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AN A ROBUST PUBLIC SPHERE coexist with an authoritarian state? The question cuts to the bone of Japanese politics before 1945. Pushed hard, most historians of Japan would answer (if guardedly) "no." My own answer is "yes," on the condition that we detach the public sphere from the telos of democracy.
The authoritarianism of Japanese regimes before the Allied Occupation is a simple matter of fact. Throughout the early modern period, hereditary martial elites monopolized the coercive powers of governance. During the better part of the modern period sovereignty resided in the monarch, who was advised by appointive, supraparliamentary organs of rule. Independent of popular control, pre-occupation regimes remained unfettered, too, by popular rights. Neither in law nor in practice did unconditional freedoms of speech, assembly, or belief protect the social voice. Censorship and surveillance attended all social representations.
The break came by fiat. The Allied-drafted constitution of 1946 declared the "Japanese people" both sovereign and possessed of "eternal and inviolate" human rights. No indigenous democratic insurgency before World War II had anticipated the change. The liberal vanguard had embraced the ballot but not any consequent surrender of imperial authority, the dignity of the subject but not any consequent entitlement of the citizen.
How, then, are we to understand the relationship between state and society in Japan before the break? Do we find a "public sphere" of nonofficial opinion and voluntary action that was brought to bear, as a legitimate extension of an autonomous society, on state power?
Some historians deny altogether the existence of a Japanese public sphere before the occupation. They emphasize the docility of a public habituated to obedience or (what is much the same thing) the lumpishness of a public that an activist state had to prod into purpose. Softer versions echo in claims that state and society tend to merge in Japan: the state absorbed a society lacking self-consciousness and the capacity for autonomous action.1
But most scholars find such claims untenable. They are vexed by state-society relations precisely because the evidence for a vigorous public life is strong. Early modernity saw routine political agitation among peasants and townspeople, heterodox philosophy and social dissent in burgeoning academies, and a critique of normative culture throughout the theater and literary circles. Modernity...