Walter Skya is Director of the Asian Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Japan’s Holy War

THE IDEOLOGY OF RADICAL SHINTO ULTRANATIONALISMBy WALTER A. SKYA

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4425-4

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………………..ixINTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………..11. From Constitutional Monarchy to Absolutist Theory……………………………………………….332. Hozumi Yatsuka: The Religious Vlkisch Family-State……………………………………………..533. Minobe Tatsukichi: The Secularization of Politics……………………………………………….824. Kita Ikki: A Social-Democratic Critique of Absolute Monarchy……………………………………..1125. The Rise of Mass Nationalism………………………………………………………………….1316. Uesugi Shinkichi: The Emperor and the Masses……………………………………………………1537. Kakehi Katsuhiko: The Japanese Emperor State at the Center of the Shinto Cosmology………………….1858. Terrorism in the Land of the Gods……………………………………………………………..2299. Orthodoxation of a Holy War…………………………………………………………………..262CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………….297NOTES…………………………………………………………………………………………329SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………….363INDEX…………………………………………………………………………………………379

Chapter One

From Constitutional Monarchy to Absolutist Theory

The Meiji political system both in theory and practice was a mixture of authoritarianism and constitutionalism, a hybrid “absolute constitutional monarchy.”-JOSEPH PITTAU, Political Thought in Early Meiji Japan, 1868-1889, 201 “So Japan is a family-state!” I thought. Even as a child I thought there was something phony about the idea. Had it meant that all Japanese were to join together as if in a family-state, I might have understood. But there was nothing I could see in the world around me that suggested a “familial harmony unparalleled in the world.” And while they filled us with this at school our parents, on this subject anyway, held their tongues. In the early years of the Showa period, when fascism began to gain ground in Japan, it is said that even the German fascists envied the Japanese kokutai its status as a “family-state.” But who invented the term in the first place?” After the defeat I found out: it appeared to have been created for the Meiji government by ideologues like Hozumi Yatsuka, Kato Hiroyuki and Inoue Tetsujiro for the purpose of solidifying the emperor system.-IROKAWA DAIKICHI, “The Emperor System as a Spiritual Structure,” 280

Emperor Ideology and Early Meiji Politics

As Irokawa Daikichi suggested in the epigraph, new ideological perspectives do not appear out of the blue. They are rooted in concrete political and social concerns. According to Irokawa, the family-state concept was invented to solidify the emperor system against the increasing power of Western liberal thought. This is certainly true. But what is important to bear in mind is that it was not until the late Meiji period that the Meiji government began aggressively to promote the family-state ideology through ideologues such as Hozumi Yatsuka, Kato Hiroyuki, and Inoue Tetsujiro. This in itself represented a fundamental shift from early Meiji thought, for in the initial phases of the Meiji period, members of the ruling oligarchy proposed ideas of the state that were astonishing liberal. The first well-known political statement by the new leadership that overthrew the Tokugawa government was the so-called Five-Point Charter Oath of 1868. Article 1 stated: “Deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by public discussion,” a clear illustration of this liberal-mindedness and openness of the new Meiji leaders in 1868.

Regardless of whether the Charter Oath was to be interpreted as a quickly drawn-up statement issued by the new leadership as a calculated political action to gain support among the daimyo for the new regime, there is no question that the promise of deliberate assemblies turned out to haunt the ruling oligarchs in subsequent years. The companion document to the Charter Oath, the “Constitution of 1868,” showed that the new leaders were also thinking in terms of representative government and the separation of powers of government. Article 3 of that document states in part that “the legislative organ [of the Council of State] shall not be permitted to perform executive functions, nor shall the executive organ be permitted to perform legislative functions.” The idea of a separation of powers, according to legislative and executive branches of government under a monarchy, brings to mind such political notions as Montesquieu’s concept of a monarchical system tempered by competing intermediary governmental powers.

Still more, the first constitutional drafts drawn up by leading oligarchs such as Kido Koin, Okubo Toshimichi, and even Iwakura Tomomi in the early days of the Meiji regime contained surprisingly strong democratic ideas. All of them presented differing proposals on how state power ought to be shared. For example, we find in a constitutional draft drawn up under instructions from Kido Koin, who had once been a radical from the domain of Choshu and a student of Yoshida Shoin, statements such as, “All the articles of the constitution are rules agreed upon between the emperor and the people.” Okubo Toshimichi expressed similar constitutional ideals. In his “Opinion on Constitutional Government,” submitted to Ito Hirobumi in 1873, he stated: “Constitutional monarchy is a joint government of the ruler and the people; it is a limited monarchy.” In short, these key members of the ruling oligarchy appeared to have envisioned some kind of constitutional monarchy with representative institutions and clearly defined limitations on the powers of the government and the emperor. Few of the oligarchs or higher-echelon bureaucrats at the center of state power seem to have been in favor of arbitrary or absolute imperial rule.

