Translating Liberty in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Douglas Howland

A concept of liberty was but one element of the Japanese engagement with western political theory after the Perry intrusion of 1853, when United States warships led by Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to negotiate a commercial treaty with the U.S. This scandal, which ultimately led to the Meiji Restoration of 1867, immediately reorganized scholarly priorities among those intellectuals interested in western knowledge and technology. Western learning under the feudal Tokugawa regime (1603-1867) was organized as Dutch studies because the Dutch were the sole European trading partner of Japan from 1641 to 1854. Dutch studies paid particular attention to European mathematics, astronomy, geography, natural history, and the Dutch language. The Perry intrusion, however, prompted the rise of western learning: language study quickly expanded to include English, French, and German; and the content of learning emphasized European law and political philosophy. But the concepts that defined this content of western thought did not translate well; they did not fit naturally with existing Japanese concepts. Hence the translation of western political theory necessitated the invention of new terminology with which to engage the new political language. Accordingly, Japanese efforts to translate western political theory must be understood as both problems of language, the creation and circulation of new concepts, as well as problems of action, and the usage of new concepts in debates about the programs and policies to be implemented in a westernizing Japan.1
Thanks to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., for supporting the research and writing of this essay, and in particular to Charles Briggs, Linn Freiwald, David Gilmartin, Akhil Gupta, Jim Hevia, Richard King, and Luise White. 1 See David Abosch, Kat Hiroyuki and the Introduction of German Political Thought: 1868-1883 (Ph.D. diss.: U of California, 1964), 63-160; Grant K. Goodman, Japan: The Dutch Experience (London, 1986); Hirakawa Sukehiro, Japans Turn to the West, in The Cambridge History of Japan, ed. Marius Jansen (Cambridge, 1989), V, 432-98; and Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830, rev. ed. (Stanford, 1969).

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Copyright 2001 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

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The scholars who figure in this essayKat Hiroyuki, Tsuda Mamichi, Nishi Amane, Kanda Takahira, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and Nakamura Keiuwere all key figures in the intellectual passage from Tokugawa to Meiji, from Dutch studies to western learning. They began their careers in the Tokugawa institute for Dutch studies; most traveled to Holland, England, or the United States during the 1860s; and after the Meiji Restoration they became intellectual and educational leaders under the new administration.2 In addition to founding private academies or filling prominent government posts, they created the first literary society, the Meiji Six Society (named after the year of its founding, the sixth year of the Emperor Meijis reign, 1873), which sponsored public debates, published these proceedings in the Meiji Six Journal, and so hoped to promote enlightenment among the Japanese people. In addition to introducing public debate to Japan, this transitional intelligentsia was involved in the fundamental work of creating the language in which to raise issues of constitutional form or personal freedoms. In their translations of western texts and original texts about western law and political philosophy they created the neologisms to translate western concepts and participated in the standardization of terminology that made western knowledge coherent. The two concepts discussed in this essay, which were among the first to figure prominently in intellectual debates of the early 1870s, were liberty and religion, the pairing of which in the debate over freedom of religion from 1872 to 1874 was crucial in defining a Japanese conception of liberty. Although religious liberty arose in western Europe as a result of the conflict between church and state authorities, the issue in Japan was a direct challenge to the new central governments attempt to decree a national Shint doctrine in 1868. As the sole case of unanimous support for personal liberty among the transitional intelligentsia, the debate over freedom of religion determined key distinctions between private and public behavior that defined the Japanese conception of liberty for the duration of Japans imperial constitution (to 1945). As a right of individuals, liberty resided in the exclusively private domain of thought, conscience, and religious faith. As a public matter the peoples liberty necessarily gave way to government maintenance of public order. In part this essay responds to the work of Japanese philologists who study the translation and standardization of modern Japanese vocabulary. Much of this work is based on dictionaries; a word is said to have become standard as it appears in greater numbers of Japanese-Chinese, Japanese-English, and other bilingual dictionaries. But this research is limited by its assumption that dictionaries reflect language usage among a language community, which is not neces-

See W. G. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travellers in America and Europe (New Haven, 1995); and G. B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures (New York, 1950).

