日本にデモクラシーは存在したのか？Did Democracy Ever Exist in Japan?

Looking at the current state of Japan, a question left to rust in the margins of history rises to the surface of my mind. Has democracy ever existed in this country? The standard narrative about postwar Japan runs something like this. The nation rose from defeat, passed through a period of high economic growth, became one of the world's advanced industrial democracies, and now stands as a country in which democracy has been realized. If you think about it calmly the connection is forced, but the question is never posed, and to this day Japan continues to be regarded as a democratic nation. To put it bluntly, one might ask who exactly is looking at what part of Japan and detecting the embodiment of democracy. There is no sign that anyone has seriously thought this through.

No one has thought it through, yet the designation of Japan as a democratic state persists and stirs. But no matter where I look inside the fabric of that narrative I cannot find the ideals of democracy. The truth is that even now, thirty-five years after being born in Japan, I still do not know where in this country the ideals of democracy have taken root. To go further, I do not even understand what this thing called democracy, imported from somewhere beyond our shores, actually means. And I suspect every Japanese person shares this sense. They have simply never thought deeply about it. If they paused to reflect they would all notice the strangeness.

I will be honest. I have no idea what democracy is. The nuance of that not knowing is this. As long as I have lived in Japan I have never once felt it, never touched it, and never once been moved or stirred or persuaded by anyone's words about it. Perhaps democracy exists in some distant country. But my recognition is that nothing of the sort exists in Japan.

To Western readers a question like this may seem absurd. You presumably know democracy intimately. You know what it is and you carry the self-assurance of living inside it. So when a question this strange and seemingly foolish is raised from within Japan, a country generally assumed to share the same democratic values, it may look unbearably immature. Yet I feel this is precisely where the problem reveals itself. The ideals of democracy cannot be embodied without indigenous rootedness in a given place. To put it in different terms, democracy can attach itself to the communal illusion in which the interests of the collective override individual alienation, but in the other forms of illusion, the personal and the paired, the ideals of democracy simply do not exist on the Japanese side. And this absence is not something negative. What exactly is it?

This question, or perhaps this suspicion, has become a surprisingly serious problem for me. I have spent many years searching for the answer, yet I have never felt even close to arriving at one, nor have I ever experienced a single moment in which democracy made visceral sense. But if Japan truly is a democratic nation then its democratic history must be shallow compared to the West's, and if we take the Meiji Restoration as the starting point, we are looking at perhaps 160 years within which democracy was deployed in a limited form. I reasoned that if I examined how the people of that initial period understood democracy when they adopted it for the formation of the state, I would surely find the answer. I was wrong. At the Meiji level I could not find a single person who discussed democracy in a way that stirred me.

If later generations are not stirred by an ideal, it is difficult to believe that the people of the time were stirred by it, embraced it willingly, and adopted it with active enthusiasm. This raises the suspicion that Japanese people have never once been moved by democracy in the entire span of their modern history. No ideal is a cold corpse. Unless it carries a living vitality it cannot permeate a society. If it is to be held aloft as a lofty national principle, that vitality must be stronger still, because a dead ideal will never stir the people. I do not know the history of democracy in the West, but given that it has reigned at the pinnacle of ideals among the advanced nations, it must have possessed a powerful historical vitality capable of stirring people. Conversely, it is precisely because that vitality is so strong that the slightest tremor produces the kind of defensive reaction we see today, talk of the death of democracy or challenges to democracy. And that in turn must be because many people in the West still feel democracy as a lived reality.

By that measure, the number of people in Japan who share the same feeling is probably zero. Over 160 years Japanese people have never been stirred by the lofty ideals of democracy. The word is uttered daily at the level of politicians, but for individual citizens it remains something they have never touched and do not know. Is this not profoundly strange? At the very least, even from the standpoint of terminology alone, democracy cannot be realized by anything other than the active assent of the people. Yet not one person among 120 million citizens has given that assent, and still the word democracy is used promiscuously in everyday life, and still Japan is called a democratic nation. Is this not absurd?

While I was sitting with this frustration, a general election was held in Japan. Whether I stepped outside or stayed home, the noise of politicians blaring through loudspeakers and demanding votes assaulted me every day. The word democracy was repeated again and again. And if their claims point toward democracy, then the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's landslide victory in this election must also be democracy. In a country where democracy exists nowhere, the word walks around on its own. This reality seems to me to speak only to the fact that Japan remains profoundly immature as a governed state. Frankly, the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo period appear to me to have been far more competent at running a country.

