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Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on how Shōtoku Taishi’s Seventeen-Article Constitution was resignified after the death of Emperor Meiji (1852-1912), going from a collection of moral rules in the early Taishō days to being considered, in the 1930s, one of the highest expressions of the kokutai itself.

Paper long abstract:

More than the dispatching of missions to Sui China or the establishment of the Twelve Level Cap and Rank System, the Seventeen-article Constitution is perhaps the achievement for which Shōtoku Taishi (574-622) is best known today. While early Shōwa ideologues understood the Constitution’s portrayal of “harmony” (wa) as an expression of the Japanese spirit, twenty-first century politicians see it as the origin of a type of Japanese sui generis democracy. In the long history of Shōtoku representations, these Constitution-centered narratives are, however, relatively new: it was not until the late Meiji period that people gained interest in Taishi’s Constitution as such. When the death of Emperor Mutsuhito in 1912 brings about a new wave of interest in the Meiji Restoration, not only Shōtoku but also the Taika Reforms that followed his regency are positioned as predecessors of these mid-nineteenth-century events. This original interest in Taishi’s achievements shifts even further when, after 1918, intellectuals begin reading his Constitution from the perspective of yet another keyword: kokutai. The weakening of a number of European monarchies around the end of World War I, along with the Russian Revolution in 1917, provided part of Imperial Japan’s intelligentsia with a new sense of danger toward Western “materialistic” ideologies. By allowing ideas such as Socialism and Individualism to circulate freely, would Japan not be paving the way for its own demise, as did the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires? As a victorious nation Japan was, however, now deeply involved in the international order so a sort of intellectual sakoku was out of question. In this context, Shōtoku’s constitutional attitude of “harmonizing” different “foreign” ideas such as Buddhism and Confucianism without losing sight of the immutable character of the Japanese kokutai became a remedy for contemporary anxieties, an understanding which will continue into the 1940s. In this presentation, by focusing on religionists and secular intellectuals alike, I will describe this process through which the Seventeen-Article Constitution went from a set of moral rules in the early Taisho days to being considered, in the 1930s, one of the clearest expressions of the kokutai itself.