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sarily the case, particularly as words are newly coined and translated.3 Bilingual dictionaries provide not widely accepted or standard Japanese translations for European words but instead, like other texts, merely examples of word usage. For example, Hori Tatsunosukes early English-Japanese dictionary includes, as a translation for freedom, the interpretation to not pay land rent and the like (jishigin nado wo dasazu).4 In a history of dictionary translations of freedom and liberty in Japanese, this idiosyncratic and unique translation is not pertinent; hence, to proceed with a history of standardization in this fashion is to misunderstand the tentative nature of initial efforts at Japanese translations of English concepts. In this regard Japanese philology suffers from the same combination of idealism and inattention to concrete historical processes that arguably marred Arthur Lovejoys original project of a history of ideas, a critique to which John Dunn, Quentin Skinner, and many others have contributed in recent decades.5 In a manner analagous to developments in European intellectual history, the work of Japanese scholars like philologist Hida Yoshifumi and political historian Ishida Takeshi insists that the history of the introduction of new concepts into Japanese account for both the range of translation words in translated and original texts as well as the usage of such neologisms in the popular press and public debate.6 At the same time this essay responds to a dominant approach to Japanese intellectual history, the biographical treatment of individuals. Although it can be useful for investigating political development, much previous work has begun by identifying individuals as liberal or nationalist or conservative, a stereotyping that has tended to minimize our understanding of new concepts in Meiji Japan.7 For to treat concepts as effects of individuals is to misread a simple Euro-American scheme in Japanese political positions and, worse, to overlook political discussions circulating outside of individuals in the print media and government documents. Meiji political debate reveals that individual positions
3 See, for example, Morioka Kenji, [Kaitei] Kindaigo no seiritsugoi hen, rev. ed. (Tokyo, 1991). 4 Hori Tatsnoskay [Tatsunosuke], A Pocket Dictionary of the English and Japanese Language / Ei-Wa taiyaku shchin jisho (Edo, 1862), 315. 5 John Dunn, The Identity of the History of Ideas, Philosophy, 43 (1968), 85-104; Reinhard Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, 1985), 73-91; and Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, History and Theory, 8 (1969), 3-53; see also William J. Bouwsma, Intellectual History in the 1980s, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1981), 279-291; and Donald R. Kelley, Horizons of Intellectual History: Retrospect, Circumspect, Prospect, JHI, 49 (1987), 143-69. 6 S g Masaaki and Hida Yoshifumi, Meiji no kotoba jiten (Tokyo, 1986); Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no seiji to kotoba (Tokyo, 1989), I. 7 Albert M. Craig, Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Philosophical Foundations of Meiji Nationalism, in Political Development in Modern Japan, ed. Robert E. Ward (Princeton, 1968), 99148; Mikiso Hane, Nationalism and the Decline of Liberalism in Meiji Japan, Studies on Asia, 4 (1963), 69-80.

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described as liberal or conservative had much in common; the same intelligentsia who supported religious freedom in 1874 accepted the governments restrictions on freedom of the press in 1875. Take the issue of religious freedom as an example of how the history of concepts can be distorted by an exercise in biography. In what is still a major reappraisal of the issues Thomas W. Burkman engages the problem of specifying causal factors in Japans decision to lift the ban on Christianity in 1873, arguing that contrary to Otis Carys 1909 thesis that foreign diplomatic pressure forced the Japanese to relent, a number of domestic changes of heart took place, which he loosely relates to the notion of domestic liberalism. Liberal intellectuals (including Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nakamura Keiu), liberal Buddhists, and the softening of government attitudes all contribute to this toleration of religious freedom.8 But if the oligarch Kido Takayoshi is any indication of softening government attitudes, his diary reveals that the ruling oligarchy was attending much larger problems in 1872 and 1873: allowing Japanese Christians the freedom to practice their religion was a minor concession in the face of projects like restructuring the domains into a modern, centralized system of prefectures. To be sure, as Burkman argues, government officials were exposed to reasonable intellectuals who offered learned arguments for religious toleration. In Kidos case a new friendship with Niijima J (who would later found the oldest Christian university in Japan, Dshisha University) reassured him that not all Christians were irrational fanatics, and his friendly association with Buddhist leader Shimaji Mokurai, who wrote a significant memorial on the separation of church and state in 1872, reinforced his deliberately centrist stance. But the problem of repressing Japanese Christians, inherited from the Tokugawa regime and raised to crisis proportions by mass arrests of Christians in the late 1860s, ceased to concern Kido after 1868.9 Political expediency, which Burkman acknowledges as the primary cause of change, had rendered such repression unneccessary and diplomatically awkward. What I take issue with here is his characterization of religious toleration as the work of Japanese liberals. Rather than look to individual biographies as units of analysis, I examine the concept of liberty as it was introduced in translation and used and standardized in political debate during the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
8 Thomas W. Burkman, The Urakami Incidents and the Struggle for Religious Toleration in Early Meiji Japan, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 1 (1974), 143-216; also Otis Cary, A History of Christianity in Japan (1909; repr. Rutland, Vt., 1976), I, 302-26, II, 80-84; Inada Masatsugu, Meiji kenp seiritsu shi (Tokyo, 1960-62), I, 174-80; Abe Yoshiya, From Prohibition to Toleration: Japanese Government Views Regarding Christianity, 1854-73, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 5 (1978), 107-38; and Japanese Traditions of Christianity: Being Some Old Translations from the Japanese, with British Consular Reports of the Persecutions of 1868-1872, ed. Montague Paske-Smith (Kobe, 1930). 9 Kido Takayoshi, The Diary of Kido Takayoshi, tr. Sidney Devere Brown and Akiko Hirota (Tokyo, 1983-86), I, 16-27 passim, 53, 147-48, II, 140-45 passim, 246-47.

