unrestrained crowd evidently consumed by madness, and that was decidedly dangerous. At best he entertained the crowd with a smile and saw them off to the next house. At worst – he watched his possessions flow down the street.

And here we must say something easily missed under the layer of coloured lanterns. This was redistribution. Soft, dancing, dressed up as a festival – but redistribution nonetheless. Wealth had been flowing for years in one direction, and now for a few weeks it flowed back. No one called it robbery, because everyone called it a feast. But the rice in the belly of the hungry man had earlier been the merchant's rice, and the merchant had not dared say „no”. In a city where a hundred coins now bought only a handful of grain, that was no trifle.

And above all this stood the fact that decided everything else: the authorities did not react. Not because they did not want to. Because they could not. The keepers of order and the soldiers in the great cities were unable to disperse a crowd that numbered hundreds and thousands of people, danced without pause, and gave no end you could grab hold of. The shōgunate even issued a formal ban on the dance. The ban had not the slightest effect. Who was supposed to enforce it when the whole city was spinning to one rhythm?

Who Cares

The very name of the phenomenon is the refrain of a chant.

ええじゃないか

"Ee ja nai ka"

This is no studied phrase from a philosophical treatise but a colloquial cry in the Kansai dialect. „Ee” is dialectal for „good”, „ja nai ka” means „isn't it?”. Together: „isn't it good?”. But this translation is too polite. In the mouth of the dancing crowd it meant rather „who cares!”, „it doesn't matter!”, „why not!”. In one short wave of sound there was both fatalism and revolt.

The refrain had dozens of variants. In some districts they sang „yoi ja nai ka”, in others „ee ja nai ka” or yet otherwise, depending on the dialect. To this were tacked local insertions, lewd jokes, mockery of particular rich men and officials. It was perhaps the simplest song one could imagine: two or three words easy to catch the first time, requiring no learning, in a rhythm in which the feet lead themselves. That is precisely why it could sweep the entire country.

The contents of the chants we know today thanks to the notes of eyewitnesses and the work of historians. They circulated as short, two- or three-line cries tacked onto each other on the fly. Among those preserved in the records are these:

今年は世直りええじゃないか

(kotoshi wa yo-naori ee ja nai ka)

„Who cares, this year the world will be renewed”

長州さんの御登り、ええじゃないか

(Chōshū-san no o-nobori, ee ja nai ka)

„Who cares, the lord of Chōshū is marching in”

神国に異人が来た、ええじゃないか

(shinkoku ni ijin ga kita, ee ja nai ka)

„Who cares, barbarians have come to the divine country”

異人の家に石が降る、ええじゃないか

(ijin no ie ni ishi ga furu, ee ja nai ka)

„Who cares, stones are falling on the foreigner's house”

服を脱いでもええじゃないか

(fuku o nuide mo ee ja nai ka)

„Who cares if we take off our clothes”

役人の刀が折れた、ええじゃないか

(yakunin no katana ga oreta, ee ja nai ka)

„Who cares, the official's katana has snapped”

お代官様も踊らんかい、ええじゃないか

(O-daikan-sama mo odoran kai, ee ja nai ka)

„Even the magistrate may dance – who cares!”

In these seven lines is the whole temperature of those months. The sanctity of pilgrimage and the hope of world renewal stand beside the mockery of an official whose katana has snapped. Right next to them – stones flying at a foreigner's house and naked bodies, because today it's allowed, who cares. Everything in one beat, everything under the same refrain. The word that returns most often, yonaoshi (世直し), literally „world repair”, was circulating everywhere at the time. Composed of the characters for „world” and „repair”, it was the dream that a broken order could be set right – at once, ideally, by a miracle. But in the same dream of repair there was also rage, lust and mockery. Carnival does not pick and choose – it takes everything at once.

But this was no innocent amusement. In this carnival there also trembled hatred: of the strangers who had forced their way into the country and, as people believed, had brought with them plague, inflation and disgrace. The dancing crowd dreamed of a renewed world, but in that dream the foreigners were to die under a hail of stones. The dream of world repair and the dream of revenge marched here to one beat.

