Freedom, Religion and the Making of the Modern State in Japan, 1868–89

Abstract:

This paper rethinks the article of religious freedom of the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and calls into question the liberalist paradigm employed to understand the Constitution and modern Japanese history. In this liberalist framework, the Constitution manifests the peculiar and authoritarian nature of the pre-war Japanese state. In particular, the 28^th article, which provides for the conditional freedom of religious belief, is seen as no more than a cover for social control by the state. This paper examines the histories of the ideas of religion and freedom, and the religious freedom article, and argues that the most appropriate task is not to measure how much religious freedom the Meiji Constitution failed to guarantee against a de-historicised liberalism, but rather to consider the function of the very inclusion of religious freedom in the Constitution. I argue that the inclusion of religious freedom as a generic type of liberty in the Meiji Constitution was instrumental in the creation of the private modern individual as a subject-citizen. It is through this private individual citizen that the modern state as a public, secular authority was created.

Keywords:

• religious freedom
• Meiji Constitution
• Shinto
• Liberalism
• Ōkuninushi
• Amaterasu

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Robert Stoltz and Anne Blackburn for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. The Meiji Constitution consists of 76 articles in 7 chapters: The Emperor, Rights and Duties of Subjects, the Imperial Diet, the Ministers of State and the Privy Council, the Judicature, Finance, and Supplementary Rules. The article of freedom of religious belief is the 28^th article in the Constitution and is included in Chapter 2, ‘Rights and Duties of Subjects’.

2. Inoue asserts in the beginning of his article, “The ‘religious freedom’ in ‘modern’ Japan was, in essence, none other than non-freedom of religious belief” (Inoue, 2005, p. 125).

3. The Cambridge History of Japan was published by Cambridge University Press from 1988–99 and covers the whole history of the country in six volumes: ‘Ancient Japan’, ‘Heian Japan’, ‘Medieval Japan’, ‘Early Modern Japan’, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, and ‘The Twentieth Century’. Each volume contains a set of essays written by prominent scholars. On the influence and authoritative status of this history, see MacFarlane (1997).

4. The wide influence of Pyle’s chapter on “Meiji Conservatism” on later works on Japan is discussed in Grimmer-Solem (2005).

5. This dichotomy, one may argue, has been a discursive tool with which the liberal democracies of Western Europe and the US tried to establish their universality and authenticity against an assumed Other, often represented by Germany. In association with this dichotomy is the equally widely deployed binary between the ethnic nationalism of Germany and civic nationalism represented by France. The historian-philosopher Hans Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism (1944) is a classic work that looks at nationalism in terms of this distinction. Craig Calhoun’s introduction to the book gives a good evaluation of how the distinction of civic vs ethnic nationalism was tied to liberalism and its supposed opponent Romanticism in Kohn’s discussion. The aforementioned reading by Kenneth Pye and W.G. Beasley of Meiji Japan, in terms of a German (and Japanese) conservatism in contrast to liberalism, shares the discursive structure with this civic-ethnic distinction of nationalism.

6. This idea of religious freedom was promoted by Hermann Roesler, the German adviser on the drafting of the Meiji Constitution. A jurist and economist, Roesler was hired by the Japanese government from 1878 to 1893, and was instrumental in creating the Constitution. He stated his opinion on the constitutional centrality of religious freedom in his Commentaries to the Constitution in 1889. Roesler’s opinion indicates that the German thought of the time was no less liberal than the French or the American. See Siemes (1968).

7. Aizawa Seishisai’s Shinron or ‘New Thesis’ is the best-known and most systematic articulation of this discourse (Aizawa, 1970).

8. For example, the 1814 French Constitution, which Inoue referred to, prescribed a state religion. The 5^th article reads “Everyone may profess his religion with equal freedom, and shall obtain for his worship the same protection”. And Article 6 reads “Nevertheless, the catholic, apostolic and Roman religion is the religion of the state”.