The Meiji birthplace — a perfectly preserved Edo castle town where Japan's modernisers grew up
Hagi is a small coastal city in Yamaguchi Prefecture that punches well above its size in historical importance: it was the birthplace and intellectual home of the young samurai revolutionaries — Ito Hirobumi (Japan's first prime minister), Yamagata Aritomo, and Kido Takayoshi — who overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate and engineered the Meiji Restoration, transforming Japan from feudal isolation to a modern industrial power between 1868 and 1912. The city is remarkably well-preserved: the samurai district of Horiuchi retains its 18th-century street grid, earthen walls, and thatched-gate townhouse…
Hagi was the castle town of the Mori clan's Choshu Domain, one of the two domains (with Satsuma) that drove the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate. The Hagi clan's frustration at the shogunate's failure to resist Western encroachment — and its own progressive leadership — bred a generation of radical young samurai educated at private academies like Shoka Sonjuku, run by executed revolutionary Yoshida Shoin. After the Meiji Restoration, many Hagi natives became the founding generation of modern Japan. The city retains the graves, houses, and schools of these figures remarkably intact. Hagi-ya…