Constructing the “National Essence”
Western Influences on Imperial Veneration as a Central Element of Kokutai in the Nineteenth Century
Henry Foushee, '25
Issue: 1
In the wake of the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Japan experienced a crisis of national identity. Despite a history of nationhood stretching back over two millennia, and rich cultural and historical traditions, the sudden influx of Western thought challenged weakly-held notions of what it meant to be Japanese.[1] The scholar Josefa Valderrama López identified two causes of this weakness: The feudal daimyō system had fragmented the country, deteriorating the sense of national unity, and the isolation of sakoku had meant that there was no way to distinguish what was “Japanese,” for everyone was Japanese.[2] Amidst this uncertainty, the Meiji government attempted to define kokutai (国体), a broad-ranging term translating to “national structure,” “national community,” “national polity,” or “national essence.”[3] To this end, Meiji leaders adorned the nation in the trappings of a modern Western nation-state: a flag, an imperial symbol, a national anthem.[4] More importantly, however, the Meiji government sought to create kokutai by elevating the role of the emperor. Despite claims to the inherent “Japaneseness” of this decision, it was based in Western thought.
From its first articulation, kokutai combined Japanese mythology with Western thought. In response to what he perceived as a rising threat of Western imperialism, Aizawa Seishisai published Shinron (in English, New Theses or New Proposals) in 1825.[5] Though he was not the first to write kokutai, the term deriving from the Chinese kuo t’i, it had previously meant “dynastic prestige” or “national honor.” Aizawa, however, interpreted it as the “national character” which related closely to the concept of saisei itchi, “the unity of religion and government.” This understanding of kokutai paralleled that of the Meiji era.[6] In New Theses, Aizawa looked to the emperor as a source of kokutai, and turned to imperial legends for justification:
Ever since earth became distinct from the firmament and men came into being, a Divine Line of Emperors descended from the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, has ruled the realm. Can it be mere coincidence that no one has ever had evil designs on the Throne? Loyalty of subject for ruler is the greatest moral precept of the cosmos.[7]
To support his arguments for imperial reverence, Aizawa referenced the traditional myth of the founding of the imperial line, found in the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan), two fundamental cultural texts from the 8th century. According to these works, Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, and greatest of Shintō deities, sent her grandchild to rule Japan; the grandchild’s son would later become the “first human emperor,” and from him all subsequent emperors descended.[8] In his seminal work on New Theses, the scholar Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi posited that, for Aizawa, this social relationship was kokutai: “the national spiritual unity–the voluntary affection and trust that commoners felt for their rulers.”[9]
Although his ideas consisted of a novel interpretation of Japan’s cultural heritage, they were an attempt to mimic the structure of the West. He disdained Westerners, considering them to be usurpers to Japan’s divinely ordained primacy, and preferred the epithet “barbarian” for them.[10] Yet, despite these nativist beliefs, he acknowledged the primacy of Western militaries, proposing policies in New Theses to match Western military strength, such as the formation of a coast guard, or increased production of heavy weapons.[11] But he considered the ideological battle to be far more important, identifying Christianity as the factor driving Western imperialist successes:
For close to three hundred years now the Western barbarians have rampaged on the high seas. Why are they able to enlarge their territories and fulfill their every desire? Does their wisdom and courage exceed that of ordinary men? Is their government so benevolent that they win popular support? Are their rites, music, laws, and political institutions superb in all respects? Do they possess some superhuman, divine powers? Hardly. Christianity is the sole key to their success.[12]
Aizawa went on to describe how the West used Christianity to their advantage. One mechanism for this was conversion, which he thought caused conquered peoples to welcome Western imperialism. Another important aspect of Christianity was the devotion it inspired in its believers to conquer:
Whenever they seek to take over a country, they employ the same method…The barbarians believe it their god’s will that they seduce other peoples into subverting their respective homelands; they borrow the slogan “Universal love” to achieve their desired ends. Barbarian armies seek only plunder, but do so in the name of their god. They employ this tactic in all lands they annex or conquer.[13]
Aizawa connected Western imperial strength, revealed both in armed forces and empires, to Christianity. He recognized this as the Western version of kokutai, which he considered to have exceeded that of Japan.[14] The West wasn’t Aizawa’s only influence, nor did he have entirely accurate information on these so-called “barbarians.”[15] Still, his conceptions of kokutai derived from an attempt to imitate the West.