What was happening on the streets had its own logic, though it was not the logic of reason. Anthropologists know such moments as rituals of reversal – those rare moments when a community suspends its own rules and allows itself to be everything it is not normally allowed to be. The poor man plays the rich man, the man plays the woman, the servant dances in the master's house. A sociologist would add that a common rhythm – the same step, the same shout, the same body of thousands of people moving together – of itself produces elation, a kind of collective intoxication stronger than sake. Whoever once fell into that rhythm ceased to be himself and became the crowd.

There is in this also plain human relief. For all those years each had carried his fear alone – his hunger, his dead, his house burned down. In the dance the weight for a moment disappeared, because it ceased to be yours. It became shared, and shared weight weighs less. One could shout without shame, weep and laugh at once, and no one asked why. The crowd gave what neither office, nor temple, nor money gave: the sense that one is not alone in a collapsing world.

But beware of romanticism. It is easy to make of this a beautiful story of a people regaining its dignity through dance. There is part of the truth in that. But there was also the other end: vandalism, arson, drunken violence, a crowd capable in a moment of moving from ecstasy to fury. The world upside down is sometimes freedom. Or its end.

Fifteen Years of the End of the World

No crowd starts dancing on the street for no reason. To understand why the entire country fell into this fever, one must go back fifteen years and see how methodically, year by year, the earth slipped from under people's feet – first literally, then in every possible way at once.

People did not experience this as separate misfortunes. They experienced it as one continuous sign. In the records of those years there returns the sense that „the last days” were coming – that the world was approaching its end, and that heaven and earth were giving proof after proof. After every catastrophe the streets were flooded with cheap one-page prints, kawaraban (瓦版, more about them here: “Suicide in Yoshiwara! Fire in Honjō!” – What kind of “newspapers” were read in the days of the Tokugawa shogunate?), the first Japanese „newspapers”, sold fresh just after a fire, an earthquake or an epidemic. A man would buy such a sheet, read about yet another end of the world and add it to the rest. Year by year a conviction grew in him that the old order was not merely failing – that the end was simply inevitable.

In 1853 the black ships of Commodore Perry stood in Edo Bay, and the shōgunate, which for over two centuries had guaranteed the country its closure and its peace, within a few years proved itself powerless. The shōgunate – mighty, all-seeing and all-hearing, the very guarantor of the existence of the Japanese order – proved entirely helpless. This alone must have sown great desolation in people's hearts. But this was not the end. In the days that followed people in the streets were horrified by further things – a whole wave of cataclysms. In the same year that the black ships appeared off the coast of Japan, the earth shook under Odawara. In 1854 tsunami struck along the southern roads. And in 1855 came the great earthquake which flattened entire districts of Edo – around ten thousand people died, more than fourteen thousand houses fell.

After the earthquake the city was flooded with a wave of strange woodblock prints. They depicted an enormous catfish, namazu (鯰), who according to folk belief inhabited the depths beneath the islands and caused earthquakes by his movements. In some of these prints the catfish is punished. In some – and this is most curious – he is almost a hero, because the earthquake had shaken the gold out of the rich and scattered it among the poor and the craftsmen, giving them work in the rebuilding. Disaster as the levelling of injustice. Catastrophe as the repair of the world. The same dream of yonaoshi that twelve years later would return on the lips of the dancers.

Then came plague. In 1858 a cholera so violent passed through the country that it was called the „three-day” cholera – a man healthy in the morning would be a corpse before the end of the third day. Estimates speak of tens of thousands dead in Edo alone, and some records push the toll for the whole country up to three hundred thousand. Among the dead that year was the master of woodblock prints, Utagawa Hiroshige. Piles of coffins stood in city streets, and funeral processions followed one after another. A comet stood in the sky, which many read as a sign of the end.

Four years later, in 1862, came the worst measles epidemic in Japanese history. It touched, by estimate, close to two thirds of the population. In Edo alone it killed nearly twenty-one thousand people. At the height of the epidemic more than two hundred funeral processions a day passed over a single bridge, Nihonbashi. And between the plagues there were fires, often. In the fifteen years preceding the fall of the shōgunate the chronicles record more than half a thousand fires. Fire from the sky, water from the sea, the trembling earth, plague in the air – the elements seemed to be in conspiracy.

To this was added poverty, which does not fall from the sky but is the work of men. After the opening of the port of Yokohama in 1859 gold began to flee the country. In Japan the rate of gold to silver was about one to five, in the world one to fifteen, so foreigners made the deal of a lifetime buying Japanese gold for a song. The currency collapsed, prices shot up. A hundred bales of rice cost in 1853 about fifty pieces of gold; in 1867 – already four hundred and fifty. Ninefold growth in fourteen years.

