translating liberty in 19th century japan

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Copyright 2001 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

Translating Liberty in

Nineteenth-Century Japan

Douglas Howland

A concept of liberty was but one element of the Japanese engagement with

western political theory after the Perry intrusion of 1853, when United Stateswarships led by Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to negotiate a com-

mercial treaty with the U.S. This scandal, which ultimately led to the Meiji

Restoration of 1867, immediately reorganized scholarly priorities among those

intellectuals interested in western knowledge and technology. Western learning

under the feudal Tokugawa regime (1603-1867) was organized as Dutch

studies because the Dutch were the sole European trading partner of Japan

from 1641 to 1854. Dutch studies paid particular attention to European math-

ematics, astronomy, geography, natural history, and the Dutch language. The

Perry intrusion, however, prompted the rise of western learning: language

study quickly expanded to include English, French, and German; and the content

of learning emphasized European law and political philosophy. But the conceptsthat defined this content of western thought did not translate well; they did not fit

naturally with existing Japanese concepts. Hence the translation of western po-

litical theory necessitated the invention of new terminology with which to en-

gage the new political language. Accordingly, Japanese efforts to translate west-

ern political theory must be understood as both problems of language, the cre-

ation and circulation of new concepts, as well as problems of action, and the

usage of new concepts in debates about the programs and policies to be imple-

mented in a westernizing Japan.1

Thanks to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., for

supporting the research and writing of this essay, and in particular to Charles Briggs, LinnFreiwald, David Gilmartin, Akhil Gupta, Jim Hevia, Richard King, and Luise White.

1 See David Abosch, KatHiroyuki and the Introduction of German Political Thought:

1868-1883 (Ph.D. diss.: U of California, 1964), 63-160; Grant K. Goodman,Japan: The Dutch

Experience (London, 1986); Hirakawa Sukehiro, Japans Turn to the West, in The Cam-

bridge History of Japan, ed. Marius Jansen (Cambridge, 1989), V, 432-98; and Donald Keene,

The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830, rev. ed. (Stanford, 1969).


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162 Douglas Howland

The scholars who figure in this essayKat Hiroyuki, Tsuda Mamichi,

Nishi Amane, Kanda Takahira, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and Nakamura Keiuwere

all key figures in the intellectual passage from Tokugawa to Meiji, from Dutch

studies to western learning. They began their careers in the Tokugawa institute

for Dutch studies; most traveled to Holland, England, or the United States dur-

ing the 1860s; and after the Meiji Restoration they became intellectual and edu-

cational leaders under the new administration.2 In addition to founding private

academies or filling prominent government posts, they created the first literary

society, the Meiji Six Society (named after the year of its founding, the sixth

year of the Emperor Meijis reign, 1873), which sponsored public debates, pub-

lished these proceedings in the Meiji Six Journal, and so hoped to promote

enlightenment among the Japanese people. In addition to introducing public de-

bate to Japan, this transitional intelligentsia was involved in the fundamental

work of creating the language in which to raise issues of constitutional form or

personal freedoms. In their translations of western texts and original texts about

western law and political philosophy they created the neologisms to translate

western concepts and participated in the standardization of terminology that

made western knowledge coherent.

The two concepts discussed in this essay, which were among the first to

figure prominently in intellectual debates of the early 1870s, were liberty and

religion, the pairing of which in the debate over freedom of religion from 1872

to 1874 was crucial in defining a Japanese conception of liberty. Although reli-

gious liberty arose in western Europe as a result of the conflict between church

and state authorities, the issue in Japan was a direct challenge to the new central

governments attempt to decree a national Shintdoctrine in 1868. As the sole

case of unanimous support for personal liberty among the transitional intelli-

gentsia, the debate over freedom of religion determined key distinctions between

private and public behavior that defined the Japanese conception of liberty for

the duration of Japans imperial constitution (to 1945). As a right of individuals,

liberty resided in the exclusively private domain of thought, conscience, and

religious faith. As a public matter the peoples liberty necessarily gave way to

government maintenance of public order.

In part this essay responds to the work of Japanese philologists who study

the translation and standardization of modern Japanese vocabulary. Much of

this work is based on dictionaries; a word is said to have become standard as it

appears in greater numbers of Japanese-Chinese, Japanese-English, and other

bilingual dictionaries. But this research is limited by its assumption that dictio-

naries reflect language usage among a language community, which is not neces-

2 See W. G. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travellers in America

and Europe (New Haven, 1995); and G. B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan: A Study in

the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures (New York, 1950).


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163Translating Liberty in Nineteenth-Century Japan

sarily the case, particularly as words are newly coined and translated.3 Bilin-

gual dictionaries provide not widely accepted or standard Japanese translations

for European words but instead, like other texts, merely examples of word us-

age. For example, Hori Tatsunosukes early English-Japanese dictionary includes,

as a translation for freedom, the interpretation to not pay land rent and the

like (jishigin nado wo dasazu ).4 In a history of dictionary translations of free-

dom and liberty in Japanese, this idiosyncratic and unique translation is not

pertinent; hence, to proceed with a history of standardization in this fashion is to

misunderstand the tentative nature of initial efforts at Japanese translations of

English concepts. In this regard Japanese philology suffers from the same com-

bination of idealism and inattention to concrete historical processes that argu-

ably marred Arthur Lovejoys original project of a history of ideas, a critique to

which John Dunn, Quentin Skinner, and many others have contributed in recent

decades.5 In a manner analagous to developments in European intellectual his-

tory, the work of Japanese scholars like philologist Hida Yoshifumi and political

historian Ishida Takeshi insists that the history of the introduction of new con-

cepts into Japanese account for both the range of translation words in translated

and original texts as well as the usage of such neologisms in the popular press

and public debate.6

At the same time this essay responds to a dominant approach to Japanese

intellectual history, the biographical treatment of individuals. Although it can be

useful for investigating political development, much previous work has begun

by identifying individuals as liberal or nationalist or conservative, a ste-

reotyping that has tended to minimize our understanding of new concepts in

Meiji Japan.7 For to treat concepts as effects of individuals is to misread a simple

Euro-American scheme in Japanese political positions and, worse, to overlook

political discussions circulating outside of individuals in the print media and

government documents. Meiji political debate reveals that individual positions

3 See, for example, Morioka Kenji, [Kaitei] Kindaigo no seiritsugoi hen, rev. ed. (To-

kyo, 1991).4 Hori Tatsnoskay [Tatsunosuke], A Pocket Dictionary of the English and Japanese Lan-

guage / Ei-Wa taiyaku shchin jisho (Edo, 1862), 315.5 John Dunn, The Identity of the History of Ideas,Philosophy,43 (1968), 85-104; Reinhard

Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, 1985), 73-91; and

Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, History and Theory, 8

(1969), 3-53; see also William J. Bouwsma, Intellectual History in the 1980s, Journal of

Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1981), 279-291; and Donald R. Kelley, Horizons of Intellectual

History: Retrospect, Circumspect, Prospect, JHI, 49 (1987), 143-69.6 Sg Masaaki and Hida Yoshifumi,Meiji no kotoba jiten (Tokyo, 1986); Ishida Takeshi,

Nihon no seiji to kotoba (Tokyo, 1989), I.7 Albert M. Craig, Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Philosophical Foundations of Meiji National-

ism, in Political Development in Modern Japan, ed. Robert E. Ward (Princeton, 1968), 99-

148; Mikiso Hane, Nationalism and the Decline of Liberalism in Meiji Japan, Studies on

Asia, 4 (1963), 69-80.