Meiji leaders tried to cultivate kokutai based on the emperor and supreme loyalty to him. From 1870 to 1884, they implemented the Great Promulgation Campaign, an attempt to create a state religion known as the Great Teaching (Taikyō). To realize this goal, a bureaucracy of 289 National Teaching Institutes spread across Japan trained over 10,000 National Evangelists, who preached “reverence of the emperor and obedience to the court,” one of the Campaign’s Three Great Teachings. Within five years, however, it would morph into a Shintō movement, using its prayers, its shrines, and its priests.[16] The Great Promulgation Campaign was but one aspect of the Meiji government’s effort to secularize Shintō, a folk belief tradition, and create State Shintō, a national cult centered around the emperor and his ancestors.[17] To this end, Meiji officials twisted the worship of one’s ancestors, a traditional element of Shintō, construing private rites for one’s forefathers as devotion to Amaterasu. Thus, individual religious practice, no matter the believer’s intent, was directed towards the symbol of the emperor and source of his divinity. Likewise, individuals were required to revere their household head in a neo-Confucian expression of filial piety, which would extend to the village and thence to the emperor.[18] Through these policies, founded in and composed of references to Japan’s cultural heritage, the Meiji government attempted to shape the “national character” into veneration for the emperor.
Meiji officials also sought to cultivate loyalty in the military. In 1882, the Emperor Meiji issued the Imperial Precepts to Soldiers and Sailors to Japan’s new conscript military, the introduction of which stressed the importance of absolute fealty to the Chrysanthemum Throne:
Soldiers and Sailors, We are your supreme Commander-in-Chief. Our relations with you will be most intimate when We rely upon you as Our limbs and you look up to Us as your head. Whether We are able to guard the Empire, and so prove Ourself worthy of Heaven’s blessings and repay the benevolence of Our Ancestors, depends upon the faithful discharge of your duties as soldiers and sailors.[19]
Written using the royal “We,” this document commanded members of the Japanese military to unthinkingly obey the emperor’s will in order to protect the state and Japanese culture, at the intersection of which sat kokutai. These men forced into service could only express kokutai through unyielding devotion to the crown. The first of these precepts would reiterate the importance of this loyalty: “The soldier and sailor should consider loyalty their essential duty.”[20]
As well as the military, the Meiji government focused on schools as a system for engendering loyalty to the emperor. Alongside the Constitution of 1889, the Imperial Rescript on Education was one of the most influential government documents of the era. Every school in Japan received a copy and was instructed to hang it alongside a portrait of the emperor. Every schoolchild had to learn the text by heart, and public readings were common.[21] It restated not only the centrality of loyalty to kokutai, but also its ancient justifications:
Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting, and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects ever united in loyalty and filial piety have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory of the fundamental character of Our Empire, and herein also lies the source of Our education. Ye, Our subjects…guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth…
The Way here set forth is indeed the teaching bequeathed by Our Imperial Ancestors, to be observed alike by Their Descendants and the subjects, infallible for all ages and true in all places.[22]
According to this document, Japan’s “fundamental character”–kokutai–was found in loyalty to the emperor. Claims to the continuity of the throne and the divine provenance of this dogma grounded this rescript in ancient tradition. A decree the following year would explicate the Rescript, turning its ethereal themes into tangible policies. For instance, on Tenchōsetsu, the holiday of the emperor’s birthday, children had to sing to express their devotion to him:
This auspicious day is the blessed day of the birth of the emperor. This auspicious day is the blessed day of the extension of his brilliance. Together with the people, celebrate the life of the emperor of vast brilliance. Together with the people, celebrate the life of the emperor of vast blessings.[23]
The floral language and deferential tone of these lyrics served to overtly demonstrate devotion for the emperor. Through the Imperial Rescript on Education and related edicts, the Meiji government inculcated a conception of kokutai based loyalty for the emperor.
