CHAPTER 1
Japan:New nation-Stateand Its Constitution
THE TOKUGAWA FOUNDATION
The defining development in Japan's modern history is the transformationof its centuries-old feudal society into a nation-state in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century. The transformation was not willed but wasbrought about by a fortuitous confluence of the collapse of Tokugawarule, which had controlled Japan for two and a half centuries, and thesuccessful demands of Western nation-states that Japan end its more thantwo centuries of isolation from the non-Asian world.
Tokugawa rule had given Japan more than two centuries of politicaland governmental stability that, in turn, had provided an opportunity forconsiderable economic and social development and change. But at thesame time great scientific, technological, economic, and social changeswere taking place in Europe and North America that resulted, among avast array of other things, in the emergence of the modern nation-state.The coming together of these two developments eventually led to thecreation of Japan's first written constitution.
The rule of the militarily powerful Tokugawa family extended fromthe opening decades of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenthcentury. The Tokugawa system was politically stable but not unchanging.Tokugawa society was changing economically and socially, with theinevitable result that the Tokugawa grasp on power was slipping. By about1850, political challenges, long kept under control, to Tokugawa powerwere developing. At this juncture the Tokugawas were confronted withan external challenge they were unable to handle.
In 1853 Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry of the United States,a very young nation-state, appeared in Japanese waters and demandedthat Japan end its policy of seclusion, thus concluding the first step in themission he had been given by U.S. president Millard Fillmore. Perry returnedin 1854 and concluded the treaty that ended Japan's isolation fromthe Western world. Within a few years a group of European nation-statesconcluded similar unequal treaties with Japan that gave the Western powerslegal and economic rights they did not grant to Japan in return.
The emerging opposition denounced the Tokugawa for both betrayingthe policy of their own ancestors and simultaneously permitting thehated "barbarians" to tread on Japan's sacred soil. Their battle cry became"Revere the Emperor; expel the barbarians!" "Revere the Emperor" waspolitical shorthand for ending Tokugawa control over the throne, whichgave their rule legitimacy. The Tokugawas were unable to resist the pressurefrom their domestic foes. In the late 1860s the Tokugawa regimecame to an end with a negotiated agreement under which the Tokugawaswould give up their monopoly over government for shared responsibilitywith their opponents. But the latter, interpreting the Tokugawa concessionas a sign of fatal weakness, soon made it clear that there would be nosharing. The Tokugawa resorted to military force to retain some power,but after fighting sporadic and limited battles for several years they gavein.
The collapse of the long-lived regime was momentous, but it wasessentially a political act. It was simply the transfer of political powerfrom one segment of the ruling class to another. It was not a civil war or abloody revolution, either of which would have disrupted society. In theabsence of such disruption Japan was in a position to initiate its transitionfrom a feudal to a national society.
The society the Tokugawas left behind was still feudal, but it containedelements that would serve as a firm foundation for a new and vastlydifferent national society. These elements were held in common with thecontemporary Western nation-states.
First, there was human mass or population. The population in 1870was more than 30 million, a figure probably attained by about 1700. Interms of mere numbers this was similar to the larger Western nations atthe time, such as the United States. Second, each Western nation wasidentified with a specific area of the earth's surface, usually referred to asthe homeland. Japan's island nature gave it a naturally defined area of itsown. Historically, no wars had been waged over territorial boundaries.Moreover, Japan's people were ethnically unified. Here again the country'sisland nature played an important role. There were no successful foreigninvasions, no large waves of immigration, and relatively few indigenousAinu.
By the late nineteenth century Japan had twelve centuries of recordedhistory as an ethnically separate people. Intimately woven into that historywas society's high culture, created and conserved in its earlier centuriesby the imperial court and later by the dominant warrior class. Poetry,prose, calligraphy and its closely allied arts, ceramics, painting, and dramaconstituted an enduring heritage, thereby strengthening ethnic unity.
Another invaluable characteristic of the population at the end of theTokugawa period was a high rate of literacy, estimated to have been about50 percent, which compared favorably with the rate of Western nations.The samurai and the imperial court nobles had schools. For commoners,schools were held in Buddhist temples (tera koya) to create the widespreadliteracy required for the smooth operation of the complex Tokugawa society.Such things as a flourishing publishing industry for popular literatureand family and village records were marks of a literate society. The existingliteracy rate simplified the task of training the population to acquire newideas and technological skills and to carry out the new and innovativetasks required by nation building.