In other words, Japan's present decline is not the result of having betrayed democracy at some point during modernization. It is possible that no such thing ever existed here in the first place. For some among the Western nations that carry the mantle of democracy, this may amount to an unbearable humiliation, because it would constitute proof that their belief in universality does not hold. Japan's decline clearly has this dimension. It is a mirror of modernization. A mirror of Westernization. It shows with precision what becomes of a nation when the same logic is applied beyond the indigenous sphere in which it took root, to an exterior where it has no ground beneath it.

In the midst of this vague confusion, or rather this frustration, I discovered that someone had once pursued a very similar line of inquiry. That person was the writer Yosano Akiko (1878–1942). She was a rare figure who remained active across three distinct eras, Meiji, Taisho, and Showa, and the passage of those turbulent times is inscribed in vivid detail across her work. What drew my attention above all was her extraordinary perceptiveness.

When the Taisho era began, the term democracy became something of a vogue word, and everyone seemed to be praising it (with exceptions such as the Japanist faction). Yosano Akiko saw through this falsity and superficiality and developed one sharp critique after another aimed at the substance of the matter. She remains an important and underappreciated figure of her era in this regard. It is not widely known even within Japan, but alongside her primary work in poetry and literature she was also contributing a substantial volume of social criticism to magazines.

What matters is not simply what she said but the arc of the times she lived through. Born in 1878 in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, roughly a decade after the Meiji Restoration, Yosano Akiko entered a private school of Chinese classical studies at the age of nine. In her teens she became absorbed in Japanese classical literature such as The Tale of Genji, and under her brother's influence she immersed herself in the new literary movements of the age. During the same period the talent for tanka poetry that would become her signature was already evident. By around twenty she had devoted herself to waka. From around 1900, at the age of twenty-two, she began publishing tanka in a magazine founded by the poet Yosano Tekkan, who would later become her husband. After moving to Tokyo she published her own poetry collections and became a darling of the age.

With her rising fame Yosano Akiko achieved a dramatic ascent from 1900 onward. Living through an era in which new values clashed violently with old, she observed society with a poet's sensibility and an acuity that surpassed the intellectuals of her time. In particular she perceived that Japanese politics in the modern sense, as inaugurated in the Meiji era, lacked real substance. This observation appears throughout the essays she wrote during the Taisho period, composed while looking back on Meiji, and her critical axis was this. Japanese politics is defined only in its outward form as something supported by the masses. A unified concept of "the nation" had not yet been established in this period, but against the prefabricated image of a government sustained by popular support she took precise aim at the fact that it was a fabrication.

The substance of her critique was this. The House of Representatives is said to consist solely of representatives elected by the people, but what must be acknowledged as actual fact is that the people themselves possess no political ideals. These words match the Japan of today with uncanny precision. The recent landslide victory of the Liberal Democratic Party under Prime Minister Takaichi was, to put it bluntly, permitted by the American side on the premise of an agreement to offer an enormous financial tribute to the United States. Japan's mass media, which does not possess even a trace of neutrality, had been trumpeting the LDP's majority victory before the election even took place, and the Trump administration went so far as to effectively endorse Prime Minister Takaichi. The LDP's landslide was nothing more than the fulfillment of commitments made before a single ballot was cast.

This election result amounts to a declaration by Japan's elderly majority electorate that they consent to the transfer of the country's governing authority to the American side. From here, with two-thirds of the seats now in hand, the LDP government will plainly accelerate its reckless trajectory. The impoverishment of the Japanese people will be offered up at increasing speed as the price, with vast wealth transferred to the American side through LDP politicians and bureaucrats. The LDP's politicians are not conducting politics for the sake of Japan. They are simply acting as compliant intermediaries for the adjustment of American interests. This too is exactly what Yosano Akiko perceived. In contemporary terms, the cause is that the citizens themselves possess no political ideals. And so even when politicians run amok, even when the nation's assets are handed over to a foreign country, it is not so much that people do not object as that they do not even know. Ignorance proliferates. To put it plainly, if we focus on the political dimension of Japan, modernization has never once been achieved. It has been a complete failure.

Since the Meiji era, the people themselves have never established political opinions grounded in political ideals from which to address practical issues. Terms such as "public opinion" and "national consensus" exist as abstractions that purport to represent the collective will of the citizenry, but in reality neither public opinion nor national consensus as a genuine aggregate of the people's views has ever existed. Yosano Akiko, living in the Meiji era, held the prevailing historical view that the Edo period had been characterized by feudalism. She therefore located the cause in the autocratic influence of feudal politics, which she believed had paralyzed the Japanese capacity to think freely. Her conclusion was that if the country rushed headlong into modernization without turning to face this indigenous dimension of its own character, the absence of substance was inevitable.