The Constitution of 1889 most clearly elucidated the relationship between kokutai and veneration of the emperor. Its third article stated, “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.”[24] An official government commentary on the constitution, thought to be drafted by Itō Hirobumi, one of this document’s primary authors, explained this article in terms of kokutai: “‘The Sacred Throne was established at the time when the heavens and the earth became separated’ (Kojiki). The Emperor is Heaven-descended, divine and sacred; He is pre-eminent above all His subjects. He must be reverenced [sic] and is inviolable.”[25] The commentary tied reverence to the emperor to a line from Kojiki, one of the earliest and most important Japanese texts, portraying loyalty to the crown as a continuation of ancient Japanese ideals. The Meiji Constitution thus enshrined kokutai as devotion to the emperor.
The Meiji government’s attempts to shape kokutai all hinged on instilling a sense of devotion to the emperor verging on the religious. Indeed, he was declared arahitogami, “Manifest Deity” or “Visible Deity” in English. But this understanding was fundamentally rooted in Western thought. Arihitogami was analogous to the Judeo-Christian God, reflecting the long-established goal of creating a Japanese faith which could parallel Christianity in the West, though he was not worshiped in the same sense. This definition represented a break from his prior spiritual conceptualizations, and lacked historical basis. At some points in history, the emperor was regarded as a kami, a supernatural entity of any religion practiced in Japan, and a far cry from arahitogami. The concept of kami existed on a spectrum of humanity and divinity; furthermore, the emperor’s divinity was mutable, on the microscale of an individual’s lifetime and the macroscale of several hundred years of Japanese history.[26] At other times, he was human. The scholar Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney posits that early Japanese emperors were similar to shamans: considered to have the ability to communicate with deities, but not deities themselves.[27] The formalities surrounding the 1868 promulgation of the Charter Oath, the symbolic moment of “restoration,” paralleled this belief of the emperor as a conduit between the earth and the heavens. The emperor began by presenting a folded piece of paper to the kami, which he then used to purify the crowd, before government officials completed the rites.[28] Even at this stage, the Emperor Meiji was human; he was not a kami, much less the “Manifest Deity,” but rather offered to traditional deities. The idea of the emperor as arahitogami meriting constant veneration, the central element of Meiji efforts to develop Kokutai, was a historical fabrication borrowed from the West.
The motivation to manipulate kokutai was European in origin, as well. Meiji leaders had long sought to match the Western nations, alternately admiring or feeling slighted by them.[29] In a 1899 speech reflecting on the Constitution, Itō Hirobumi echoed this sentiment: “The aim of our country has been from the very beginning…to become a member of the comity of European and American nations…To join this comity of nations means to become one of them.”[30] Like Aizawa before him, Itō looked to the West for a model for Japan. Similarly, he identified Christianity as the most important cultural element to imitate:
In Europe, constitutional government has had over a thousand years since its inception. Not only are the people thoroughly familiar with it, religion serves as a “‘linchpin” for them. |Religion] has seeped deeply into the people’s hearts; their hearts and minds are united in this faith.
But in our country religions are very weak; none of them can serve as a linchpin in the state…In our country, the only thing that can serve as a linchpin is the imperial house.[31]
Itō saw Christianity as a unifying force in Western nations. Furthermore, in his eyes, only the emperor could play a similar role. As one of the two primary writers of the Meiji Constitution, his thoughts played a large role in shaping kokutai. Nor was the Japanese association between the monarch and divinity unique. Article 3 of the Meiji Constitution had consecrated the emperor. Hermann Roesler, a German constitutional scholar who was highly influential in that document’s creation, argued that this connection was to be found in Europe, as well:
This article is found in most European constitutions. In the Belgian Constitution the person of the King is declared inviolable, but the declaration of his sacredness has been omitted, probably on account of that constitution declaring all powers of the state to emanate from the people, and the King being entitled only to the exercise of the special powers expressly conceded to him. Thus there is in the Belgian Constitution a mixture of monarchical and democratic principles which is quite inadmissible in Japan.[32]
Roesler distinguished the Belgian and Japanese treatments of imperial divinity only by those countries’ relationships with democracy. The Meiji government was not unique in associating kokutai with the West, but rather based this conception in Western thought.