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164 Douglas Howland

described as liberal or conservative had much in common; the same intelli-

gentsia who supported religious freedom in 1874 accepted the governments

restrictions on freedom of the press in 1875.

Take the issue of religious freedom as an example of how the history of

concepts can be distorted by an exercise in biography. In what is still a major

reappraisal of the issues Thomas W. Burkman engages the problem of specify-

ing causal factors in Japans decision to lift the ban on Christianity in 1873,

arguing that contrary to Otis Carys 1909 thesis that foreign diplomatic pres-

sure forced the Japanese to relent, a number of domestic changes of heart took

place, which he loosely relates to the notion of domestic liberalism. Liberal

intellectuals (including Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nakamura Keiu), liberal Bud-

dhists, and the softening of government attitudes all contribute to this toleration

of religious freedom.8 But if the oligarch Kido Takayoshi is any indication of

softening government attitudes, his diary reveals that the ruling oligarchy was

attending much larger problems in 1872 and 1873: allowing Japanese Chris-

tians the freedom to practice their religion was a minor concession in the face of

projects like restructuring the domains into a modern, centralized system of

prefectures. To be sure, as Burkman argues, government officials were exposed

to reasonable intellectuals who offered learned arguments for religious tolera-

tion. In Kidos case a new friendship with Niijima J (who would later found the

oldest Christian university in Japan, Dshisha University) reassured him that

not all Christians were irrational fanatics, and his friendly association with Bud-

dhist leader Shimaji Mokurai, who wrote a significant memorial on the separa-

tion of church and state in 1872, reinforced his deliberately centrist stance. But

the problem of repressing Japanese Christians, inherited from the Tokugawa

regime and raised to crisis proportions by mass arrests of Christians in the late

1860s, ceased to concern Kido after 1868.9 Political expediency, which

Burkman acknowledges as the primary cause of change, had rendered such re-

pression unneccessary and diplomatically awkward. What I take issue with here

is his characterization of religious toleration as the work of Japanese liberals.

Rather than look to individual biographies as units of analysis, I examine the

concept of liberty as it was introduced in translation and used and standard-

ized in political debate during the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

8 Thomas W. Burkman, The Urakami Incidents and the Struggle for Religious Toleration

in Early Meiji Japan, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 1 (1974), 143-216; also Otis

Cary,A History of Christianity in Japan (1909; repr. Rutland, Vt., 1976), I, 302-26, II, 80-84;

Inada Masatsugu, Meiji kenp seiritsu shi (Tokyo, 1960-62), I, 174-80; Abe Yoshiya, FromProhibition to Toleration: Japanese Government Views Regarding Christianity, 1854-73,Japa-

nese Journal of Religious Studies, 5 (1978), 107-38; and Japanese Traditions of Christianity:

Being Some Old Translations from the Japanese, with British Consular Reports of the Perse-

cutions of 1868-1872, ed. Montague Paske-Smith (Kobe, 1930).9 Kido Takayoshi, The Diary of Kido Takayoshi, tr. Sidney Devere Brown and Akiko

Hirota (Tokyo, 1983-86), I, 16-27passim, 53, 147-48, II, 140-45passim, 246-47.


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Liberty and European Political Theory

Liberty is by no means a necessary element of constitutional theory. As Kat

Hiroyuki demonstrated in his startling typology of political administrations in

1861, Tonarigusa or The Grass Next Door, one can describe the range of des-

potic, monarchical, republican, and democratic forms of government without

any reference to liberty. Japanese political theory as it engaged Anglo-American

and French theory after 1853 was, like its counterparts in Europe, grounded in a

dialectic of sovereign and people. To account for the limitations on monarchy

and the foundations of constitutionalism requires only the intervention of a sec-

ond dialectic, that of privileges and law. Law limits the sovereigns privileges

and transforms them into the peoples rights, thereby shifting the politys center

of gravity from sovereign toward people and initiating the form of a constitu-

tional monarchy. As described in the work of European political theorists like

Thomas Hobbes and Benjamin Constant, law becomes the new sovereign, re-

placing the arbitrary will of the monarch and protecting the peoples rights, and

all become subjects of the law.

An analysis of the Japanese situation in the nineteenth century must be guided

at the outset by two theoretical precautions. First, we must retreat from our

contemporary preference for negative freedom, that sphere of non-interfer-

ence surrounding the individual and his political rights, in order to appreciate

positive freedom, that political education of man in active self-rule, pursued

through the collective enactment of lawdescribed by Constant as ancient

liberty and by seventeenth-century English republicans as civil liberty.10

Mainly because of the alleged excesses of such positive freedom perceived in the

French Revolution, the Anglo-American liberal tradition in the century and a

half since the publication of John Stuart Mills On Liberty has preferred nega-

tive freedom. One consequence is that Mill, Herbert Spencer, and other liberal

defenders of negative freedom have jealously guarded the positive freedom of

participation as a privilege, not a right, which the ruling class in its tutelary

capacity judiciously grants to deserving compatriots.

A second theoretical precaution to bear in mind is the difference between

human liberty and the negative liberty of civil rights. As Blandine Kriegel has

pointed out in her provocative study of royal jurisprudence in early modern

Europe, the dominance of liberal arguments about civil rights since the nine-

teenth century has tended to obscure the older tradition of civil or human liberty.

Defended by Hobbes, Jean Bodin, and other contemporaries in England and

France, human liberty encompasses that personal security, personal liberty, and

10 Benjamin Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,

inPolitical Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge, 1988), 307-38; also J. G. A. Pocock,

Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought, Political Theory,

9 (1981), 353-68; and Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998).


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166 Douglas Howland

personal property upheld by the sovereign state through the rule of law. In oppo-

sition to the feudal tyranny of force the sovereign state requires a division of

powers in order to pursue justice, particularly the goals of peace and personal

security.11 If this earlier tradition, which stressed the rule of law to safeguard

people from despotic lords, is now perceived as conservative and the later

tradition, which stressed civil rights to safeguard individuals from tyranny, is

now a liberal position, we must remember that both were reactions to monar-

chical despotism in Europe; and for that reason both appealed to Japanese intel-

lectuals when they were introduced to Japan in the mid-nineteenth century as

justifications for constitutional government.

