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Paper short abstract

This paper proposes that Miyatake’s Minponshugi was in fact a working out of an intensifying tension between the validity of individual desires and aspirations and the prerogatives of state and Emperor, thereby exploring the proper relationship between the individual and the state.

Paper long abstract

Miyatake Gaikotsu (1867 – 1955) was renowned for his satirical and anti-establishment publications but after the success of Kokkei Shimbun he published on topics that dealt with issues related to highly individually personal matters such as gender identity. He also began to clarify his stance in relation to contemporary anarchism and socialism. After initially joining forces with Kōtoku Shūsui and Sakai Toshihiko to support their Heiminshugi with the Heimin Shimbun, he developed a more nuanced interest in participatory politics through his association with the Minponshugi (lit. “People-based” Democracy) of Yoshino Sakuzō.

This paper aims to contextualize the shift to Minponshugi in relation to Miyatake’s earlier intellectual development and public engagement while also locating his output within contemporary currents of public discourse. The paper focuses on Miyatake’s writings on individual, society, nation and state at the end of World War One, particularly the attempt to found a new magazine Minponshugi (lit. “People-based” Democracy) in 1919. Apart from contributions by prominent opinion leaders like Miyake Setsurei and Niitobe Inazō, it included a declaration from the Minpontō political party which called for a reconstruction of the relation between the people and the sovereign.

It is proposed that Miyatake’s conception of Minponshugi was in fact a working out of an intensifying tension between the validity of individual desires and aspirations and the prerogatives of state and Emperor. Miyatake had long held a fundamental distrust of the political elite, along with a distaste for distinctions based on status. The Emperor himself was a mortal human just as anyone else (indeed Miyatake would go further – the Emperor was a human with sexual desires and predilections just as anybody else). Minponshugi, in Miyatake’s take on it, articulated an attempt to clarify the proper relationship between the individual and the state based on a universality of humanity, in a society that did not treat the ruled as an interminably exploitable resource for the grand aims of Empire.