Translating Liberty in Nineteenth-Century Japan Liberty and European Political Theory

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Liberty is by no means a necessary element of constitutional theory. As Kat Hiroyuki demonstrated in his startling typology of political administrations in 1861, Tonarigusa or The Grass Next Door, one can describe the range of despotic, monarchical, republican, and democratic forms of government without any reference to liberty. Japanese political theory as it engaged Anglo-American and French theory after 1853 was, like its counterparts in Europe, grounded in a dialectic of sovereign and people. To account for the limitations on monarchy and the foundations of constitutionalism requires only the intervention of a second dialectic, that of privileges and law. Law limits the sovereigns privileges and transforms them into the peoples rights, thereby shifting the politys center of gravity from sovereign toward people and initiating the form of a constitutional monarchy. As described in the work of European political theorists like Thomas Hobbes and Benjamin Constant, law becomes the new sovereign, replacing the arbitrary will of the monarch and protecting the peoples rights, and all become subjects of the law. An analysis of the Japanese situation in the nineteenth century must be guided at the outset by two theoretical precautions. First, we must retreat from our contemporary preference for negative freedom, that sphere of non-interference surrounding the individual and his political rights, in order to appreciate positive freedom, that political education of man in active self-rule, pursued through the collective enactment of lawdescribed by Constant as ancient liberty and by seventeenth-century English republicans as civil liberty.10 Mainly because of the alleged excesses of such positive freedom perceived in the French Revolution, the Anglo-American liberal tradition in the century and a half since the publication of John Stuart Mills On Liberty has preferred negative freedom. One consequence is that Mill, Herbert Spencer, and other liberal defenders of negative freedom have jealously guarded the positive freedom of participation as a privilege, not a right, which the ruling class in its tutelary capacity judiciously grants to deserving compatriots. A second theoretical precaution to bear in mind is the difference between human liberty and the negative liberty of civil rights. As Blandine Kriegel has pointed out in her provocative study of royal jurisprudence in early modern Europe, the dominance of liberal arguments about civil rights since the nineteenth century has tended to obscure the older tradition of civil or human liberty. Defended by Hobbes, Jean Bodin, and other contemporaries in England and France, human liberty encompasses that personal security, personal liberty, and
10 Benjamin Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns, in Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge, 1988), 307-38; also J. G. A. Pocock, Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought, Political Theory, 9 (1981), 353-68; and Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998).