In fact the development of liberty in Japan corresponds in great measure

to that of liberty and the related liberal in English. While the earliest use of

the term was liberal arts, the mark of a free man and a generous mind (c.

1375), liberty soon followed in the context of permission or privilege, as in

liberties of the subject, which referred to those rights granted within an un-

questionable subjection to a particular sovereignty. The other word for such a

formal right was license, and in tandem with the negative form, licentious,

the negative sense of liberty as unrestrained developed in the sixteenth cen-

tury, as we read in John Knoxs First Blast, beheaded for the libertie of his

tonge. The strong political sense of liberty as freedom dates from the fif-

teenth century, and like the development of the Latin term libertas in the free

cities of medieval Italy, liberty proclaimed freedom from feudal constraints and

celebrated self-rule. In England liberty became attached to the political position

of liberal as being open-minded or reforming in the late eighteenth century.

But the persistent negative sense of liberal as improper or unorthodox

allowed defenders of the status quo to castigate their rivals as liberal, and

therefore to question their beliefs as foreign or unorthodox. Both liberal

and liberty, and free and freedom, have oscillated between these positive and

negative connotations from the fifteenth century on.12

Japanese intellectuals encountered this centuries-long history of the English

concept in the two decades spanning 1855 and 1875. Generally, however, the

majority of Japanese leaders remained unconvinced that liberty was the be-

neficent force praised by English theorists like J. S. Mill. They noted its dyna-

mism but remained suspicious that it undermined the virtues more appropriate

11 Blandine Kriegel, The State and the Rule of Law, tr. Marc A. LePain and Jeffrey C.

Cohen (Princeton, 1995), 20-24, 33-37; Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On theTheory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago, 1995), 100-133; and Franz Neumann, The Change in

the Function of Law in Modern Society, in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State, ed.

Herbert Marcuse (Glencoe, Ill., 1957), 22-68.12 See The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd. ed., J. A .Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Ox-

ford, 1989), VI: 157-65; VIII: 881-87; and Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York, 1976),

148-50.


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to the peopleduty to others and loyalty to ones superiors, particularly the

government administration that rightly protected public peace. In a surprising

set of reversals in 1874 and 1875, just at the moment that liberty entered the

public sphere of the newspaper debate over freedom of the press, Meiji intellec-

tuals retracted the liberal interpretation of personal liberty in favor of the earlier

tradition of civil (human) liberty, introduced in the 1860s. The states claim to

safeguarding the well-being of the people under the rule of law outweighed the

liberal claim to individual freedom from state interference.

Autonomy and Personal Discretion

Japanese philologists agree that by 1870 Japanese lexicographers translated

the English word liberty and its close relationsFrench libert, Dutchvrijheid,

GermanFreiheit, and English freedomwith four main expressions. All four

of these were Chinese-character expressions available to educated Japanese of

the time:jishu, self-mastery, or acting on ones own authority; jiy, following

ones intentions, without restrictions;jizai, also meaning following ones inten-

tions, unrestrictedly, but with a nuance not so much directional (y) as stative

(zai); and fuki, a metaphor drawing on the image of a horse without reins,

implying unfettered or free. In addition, these terms were used in two emphatic

combinations:jishujiy, self-determining and free; andjiyjizai, utterly free to

do whatever one likes. However, in the key legal and political texts of the 1860s,

we rarely find either the metaphor fuki orjiy, the future standard translation

word. Instead, we find bothjishu andjizai at work, but only the latter expression

can be confidently called a translation for liberty.

These key texts, composed during the 1860s, were all based on Dutch sources;

they survey basic political systems discussed in European political theory and

employed in Europe and North America at the time. Kat Hiroyukis The Grass

Next Door and An Outline of Constitutional Political Forms were based on

unspecified texts available at the Dutch studies institute. Tsuda Mamichis On

State Law of the West and Nishi Amanes Encyclopedia were based on their

notes of Dutch political economist Simon Visserings lectures, which they at-

tended in Leiden during 1863-65. Nishis summary of Visserings lectures on

natural law also provided the basis for their colleague Kanda Takahiras An

Outline of Natural Law.13

Kat, for example, discusses liberty toward the end ofAn Outline of Con-

stitutional Political Forms, where he enumerates the private rights of the people

in a constitutional system. These include, (1) a right to life; (2) a right to bodily

13 See Kanda Takahira, Seih ryaku (Tokyo, 1871); repr.Meiji bunka zensh (Tokyo, 1957),

XIII (Hritsu hen), 4. On Simon Vissering, see Irene Hasenberg Butter, Academic Economics

in Holland, 1800-1870 (The Hague, 1969).


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168 Douglas Howland

autonomy; (3) a right to liberty of action; (4) a right to assemble and form

associations; (5) a right to liberty of thought, speech, and writing; and (6) a right

to liberty of faith. Seventh is a right to the identicality of the people, which,

Kat explains, granted the identicality (equality) of the laws that protect the

rights of all people, one has a right to absolute impartiality regardless of family

or official position. Eighth is the right of each person to freely hold property.14

Rights 3, 4, 5, and 6 clearly interpret what to us are fundamental civil liber-

ties; we can be confident that Kats and Tsudas term, jizai, is indeed their

translation word for liberty. But if we compare Kats list to that of Tsuda,

there are two apparent tensions in such a rendition of liberties. First, as Tsuda

makes clear with his different phrasing of the liberty of faith, one need not couch

liberty in the abstract language of a right to liberty. Where Kat specifies a

right to liberty of faith, and goes on to explain the priority of ones own discre-

tion in matters of faith, Tsuda makes the point more directly: one has a right to

ones own discretion in believing a sectarian doctrine or engaging in sectarian

ceremony.15 Liberty is implicit in the personal discretion of believing. This

difference between Kat and Tsuda is that between abstracting liberty as a spe-

cific right and describing liberty as a general mode of action, relying on ones

discretion. Both conceptions are present, and neither Kat nor Tsuda unequivo-

cally favors one over the other. The difference between the two approaches to

liberty lies in an implied moral agent at work in the notion of discretion.

Where the abstract right to liberty seems to set no subjective conditions, discreet

action depends on the moral responsibility of the agent.

This contrast is even more pronounced in a second tension in these enu-

merations of rights raised by the expressionjishu, self-mastery, self-deter-

mination, or autonomy, which figures in both Kats and Tsudas right to

bodily autonomy (one should not be arbitrarily bound or thrown into jail).

