Jiyu-Minken movement

Japan’s 1870s can be called a decade of reform in the world of ideas as well as in administrative measures, while politically a series of rear-guard actions intended for the preservation of samurai autonomy had to be put down by the new government. The decade was best represented by the movement for Jiyu-Minken (Liberty and People’s Right), which began with the 1874 memorial for a popular assembly. The Meiji government in its early years consisted of state ministers and councilors, and important posts were practically in the hands of the politicians of Satsuma-Choshu origins, the state of affairs referred to as ‘autocracy by officials’. Four former state councilors including Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919) of Tosa, who had found himself in a minority on the Korean issue (of whether to chastise the Sinophile Koreans), together with four associates signed the above memorial denouncing the meddling by the officials who placed themselves

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between the Emperor and the people, and advocating the establishment of ‘a council- chamber chosen by the people’. Itagaki regarded the Meiji Restoration not merely as the restoration of the imperial right but also as that of the people’s right, a view widely held at the time. Meanwhile, intellectual ferments for reform took the shape of an academic society called Meirokusha (The Sixth Year of Meiji (1873) Society) founded by Mori Arinori (1847–89), a former Satsuma student sent to London who acted as a consul- general in the USA after the Restoration, and whose zeal for Western civilization went so far as to advocate the spread of Christianity and the adoption of English as an official language in Japan. The society published its own journal edited by Fukuzawa Yukichi and contributed to by many other able scholars. Though they took a moderate line as to Itagaki’s memorial, Mori and Nishi Amane (1829–97), formerly a bakufu student sent to Holland and later the compiler of the imperial rescript to the soldiers, argued against its egalitarian assumptions, while Kato Hiroyuki considered it premature for ignorant people.

The initiative taken by Itagaki and the concerted efforts by local activists like Ueki Emori (1857–92) of Tosa developed into a powerful movement, supported by 100,000 petitioners by 1880, while several Minken groups joined together to form the Liberal Party in 1881. This was the peak year of Jiyu-Minken, when as many as thirty-nine drafts of a Japanese constitution were prepared including one by Ueki Emori upholding the right to resist an oppressive government.

The government for its part announced in an imperial decree of October 1881 that a constitution was to be granted prior to a national assembly promised for 1890. This coincided with an attempt to force resignation from the government of a liberal state councilor Okuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), who had favoured a British-type constitution. These authoritarian measures were meant to cope with the spread of the Popular Right movement throughout the country, especially among the common people in east and northeast Japan, where opposition to the Satsuma-Choshu hegemony had been strong, and the government policy of economic retrenchment hit hard the peasants and small traders engaged in sericulture. Local branches of the Liberal Party were also involved. A series of popular uprisings ensued, at Fukushima (1882), Mt Kaba, Lida and Nagoya, all in 1884. One at Chichibu in the same year took the magnitude of a peasant war involving over 10,000 men in one district, with their nucleus formed in a Party of Sufferers (Konminto), though they were besieged and overwhelmed by the government troops. The decline of the movement was hastened by government measures such as the deportation of radical leaders from the metropolis.

Jiyu-Minken movement