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personal property upheld by the sovereign state through the rule of law. In opposition to the feudal tyranny of force the sovereign state requires a division of powers in order to pursue justice, particularly the goals of peace and personal security.11 If this earlier tradition, which stressed the rule of law to safeguard people from despotic lords, is now perceived as conservative and the later tradition, which stressed civil rights to safeguard individuals from tyranny, is now a liberal position, we must remember that both were reactions to monarchical despotism in Europe; and for that reason both appealed to Japanese intellectuals when they were introduced to Japan in the mid-nineteenth century as justifications for constitutional government. In fact the development of liberty in Japan corresponds in great measure to that of liberty and the related liberal in English. While the earliest use of the term was liberal arts, the mark of a free man and a generous mind (c. 1375), liberty soon followed in the context of permission or privilege, as in liberties of the subject, which referred to those rights granted within an unquestionable subjection to a particular sovereignty. The other word for such a formal right was license, and in tandem with the negative form, licentious, the negative sense of liberty as unrestrained developed in the sixteenth century, as we read in John Knoxs First Blast, beheaded for the libertie of his tonge. The strong political sense of liberty as freedom dates from the fifteenth century, and like the development of the Latin term libertas in the free cities of medieval Italy, liberty proclaimed freedom from feudal constraints and celebrated self-rule. In England liberty became attached to the political position of liberal as being open-minded or reforming in the late eighteenth century. But the persistent negative sense of liberal as improper or unorthodox allowed defenders of the status quo to castigate their rivals as liberal, and therefore to question their beliefs as foreign or unorthodox. Both liberal and liberty, and free and freedom, have oscillated between these positive and negative connotations from the fifteenth century on.12 Japanese intellectuals encountered this centuries-long history of the English concept in the two decades spanning 1855 and 1875. Generally, however, the majority of Japanese leaders remained unconvinced that liberty was the beneficent force praised by English theorists like J. S. Mill. They noted its dynamism but remained suspicious that it undermined the virtues more appropriate

11 Blandine Kriegel, The State and the Rule of Law, tr. Marc A. LePain and Jeffrey C. Cohen (Princeton, 1995), 20-24, 33-37; Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago, 1995), 100-133; and Franz Neumann, The Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society, in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State, ed. Herbert Marcuse (Glencoe, Ill., 1957), 22-68. 12 See The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd. ed., J. A .Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford, 1989), VI: 157-65; VIII: 881-87; and Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York, 1976), 148-50.

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to the peopleduty to others and loyalty to ones superiors, particularly the government administration that rightly protected public peace. In a surprising set of reversals in 1874 and 1875, just at the moment that liberty entered the public sphere of the newspaper debate over freedom of the press, Meiji intellectuals retracted the liberal interpretation of personal liberty in favor of the earlier tradition of civil (human) liberty, introduced in the 1860s. The states claim to safeguarding the well-being of the people under the rule of law outweighed the liberal claim to individual freedom from state interference. Autonomy and Personal Discretion Japanese philologists agree that by 1870 Japanese lexicographers translated the English word liberty and its close relationsFrench libert, Dutch vrijheid, German Freiheit, and English freedomwith four main expressions. All four of these were Chinese-character expressions available to educated Japanese of the time: jishu, self-mastery, or acting on ones own authority; jiy, following ones intentions, without restrictions; jizai, also meaning following ones intentions, unrestrictedly, but with a nuance not so much directional (y) as stative (zai); and fuki, a metaphor drawing on the image of a horse without reins, implying unfettered or free. In addition, these terms were used in two emphatic combinations: jishujiy, self-determining and free; and jiyjizai, utterly free to do whatever one likes. However, in the key legal and political texts of the 1860s, we rarely find either the metaphor fuki or jiy, the future standard translation word. Instead, we find both jishu and jizai at work, but only the latter expression can be confidently called a translation for liberty. These key texts, composed during the 1860s, were all based on Dutch sources; they survey basic political systems discussed in European political theory and employed in Europe and North America at the time. Kat Hiroyukis The Grass Next Door and An Outline of Constitutional Political Forms were based on unspecified texts available at the Dutch studies institute. Tsuda Mamichis On State Law of the West and Nishi Amanes Encyclopedia were based on their notes of Dutch political economist Simon Visserings lectures, which they attended in Leiden during 1863-65. Nishis summary of Visserings lectures on natural law also provided the basis for their colleague Kanda Takahiras An Outline of Natural Law.13 Kat, for example, discusses liberty toward the end of An Outline of Constitutional Political Forms, where he enumerates the private rights of the people in a constitutional system. These include, (1) a right to life; (2) a right to bodily
See Kanda Takahira, Seih ryaku (Tokyo, 1871); repr. Meiji bunka zensh (Tokyo, 1957), XIII (Hritsu hen), 4. On Simon Vissering, see Irene Hasenberg Butter, Academic Economics in Holland, 1800-1870 (The Hague, 1969).
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autonomy; (3) a right to liberty of action; (4) a right to assemble and form associations; (5) a right to liberty of thought, speech, and writing; and (6) a right to liberty of faith. Seventh is a right to the identicality of the people, which, Kat explains, granted the identicality (equality) of the laws that protect the rights of all people, one has a right to absolute impartiality regardless of family or official position. Eighth is the right of each person to freely hold property.14 Rights 3, 4, 5, and 6 clearly interpret what to us are fundamental civil liberties; we can be confident that Kats and Tsudas term, jizai, is indeed their translation word for liberty. But if we compare Kats list to that of Tsuda, there are two apparent tensions in such a rendition of liberties. First, as Tsuda makes clear with his different phrasing of the liberty of faith, one need not couch liberty in the abstract language of a right to liberty. Where Kat specifies a right to liberty of faith, and goes on to explain the priority of ones own discretion in matters of faith, Tsuda makes the point more directly: one has a right to ones own discretion in believing a sectarian doctrine or engaging in sectarian ceremony. 15 Liberty is implicit in the personal discretion of believing. This difference between Kat and Tsuda is that between abstracting liberty as a specific right and describing liberty as a general mode of action, relying on ones discretion. Both conceptions are present, and neither Kat nor Tsuda unequivocally favors one over the other. The difference between the two approaches to liberty lies in an implied moral agent at work in the notion of discretion. Where the abstract right to liberty seems to set no subjective conditions, discreet action depends on the moral responsibility of the agent. This contrast is even more pronounced in a second tension in these enumerations of rights raised by the expression jishu, self-mastery, self-determination, or autonomy, which figures in both Kat s and Tsudas right to bodily autonomy (one should not be arbitrarily bound or thrown into jail). Although Kat and Tsuda are referring to what in English is usually called a right to personal liberty and although some texts, notably dictionaries, use jishu as a translation word for liberty, I do not believe that jishu means liberty here. Rather, given Tsudas extensive deployment of jishu in his historical discussion of self-governing peoples and non-self-governing peoples, it is clear that self-governing refers to the status of a person as independent of external political forcein a word, autonomous. Or as Kanda employs the term, our rights in making contracts are all based on our right to self-determination.16 These texts, in other words, propose two related conceptions of liberty: on the one hand the autonomy of the self (jishu), and on the other hand following
14 Kat Hiroyuki, Rikken seitai ryaku, in Nishi Amane / Kat Hiroyuki, ed. Uete Michiari (Tokyo, 1984), 342-43; cf. Tsuda Mamichi, Taisei kokuh ron (Edo, 1868; repr. Tokyo, 1875), 91-100. 15 Tsuda, Taisei kokuh ron, 95-96. 16 Kanda, Seih ryaku, 12.