Of fundamental importance to nation building was leadership. InJapan's long history there are few charismatic leaders. The triumvirate ofOda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu—who followedeach other as leaders in the late sixteenth and early seventeenthcenturies—constitutes perhaps the most outstanding examples. The workof Nobunaga and Hideyoshi opened the way for Ieyasu to found theregime. But that regime was not kept in power by a succession of strongindividuals. Rather, it was the political astuteness and administrative skillsof a self-perpetuating body of men who operated the system.
In the crunch of the Tokugawa collapse, a group of able leaders of theanti-Tokugawa opposition not only emerged victorious but remained inposition to direct successfully the early decades of the drive to nationhood.They enjoyed the enormous advantage of presiding over a societythat, although feudal, was evolving invisibly toward nationhood. We haveseen how the human element of the society was developing toward nationhood.Now we examine Tokugawa political, economic, and socialinstitutions that would play vital roles in the creation of the new nationalsociety.
Of prime importance to nation building was Japan's two and a halfcenturies of stable government that controlled both the territory and thepeople. When the Tokugawa government disappeared, there was no needto create the concept or machinery of a central government. But a problemremained: how to convert an existing but outmoded feudal structureof government to a modern bureaucracy equal to the task of operating theemerging nation. As has been indicated, no bitter and bloody politicalstruggle to control the new government took place. Thus in both governmentand politics Japan escaped the major difficulties that confrontednation-building efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Throughout the Tokugawa period Japan's economy was basically agrarianbased on the principal crop—rice—which was not only the basis ofthe economy but also the foundation of political power. The severalbranches of the Tokugawa family controlled about a quarter of the landand consequently a quarter of the rice yield. The feudal lords' economicbase was also rice. Status and its twin, power, were determined by the sizeof estates and the consequent yield of rice. The Tokugawa governmentretained the power to control the size of the lords' estates and the yieldsof rice.
Although the basis of the economy remained agrarian, it was not static.It was characterized by a broad development of commerce accompaniedby steady growth in the use of money. This development, however, wascontrolled by the merchant class, which ranked at the bottom of the socialscale and had no political power.
Well before the end of the Tokugawa period the country was operatingunder a society-wide economic system. Rice was produced by peasantsthroughout the land, the peasants were controlled by their feudallords, and rice was priced and distributed under a society-wide system.Commerce was monopolized by merchants who developed goods for distributionthroughout the country. They were also instrumental in developingand operating the emerging monetary system.
Light industry (with the use of human-powered machinery) was focusedon the production of consumer goods and was dependent on thelabor of artisans who ranked just above merchants on the social scale. Themerchant class provided the capital and management for light industry.The artisans' skill and discipline were later duplicated by workers in industrialJapan.
Another manifestation of the economic change was the growth ofcities and towns. Tokugawa Japan had three major cities. Edo (renamedTokyo in 1868) was a small village when the Tokugawas came to power andwas transformed into the seat of the Tokugawa administration—where allthe feudal lords had to establish residence—a major center of economicactivity, and the scene of a flourishing popular culture with a populationestimated at about a million by the mid-eighteenth century. Osaka had aparallel development as the country's economic hub. Kyoto had been theimperial capital since the eighth century; it remained at the center of thecountry's high culture yet out of the main current of Tokugawa society.
Economic change also produced the phenomenon of "castle towns."Each feudal lord had a castle as his residence and headquarters. Becausethese castles were the centers of control and administration, they alsobecame economic centers. The three major cities and the castle townsserved as key areas of social change as the modernization process developedin the second half of the nineteenth century.
Another product of economic change was a network of "highways," anationwide system of heavily traveled roads for humans and their packanimals. These roads foreshadowed a modern system of land transportation.
The highway system was closely linked to the sankin kotai (alternateresidence) system that was a key device in the Tokugawa structure of controlover the feudal lords. Briefly, each of the approximately 250 feudallords was required to maintain in Edo a mansion befitting his rank in thefeudal order, to travel to it from his domain—usually annually—for a stayof about six months, and on his return to his domain to leave members ofhis family behind as hostages. This system kept the lords under the eye ofthe Tokugawa government and drained the lords' finances. All lords wererequired to travel with a retinue befitting their rank.
In addition to its political utility, the system played an importanteconomic and social role. The processions were large, and those fromdistant domains were on the road for some time. Thus logistical requirementssuch as provisions and campsites stimulated local economies alongthe way. The annual travel involved thousands of individuals, creatingwhat might be termed a primitive domestic tourist industry.
Apart from the sankin kotai system, Tokugawa authorities exerted strictcontrol over unofficial travel of individuals by means of travel permits andbarriers or checkpoints established at regular intervals on the highwayswhere the permits had to be produced for inspection. In one notableexception, large numbers of commoners were permitted to make pilgrimagesto famous temples and shrines. Over two and a half centuries, travel—bothofficial and unofficial—had the unplanned effect of creating a widefeeling of ethnic identity and identification with the homeland, two primaryrequirements for the establishment of a nation-state.
