The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (review)

Kyu Hyun Kim's book aims to do more than fill a gap in the English-language history of the Freedom and People's Rights (jiyū minken) movement. Focusing on the fifteen-year period preceding the promulgation of 1889 Meiji Constitution, Kim analyzes the process through which "visions and arguments" of constitutional, representative government—which he terms "parliamentarianism"—became politically ascendant. The parliamentary movement, he argues, acted as the catalyst for the formation of Meiji civil society; Japanese civil society in the 1870s and 1880s was strong, not weak; and advocates of representative government resolutely pushed their demands, using the press and public lectures to mobilize public opinion. Reversing the conventional analysis, Kim asserts "it was the weak [Meiji] state that, by carefully modulating its strategies of compromise and coercion, steadily gained ground against the society" (p. 12).

In the introduction Kim lays out his theoretical and methodological positions with admirable clarity. He adopts Charles Taylor's definition of civil society as a "web of autonomous associations of people, independent of the state, which binds citizens together in matters of common concern, and by their mere existence or action can have an effect of public policy" (cited on p. 6) and Jurgen Habermas's related conception of the public sphere as performing "the tasks of criticism and control which a public body of citizens informally—and in periodic elections, formally as well—practices vis-à-vis the ruling structure organized in the form of a state" (p. 8). Finally, following Mary Elizabeth Berry, he wishes to separate the public sphere in Meiji Japan from the "telos of democracy" (p. 11). Quoting Berry, he argues against production of the democratic subject as the litmus test of a functioning political sphere; it is sufficient that there be a space "where leadership was scrutinized and disciplined by criticism" (p. 11).

Taylor and Habermas provide a coherent and dynamic conceptual framework for the analysis that follows. Kim's book copiously documents and narrates the emergence of a vibrant public sphere in Japan that began in the early 1870s and was populated by metropolitan journalists, writers, defense lawyers, teachers, and civil servants. The other players in the People's Rights movement have been well studied: Tosa and Hizen former samurai (shizoku) politicians, radical intellectuals and revolutionaries, and village "local notables" who organized political societies, sponsored lending libraries and schools, and orchestrated the massive petition campaign in 1880–1881 demanding a constitution and elected national assembly. Kim's account of the crucial role played by Tokyo intellectuals nicely rounds out the picture.

After the introduction, Kim's narrative of parliamentarianism's progress unfolds both chronologically and thematically, with some but not too much overlap and backtracking. The two chapters that make up Part 1 locate the origins of Japanese "public opinion" (kōgi yoron) in the late Tokugawa period. Kim makes a good case for late Edo satirical popular print media and sakariba (open spaces of commercial entertainment such as Asakusa and Ryōgoku) as incubators of the post-1868 public sphere. He provides documentation of the former in reproductions of late Tokugawa prints. Evidence of the role he attributes to sakariba is inferential, but it is hard to deny the likely significance of tea houses, candy shops, vendors, and open air performances of all kinds that allowed "consumers of popular culture [to] congregate with one another without heeding any societal mandates or obligations" (p. 31).

Part 2, which is the heart of the book, details the rise and heyday of the parliamentarian movement between 1874 and 1882. Key to Kim's conception of the early Meiji public sphere is the proposition that government officials and public intellectuals were substantially in agreement in envisioning a role for public opinion in policy making. In Chapter 3 Kim makes a good case that some officials at the top—Ōkubo and Ōkuma, for example—and many...