• 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,"[1] 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.
  1. Gluck, 267.