Kokutai
Kokutai is a concept in the Japanese language translatable as "system of government", "sovereignty", "national identity, essence and character", "national polity; body politic; national entity; basis for the Emperor's sovereignty; Japanese constitution" or nation.
Etymology
Kokutai originated as a Sino-Japanese loanword from Chinese guoti. The Japanese compound word joins and. According to the Hanyu Da Cidian, the oldest guoti usages are in two Chinese classic texts. The 2nd century BC Guliang zhuan to the Spring and Autumn Annals glosses dafu as guoti metaphorically meaning "embodiment of the country". The 1st century AD Book of Han history of Emperor Cheng of Han used guoti to mean "laws and governance" of Confucianist officials.Before 1868
The historical origins of kokutai go back to the Edo period ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate, especially to writings associated with Mitogaku.Aizawa Seishisai was an authority on Neo-Confucianism and leader of the Mitogaku tradition who supported direct restoration of the Imperial House of Japan. He popularized the word kokutai in his 1825 Shinron, a collection of essays which also introduced the term Sonnō jōi.
Aizawa developed his ideas of kokutai treating the Japanese national myths in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki as historical facts, including that the Emperor was directly descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu-ōmikami. Aizawa used this divinely-ruled ancient Japan to justify a polity in which religious and political authority were united in the form of saisei itchi or theocracy.
The intellectual context for Aizawa’s thought combined kokugaku with Neo-Confucian political theory. Mitogaku scholars synthesized native mythic sources and Confucian ideas to present a distinctive claim for Japan’s political uniqueness. Aizawa also argued that Christianity and other Western influences threatened Japan’s social order and recommended strengthening a unified state religion and moral education as defense against foreign subversion.
Scholars note that for many early Neo-Confucian and Mitogaku thinkers the meaning of kokutai remained imprecise and contestable. As linguist Roy Andrew Miller put it, for early thinkers, "kokutai meant something still rather vague and ill defined. It was more or less the Japanese 'nation's body' or 'national structure'." Nevertheless, elements of Mitogaku and the Sonnō jōi rhetoric later helped provide an ideological bridge from late-Edo activism to the political changes of the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods, although the specific, state-endorsed doctrine of kokutai was not codified until much later.
From 1868 to 1945
From 1868 to 1890
and Fukuzawa Yukichi were Meiji period scholars who analyzed the dominance of Western civilization and urged progress for the Japanese nation.In 1874, Katō wrote the Kokutai Shinron, which criticized traditional Chinese and Japanese theories of government and, adopting Western theories of natural rights, proposed a constitutional monarchy for Japan. He contrasted between kokutai and seitai. Brownlee explains.
The concept of the kokutai was popularized during the Meiji era as Japanese elites had embraced a "crude Social Darwinism" as their guiding principles, seeing nations as being locked in perpetual struggle with one another for dominance, and as such the purpose of the Japanese state was first and foremost as a machine for conducting foreign policy. In order to maintain support for the existing social system and for this view as the state for a machine for conducting foreign policy, the idea of the kokutai was popularized with the Japanese people being liked to one vast family under the rule of the patriarchal god-emperor. The American historian M. G. Sheftall wrote that the concept of the kokutai was the ideological foundation stone of Japanese militarism, writing for millions of Japanese the kokutai was "...the mystical embodiment of the essential unity of the Japanese people, inextricably bound up with völkish ideas about the mythical divine origins of the nation, all under the august beneficence of the institution of the divine emperor and the proverbial protection of several millennia worth of ancestral ghosts. For the IJA and tens of millions of Emperor Meiji's subjects, the kokutai was not merely a source of pride and spiritual power for the nation, it was the lifeworld of the nation in toto, not only in social and political terms, but also in theological and cosmological terms, and no means were too extreme and no sacrifice too great if deemed necessary for its survival". Sheftall wrote this way of viewing the kokutai as divinely sanctioned by a god-emperor led to a certain psychological in-balance as it was difficult for those who believed in the kokutai to accept any setback, which explains the immense rage that periodically erupted over any setback to Japan. In 1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth mediated by the American president Theodore Roosevelt ended the Russian-Japanese war, where Japan made gains, but nowhere near what was expected as the costs of the war had nearly bankrupted Japan, and thus the treaty was more favorable to Russia than it was assumed would be the case. The Treaty of Portsmouth led to anti-American rioting breaking out all over Japan and was presented in Japan as a national humiliation.
