Japan

The Meiji State, established in 1868, was the first modern state in Japan’s history. The Emperor had absolute political, administrative, legislative, judicial and spiritual authority under the Meiji Constitution. This pre-war ideology of a divine and inviolable sovereign was totally discredited by the political, economic and human disaster of the Second World War. Japan was under the military government of the Allied Nations, effectively the USA, during that period and a condition of the termination of the Allied occupation was that Japan become a ‘democratic nation’. This task was given to General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Allied Commander. On 13 February 1946 the General Headquarters of the Allied Command presented its draft of a new Constitution to the Japanese Government; it was adopted in November 1946, and became elective on 3 May 1947. The new Constitution appeared to have established the conditions of a democratic society by placing sovereign power in the hands of the people and by enunciating in detail the imperatives of a genuinely democratic society. A number of democratic institutions were created in addition to the establishment of fundamental principles of a national electoral system: a representative democracy and the guarantee of universal suffrage, equality of votes and secrecy of the ballot. Japan’s democratisation as envisioned by the occupation was criticised on several grounds. The Allied powers, it was claimed, had two major goals in reforming the political system; to prevent Japan from becoming a militarist nation again and threatening world peace (Kyogoku 1983), and to strengthen Japan politically and economically against the threat of communism. It was also argued that the Constitution was imposed by foreigners with foreign ideas, which did not accord with Japanese character and tradition.