This was because the binary of "Edo period equals feudalism" and "Meiji era equals modern nation-state" had been constructed deliberately by the politicians, bureaucrats, and scholars of the time. In a context where no one seriously examined this framing, she pointed out that even if the people acquired various rights, they would in the end have no choice but to act under the guidance of a small number of bureaucrats, politicians, and scholars. For example, even if the people gained the right to vote, they lacked the cultivation to exercise it, and so the majority would simply fall in line behind the opinions manufactured by a small group. In fact, what has been called public opinion or national consensus since Meiji has in reality been nothing more than a label affixed to the majority's unthinking compliance with the views of a few. There is no substance in it and no vitality. What is striking is that this structure has continued completely unchanged for roughly a hundred years. The LDP's latest landslide is simply a reconfirmation. Nothing has changed.

The point is that the cause does not lie in the political positions and ideological arguments debated within Japan's domestic arena. The truth is more fundamental. The people themselves have no political ideals. And this is not something that began recently. It has been exactly the same for 160 years. Even the student movements of the late 1960s, which may appear to have been the closest thing in Japan's modern history to genuine political struggle, were upon close inspection nothing more than clashes between imported ideologies and fell far short of an articulation of the people's own political ideals. In summary, Japan lacks the soil in which modern politics can grow. This is another way of saying that the country occupies a stage at which democracy is simply not possible. And yet, strangely, the prevailing view is that Japan is a democratic nation. This can only be called a complete fabrication. With this foundation established, let me turn to the question of democracy itself.

Yosano Akiko wrote an essay titled "My Reflections on Democracy" in the early Taisho period. It is a fascinating piece that reveals the distinctive character of the Taisho era as something different from Meiji. The essay is not the kind of thoughtless celebration of democracy that scholars of the time were producing. It is a sharp piece of writing that could only have been produced by someone like Yosano Akiko, precisely because she was not a scholar. I will use her essay as the basis for the discussion that follows.

Around the beginning of the Taisho era the slogan of democracy spread to every corner of Japan with sudden force and before anyone noticed had grown into an absolute presence. In other words, the term democracy had been used in various contexts since Meiji, but it had not carried enough weight to enter common speech until the Taisho era. The new winds of the Taisho period swept the word across the country overnight, and suddenly everyone was talking about democracy. This suggests that a threshold had been crossed. The term was no longer confined to limited use by politicians and scholars. It had entered daily use at the level of the entire population.

Normally such a cultural tide would be welcomed by political leaders who lack serious intellectual capacity. But Yosano Akiko questioned more than anyone whether this tide was truly something to celebrate. Her suspicion crystallized into a conviction that the democratic current of the day in fact lacked substance. Incidentally, the term Taisho Democracy does exist, but it was coined in 1954 as a retrospective label for the era. No such phrase was used during the Taisho period itself. The concept encompasses the establishment of party politics, the universal suffrage movement, labor and agrarian movements, the social advancement of women, and more broadly a set of movements that criticized Meiji-era methods and demanded popular participation in politics.

To reframe this in a way that may make the dynamics clearer, consider the following. The starting point was the critical framework erected by the politicians of the new Meiji government, who characterized the Tokugawa shogunate of the Edo period as feudal autocracy and positioned Meiji as its antithesis. Then when the Taisho era arrived, the emphasis shifted. Meiji itself was redefined, and the distinctive character of the Taisho era was asserted in opposition. This meant criticizing the privileges of the domain cliques and military cliques that had been Meiji's ruling class and centering the demand for popular participation in politics. The domain cliques referred above all to the dictatorial dominance of politicians from the former Choshu domain, present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture, who had occupied the top positions in the Meiji government.

It was as a reaction against this Meiji-era system that the term democracy gained such traction during Taisho. Here a note on the Japanese-language dimension is necessary. Democracy is treated as a loanword imported from English, but when the word first entered Japan in early Meiji it was given a translated equivalent. That translation was [共存同衆] (Kyozon Doshu). This is not a term modern Japanese people would use, but put simply it contains the idea that all people are equal and that they help one another and coexist. As a translation of the basic concept of democracy it was probably apt. Critically, however, this term failed to gain any traction in Meiji and was immediately abandoned.

After that, Yosano Akiko notes, a new translation was coined. [民主主義] (Minshushugi). In other words, a shift in the Japanese rendering of democracy had already taken place during the Meiji period. This term, [民主主義], is now positioned as the orthodox direct translation of democracy and is the standard term used in Japan today. However, it too was not used consistently. Almost as soon as Taisho began, another shift occurred. The objection was raised that the opening component [民主] (Minshu), meaning "the people as sovereign," carried implications that certain parties found distasteful. A new translation was created. [民本主義] (Minponshugi). The man who championed this term was the political scientist Yoshino Sakuzo (1878–1933), hailed as the standard-bearer of Taisho Democracy. He exerted enormous influence over the era. But what must be understood is that in terms of the meaning carried by the Japanese, the shift from [民主主義] to [民本主義] was in fact a conversion toward the negation of democracy. The difference may appear to be a single character. In Japanese, however, this single-character shift is profoundly consequential, because it changes the meaning entirely.

