Edokai

• Established: 1889
• Japanese: 江戸会 (Edo kai)

The Edokai ("Edo Association") was a group formed in 1889 by a number of former Tokugawa shogunate officials, who sought to restore the reputation of the shogunate, and of the Edo period, amidst a new Meiji period conventional wisdom, that the Edo period was akin to a "Dark Ages."

The group asserted that "the three hundred years of Tokugawa rule saw the greatest progress and development that Japanese civilization had ever known," asserting too that the shoguns had always been firmly loyal to the Emperor, as the political atmosphere of their time (in the mid-Meiji period) required them to.

References

• Carol Gluck, "The Invention of Edo," in Stephen Vlastos (ed.), Mirror of Modernity, University of California Press (1988), 267.