Although Kat and Tsuda are referring to what in English is usually called a

right to personal liberty and although some texts, notably dictionaries, use

jishu as a translation word for liberty, I do not believe thatjishu means liberty

here. Rather, given Tsudas extensive deployment ofjishu in his historical dis-

cussion of self-governing peoples and non-self-governing peoples, it is clear

that self-governing refers to the status of a person as independent of external

political forcein a word, autonomous. Or as Kanda employs the term, our

rights in making contracts are all based on our right to self-determination.16

These texts, in other words, propose two related conceptions of liberty: on

the one hand the autonomy of the self (jishu), and on the other hand following

14 Kat Hiroyuki, Rikken seitai ryaku, in Nishi Amane / Kat Hiroyuki, ed. Uete Michiari

(Tokyo, 1984), 342-43; cf. Tsuda Mamichi, Taisei kokuh ron (Edo, 1868; repr. Tokyo, 1875),

91-100.15 Tsuda, Taisei kokuh ron, 95-96.16 Kanda, Seih ryaku, 12.


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ones own mind in specified activities (jizai). This difference is not yet articu-

lated in terms of what the Anglo-American tradition has described as two forms

of liberty: positive liberty, or self-realization enacted politically through self-

government, and negative liberty, or freedom from external interference.17 Rather,

the issue seems to be one simpler and more fundamental to all democratic or

republican societies, now and in the past, namely, the degree of individual free-

dom acceptable to others in the community. The fact that the two expressions,

autonomy and liberty, are related in the common character signifying self-re-

flexivity, ji, underlines the Japanese concern with the role of the self or person in

European constitutional thought. The autonomous self is free to use his discre-

tion, as is every other such autonomous self. Clearly, this Japanese use ofji is

not a simple correspondence to the Latin reference in our word liberty, liber, the

free man, who, in distinction to the slaves, self-governs with other free men.

Rather, Kat and Tsuda implicitly question the autonomy of the individual within

the polity. To what degree can and should an individual entrust his own discre-

tion as he pursues his interests within the constitutional state?

Most often, Kat concludes that the restrictions of supreme law are a

reasonable external limitation upon the activities of individuals. As he explains

in a commentary on the fifth right, arbitrary behavior cannot be tolerated:

The liberty of thought cannot be prohibited in the manner of ancient

and infamous tyranny. But it is usual in a despotism or monarchy to

prohibit the act of freely writing, printing, or speaking what is thought.

Only the two forms of constitutional systems [democratic republics and

constitutional monarchies] permit such liberty.... But this right to lib-

erty does not permit arbitrary writing. If writing gravely corrupts the

heart or damages peaceful rule, it is certainly appropriate that the writer

receive his due punishment. Hence the law entrusts the responsibility

for justification to the writer.18

This is very much in the spirit of John Lockes comment in hisSecond Treatise

on Government that Where there is no law, there is no freedom; freedom is

not the liberty to do what one wants, but to order ones person, actions, and

property within the limits of the law.19 In Kats formulation of private rights

and liberty, when tyranny and monarchy no longer provide external limits on the

autonomy of the individual, law must fill the breach; public peace and morality

justify legal restrictions upon the liberties. The language of moral agency, im-

plicit in words like arbitrary and responsibility, assumes a prevailing counter-

17 Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969),

118-72; and Holmes, Passions and Constraint, 13-41.18 Kat,Rikken seitai ryaku, 342.19 John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslette (New York, 1963), 348.


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170 Douglas Howland

point to liberty. As Tsuda Mamichi put it, even in daily interactions among

common people, the law demands limits and standards; two people are free to

say whatever they like in conversation, but there is a clear prohibition on some-

thing like their harming a third party.20

Comparable comments appear in all of these texts. What we do not find in

general use is an abstract term, liberty, standing on its own as a motive for

action or principle of political organization. The appearance of a principle of

liberty must be credited to Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nakamura Keiu, with their

turn to Anglo-American liberalism and its grounding of the general concept of

liberty in the individual.

Independence and Selfishness

Fukuzawas Conditions in the West (1866-70) and Nakamuras The Prin-

ciple of Liberty, a careful translation of John Stuart Mills On Liberty published

in 1871, advanced the Japanese conception of liberty beyond the Dutch-based

texts in three important ways. First, by casting historical narratives of political

revolution and change in terms of liberty, they established a connection between

liberty and the creation of constitutional political forms. Second, by posing these

conflicts among individuals and groups in both concrete, historical terms and in

the abstract, they domesticated the passage from liberties, those particular

principles of action enumerated by Katand colleagues, to liberty, a general,

abstract principle. Third, by struggling to overcome others misconceptions about

liberty, they both publicized and contributed to the persistence of a fundamental

conflict within the Japanese conception of libertythat between independent

action and selfishness. Ultimately, in order to address this third issue, both

Fukuzawa and Nakamura imposed moral limitations upon liberty in order to

keep individuals from giving themselves over to objectionably selfish behavior.

In the first volume ofConditions in the West Fukuzawa identifies all civi-

lized states in Europe as constitutional monarchies. First of the attributes of

these civilized administrations isjishu nini, self-determination and personal

discretion, an expression that he equates with both liberty andjiy. Because

Nakamura Keiu later quoted this discussion of liberty as the primary precedent

for his use ofjiy in translating Mill, I retranslate it in full:

When the countrys traditions are relaxed and people no longer restricted,

each can do what pleases himself. Those who take pleasure in official

life can become officials; those who enjoy farming become farmers.

Not the least discrimination is established among the [four classes of]

officials, farmers, artisans, and merchants. Of course, there is no dis-

20 Tsuda, Taisei kokuh ron, 39.


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cussion of lineage, no slighting of persons according to their status at

court; among the high and low, the noble and mean, each obtains what

is due him, without any interference into the liberty of others, which

is the aim of extending the talent granted by Heaven. Nonetheless, the

difference between noble and mean is appropriate in the arena of public

service, where positions at court alone are revered. Except for this,

there are no differences among the four classes. Literacy, reasoned dis-

cussion, and ambitious effort make the superior man, who is respected;

while illiteracy makes the small man, who performs manual labor. Note:

the expressionsjishu nini andjiy do not mean selfishness, dissolute-

ness, or contempt for the countrys traditions. In general, the people of

the land interact without anxiety or formality, with the aim of expand-

ing each ones personal ability as each sees fit. In English, this is called

furdomu (freedom) or riberuchi (liberty). There is still no appropriate

translation word.21

Fukuzawa thus introduces liberty as a clear alternative to the status dis-

criminations instituted by the Tokugawa regime. He duly notes the exceptional

nobility of the Imperial court, and the factdear to those of his contemporaries

advocating revolutionthat western regimes value talent and reward ability. If

Fukuzawa presents this somewhat quaintly in the classical Confucian language

of the superior man and the small-minded laborer, his point is clear in the note:

a new model of social relations is available in the west that will serve the cause

of fostering ability.

In addition to communicating that possibility Fukuzawa and Nakamura felt

the need to safeguard this new concept, liberty, from popular misconceptions.