But the real drama is visible only in the coin of the poor man. In 1853 a hundred copper coins bought enough rice to feed one person for two days. In 1868 those same hundred coppers bought barely a handful – just enough to survive a day. This is the scale at which a bowl of rice ceases to be a meal and becomes a sentence. No wonder that already in 1866 a wave of revolts passed through villages and towns. Under one of the villages a banner was painted with a bowl of rice and crossed scoops for ladling grain, and beneath it was written: „Great God of World Repair”. Under this sign about three thousand people marched.

At the same time new religions were growing. A woman of peasant family, Nakayama Miki, declared that a god had entered into her, and gave rise to a movement that promised healing and a renewed world – with its own sacred dance at the very heart of the rite. New communities arose proclaiming that a new age was approaching, that salvation was near, that the world was about to be transformed. All of this – the dancing prophetesses, the rebelling peasants under the banner of world repair, the crowds bowing before holy objects carried into view – was the same underground tremor. Ee ja nai ka was its ultimate outburst.

Did Someone Direct All This?

Here begins the most interesting puzzle. For there is one fact that makes you suspect that behind the madness lay a cold calculation. The dancing crowd paralysed the authorities in the great cities precisely in the months when the opponents of the shōgunate were preparing their decisive blow. When the keepers of order could not move through the crowd, the men of Satsuma and Chōshū had a clear field.

The evidence that fires the imagination is a certain murder. On 10 December 1867, in Kyoto, at the very peak of the dancing frenzy, assassins caught up with Sakamoto Ryōma – one of the most important architects of the fall of the shōgunate – and his companion Nakaoka Shintarō. Sakamoto died on the spot. Think about this for a moment. On the streets a carnival is spinning, the city does not sleep, the watch controls nothing – and at that very moment, in this din and chaos, someone calmly enters a room and kills a man who was changing history.

Did someone, then, direct this dance? The temptation to think so is enormous, and yet serious historians reject it. The reason is simple and apt: no conspiracy would have been able to scatter amulets and ignite the dance over a territory stretching from Kyoto through Kobe all the way to Nagoya, in dozens of cities at once, over many months. It was too vast, too spontaneous, too chaotic to be anyone's plan. One can fan a fire that is already burning. One cannot order an entire country to go mad.

Was it then a rebellion? So for decades ee ja nai ka was read by historians searching the past for the voice of the people – as a protest of the oppressed, a cry for justice, a folk version of revolution. There is truth in this too. But this does not close the case either, because the crowd had no demands, no programme, no leader. It demanded nothing concrete. It danced. That is what is so astonishing in this story.

In that silence there is something that should give us pause. A rebellion with demands can be granted or crushed. A rebellion that demands nothing cannot be dealt with at all – it cannot be yielded to, nor defeated. It can only be waited out. The power of the shōgunate, expert in cutting off the heads of rebels with a concrete banner, was wholly helpless before a crowd singing „who cares” and wanting nothing but the dance.

The most recent research moves in yet another direction. The diary of a certain official from Nagoya, who carefully noted the events of that autumn, shows something that contradicts the picture of wild anarchy: orderly, communal rites of thanksgiving for the fallen amulets, organized within neighbourhoods, with altars and offerings. By this reading ee ja nai ka was above all religious – an eschatological hope for a cleansed world, neither political anger nor pure chaos.

And here we come to the least comfortable truth, and probably the one closest to the matter. Ee ja nai ka was neither a rebellion, nor a conspiracy, nor a festival – in pure form it was none of these. It was something harder to name: a collective reaction to the collapse of meaning. When power failed, when the economy failed, when the temples of the established order failed, when even the earth ceased to be sure, people reached for the only answer left to them. They began to dance. And that is why each age reads this dance in its own way, and none can close it. Because it was not an answer to a question. It was an answer to the fatalistic absence of any question to be answered.

While the People Danced, the Shōgunate Died

The most astonishing thing in this story is what was happening in parallel. For while the people were dancing in the streets, at the very top there was collapsing the order which had held Japan in its grip for two hundred and sixty-four years. And the one knew almost nothing of the other.

