Power and Dissent in Imperial Japan: Three Forms of Political Engagement

By Hiromi Sasamoto-Collins

This volume examines the careers and intellectual positions of three prominent Japanese “dissidents” in the later Imperial period – Minobe Tatsukichi, Sakai Toshihiko and Saitō Takao – as individual responses to the new forms of authority that appeared after the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

The principles to which each adhered – the rule of law, socialist egalitarianism, and representative government – contributed to the new ideas about authority and the individual in post-Restoration Japan. They also remain fundamental (at least in theory) in today’s Japanese polity and society. The study reaffirms the serious limitations of the pre-war Japanese political system, its structural and institutional problems, and deep-rooted ambivalence about democratic change. But it also confirms the birth of an alternative tradition in which individuals began to define and sponsor the processes of national self-regulation. This book traces the perspectives of three such individuals who chose to contest the new power arrangements through their writings and political activities.

Highlights

• First study of modern Japanese political dissent to combine modernist theory, close textual analysis and socio-economic history.
• Presents original Japanese material that has not been fully explored.
• Links three dissenting subjects who have yet to be jointly considered.

About the Author

Dr Hiromi Sasamoto-Collins is a former lecturer in modern Japanese history at Durham University, and is currently a tutor in Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.