Organizer: Kyu Hyun Kim, University of California, Davis
Chair: Andrew Gordon, Harvard University
Discussant: Matsuzawa Hiroaki, International Christian University, Japan
Constitutional thought and politics in the formative period of modern Japan, the Meiji period (1868–1912), have mostly been studied from the state’s point of view. The dominant narrative praises the prescience and control exercised by government leaders such as Ito Hirobumi, culminating in the promulgation of the Imperial Constitution in 1889. This panel presents three papers and a discussion which attempt to shift the focus of inquiry from the state to civil society. For several decades now, many works have been produced in Japan, most notably by so-called people’s historians such as Irokawa Daikichi, which challenge the state-oriented perspective in the dominant narrative of Meiji constitutional development. Still, public discourse in civil society, which vigorously and critically engaged the state in this period, remains inadequately understood, especially in English language works.
To address this gap, our panel proposes to look into critical discourses in civil society centered on the contents and interpretation of the Imperial Constitution, both before and after its promulgation. The papers deal with civic constitutional drafts circulated in the public sphere of the late 1870s and 1880s, the operation of the constitutional system during the Early Diet period (1890–1894) with a focus on various uses of ‘public opinion’ by different political actors and Tanaka Shozo’s socially critical and environmentally conscious constitutional thought, respectively. It is hoped that this series of explorations and reexaminations will contribute to improving our understanding of the dialectical engagement between state ideology and public discourse in civil society, which ultimately determined the course of Japanese politics in imperial Japan.
Heaven’s Laws: Tanaka Shozo and Meiji Constitutionalism
Timothy George, University of Rhode Island
Tanaka Shozo (1841–1913) is known as an environmental activist but not as a constitutional thinker. He never wrote a draft constitution, and his ideas matured well after the early Meiji "period of possibilities" ended with the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution. Yet his later writings portray a search for alternatives consistent with "the constitution of the universe."
For his first fifty years Tanaka lived a life much like those of other village notables caught up in the Meiji enlightenment and popular rights movements. But after his election to the first Diet in 1890, he began campaigning on behalf of victims of pollution and flooding from the Ashio copper mine, and his political career and thought turned in new directions. "Nature" was for him not a metaphor but the very real source of the "laws of heaven" to which human beings and their laws must conform. Human laws, and the government and politics they regulated, required a bottom-up implementation, beginning with the family and the village, and a "harmonious cooperation" in which rulers respect their subjects’ human rights.
Influenced by Confucianism, enlightenment thought, Christianity, and socialism, and enriched by his farm village background and his environmental activism, Tanaka Shozo’s constitutional thought was at odds with the centralizing trajectory of imperial Japan but offers a link between traditional and progressive political values and vocabulary of that era.
From ‘Public Opinion’ to ‘Anti-Foreignism’: Shifting Faces of Political Opposition in the Early Japanese Diet
Jin Whi Hong, Harvard University
Surveying the political landscape of Meiji Japan in 1889, the Times of London announced the emergence of "a new force, that of public opinion," calling it "one of the most radical features of difference between the Japan of twenty years ago and the Japan of today." Four years later, however, its tone would not be so buoyant, this time condemning "anti-foreignism" which had emerged as the new driving force behind the Japanese nation. This paper takes this Victorian liberal position as a point of departure and, from there, examines the Meiji politics of early to mid-1890s to account for the limits of such understanding and to provide a view of the actual workings of the fledgling constitutional system.
The focus of the paper is on the Diet politics surrounding the issue of treaty revision and how domestic political opposition was shaped by it. The paper argues that treaty revision was the issue that brought about the first major rupture between the two main opposition parties, the Jiyuto and the Kaishinto, as well as within the Meiji government. The "anti-foreignism" that erupted in the Lower House in late 1893 should be understood as part of this realigned domestic political dynamics.
Civic Constitutional Drafts in Early Meiji Japan
Kyu Hyun Kim, University of California, Davis
The promulgation of the Imperial Constitution in 1889 is generally considered one of the most important turning points in the history of modern Japan. This paper deals not with the constitution itself, but with a wide variety of "civic constitutional drafts" (shigi kenpo soan) that were not officially sanctioned by the government. These were drawn up by intellectuals, journalists and political activists between late 1870s and 1880s, and publicized by means of the newly created national and local newsmedia and other networks of public communication.
These hypothetical constitutions have not been introduced into English-language scholarship, and even Japanese-language studies tend to emphasize the relative "radicalness" of their contents vis-à-vis the Imperial Constitution. This paper will attempt to analyze these drafts in the context of the greater debates on the nature and character of the Japanese polity. By doing so, this paper will demonstrate their significance in terms of the historical development and maturation of the national public sphere in Japan of the early Meiji period, where political and social issues were intensely debated among the constituents of civil society and the state.