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Rebellion and democracy : a study of commoners in the popular rights movement of the early Meiji period

University of British Columbia

The thesis is concerned with three so-called "incidents of intense violence" (gekka jiken) that occurred between late 1882 and late 1884: the Fukushima, Kabasan, and Chichibu incidents. All three revolts occurred simultaneous to, and were connected with, the rise and fall of the "freedom and popular rights movement" (jiyu minken undo), especially with its principal institutional expression, the Jiyuto or "Liberal Party." One of the most important of the connections between the revolts and the Jiyuto is that of their overlapping leadership. For the most part, local Jiyuto leaders served as the leaders of these three revolts. Due to this fact, and the other equally important one of the critical extent to which the local Jiyuto leaders embraced the ideological principles of the national Jiyuto—as opposed to the pragmatic, perhaps cynical, approach toward these principles taken by the national leadership—the "natural right" basis of the Liberal's ideology and its corresponding endorsement of the "right of revolution" filtered down to the farmers, hunters, day-labourers and others who participated in these incidents. Notions of "natural right" were used as guiding principles to govern the aims of their revolutionary organisations and as explanations to justify their attempts to overthrow the government. Popular songs, poems, the courtroom testimony of those participants arrested, the content of their revolutionary manifestos, their statements of aims as presented in their organisational charters, the content of lectures given in peasant villages, by local Jiyuto organisers, and the like attest to the beginnings of a strong liberal-democratic undercurrent existing in the early 1880's among Japan's common people (heimin). These findings call into question the conclusions regarding the early failure of democracy in Japan reached by such noted Western scholars as E. H. Norman, Robert Scalapino, and Nobutaka Ike. This is due partly to the fact that each of these scholars analysed Japan's politics of this period almost exclusively at the level of national, elite figures and thereby ignored the impact that the popular rights movement had upon local politics and rural folk. By neglecting local politics, the above-mentioned scholars prematurely drew the conclusion that Japan's common people acted as a collective Atlas who patiently bore the burdens of modernisation upon their peasant backs in obedient silence.

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2010-02-19

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/20538

Political Science

University of British Columbia

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