ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Tokugawa-Meiji transition period in the Japanese archipelago. It discusses the question of the perceived poor prospects for the transplantation of a "parliament" onto Japanese soil. The Japanese system itself, on which the new parliament was premised, hovered between a centralized unitary state and an extremely decentralized federal state (at the time, the controversy was conceptualized by means of the Confucian terms hōken 封建 and gunken 郡県). This polarization of the image of the existing Japanese system as the basis of the new parliament naturally produced a polarization of the image of the congress as well, namely between the decentralized “Montesquieu Model” and the centralized “Bagehot Model.” I want to show that the story of modern Japanese parliamentarism was never a monolithic success story, but rather a drama of conflicts that was open to different possibilities.