An indirect source of confusion in the 1860s lay in the pragmatic history of the

word in Chinese texts. Like Kats and Tsudas preferred jizai, jiy was a

longstanding expression in the Chinese lexicon, with an equally wide range of

meanings borrowed by the Japanese and centered on following ones inclina-

tions or having ones wayactivities that emphasized the individual at the

expense of the social.22 A second, direct source of misunderstandings lay in the

history ofjiy as a translation word in Japan. From the mid-1500s it was used to

translate expressions akin to liberty: first in Portuguese Christian texts as a

translation for the Latin libertas, later in Tokugawa-period Dutch studies texts

as a translation for the Dutch vrijheid, and then in Anglo-American missionary

21 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Seiy jij (1866-70), repr.Fukuzawa Yukichi zensh (Tokyo, 1958),I, 290 (hereafter SYJJ). See also Nakamura Keiu,Jiy no ri (Suruga, 1871), repr.Meiji bunka

zensh (Tokyo, 1927), V (Jiyminken hen), 84 (hereafterJYNR).22 See Kimura Ki, Bunmeikaika (Tokyo, 1954), 81-122; Ishida, Nihon no seiji to kotoba, I:

32-37; ShindSakiko, Meiji jidai go no kenky: goi to bunsh (Tokyo, 1981), 32-56; Suzuki

Shji,Nihon kango to chgokugo (Tokyo, 1981), 137-50; and Yanabu Akira, Honyaku to wa

nani ka? (rev. ed., Tokyo, 1985), 107-14.


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172 Douglas Howland

histories and geographies of the 1850s, imported from China, as a Chinese trans-

lation for the English freedom and liberty. However,jiy took a peculiar

turn in the early nineteenth century, when it became associated with selfish

and willful as a result of a surprising translation ofvrijheidon the part of the

Shoguns official interpreters in Nagasaki. Whether through error or value judge-

ment, an unnamed Nagasaki interpreter is credited with producing the memo-

rable Dutch remark that the world situation tends toward greater selfishness

every year, in which the original term, vrijheid, is rendered wagamama. The

association persisted in Dutch-Japanese dictionaries and was transferred to of-

ficial uses of English. Where the U.S.-Japan treaty signed by Commodore Mat-

thew Perry in 1854 demands that shipwrecked sailors and American citizens be

free to go where they please, the Japanese version translates this withkany,

or openly, and katte ni, or willfully. The Harris Treaty of 1858 substitutes

jiy for identical instances of free, thus reproducing the same association of

jiy and selfish with the English word free that had earlier occurred in

Japanese understandings ofvrijheid.23

In the face of this potential confusion Fukuzawa and Nakamura worked to

ground liberty in a positive light through a history of political reform and revo-

lution. Both emphasize the expressionfuki dokuritsu, unfettered and indepen-

dent. At the start ofThe Principle of Liberty, for example, Nakamura explains

the right to liberty as the limit placed on a masters privileges. Following Mill,

he reiterates the general problem seen in the histories of Greece, Rome, and

England of the peoples struggle against the rulers privilege and power of free-

dom and independence (fuki dokuritsu), which threatened always to turn into

tyranny. In order to protect themselves the people invoked their liberty (jiy)

and placed a limit on the power of the ruler through the imposition of laws.

What is striking about Nakamuras initial characterization of liberty is that he

equatesjiy andjishu. Freedom from tyranny is the autonomy of self-rule, a

state that graces the people with freedom and independence as they displace

their former and despotic king.24

Liberty, in the Anglo-American tradition presented here, commands atten-

tion as a means toward establishing independent constitutional systems. More-

over, as Nakamura makes clear, because these polities are animated by indi-

viduals pursuing their own interests, the greater collective utility of the liberties

is served. Following Mill, Nakamura introduces the personal liberties of judg-

ment, occupation, friendly assembly, thought, discussion, and so on. These are

all good and useful because they encourage the progressive sequence of explor-

atory debate, the discovery of truth, the application of knowledge, and the ad-

vancement of humankind. But Mill and Nakamura are not blind to a common

consequence of constitutionalism, which is that, in the absence of a common

23 See Kimura, Bunmeikaika, 137-57.24 Nakamura, JYNR, 7-8.


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understanding of good and evil, the population may divide into larger and smaller

factions. Of course, Nakamura states, people will turn to the government for

direction, but at the same time they still want to guard against the unfair interfer-

ence of government. Mill and Nakamura seek to persuade their readers that in

this absence of moral unanimity, it is far better that everyone acknowledge a

general principle of liberty than not, for liberty grants far more benefits than it

harms public well-being. Where Kat and Tsuda saw liberties as structural propo-

sitions of constitutionalism, Nakamura imagines a new form of social dyna-

mism, animating each individual for what promises to be a progressive collec-

tive whole.25

Two changes thus occur with the introduction of the liberal interpretation of

liberty. First, in demonstrating its utility in multiple situations, liberty is reified

as a general concept. The liberty of discussion works to advance mankind, lib-

erty of occupation grants us the well-being of suitable work, the liberty of as-

sembly serves us well for support in times of need, and so on. Nakamura sensi-

bly translates Mills title as The Principle of Liberty because his central argu-

ment concerns the general applicability and utility of the abstraction. Second,

liberty is grounded in the individual, acquiring a much more internalized point of

reference than Kat and Tsudas principle of discretion. For example, where

they treated the liberty of thought in terms of the objectified act of thinking,

akin to comparable acts like speaking and writingall of which are tempered by

an external standard of discretionNakamura locates liberty within the indi-

vidual. Mill states that the first appropriate region of liberty is the inward do-

main of consciousness, and hence we must have freedom of thought.26 Where

Katand Tsuda juxtaposed a persons free actions to the laws of the domain, the

people, or some collective understanding of discretion, Nakamura sees the indi-

vidual agent in juxtaposition to other such individual selves, against whose pro-

pensity to combine in a tyrannous majority one must always be on guard.

What is potentially disturbing about this interpretation of liberty is that its

typically negative presentation, that one is free from the interference of others,

never returns logically to the principles of a free polity grounded in law. As

Blandine Kriegel has argued, the liberal version of liberties abandons the state

protection of those human liberties that were the reason for establishing a consti-

tutional system in the first place.27 The rights to life, home, and personal secu-

rity, which Kat and Tsuda included in their enumerations of rights, no longer

matter per se. Instead, we are to imagine a self-interested people whose au-

tonomy is defined less by self-rule and more by the exclusion of external inter-

ference.

25Ibid., 15-17.26Ibid., 16-17.27 Kriegel, The State and the Rule of Law, 35-36.