However, ideological contestation among the ruling oligarchs broke out into the open in 1873. A split occurred in the heart of the collective leadership in the ruling Council of State in that year over the issue of whether or not to invade Korea. Many of those who resigned from government in the wake of this real crisis in the leadership, such as Itagaki Taisuke, Goto Shojiro, Eto Shimpei, and Soejima Taneomi, together submitted a memorial to those remaining in the ruling oligarchy calling for the establishment of a national assembly. This memorial marked the beginning of the freedom and popular rights movement and stimulated support for parliamentary government among journalists and intellectuals of the time. Initially, Itagaki and his followers constituted the core of the freedom and popular rights movement. At the same time, those who remained at the center of power in the oligarchy tended to become more conservative in their political outlook and less inclined to entertain thoughts of sharing any real political power.

The central issue of this political struggle between those in government and those former oligarchs who left the government was not an issue of whether to adopt a constitutional monarchy. That, too, was almost a foregone conclusion, given the political circumstances surrounding the Meiji Restoration. The legitimizing authority for the overthrow of the Tokugawa feudal regime had always been recognized, implicitly or explicitly, as the emperor. Thus, this fact insured that the emperor was to be the focus of political power. Moreover, most of the key members of the collective leadership long before the coup d’tat in 1868 were aware that almost all of the powerful Western states had constitutions and were convinced that this was a key element contributing to their state power. The oligarchs for the most part had resigned themselves to granting limited popular participation in the affairs of government in the hope of obtaining broad public support from educated subjects for government policies and the long-range goals of the state. In other words, the government oligarchs sought to use liberal institutions for conservative ends. An equally important factor ensuring the adoption of a constitutional government was that the oligarchs were fully aware that constitutional government was a minimal requirement to gain acceptance by the Western powers and rectify the unequal treaties imposed by them. And the demands for representative government by the former oligarchs and other intellectual elites were of course the overriding factor that contributed to the establishment of constitutional government.

Such political circumstances out of which the Meiji Constitution of 1889 eventually emerged virtually ensured that the modern Japanese state would have both monarchical government and constitutional government. In short, it would be a constitutional monarchy. Thus, the real ideological cleavage among the political elite was not over the inevitability of a constitutional monarchy, but over the type of monarchy and the timing of the constitution to be granted.

On one side of this debate, we tend to find the oligarchs in government who subscribed to the Prussian model of constitutional monarchy, which, in line with Hegel’s ideas of state organization, represented a rejection of Montesquieu’s principle of the separation of powers. It was a system of constitutional monarchy in which the ministers of state were to be responsible to the emperor and whose function it was to serve him as advisers. In this Prussian system of constitutional monarchy, the parliament was designed to function not as a real legislative organ of the government but as a kind of mediating organ between the executive and its bureaucracy, on the one side, and the masses of people outside government, on the other side. It was seen as a useful representative organization to channel potential organized opposition to the state into an acceptable form of participation in government. Still more, the popularly elected parliament was regarded as a potentially powerful vehicle for mobilizing broad support among the population in support of state policy.

On the other side of this debate, we tend to find the former oligarchs who demanded variations of English and French popular-sovereignty theories of state. In general, they held the notion that political authority derives ultimately from the people, and they envisioned a type of constitutional monarchy in which sovereignty resided jointly in the emperor and in the people, something very close to the English tradition of the “King-in-Parliament.” Under this kind of government, the cabinet was to be responsible to a popularly elected parliament, which held real legislative power in the state.

Repercussions from this debate among oligarchs and former oligarchs over whether to adopt a Prussian system of constitutional monarchy or an English style of constitutional monarchy were felt well into the next decade. As time passed, an increasingly broad segment of the educated elite became involved in this debate, and the positions taken by people in the debate tended to become increasingly polarized. Opinion makers such as the editorial staff of the Kochi Shimbun, for example, went far beyond the English style of constitutional monarchy, expressing ideas close to republicanism. An editorial in Kochi Shimbun on October 7, 1881, said,

In the words of Rousseau, society is built upon a social contract. This is not completely according to historical data, and, therefore, we cannot easily agree with him. However, we firmly believe that society should not exist without a social contract. Thus, we are convinced that sovereignty must reside in the people. Since the people are the nucleus of the state, without the people the state cannot exist. If there are the people, even without a king, society can exist.