Fukuzawa Yukichi was an influential author translator for the Japanese Embassy to the United States. His 1875 "Bunmeiron no Gairyaku" contradicted traditional ideas about kokutai. He reasoned that it was not unique to Japan and that every nation could be said to have a kokutai "national sovereignty". While Fukuzawa respected the Emperor of Japan, he believed kokutai did not depend upon myths of unbroken descent from Amaterasu.
Meiji Constitution
The Constitution of the Empire of Japan of 1889 created a form of constitutional monarchy with the kokutai sovereign emperor and seitai organs of government. Article 4 declares that "the Emperor is the head of the Empire, combining in Himself the rights of sovereignty", uniting the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, although subject to the "consent of the Imperial Diet". This system utilized a democratic form, but in practice was closer to an absolute monarchy. The legal scholar Josefa López notes that under the Meiji Constitution, kokutai acquired an additional meaning.This stemmed from drafter Itō Hirobumi's rejection of some European notions as unfit for Japan, as they stemmed from European constitutional practice and Christianity. The references to the kokutai were the justification of the emperor's authority through his divine descent and the unbroken line of emperors, and the unique relationship between subject and sovereign. The "family-state" element in it was given a great deal of prominence by political philosophy. Many conservatives supported these principles as central to Nihon shugi , as an alternative to rapid Westernization. Nihon shugi is an ideology that values the traditional Japanese spirit and sets the tone of the state and society; it emerged in this period as a reaction to the Meiji government's radical Europeanization policy. Nihon shugi is a kind of "kokka shugi" ideology. Nihon Shugi opposed 'Europeanism', including democracy and socialism, which it considered foreign to Japanese tradition, and during the Taishō and Shōwa era, it emphasized the Kokutai ideology centered on the emperor as opposed to Marxism.
Initially, perceived threats to the kokutai were seen as coming from abroad, but starting in the early 20th century there was a tendency to see threats to the kokutai as coming from within. The internal threats to the kokutai were seen first and foremost as class consciousness as Japanese peasants moved to cities to become the working class of the Japanese industrial revolution while other Japanese rose up to become a new middle class, both developments which were seen as threatening the kokutai between dividing Japanese society into classes with different interests. Other perceived threats to the kokutai were socialism and the rise of a trade union movement along with the rise of consumerism which were as seen as threatening the spiritual unity of the kokutai. Finally, "Westernization" in a cultural sense was seen as damaging the kokutai by introducing foreign ideas into society. Paradoxically, the Russian-Japanese war emphasised these concerns about the cracks in the unity of the kokutai as it was believed that the principle reason for Russia's defeat was the gulf between the aristocratic officers of the Imperial Russian Army vs. the "salt-of-the-earth" common Russian soldiers, and that if a similar gulf were to emerge in Japanese society, then Japan too would be defeated in war.
In 1910, the Army Minister Tanaka Giichi engaged in a project in "mass social engineering" by founding the semi-official Zaigo Gunjin Kai that worked closely with the Army Ministry to "spread militaristic thought among the population at large" as its founding charter put it. The purpose of the Zaigo Gunjin Kai was to solidify support for the kokutai as defined by the Imperial Japanese Army, which marked the beginning of the IJA as a political force. In 1915, the Imperial Military Reserve Association founded the Youth Associations designed to provide realistic military training for Japanese high school students. Later on in the 1920s, the Army Minister General Kazushige Ugaki founded the Youth Training Schools and the Attached Officer Program under which active duty serving officers worked as teachers in every elementary school and every high school in Japan. Under the Attached Officer Program, IJA officers taught the youth of Japan military tactics and drill, gymnastics and what Sheftall called "a heavy dose of indoctrination in ultra-nationalistic kokutai ideology under the guise of 'civics'". This militarization of the educational system led to a marked xenophobic and militaristic mood amongst the Japanese people who had been indoctrinated into believing to fight and die for the god-Emperor as the leader of the kokutai was their highest duty.