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ones own mind in specified activities (jizai). This difference is not yet articulated in terms of what the Anglo-American tradition has described as two forms of liberty: positive liberty, or self-realization enacted politically through selfgovernment, and negative liberty, or freedom from external interference.17 Rather, the issue seems to be one simpler and more fundamental to all democratic or republican societies, now and in the past, namely, the degree of individual freedom acceptable to others in the community. The fact that the two expressions, autonomy and liberty, are related in the common character signifying self-reflexivity, ji, underlines the Japanese concern with the role of the self or person in European constitutional thought. The autonomous self is free to use his discretion, as is every other such autonomous self. Clearly, this Japanese use of ji is not a simple correspondence to the Latin reference in our word liberty, liber, the free man, who, in distinction to the slaves, self-governs with other free men. Rather, Kat and Tsuda implicitly question the autonomy of the individual within the polity. To what degree can and should an individual entrust his own discretion as he pursues his interests within the constitutional state? Most often, Kat concludes that the restrictions of supreme law are a reasonable external limitation upon the activities of individuals. As he explains in a commentary on the fifth right, arbitrary behavior cannot be tolerated: The liberty of thought cannot be prohibited in the manner of ancient and infamous tyranny. But it is usual in a despotism or monarchy to prohibit the act of freely writing, printing, or speaking what is thought. Only the two forms of constitutional systems [democratic republics and constitutional monarchies] permit such liberty.... But this right to liberty does not permit arbitrary writing. If writing gravely corrupts the heart or damages peaceful rule, it is certainly appropriate that the writer receive his due punishment. Hence the law entrusts the responsibility for justification to the writer.18 This is very much in the spirit of John Lockes comment in his Second Treatise on Government that Where there is no law, there is no freedom; freedom is not the liberty to do what one wants, but to order ones person, actions, and property within the limits of the law.19 In Kats formulation of private rights and liberty, when tyranny and monarchy no longer provide external limits on the autonomy of the individual, law must fill the breach; public peace and morality justify legal restrictions upon the liberties. The language of moral agency, implicit in words like arbitrary and responsibility, assumes a prevailing counter17 Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), 118-72; and Holmes, Passions and Constraint, 13-41. 18 Kat, Rikken seitai ryaku, 342. 19 John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslette (New York, 1963), 348.

