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Citizenship and National Identity in Early Meiji Japan, 1868–1889

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Citizenship and National Identity in Early Meiji Japan, 1868–1889 Citizenship and National Identity in Early Meiji Japan, 1868-1889: A Comparative Assessment* EIKO IKEGAMI After the collapse of the long-standing Tokugawa regime (1603-1867), Japan under the Meiji emperor (1867-1912) rapidly implemented the process of modern nation-building by effectively utilizing the venerable institution of the emperor (Tenno) as its new national symbol. Following the imperial restoration, the Meiji government abolished the socio- economic and political privileges of the samurai class, namely its exclusive right to bear arms, hold office and receive hereditary stipends. By 1900, Japan had already equipped itself with a modern Constitution that defined citizens' rights and obligations, a parliamentary system, an updated judicial system, universal education, a restructured national and local bureaucracy, national standing army, private ownership of land, and a nation-wide taxation system. None of these institutions had existed prior to 1868. All of the developmental innovations listed above were instituted within little more than a quarter century after the collapse of their predecessor's political structures. Before the Meiji restoration, Japanese society had been governed exclusively by its hereditary samurai elites for two and a half centuries. It was only during the early Meiji period - a little more than two decades or so - that the concept of kokumin (usually translated as "citizen", more literally "country-person") entered the popular vocabulary for the first time in Japanese history. The complex social and political dynamics of this initial period of development for Japanese citizenship rights is the primary object of my inquiry. Japan's first modern Constitution (1889) defined the emperor as the source of supreme.sovereign power, at the same time that it codified the civic rights of "imperial subjects", including freedom of speech and religion, property rights and political participation through a parliamen- tary system. These provisions were by no means ideal from a modern liberal democratic perspective, in so far as they were coupled with assertion of the emperor's divine power and authority. Under the terms of the 1889 Constitution, sovereignty was vested in the emperor alone, on the basis of his "unbroken mythic" bloodline, but actual exercise of power was divided between a bicameral Diet and a Cabinet. Given the * I would like to thank Reid Andrews, Herrick Chapman, Betsy Fray, Michael Mosher and Charles Tilly for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. A version of this paper was presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Los Angeles, and at a conference on "Social Construction of Democracy" at the University of Pittsburgh in 1992. International Review of Social History 40, Supplement 3 (1995), pp. 185-221 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 26 Sep 2021 at 01:51:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000113641 186 Eiko Ikegami fact that Japan did not have either a tradition of citizenship or experience of parliamentary rule, this formal codification and institutionalization of political citizenship was a watershed in its history. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Japan further extended the suffrage, and parliamentary partisan politics acquired a solid institutional form. Even though these temporary achievements of democracy were dis- mantled in the 1930s during the rise of anti-democratic militarism, the gradual expansion of liberal-political institutions during this earlier transitional period stood in partial contradiction to the authoritarian image of the pre-war Japanese state. In this paper, I shall examine the institution of citizenship in Meiji Japan as the outcome of processes in which a variety of social forces interactively shaped public discourse in a particular historical contin- gency. I define "citizenship" as a set of negotiated relationships between the state and its members, entailing certain provisions for individuals' rights and obligations that define their relationships. The construction of citizenship as a political relationship rests upon shared, but also often simultaneously contested, understandings of the social identities of the state's members, as well as that of the state itself (i.e. nationhood). I stress the importance of process in this set of interactions, because it was this search for the social construction of individual and collective identity that clearly distinguished the political experience of Meiji Japan from that of its feudal predecessor. Before the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate in the middle of the nineteenth century, political relations between the government and individual subjects were never considered negotiable entities, at least officially. Only with the passing of the shogunate and the subsequent establishment of the Meiji restoration, did open public discussion of the nature of the Japanese state and its actual and potential relationships to the general population emerge as a significant factor in the political process. The idea and institution of "citizenship" is of Western provenance. The modern version of citizenship, which assumes an egalitarian principle of membership in the state, is also a Western product associated with the rise of the nation-state, democracy and a mature civil society. Thus, the development of citizenship in non-Western societies is conventionally measured according to the extent of their importation of Western ideas and institutions. If we evaluate non-Western definitions of citizenship only in terms of concepts and law codes, the Meiji Constitution's defini- tion of the Japanese people as "subjects" {shinmin) of the divine emperor is hardly an impressive instance of importation. The case of Meiji Japan is a significant chapter in the history of citizenship, however, not because of the resultant legal provisions (i.e. the extent of citizens' legal claims on the state), but rather because of its accrued political experience; that is, the process of bargaining and negotiation that defined the relationship between the government and its population. The Meiji period was the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 26 Sep 2021 at 01:51:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000113641 Citizenship and National Identity in Early Meiji Japan 187 first time in Japanese history that new identities of the Japanese people and the Japanese state were seriously influenced by and reformulated through emerging vehicles of public debate. I consider that the general rubric of the notion of citizenship allows for a multiplicity of possible relations between governments and their populations. The Japanese variant was a product of borrowing from Western models, improvisation and deliberate invention within the strict constraints of a historical context. The articulation of this historical context allows for an exploration of the seemingly paradoxical nature of Meiji citizenship, which I propose to do in this paper. The first question concerns the apparent contradiction between the elitist nature of the Meiji oligarchy and its acceptance of a modicum of popular political participation. Given its authoritarian image, why did the Meiji oligarchy make sizable concessions to popular oppositional demands, and allow the institution of at least some degree of civic and political rights? At the same time, why was this seemingly "modernist" attempt at legal reform tied to the formal institutionalization of the emperor system, which eventually grew to monstrous proportions and ushered Japan into the military authoritarianism of the 1930s? In other words, how could Japan's initial attempt to construct formal relationships between government and citizens, based as it was on a shared under- standing of collective identity, issue in the creation of an authoritarian imperial ideology? THE CONVENTIONAL IMAGE OF MEUI JAPAN IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Social scientists have tended to view Meiji Japan as an example of the authoritarian as opposed to the democratic path of English or French political developments - as articulated by the famous thesis of Barrington Moore - of "dictatorship" as compared to "democracy".1 The Meiji imperial restoration was a typical "revolution from above" that forcefully imposed economic modernization while intentionally retarding the demo- cratization of the political process.2 This understanding is often elabo- 1 Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966). 2 Ibid., pp. 433-452; Ellen Kay Trimberger, Revolution from Above (New Brunswick, NJ, 1978). This perspective is in at least partial agreement with the writings of post-war Japanese leftist and liberal scholars, who have focused on this question: what prevented Japan from becoming a modern society in a liberal-democratic sense? In their views, Meiji Japan essentially took the first step on the fatal path toward militaristic authoritarianism and the catastrophe of 1945. To be sure, some scholars have articulated a "positive" evaluation of Meiji Japan. When the recovery and rapid expansion of the Japanese post-war economy became conspicuous, and a new set of liberal-democratic institutions, including civic and political citizenship appeared to take
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