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

There really is nothing quite like the early Meiji period for inspiring regrets about what might have been, exultation about submerged capacities among Japanese commoners that may yet reemerge to save contemporary Japan, and teleological judgments for and against key political figures of the era based on much later events. Most historians would agree that, for better or for worse, Japan in the period from 1868 to 1889 was more exciting, freewheeling, unpredictable, fragile, hopeful, and amorphous than it was in midand late Meiji. The historian Ōishi Ka’ichirô in the 1960s referred to the era as the “period of possibilities” (kanōsei ga nokotte ita jiki), possibilities that ended when the new Meiji constitution determined the form of the Japanese polity. The phrase remains apt today.

Kyu Hyun Kim’s substantial book focuses on this most fluid of eras to trace the emergence of “public opinion” (kōgi yoron) as a vital and consequential, albeit ultimately ignored, ingredient in the political discourse of preconstitutional Japan. In some ways Kim tries to do for “public opinion” what Irokawa Daikichi once attempted to do for the late Tokugawa village assembly (yoriai): to declare that it contained the seeds of a sort of homegrown democracy that might have been brought to fruition “from below” by the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement if the latter had been allowed to flourish. Irokawa also maintained that in some sense indigenous but dormant democratic traditions might yet be revived to rescue contemporary Japan. Similarly, Kim stresses that “public opinion” exerted real effects on Meiji leaders and helped shape the emerging polity even though it was essentially ignored in the actual drafting of the Meiji constitution. Commoners (albeit well-heeled, literate commoners) therefore were not passive recipients of civilization and enlightenment, but selfaware subjects of the nation with a right to be heard—a revivable concept, whatever its short-term fate.

Kim is nevertheless not a younger version of Irokawa. He is very much aware of the current historiographical landscape. He takes pains to steer a middle course, avoiding Irokawa’s attributions of indigenous democratic elements to the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, yet disagreeing with the political historian Banno Junji, whom he feels overvalues the benevolence of the Meiji state and hence misses the influence of civil society and public opinion and the distinctions between the goals of state and society. Kim also seeks to define and navigate the waters between what he perceives as another Scylla and Charybdis: George Akita’s high estimation of Meiji leaders in his 1967 classic Foundations of Constitutional Government in Modern Japan, 1868–1900 (Harvard University Press) versus various Marxist historians’ standard vilifications of them.

“Public opinion,” of course, requires a “public sphere.” Kim argues that a highly circumscribed public sphere was conceived in the urban centers of the middle Tokugawa period, resulting from the widespread use of printing together with a set of values (presumably involving the Confucian obligations of the ruler) shared by some commoners that could form the basis for criticism. He uses Tokugawa-era kawaraban (tile sheets) and satirical woodblock prints, as well as popular verses, to good effect, painstakingly explaining the derisive puns conjured up by the portrayal of octopi, vegetables, shellfish, and other organisms. Kim builds on the work of M. William Steele and other scholars of late Tokugawa kawaraban to make the case that the incorporation of antiforeign caricatures into print and pictorial media in the wake of Perry’s arrival laid the groundwork for at least some non-samurai to see themselves as Japanese in a broad manner, not simply as villagers or Edoites.

Such people were a “public” only in the most embryonic sense; it is a great distance from minimal national consciousness to the idea that “public opinion” is a legitimizer of political power. Indeed, as Kim explains, kōgi referred...