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174 Douglas Howland

This conundrum is acute in the third volume of Conditions in the West,

where Fukuzawa is baffled by the French Revolution. France follows the prece-

dents of England and the United States: the winds of freedom blow across the

country in the face of tyranny, and the National Assembly proclaims indepen-

dence. Although a republic is established, crudeness and violence grow, with the

surprising result of freedom in name, but not at all in reality.28 The confusion

generated by the reigns of Napoleon and Charles X redirects Fukuzawas narra-

tive from liberty back to the question of rightsestablishing the rights of par-

ticipatory government through law. Clearly, the fact that true liberty is in

danger of being undermined by selfish or willful behavior compels Fukuzawa to

add a second set of clarifications regarding liberty. He points out that liberty

is a matter much more serious than granting a child who has finished his home-

work the permission to go outside and play; it has nothing to do with polite

requests or likes and dislikes. Rather, quoting the American proclamation give

me liberty or give me death, he concludes that liberty is a principle devoted to

saving the people from misery, a case of not interfering with the natural rights of

the inhabitants of the country: simply putto invigorate the work of mind and

body, to work together without interfering, to aim for the prosperity of each

person.29

For both Fukuzawa and Nakamura, the way out of this impasse follows the

path taken by Kat and Tsuda: to impose external limits on liberty. For Fukuzawa

the conception of duty provides a solution. Fukuzawa makes clear that free-

dom comes with the body, and since both are granted by Heaven, they cannot be

taken away by another man or the nation. In that regard he admits that we are

most free in the state of nature, a condition of barbarism to be sure, but that this

freedom is the freedom to starve, the freedom to be destroyed by force

which is not a true freedom at all. Hence we must remember that people are

members of families and belong to nations, and these associations impose upon

us natural limits to liberty, which Fukuzawa calls duty. These begin natu-

rally: each mans effort to preserve his own person is extended to his family.

From this follows the more general duties to prevent trouble for others and to

obey the law. Because it forces us to consider other persons in human interac-

tion, duty intervenes to keep the free individual from utterly selfish behavior. In

fact it is duty that holds the human community together.30

By contrast, in a surprising set of additions to Mills essay Nakamura en-

lists Christianity as a corrective for the human propensity to err on the side of

selfishness. At issue for Nakamura, much as in Fukuzawas history of France,

is the difference between true and false freedom. True freedom is limited.

As Nakamuras friend and spiritual counselor Edward Warren Clark states in a

28 Fukuzawa, SYJJ, 581.29Ibid., 486-87.30Ibid., 392-95.


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preface to The Principle of Liberty, In some, there is a certain restless spirit

which brooks no restraint, either from civil code or from individual conscience,

& which feigns itself free in proportion as it is independent of rightful rule. In

fact this false freedom is the licentious delusion of total independence, which

can only be corrected by heeding the example of the true liberator of mankind,

the Messiah who came to unchain the captive, not from a temporal, but from a

spiritual despotism.31 Key to this true freedom is the capacity to love. While

Mills text concerns the limits of government, the problem for mankind, Nakamura

adds, is to emulate Gods limitless love for man. The difference between Gods

love for man and mans limited institutions, Nakamura implies, highlights the

rightful limitations on mans control over other men, for liberty ultimately refers

to Christian promise and responsibilityself-development to the glory of God.32

In other words both Fukuzawa and Nakamura understand that liberty grounded

in the individual imparts a progressive dynamism to the community, but both

recast the independence of the individual as a bounded autonomy by linking him

to family and others through duty and love. Neither condones the licentious

delusion of unrestricted, false freedom.

Religious Liberty: Personal Faith and Collective Worship

In addition to providing the momentum for standardizingjiy as the transla-

tion word for freedom and liberty, the liberal interpretation of freedom intro-

duced by Fukuzawa and Nakamura is crucial for a second reason. It defined

freedom of conscience as a right internal to the individual, out of reach of politi-

cal authorities, so that it immediately became the reference for religious liberty,

defined as the freedom of personal faith. Nakamura in particular is to be cred-

ited with linking this internal freedom of conscience to religious liberty. Al-

though Nakamuras additions to Mill stressed the value of Christian belief for

liberty and civilization, Mill himself judged religious belief a prominent site of

social tyranny, especially because of the close relation between religion and (to

him oppressive) middle-class morality; as a consequence Mill found most praise-

worthy the great religious leaders assertions of freedom of conscience. Sup-

pressing freedom of religion, like the suppression of any liberty, harms human

development; and religion, like so many aspects of social life in Mills world,

can only benefit from the liberty of thought and discussion, which, for the Chris-

tian, serves to forge a living belief.33

But to my knowledge no Japanese in the early Meiji period was willing to

accept Mills scenario of an actively inquiring citizenry taking the lead as the

minimal state observed from the sidelines; nor did anyone imagine organized

31 Nakamura, JYNR, 4.32Ibid., 18-19.33Ibid., 12, 18-19, 24-30.


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176 Douglas Howland

religions in a position to infringe on the freedom of individuals. Rather, writers

in the 1870s largely accepted the role of the state in supervising religion as

valid. Given the presence of Christianity in the Shimabara Uprising (defeated in

1638) and the several riotous cults affiliated with popular forms of Buddhism

during the Tokugawa period, the Shoguns use of legal bans to suppress socially

objectionable forms of religion was a normative precedent.34 Accordingly, dis-

cussions of religious liberty in the early Meiji period developed along the lines

first suggested by Kat Hiroyukis translation of Johann Kaspar Bluntschlis

Allgemeines Staatsrecht, the first installment of which appeared in 1872. On

the one hand each individual had a personal right to faith; on the other hand

groups had a right to worship the religion of their collective choice. Because

these two rights overlapped in the space of public worship, the state too had a

right to involve itself in religious matters, if only to protect public order.35 What

offended a number of scholars was the states attempt to prescribe one na-

tional religion above others as suitable for all Japanese people.

Debates over religious liberty were precipitated by the new Meiji gov-

ernments official policy toward religion on two fronts. First, the policy of uniting

politics and religion, which was decreed in April 1868 and reinforced with the

subsequent promulgation of the Three Standards of Instruction in April 1872,

attempted to establish a newly constructed Shint as the national doctrine of

Japan and to put Buddhist sects under the domination of a Shint hierarchy.

Second, the reiteration of the official Tokugawa ban on Christianity in April

1868 generated controversy by continuing the arrests and deportations of Japa-

nese Christians from southern Japan between 1867 and 1870. Although the two

series were independent developments, they provoked a common set of argu-

ments whose outcome provisionally affirmed a principle of religious freedom.

The first set of events draws us immediately into the problem of naming

religion in the early Meiji period. Variously described assaisei itto (one road

of ceremony and administration) or seiky itchi (union of administration and

instruction), this policy of uniting politics and religion consistently points to

political administration as one half of the combination, while the other half vac-

illates between the expression of religious practices and the content of religious

teachings. For religion during the first fifteen years of Meiji was translated

with multiple combinations of Chinese characters referring to Buddhist sects,

terms for worship or ceremony, for faith or belief, for religious or philosophical

doctrines or schools, and for religious or philosophical law or principles. Al-

though these words covered a range of faiths and programs of instruction from

34 Umeda Yoshihiko, Shky h ni tsuiteEdo bakufu kara Meiji seifu e, Shint shky,

26 (1961), 37-55.35 [J. K.Bluntschli],Kokuh hanron, tr. Kat Hiroyuki (Tokyo, 1872-76), repr.Meiji bunka

zensh (Tokyo, 1971), supp. II [= XXXI] 187-201.