[民主主義], interpreted literally through its characters, means "the principle in which the people are sovereign." At the root of this principle the active agency of the people is emphatically foregrounded. [民本主義], by contrast, means "the principle in which the people are the foundation." These two formulations may appear nearly identical, but in reality they point in opposite directions. From my perspective, [民主主義] as a term approximates democracy and carries Western meaning. [民本主義] is Confucian. This distinction has not been treated as a problem even within Japan, but it is critically important because it connects directly to the falsification of the Japanese language that occurred in modern Japan. Yoshino Sakuzo was a participant in that falsification.

This was already an era in which modern currents were gaining force in Japan, so let me state it plainly. [民主主義] is a principle in which the people are the subject. [民本主義] is a principle in which the people are not the subject. This may sound convoluted, but behind this terminological shift lies a fabrication perpetrated by modern Japanese linguists. Reduced to its essence, the fabrication is the notion that "in Japanese the subject is hidden." This premise still underpins school education in Japan today. It is the assumption presented to every foreigner learning Japanese. In other words, the premise that Japanese possesses a subject, a copula, and a predicate just as other languages do. I will not go into full detail here, but this is a lie. Japanese has neither a grammatical subject nor a copula.

What happened was that after the discipline of national language studies emerged in Meiji, professors of linguistics at what is now the University of Tokyo colluded to fabricate a grammatical subject that does not exist in Japanese. Their reasoning, such as it was, held that since English, the language of the leading modern powers Britain and America, possessed this structure, Japanese must surely possess it too. Because these men were professors at the University of Tokyo their fabrication was allowed to pass unchallenged as scholarship, and it created a source of damage that persists to this day. Yoshino Sakuzo studied at this same influential University of Tokyo, absorbed its thinking without question, and applied it to political theory. Let me press a little further into this convoluted point.

I said earlier that the Japanese-language meaning of [民主主義] is a principle in which the people are the subject. But if the people become the subject, then the privileges of the Meiji-era ruling class, the politicians, bureaucrats, and scholars, cannot be maintained. Operating under the false premise that Japanese possesses a subject structure, the men of that era were thinking obsessively about the problem of subjecthood. For Yoshino Sakuzo and the scholars around him, a political movement in which the people became the subject was unacceptable, because it would mean consenting to the release of their various monopolized privileges to the people.

So Yoshino Sakuzo took the already established term [民主主義] and altered it into [民本主義], substituting the meaning as I described earlier so that the people became not the sovereign but the foundation. The crucial mechanism at work here is the mysterious falsehood about the Japanese language, the claim that "the subject is hidden." Applied to this new term, it produces the interpretation that in [民本主義] the subject is hidden. The subject is not the people. It is some concealed entity, and the people are merely subordinate to it. That concealed entity, emerging from the imperatives of state politics, is the state itself. The true meaning of [民本主義] thus becomes "the state takes the people as its foundation," and the structure is inverted from [民主主義] entirely.

Under [民主主義] the premise is the people. There is ample room for the state to be formed through the active agency of the people. I regard this as the form closest to democracy on the Japanese side. Under [民本主義] the premise is the state. The meaning is reduced to something like "the people are needed for the existence of the state," and the people are repositioned as subordinate to it. Because Meiji-era thinking is installed as the underlying framework, one notices that the structure in which the people obey the opinions of the politicians, bureaucrats, and scholars who lead the state has been quietly perpetuated. What Yoshino Sakuzo, celebrated as the standard-bearer of Taisho Democracy, actually accomplished was an act of intellectual fraud. The reason I call it Confucian is that, as I have discussed several times in Shitsurae, the thought of Zhu Xi's neo-Confucianism, which was the essential philosophy undergirding the Edo-period regime, runs through this modern formulation as a subterranean current. Reduced to its simplest expression, it is the premise that the people offer everything for the sake of the state.

Once this overview is grasped, it becomes clear that the essential character of the Taisho era does not lie in democracy. It is rather a Meiji-era restoration in disguise, a structure that anticipates the ideology of the march toward the Second World War in the Showa era. These dynamics permeate the fascinating Taisho period from every direction. In the next piece I will build on this foundation and examine how democracy was understood within that vortex.