Still more striking during the early Meiji period is that, in the early 1870s, we find intellectuals such as Kato Hiroyuki who not only argued for liberal democracy but were not in the least afraid to openly declare that the emperor was a man just like any other man. In Kokutai Shinron (A New Theory on the Kokutai), published in 1874, he stated:

It has been taught that the true “Way of the Subject” is to submit, without questioning whether it is good or evil, true or false, to the Imperial Will and to follow its directives…. This type of behavior has been characteristic of our national polity. It has been said that for this reason Japan’s national polity is superior to that of any other country. This viewpoint is a base and vulgar one! … Our national polity is characterized by the mean and vulgar tradition of servility, the land held to be the private property of the Emperor alone. The Emperor and the people are not different in kind: the Emperor is a man; the people too are men.

Joseph Pittau noted that in this context Kato was aiming his attack not at the ruling oligarchy so much as at the Kokugaku scholars of the time who, despite their small numbers, were a political force to be reckoned with and whose political view was that “people born in Japan exist only to serve the imperial will.” Pittau further noted that it was Kato’s opinion that under such a system of thought, which demanded that people be subservient to the will of the emperor, “the people of Japan will become as cattle and horses.”

Kato’s attack on Kokugaku ideology in the passage from A New Theory on the Kokutai reveals the existence of a state Shintoist movement advocating absolute monarchy. They were certainly actively, although not centrally, involved in this debate over the state at that time. The fact that we find the Office of Shinto Worship above the Council of State in the first reorganization of government after 1868 is proof enough that the state Shintoists held, though for a very brief period, considerable clout in the highest circles of government. In the extreme, some Shinto fundamentalists believed in direct emperor rule in some kind of religious mystical sense. One might liken them to political romantics who imagined some kind of a direct relationship between the emperor and a communal collectivity.

Accordingly, these Shinto fundamentalists “could not project the principles on which to erect a state apparatus capable of ensuring order and security.” They failed to propose concrete institutions and structures of government because their vision of a restoration of emperor rule was “too radical for the present and bordered upon utopia.” Quickly pushed aside by the practical oligarchs attempting to establish a powerful centralized state, they became, as H. D. Harootunian eloquently put it, mere “accomplices of restoration.” Although relegated at this juncture in history to the fringes of politics, their involvement in modern Japanese politics did not end, for they would gradually reemerge at the center of state politics in the twentieth century. In the meantime, however, the masses had yet to be politicized, and the Japanese state did not have the industrial and technological capabilities to project massive power on a global scale. Political realists were left with the task of working out a system of government in which the emperor and the emperor system would be legally and institutionally linked to some form of bureaucratic state structures.

To reiterate, the central debate over the state in the pre-constitutional period was over the adoption of two different systems of constitutional monarchy. Indeed, Iwakura Tomomi, one of the most powerful oligarchs in the early years of the Meiji Restoration, stated that the essence of this constitutional debate boiled down to whether Japan should adopt a system of constitutional monarchy close to that of England or one close to that of Prussia:

If we plan to establish a constitutional government in our country and open a parliament, we will be creating something new. The problem is: shall we follow the English model and establish a party government, making the parliamentary majority responsible for the administration? Or shall we, following the principle of gradualism, grant only legislative power and reserve the executive power to the Emperor, according to the Prussian model? Today’s decision between these two alternatives will establish a permanent foundation and determine the interests of the country for a hundred years.

Iwakura’s remark about the high stakes involved in the outcome of this debate was quite perceptive. Subsequent history would show that this pre-Meiji Constitution debate over the state was the beginning stage of an ideological dynamic driving the nation in two opposite directions.

This pre-constitutional debate ended with the defeat of those who held to English and French theories of the state, theories of the state based on the conception of the contract origins of government, and individualistic rationalism that formed the intellectual backdrop for popular sovereignty theories of state. This victory for the establishment of a Prussian-style of constitutional monarchy therefore eliminated the possibility-at least theoretically, although not in actual political practice-of Japan evolving into a classical Western European liberal-democratic state 0based on the theoretical concept of popular sovereignty. The intellectual legacy of the outcome of this pre-constitutional debate in favor of German constitutionalism was that Japan was then left without an ideology or a solid theoretical basis on which to build a liberal-democratic state.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Japan’s Holy Warby WALTER A. SKYA Copyright © 2009 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.