On 9 November 1867, in the middle of the dancing fever, the last shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu handed power back to the emperor. The act was called taisei hōkan (大政奉還), „the return of imperial power”. On the third of January 1868 the troops of several southern domains seized the imperial palace in Kyoto, abolished the office of shōgun and proclaimed the restoration of imperial rule, ōsei fukko (王政復古). Some twenty days later, at Toba and Fushimi, the first shots were fired in the civil war that was to decide the shape of the new Japan.

Set these two scenes next to each other. In one room dignitaries in silks decide the fate of the country, ending the age of the samurai after almost seven hundred years of their rule. A few hundred metres further on, in the street, a man in a woman's kimono with a red lantern on his head shouts „who cares!” and walks into a merchant's house for a bowl of rice. The man in the street most likely did not know that the world in which he was born was at that very moment ending. Or perhaps he knew better than the dignitaries. Perhaps that is why he danced.

History often does this: a regime falls quietly. The end of two hundred and sixty-four years of Tokugawa rule played out in council chambers, in the exchange of letters, in a few skirmishes on the edges of cities. The most important decisions were taken in the silence of cabinets. The crowd knew nothing of them. Great history and history as lived passed each other on the same streets without recognizing each other.

From the years preceding the fall of the shōgunate there has survived a whole wave of yonaoshi woodblock prints – „world repair”. Their composition repeats itself: the Seven Gods of Fortune fly down from the sky and shower the crowd with coins and amulets; the giant catfish namazu shakes the earth, shaking gold out of the rich; in the background stands Fuji as if about to erupt. Everyone is laughing, everyone is catching the falling gifts. And above all this joy lurks catastrophe – for the rescue of the gods comes only when the old world has already fallen apart. Hardly a more apt picture of the mood of those days could be found.

What Remains After the Dance

The dance fell silent in the spring of 1868, more or less the way it had begun – with no announcement, no decree, no one to say „enough”. Simply, fewer and fewer people came out to dance, until one day only the usual din was left in the streets. In its place came a new order: the emperor moved to a renamed Edo, now Tokyo, modernization at a pace that took the breath of Japan and of the whole world. And a bloody civil war that did not finally die down until a year later, far in the north.

A year after the same streets had whirled in crimson silks, columns of soldiers with modern cannons marched along them. The refrain fell silent so completely that later Japan, proud and modern, for a long time forgot about it – as if a little ashamed of it. It came back only in the 20th century, in films and books, when descendants began to wonder what that fever had really been.

The question that ee ja nai ka leaves behind gives you gooseflesh. It is a question about the human being. What will he do when the earth slips from under his feet and the systems meant to hold him fall one after another, when power does not protect, money does not suffice, the gods are silent, and the very earth trembles? It turns out that he does not always reach for a weapon and does not always fall to his knees. Sometimes he begins to dance. Is this fatalism a kind of total surrender? To this day we do not know whether it was the laughter of despair, or the first awkward step toward freedom – or perhaps simply the only human way to live through the last night of the old world. I think that the search for an answer to these questions is now important, more important than even a few decades ago. Could a new ee ja nai ka happen? No longer Japanese, but broader, global? How will we react if the world in the next few years changes more drastically than in any of the greatest transformations of the past?

SOURCES

1. George M. Wilson, „Patriots and Redeemers in Japan: Motives in the Meiji Restoration”, 1992.

2. M. William Steele, „Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History”, 2003.

3. Anne Walthall, M. William Steele, „Politics and Society in Japan's Meiji Restoration: A Brief History with Documents”, 2017.

4. M. William Steele, „Apocalypse Now: An Alternate View of the Bakumatsu Years”, Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource, University of British Columbia (online).

5. „The Ee ja nai ka and the Meiji Restoration”, Journal of Religion in Japan, vol. 7, no. 3 (2018).

6. 細野要斎『感興漫筆』 (Hosono Yōsai, „Kankyō manpitsu” – diary of an official of Owari domain, notes from 1836–1878; the principal source on ee ja nai ka in Nagoya).

7. 佐々木潤之介『世直し』, 東京大学出版会, 東京 1979 (Sasaki Junnosuke, „Yonaoshi” – „World Repair”).

"Strong Japanese Women"

see book by the author

of the page

    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

___________________

inari.smart

Would you like to share your thoughts or feedback about our website or app? Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you quickly. We value your perspective!