Alternative Understandings of Power in Meiji Japan

Unlike building railroads, writing treaties and conducting diplomacy was by no means a new practice in Meiji Japan (1868–1912). Performing these transactions in the terms of international law, however, required new techniques to control the discourse. The scholars and state aggrandizers who translated international law into Japanese at the time did not cause Japan to become the imperialist nation it did. Their fluent use of this discourse, however, legitimated Japan's imperialist claims within Japan and abroad. Although international terms empowered the powerful, the potential meaning of many of the terms inspired those trying to resist domination. For the architects of the Japanese empire, however, controlling Japanese sovereignty meant controlling the legal terms of governance wherever Japan ruled. The permitted discourse of legitimate Japan circumscribed expression throughout the geographical boundaries to which the new regime aspired. Techniques of control included obvious means such as banning books, but on a deeper level it meant negating definitions that challenged how Japan constituted its sovereignty within Japan and abroad. Following Pierre Bourdieu's discussion of the “metaphor of censorship,” I will demonstrate how the few people who challenged the discursive range that the state determined to use contested what most of society—at home and abroad—simply presumed to be a normatively defined legal terminology. Japan did not officially annex Korea until 1910, but it vied most doggedly there with other nations throughout the late nineteenth century over strategic privileges, mining and railroad rights, and souls to proselytize. For these reasons, Japanese officials realized the need to make Japan's Korea policies make international sense more acutely at the time than the country's other colonial schemes in order to engage in that competition with the Europeans and Americans. Within Japan's expanding empire the annexation of Korea most significantly established the perceived legitimacy of Japan as a modern imperial nation. Dissenting voices from mainland Japan as well as colonized Korea, however, tried to subvert how the new international terms were understood and used, and my essay will consider two examples. In the 1870s, Tarui Tōkichi, a poor and unsuccessful politician from Nara, envisioned a new nation he called “Great East” (Daitō) by blending Japan and Korea together. The Meiji government censored Tarui's plan until it effected its own version of “Daito” whereupon it celebrated Tarui and his book for its foresight. In 1908, a Korean high court justice named Heo Wi demanded that the world recognize his anti-Japanese rebellion (the Uibyeong) as a legitimate war according to international law. The international arena ignored his appeal, and he was tortured to death in a Japanese prison in Seoul. Alternate definitions of international terms were deemed inadmissible or illegal vis-à-vis the state's encoded limits for them, erasing the proposed meanings and often the people themselves from the record of legitimate Japan.