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Buddhist sects to Chinese philosophical schools, Christianity, and Shint, what

they all share is the notion of a set of beliefs or instructions which presumably

inform a code of behavior. As James Ketelaar has rightfully remarked, the key

term ky shifts gradually from doctrine to religion during these early years

of Meiji.36 As an official policy, uniting politics and doctrine meant that Shint

priests and advocates of Japanese Nativism advised the oligarchy and the

Meiji emperor to return to the model of imperial rule established by ancestral

Emperor Jimmu, articulated as matsurigoto , when politics and religion were

one and the same.37 Practically, this meant creating an Office of Shintwithin

the Meiji government (replaced with the Ministry of Doctrine in 1872), on the

model of Jimmus ancient administration, and indoctrinating the people with the

new Shint teachings, the official goals of which were to revere the spirits (kami)

of the land, to illuminate human morality, to rectify the hearts of the people, and

to fulfill duty, all of which would instill service to the Imperial Court.38 Four

years later, the Three Standards of Instruction reiterated similar goals. In sum,

the union of politics and doctrine was an attempt by the new government to

unify talk of morality, the cult of Shint, and loyalty to the Emperor as a project

for mobilizing the new citizenry. What was once nameable as one, matsurigoto,

had become the duality of politics and religion that had to be rejoineda bu-

reaucratic measure that provoked talk of liberty.39

The second set of events prompting calls for religious freedom was the ban

on Christianity. The reintroduction of foreigners to Japanese ports after the es-

tablishment of a treaty-port system beginning in 1858 allowed American, En-

glish, and French religious personnel to serve their countrymen in Yokohama,

Nagasaki and elsewhere. Although traveling in the countryside and proselytiz-

ing among the Japanese people were forbidden, French Catholic priests in the

Nagasaki area defied Japanese law, encouraging local hidden Christian groups

to practice their faith publicly after a hiatus of two and a half centuries (follow-

ing the Shoguns ban in 1614). The Shoguns representative in Nagasaki ar-

36 James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its

Persecution (Princeton, 1990), 125.37 See Burkman, The Urakami Incidents, 168-70, and on matsurigoto, H. D. Harootunian,

Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago, 1988), 164-

66; and Maruyama Masao, The Structure ofMatsurigoto: the basso ostinato of Japanese

Political Life, in Themes and Theories in Modern Japanese History: Essays in Memory of

Richard Storry, ed. Sue Henny and Jean Pierce Lehmann (London, 1988), 27-43.38 Jinshin no kis o ichi ni subekuseiky itchi no goshushi o seny, Dajkan nisshi,

1871.7.4.; repr. Shinbun shsei Meiji hennen shi, ed. NakayamaYasumasa (1934-36; repr. To-kyo, 1982), I, 383-84. Hereafter SSMHS.

39 See Abe, From Prohibition to Toleration; Burkman, The Urakami Incidents; Ketelaar,

Of Heretics and Martyrs, 43-135; Muraoka Tsunetsugu, Studies in Shinto Thought, tr. Delmer

M. Brown and James T. Araki (1964; repr. New York, 1988), 203-8; and Notto R. Thelle,

Buddhism and Christianity in Japan: From Conflict to Dialogue, 1854-1899 (Honolulu, 1987),

10-17.


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178 Douglas Howland

rested sixty-some villagers in July 1867, and as the numbers increased to some

4000 in the course of a year, the new Meiji government inherited the problem. It

quickly became an international issue as the Meiji oligarchy tried on the one

hand to placate southern lords opposed to Christianity and western intrusions

and on the other hand to secure the support of the western powers as the oligar-

chy commenced the work of state-building. Needless to say, the western powers

would be satisfied with nothing less than a repeal of all laws prohibiting Chris-

tianity.40 But like the union of politics and religion simultaneously underway,

the ban on Christianity, in addition to its rationale of preventing such corrupting

foreign influences, was publicly justified by the need to respect the kami of the

land, illuminate the moral relations between lord and subject, and protect the

state so as to preserve loyalty and affection.41

In other words both sets of religious policy indicate that the new govern-

ment hoped to enlist the support of the Shint cult and traditional forms of

morality in their efforts to foster obedience to the emperor and the new adminis-

tration. Reactions to this religious policy came accordingly from two directions

and prominently in 1872. As one might expect, Japanese Buddhists objected to

both government interference with their practice of religion and the relegation of

Buddhism to a secondary status in relation to official Shint. The intelligentsia

associated with the Meiji Six Society objected to the governments religious

policy as a matter of principle. In these memorials and subsequent debates the

arguments returned to three main points: that politics and religion comprise two

different spheres of activity, that choice of doctrine or religious faith is a matter

for the individual to determine, and that freedom of religion was but one element

of the progress of civilization to which Japanese leaders must be committed.

Implicit in these three arguments was a set of negotiations over the boundaries

of religion in a civilized domain: what is the appropriate unit of religious faith,

the individual, community, or nation? And what is the appropriate sphere of

religious faith, private or public?

In opposing the union of doctrine and administration Shimaji Mokurai, a

charismatic leader of the Jdo Shin sect, offered the first extended differentia-

tion ofsei and ky. The former, political administration, has to do with ordering

the form of human affairs, such as departmentalizing countries, domains, and

areas; as a particularizing effort its practical goal is to urge people to study hard

and improve themselves. The latter, doctrine (or religion), has to do with divine

affairs, the ordering of the internal heart, and the connecting of all domains, a

universalizing effort inclining people to the good.42 Nishi Amane, in addressing

the Meiji Six Society, reiterated the point that politics and religion comprise two

40 Burkman, The Urakami Incidents; and Umeda, Shky h ni tsuite.41 Yasoky yokuatsu no h saku, Kybush nisshi (1872); repr. SSMHS, I, 453.42 Shimaji Mokurai, Sanj kysoku hihan kenpakusho, in Gendai Nihon shis taikei, ed.

Yoshida Kyichi (Tokyo, 1965), VII, 61-70.


