ABSTRACT
A NUMBER of able writers have dealt exhaustively with the constitutional history of modern Japan,1 so that a mere description of the growth of the present political organization would be vain repetition. All that can be attempted here with advantage is to point the contrast which Japanese methods of government present to those constitutional forms with which English-speaking readers are most familiar, and to indicate the relationship of the political system to the social organization. This is a particularly interesting field of study; for just as Japan has to some extent assimilated the externals of Western civilization to her Oriental social outlook, so she has combined in a most fascinating way ancient principles of government with modern institutional forms. A superficial glance would suggest that the country merely possesses one of those political systems which appeared in such abundance during the world-wide enthusiasm for the English Constitution in the last century, and which are now decaying under the influence of unfavourable environments. Japan possesses a House of Representatives, which will be elected henceforth on the principle of universal manhood suffrage. Her House of Peers is modelled largely on the constitution of the upper chamber of Imperial Germany. She has a Cabinet, a constitutional monarch, and a Civil Service recruited by competitive examination. She has, finally, general elections, parties, a political Press, a written Constitution, and, in fact, all the paraphernalia of the representative system. Yet if these things are common in the West to widely different types of government, it is not surprising that in the Far East they accompany a system which bears practically no resemblance to that of the country in which parliamentary government was born.