The Tokugawas came to power early in the seventeenth century throughthe exercise of military strength, their own and that of their associatedfeudal lords; but after roughly two decades the Tokugawa regime neveragain had to use military might to fight off contenders for power. Theregime's military strength was the source of its political power, but thesword was kept in its scabbard for more than two centuries.
Tokugawa power was durable because it rapidly became institutionalized.If a constitution constitutes the basic principles by which a society isorganized and governed, then Tokugawa rule was based on a constitution.It was not set forth in a single formal written document. It was uncodifiedbut was embodied in a complex arrangement of institutions, edicts, practices,and beliefs that grew over decades and was unplanned except for itscentral aim: the unchallenged maintenance of Tokugawa power. It wasnot a social or a political contract. It served the purposes of a single classof the society—the warriors—and the most powerful warrior family, theTokugawas.
This unwritten constitution endured because by manifesting the basicprinciples and practices of the society, it was a faithful reflection of thesociety itself; as the expression of the society and its arrangement of politicalpower at the time, it was dealing with the society's economic andsocial requirements. If the Tokugawa authorities had ever produced a writtenconstitution, the principal topics would have included:
1. The emperor: the locus of sovereignty, that is, the supreme authorityto bestow the right to rule on the head of the Tokugawa family; hisgeographical isolation in Kyoto; his exclusion from politics andgovernment
2. The Tokugawa shogun: the recipient from the emperor of the rightto rule the country from Edo and possessor of the exclusiveTokugawa hereditary right to the office
3. The Bakufu: the bureaucracy for the Tokugawa ruling the countryand governing the family and its affairs
4. The daimyo: approximately 250 feudal lords subject to Tokugawaauthority and control; their division into two categories, thosetraditionally allied with the Tokugawa family before it came topower and the "outside lords" who might (and some did) becomechallengers for power; vested with control over and responsibilityfor the administration of their estates and the sankin kotai system
5. The classes (in descending rank order): warriors with the exclusiveright to possess weapons and with a monopoly on government andpolitics; peasants as the producers of rice, the basis of the economy,but with no political role and bound to the feudal domains; artisansas producers of consumer goods but without political power orinfluence; and merchants with increasing economic significance butalso politically powerless; clear distinction and separation of theclasses
6. The Seclusion Policy: prohibition on Japanese leaving the countryfor any reason; prohibition against westerners entering the country,except for a handful of rigidly controlled Dutch; limited contactwith neighboring China and Korea; an absolute ban on Christianityand its missionaries; and finally, imposition of the death penalty forany discovered Japanese converts
The first five points deal with the three basic issues of any modern writtenconstitution: the locus of sovereignty (point 1), the structure of government(points 2, 3, and 4), and the relationship between the governing andthe governed (point 5).
Because it was an expression of the Tokugawa system, the unwrittenconstitution was destined to disappear with the collapse of the Tokugawaand their system. But it had performed a useful function. As its society'sfundamental law, it paved the way for the concrete written constitutionthat was necessary for the new society of the emergent Japanese nation-state.
The society the Tokugawa regime left behind could still be describedas feudal, but lurking just below the surface was what could be termed aproto-nation-state, one that possessed in nascent form the basic elementsof a national society, as has been described, but that lacked the infrastructureof a functioning one.
DAWN OF THE NATION-STATE
When Japan's new leaders came to power, they were confronted with atask the complexity of which was matched by the simplicity with which itcould be stated: to build into their society an infrastructure similar tothat of the Western nation-states. The principal elements of such an infrastructurewere a modern bureaucratic centralized government, a nationalarmy and navy, contemporary technology and industry (including railroads,heavy and light industries using machine power, the high-speedprinting press, the telegraph, and soon the telephone), the introductionof modern science as the foundation of technology, a new system of publicand private finance, and a system of education designed both to createmass literacy and to train personnel to manage and operate all elements ofthe new infrastructure.
The Tokugawa heritage included none of these elements, but it didprovide the necessary foundation on which the infrastructure could bebuilt. The aim here is simply to state the problem, not to describe indetail its solution.
Within a few weeks after coming to power, the new leaders revealedthe road they had in mind for their society. Their plan was set forth in theImperial Oath of Five Articles, less formally known as the Charter Oath.It was issued in the name of the nineteen-year-old Meiji Emperor, whosepersonal name was Mutsuhito. The oath had been drafted by relativelylow-ranking members of the new leadership but was based on the views oftheir superiors.