Since Aizawa Seishisai’s New Theses, kokutai contained a strand of Western influence. Paralleling his ideas, in the late nineteenth century, the Meiji government enforced a limiting interpretation of this “national essence.” Through State Shintō, imperial rescripts, and the Constitution of 1889, they made popular reverence for the emperor the central component of the national character. But these policies, though making liberal use of Japanese mythology, were by no means unique. Ironically, they were attempts to mimic the West and the role Christianity played in its societies. In the 20th century, kokutai would become increasingly linked with State Shintō and imperial veneration as Meiji nationalism intensified. To wit, Katō Genchi, a pioneer of comparative religion in Japan, wrote in 1926 (emphasis his),
The vital essence of Shintō manifests itself in an expression of that unique spirit of the national service of the Japanese people, which is not only mere morality but is their religion, culminating in Mikadoism, or their own peculiar form of loyalty or patriotism towards the Emperor.[33]
This nationalism would build until the end of WWII, when Emperor Hirohito renounced his claims to divinity. Kokutai as conceived in the nineteenth century thus left an indelible mark on Japanese history. In the postwar period, in contrast to the Meiji era’s attempts to trivialize Western influence, Japanese society accepted Western culture. From the Shinkansen to anime, Japanese citizens innovated on Western concepts to create unmistakably Japanese products. The quest to create a solely Japanese identity in the nineteenth century thus reflected what Japanese identity would become in the postwar period: decidedly Japanese, but colored by Western concepts and beliefs.
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Brownlee, John S. "Four Stages of the Japanese Kokutai (National Essence)." Paper presented at JSAC Conference, University of British Columbia, October 2000.
Buruma, Ian. Inventing Japan: 1853-1964. New York: Modern Library, 2004.
"Charter Oath." In Sources of Japanese Tradition, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary, compiled by Ryūsaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, 136-137. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. Accessed February 6, 2023. https://archive.org/details/sourcesofjapanes0002tsun.
Hardacre, Helen. Shintō and the State, 1868-1988. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Accessed January 27, 2023. https://archive.org/details/shintstate1868190000hard.
Hur, Nam-lin. Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. Accessed February 28, 2023. https://archive.org/details/deathsocialorder0000hurn.
"Imperial Precepts to Soldiers and Sailors, 1882." In Sources of Japanese Tradition, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary, compiled by Ryūsaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, 198-200. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. Accessed February 6, 2023. https://archive.org/details/sourcesofjapanes0002tsun.
"The Imperial Rescript on Education." In Sources of Japanese Tradition, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary, compiled by Ryūsaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. Accessed February 28, 2023. https://archive.org/details/sourcesofjapanes0002tsun.
Itō, Hirobumi. Commentaries on the Constitution of the Empire of Japan. 2nd ed. Translated by Miyoji Itō. Tokyo: Chū-ō Daigaku, 1906. Accessed February 25, 2023. https://archive.org/details/commentariesonco00itohuoft.
———. "Speech on the Restoration and Constitutional Government." In Sources of Japanese Tradition, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary, compiled by Ryūsaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, 169-71. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. Accessed February 6, 2023. https://archive.org/details/sourcesofjapanes0002tsun.
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———. Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986. Accessed February 24, 2023. https://archive.org/details/antiforeignismwe0000waka.
Footnotes
[1] Joseph M. Kitagawa, "The Japanese 'Kokutai' (National Community) History and Myth," History of Religions 13, no. 3 (1974): 212, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1061814.
[2] Josefa Valderrama López, "Beyond words: the 'kokutai' and its background," Revista HMiC, no. IV (2006): 127, PDF.
