The Meiji Restoration and the Modern Emperor

Up to now we have watched the emperor withdraw from the political stage and remain quietly preserved as an authority embodying a long lineage. But in the mid-nineteenth century, amid pressure from without and turmoil within, the very shape of the country called Japan was shaken to its foundations. At that moment, the figure people sought to set at the center of a new nation-building was the emperor, who had long dwelt in the palace at Kyoto. In this installment, tracing the road from the proclamation of the Restoration of Imperial Rule to the promulgation of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, we look — grounded in the historical record — at how this new mode of being, the modern emperor, came to take shape.

The Proclamation of the Restoration — The Emperor to the Center

In the last days of the shogunate, Japan was greatly shaken, as turmoil over trade with foreign countries overlapped with conflict among domestic political forces. Limits began to show even in the power of the Edo shogunate, which had long held real political authority. In time the Taisei Hōkan was carried out, in which the shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu returned governing authority to the court, and then, at the close of the third year of Keiō (the start of 1868 by the new calendar), the Great Proclamation of the Restoration of Imperial Rule is said to have been issued. This declared the founding of a new government centered on the emperor.

What occurred here was no mere change of government. To return the real political authority long borne by the warrior houses once more to the emperor — such, at least in principle, was the great turn that was proclaimed. As we have seen up to now, the emperor had stood apart from the front of the political stage for some seven hundred years. That figure was now called back as the source of legitimacy for a new age. One might say that the very continuity preserved over so long was itself put to use as the foundation for raising up a modern state.

And in the first year of Meiji, Emperor Meiji is said to have set forth the Charter Oath of Five Articles. To decide matters through widely held assemblies, and to aim for a society in which each person, unbound by rank, might fulfill their aspirations — these, it is said, were made clear to all at home and abroad in the form of an oath sworn to the gods as the new government’s basic policy. The starting point of a new nation-building was proclaimed in the name of the emperor.

As the Center of a Modern State — The Road to Constitutional Monarchy

What the new government took up was the great enterprise of remaking a scattered country into a single modern state. It is said to have abolished the domains across the land and shifted to a system governed from the center, and to have established, one after another, the systems of the military, of taxation, of schools, and more. All of these reforms were advanced upon the conception of a country brought together as one beneath the emperor. The emperor came to be positioned as the center upon which the new state stood.

One culmination of that progress was the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, said to have been promulgated in the twenty-second year of Meiji (1889). By this, Japan is said to have become one of the constitutional monarchies in East Asia to possess a modern constitution at an early date. The constitution defined the emperor as the head of state who held and combined the rights of sovereignty (gathered and bound them together), while also setting down the framework of constitutional monarchy, in which those powers were to be exercised in accordance with the provisions of the constitution. To grant the emperor strong powers while at the same time placing their exercise within the frame of a constitution — in holding these two aspects together lies the character of this constitution.

How to grasp the emperor’s mode of being under this constitution admits of several views. There is a reading that weighs heavily the constitutional-monarch aspect, in which powers were framed by the constitution; there is also a reading that emphasizes the point that wide-ranging powers still gathered upon the emperor; and assessments are divided. The question of how this framework came to be operated in a later age connects, too, to the themes of the installments that follow.

As a Symbol of Unity — Reverence and the People

Another important role of the modern emperor was that of a spiritual anchor uniting the newly born people as one. Until then, people had lived their lives within the region where they dwelt or the rank to which they belonged. To bind those people together as ‘the people of one and the same country’ required a shared center that all could look up to. The emperor, with a long history, is said to have taken on the role of that center.

In this age, the emperor came before the people through education, ceremony, and progresses to various regions. New technologies and systems such as the railway and the newspaper are said to have played a great part in conveying that figure throughout the whole country. Amid this, the emperor came to be revered, by degrees, as a sacred being, and strengthened the character of a symbol uniting the people as one. The building of a modern state and the rising reverence for the emperor may be said to have advanced while mutually sustaining each other.

The emperor, lifted to the center of the nation with the proclamation of the Restoration of Imperial Rule, came to be positioned as the core of a modern state, through the road that began with the Charter Oath of Five Articles and led to the Constitution of the Empire of Japan. An authority long removed from the front of the stage changed its form into the center of legitimacy and unity for a new age. Yet to be placed at the center of a modern state meant, at the same time, that the responsibility for the road the state was to travel could be borne upon that single person. In time, the age would turn toward the century of war. In the next installment we trace, fairly setting several views side by side, the position in which the figure of the emperor was placed amid that great wave.