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different spheres of activity; but as if to reassure the ruling oligarchy, he added

that religion cannot interfere with Japans body politic, since the latter is prop-

erly the sphere of secular law and obedience thereto. Hence Nishi made specific

recommendations for the Meiji government: the Ministry of Doctrine should

have no control over religion other than to prevent disturbances, should take no

notice of what is in peoples hearts (since rulers are not gods) and should estab-

lish prohibitions on arguments between sects. Controlling religion, in other words,

should be limited to licensing shrines and temples and restricting outdoor ser-

vices and it should not intervene in peoples choice of religion or ecclesiastic

ranking.43 In similar responses both Kat Hiroyuki and Nakamura Keiu added

warnings that historical cases like that of the Reformation in Europe demon-

strate that the union of politics and religion is a bad policy, since it oppresses

human knowledge and brings disorder to the world. Religious worship and free-

dom of conscience concern the individual, who believes what is in his heart,

while the governments appropriate sphere of action is external, to use law to

protect morality and duty and to look after public benefit and collective advan-

tage. In that regard, Kat pointed out, the government has the right to prohibit

religious practices that harm public order, like polygamy among the Mormons

or suicide among Indian widows. But one should follow the example of the

United States Constitution and those of the individual states, which typically

prohibit laws interfering with religious liberty.44

Religion, in other words, had its properly personal and internalized domain

of action that, whether directly or indirectly, contributed to progress and civili-

zation. Religious freedom, then, was both acceptable and necessary as an indi-

vidual choice and internal practice. But what if the government wanted to create

a national religion? Was it, as a matter of principle, forbidden to do so?

On the one hand this intelligentsia agreed that religious liberty was one of

the fundamental freedoms of man. A frequent explanation for this position, aside

from the perfunctory justification that it was a mark of civilized government,

was that because human nature is such that some people are good and some bad,

belief cannot be forced on everyone with uniform results. What is good and true

to one will not necessarily appear so to another.45 The same could be said of the

43 Nishi Amane, Kymon ron, parts 1 and 2, Meiroku zasshi, 4 (n.d.), 5b-8b, and 5

(n.d.), 3b-6a. The English translation by William Braisted is not always reliable for my pur-

poses, but see hisMeiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1976).44 Kat Hiroyuki, Beikoku seiky, parts 2 and 3,Meiroku zasshi, 6 (n.d.), 3b-6a, and 13

(1874),1-4a; Nakamura Keiu, Seigaku ippanjni g no zoku, Meiroku zasshi, 15 (1874),2b-4b. See also Mori Arinori, Shky,Meiroku zasshi, 6 (n.d.), 6a-12b; andReligious Free-

dom in Japan: A Memorial and Draft of Charter (Washington, DC, 1872); as well as Kykai

ritsurei, an unpublished report prepared by the Translation Bureau of the Dajkan in 1874,

repr.Meiji seifu honyaku sk ruisan (Tokyo, 1987), XII, 327-81.45 Shimaji, Sanj kysoku hihan kenpakusho, 65f; Nishi Amane, Kymon ron, parts 1

and 2,Meiroku zasshi, 4 (n.d.), 5b-7b and 5 (n.d.), 3b-6a; and Kat Hiroyuki, Beikoku seiky,

part 1, Meiroku zasshi, 5 (n.d.), 10b-13.


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180 Douglas Howland

states preferences. As the compilers of a survey of Religious Laws under-

taken by the Translation Bureau of the Dajkan (Supreme Executive Council)

concluded, countries too have their preferred religions and teachings about ones

duty to God, all of which may differ. Therefore, the best policy was that of the

U.S., which did not attempt to produce correct personal behavior in religion.46

On the other hand acknowledging an individuals religious freedom did not

preclude the governments right to establish a national religion. At best the de-

bate in 1874 concluded in a draw, for the two sides took the debate about reli-

gious freedom into the matter of the governments duty to protect public peace

and morality. In libertarian fashion Nakamura argued against any government

involvement in religionand even, as some of his fellows had suggested, to

encourage public morality. In an essay determined to allay concerns over a con-

flict of interest between Christianity and Japanese sovereignty Nakamura ob-

served that the English pray daily for the prosperity of the Queen, and because

the people share in the responsibility of national administration, the joint rights

of sovereign and people encourage the ruler to cherish the people and the people

to appreciate the law. To assume that the people are stupid and must be ordered

from above is to encourage the people to think of rebellion. Rather, Nakamura

cautioned, religion is food for the spirit and must be left to peoples discretion.47

Mori Arinori, playing devils advocate for the opposing view, enlisted Emeric

Vattell and Robert Phillimore on international law to relate the issue of a na-

tional religion to that of religious liberty directly. The crux of Moris argument

depends on differentiating the two fundamental forms of religion: religion in the

heart of the individual and religion expressed externally in a publicly estab-

lished form. According to Vattell, the individuals right to freedom of religion

pertains only to resisting official orders to worship a particular religion; one

cannot be forced to believe what one does not approve. At the same time, how-

ever, one does not have the right to harm social interaction by doing as one likes

in public. Hence, when all the people worship one deity or honor one religion,

the government can rightly support such a national religion. In the absence of

such unanimity the ruler nonetheless has both a duty to plan for the peoples

well-being and a right to select a national religion, according to what he person-

ally finds most true and good. But he does not have the right to order or oppress

the people. In light of Vattell, in other words, Moris version of national reli-

gion is at best a description of majority habits and not a prescription for na-

tional behavior.48

46 Kykai ritsurei, 328-29.47 Nakamura Keiu, Seiky mu mujun no hei, in Keiu bunsh, 13, 16-17.48 Mori, Shky, 6a-12b.


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The point to be drawn from this discussion of the proper spheres of religion

and government is that as Meiji intellectuals began to determine the appropriate

activities of government and the respective duties proper to individuals and gov-

ernment, they differentiated a domain of personal freedom as a private, interior

space from the public domain of law and order. That is, they absolutized the

individuals personal right to faith but invoked the governments duty to main-

tain public order as a way to justify its interference with a groups collective

right to public worship. As we have seen, Fukuzawa and Nakamuras liberal

interpretation of freedom minimized government but restrained the individual

through his duties to others. Ultimately, however, the earlier tradition of civil

liberty, represented by the Dutch-based texts on law, proved most compelling for

Japanese considerations of liberty: when individual discretion lapsed and per-

sonal behavior threatened public well-being, law was the appropriate measure

for restraining individuals.

This general consensus arrived at in the debate on religious liberty had im-

mediate consequences for the debates over the liberty of the press (1873-75) and

the peoples right to criticize the governmentwhat would become known as

the freedom and peoples rights movement. For the distinction between an

absolute right to freedom of conscience or faith, defined as internal, and the

external manifestation of that faith as a qualified right to freedom of religion

meant that in the debate over publicizing opinions, which is necessarily a public

activity, individual liberty is largely meaningless when confined to the internal

domain of thought or conscience. What united the Meiji leadership and intellec-

tuals in the debate over religion was the general commitment to both the goal of

constitutional government and the governments duty to maintain peace. The

liberal valorization of the individuals personal freedom proved to be the easily

dispensable aspect of a theory of liberty in 1870s Japan. It was a fine line be-

tween not oppressing the people in matters of religion, by forcing them to be-

lieve, and oppressing the people in public discussion, by restricting the expres-

sion of their opinions. But in the interests of promoting law and public order and

the general progress of civilization, state leadership was incomparably more

useful than individual liberty.

DePaul University.

translating liberty in 19th century japan

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