[3] Kitagawa, "The Japanese," 212; Federico Lorenzo Ramaioli, "From the gods of heavens: kokutai, myth and law in Japanese history, 1825-1947," Academia Letters, July 2021, 1, PDF; López, "Beyond words," 131.
[4] Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, "The Emperor of Japan as Deity (Kami)," Ethnology 30, no. 3 (1991): 205, https://doi.org/10.2307/3773631; Helen Hardacre, Shintō and the State, 1868-1988 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 4, accessed January 27, 2023, https://archive.org/details/shintstate1868190000hard.
[5] Ryūsaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, comps., Sources of Japanese Tradition, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 2:88, accessed February 6, 2023, https://archive.org/details/sourcesofjapanes0002tsun.
[6] Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986), 13, accessed February 24, 2023, https://archive.org/details/antiforeignismwe0000waka.
[7] Seishisai Aizawa, "New Theses," in Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western, 152.
[8] John S. Brownlee, "Four Stages of the Japanese Kokutai (National Essence)" (paper presented at JSAC Conference, University of British Columbia, October 2000), 1-2.
[9] Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western, 124, cited in Brownlee, "Four Stages," 3.
[10] Aizawa, "New Theses," 149.
[11] Ibid, 223, 234-235.
[12] Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western, 13-14; Aizawa, "New Theses," 200.
[13] Ibid, 200-201.
[14] Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western, 13.
[15] Ibid, 14, 69.
[16] Hardacre, Shintō and the State, 42-45.
[17] Ian Buruma, Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 55-56; Hardacre, Shintō and the State, 32-33.
[18] Nam-lin Hur, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), 359-360, accessed February 28, 2023, https://archive.org/details/deathsocialorder0000hurn.
[19] "Imperial Precepts to Soldiers and Sailors, 1882," in Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese, 2:198-199.
[20] "Imperial Precepts," 2:199.
[21] Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese, 2:139; Sharon H. Nolte, "National Morality and Universal Ethics: Ōnishi Hajime and the Imperial Rescript on Education," Monumenta Nipponica 38, no. 3 (1983): 284, https://doi.org/10.2307/2384883; David John Lu, ed., The Late Tokugawa Period to the Present, vol. 2, Japan: A Documentary History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 343, accessed February 19, 2023, https://archive.org/details/japandocumentary0000unse_l3s1.
[22] "The Imperial Rescript on Education," in Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese, 2:139-140.
[23] Shimazono Susumu and Regan E. Murphy, "State Shinto in the Lives of the People: The Establishment of Emperor Worship, Modern Nationalism, and Shrine Shinto in Late Meiji," Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 36, no. 1 (2009): 102, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30233855.
[24] Itō Miyoji, trans., "The Constitution of the Empire of Japan," National Diet Library Archives, accessed February 19, 2023, https://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c02.html.
[25] Johannes Siemes, Hermann Roesler's Commentaries on the Meiji Constitution (n.p.: Monumenta Nipponica, 1962), 11, https://doi.org/10.2307/2383259; Itō Hirobumi, Commentaries on the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, 2nd ed., trans. Itō Miyoji (Tokyo: Chū-ō Daigaku, 1906), 7, accessed February 25, 2023, https://archive.org/details/commentariesonco00itohuoft.
[26] Ohnuki-Tierney, "The Emperor," 207-210.
[27] Ibid, 204, 212.
[28] Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 334; James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 88-89, accessed March 2, 2023, https://archive.org/details/ofhereticsmartyr0000kete, cited in Jansen, The Making, 340.
[29] Jansen, The Making, 335.
[30] Itō Hirobumi, "Speech on the Restoration and Constitutional Government," in Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese, 2:171.
[31] Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western, 143-144.
[32] Hermann Roesler, "Commentaries on the Constitution of the Empire of Japan," trans. Johannes Siemes, in Siemes, Hermann Roesler's, 21.
[33] Katō Genchi, A Study of Shinto: The Religion of the Japanese Nation, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 208, accessed February 15, 2023, https://archive.org/details/studyofshintorel0000kato.