The Tempo era had been one of critical importance for Japan. Even
historians who agree on little else agree on this, detecting in these
years of crisis the beginning of a chain of events that culminated thirty
years later in the dismantling of Japan's ancien regime. Beyond this, of
course, they disagree. To some historians, perhaps the majority, the
Tempo era's most important contribution to Japan's future ferment
was the informal alliance concluded across class barriers by the country
gentry, on the one hand, and some sections of the samurai class -
the so-called lower samurai - on the other, an alliance of the kind of
men who, in 1868, put paid to an establishment that excluded them
and installed themselves in its place.6* Other scholars, to whom the
Meiji Restoration was far more the result of political developments
than social ones, contrast the failure of the bakufu's reforms with the
success of those carried out in domains like Satsuma, finding the seeds
of future instability in the poverty of the one and the wealth of the
other.