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point to liberty. As Tsuda Mamichi put it, even in daily interactions among common people, the law demands limits and standards; two people are free to say whatever they like in conversation, but there is a clear prohibition on something like their harming a third party.20 Comparable comments appear in all of these texts. What we do not find in general use is an abstract term, liberty, standing on its own as a motive for action or principle of political organization. The appearance of a principle of liberty must be credited to Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nakamura Keiu, with their turn to Anglo-American liberalism and its grounding of the general concept of liberty in the individual. Independence and Selfishness Fukuzawas Conditions in the West (1866-70) and Nakamuras The Principle of Liberty, a careful translation of John Stuart Mills On Liberty published in 1871, advanced the Japanese conception of liberty beyond the Dutch-based texts in three important ways. First, by casting historical narratives of political revolution and change in terms of liberty, they established a connection between liberty and the creation of constitutional political forms. Second, by posing these conflicts among individuals and groups in both concrete, historical terms and in the abstract, they domesticated the passage from liberties, those particular principles of action enumerated by Kat and colleagues, to liberty, a general, abstract principle. Third, by struggling to overcome others misconceptions about liberty, they both publicized and contributed to the persistence of a fundamental conflict within the Japanese conception of libertythat between independent action and selfishness. Ultimately, in order to address this third issue, both Fukuzawa and Nakamura imposed moral limitations upon liberty in order to keep individuals from giving themselves over to objectionably selfish behavior. In the first volume of Conditions in the West Fukuzawa identifies all civilized states in Europe as constitutional monarchies. First of the attributes of these civilized administrations is jishu nini, self-determination and personal discretion, an expression that he equates with both liberty and jiy. Because Nakamura Keiu later quoted this discussion of liberty as the primary precedent for his use of jiy in translating Mill, I retranslate it in full: When the countrys traditions are relaxed and people no longer restricted, each can do what pleases himself. Those who take pleasure in official life can become officials; those who enjoy farming become farmers. Not the least discrimination is established among the [four classes of] officials, farmers, artisans, and merchants. Of course, there is no dis20

Tsuda, Taisei kokuh ron, 39.

Translating Liberty in Nineteenth-Century Japan cussion of lineage, no slighting of persons according to their status at court; among the high and low, the noble and mean, each obtains what is due him, without any interference into the liberty of others, which is the aim of extending the talent granted by Heaven. Nonetheless, the difference between noble and mean is appropriate in the arena of public service, where positions at court alone are revered. Except for this, there are no differences among the four classes. Literacy, reasoned discussion, and ambitious effort make the superior man, who is respected; while illiteracy makes the small man, who performs manual labor. Note: the expressions jishu nini and jiy do not mean selfishness, dissoluteness, or contempt for the countrys traditions. In general, the people of the land interact without anxiety or formality, with the aim of expanding each ones personal ability as each sees fit. In English, this is called furdomu (freedom) or riberuchi (liberty). There is still no appropriate translation word.21

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Fukuzawa thus introduces liberty as a clear alternative to the status discriminations instituted by the Tokugawa regime. He duly notes the exceptional nobility of the Imperial court, and the factdear to those of his contemporaries advocating revolutionthat western regimes value talent and reward ability. If Fukuzawa presents this somewhat quaintly in the classical Confucian language of the superior man and the small-minded laborer, his point is clear in the note: a new model of social relations is available in the west that will serve the cause of fostering ability. In addition to communicating that possibility Fukuzawa and Nakamura felt the need to safeguard this new concept, liberty, from popular misconceptions. An indirect source of confusion in the 1860s lay in the pragmatic history of the word in Chinese texts. Like Kat s and Tsudas preferred jizai, jiy was a longstanding expression in the Chinese lexicon, with an equally wide range of meanings borrowed by the Japanese and centered on following ones inclinations or having ones wayactivities that emphasized the individual at the expense of the social.22 A second, direct source of misunderstandings lay in the history of jiy as a translation word in Japan. From the mid-1500s it was used to translate expressions akin to liberty: first in Portuguese Christian texts as a translation for the Latin libertas, later in Tokugawa-period Dutch studies texts as a translation for the Dutch vrijheid, and then in Anglo-American missionary
21 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Seiy jij (1866-70), repr. Fukuzawa Yukichi zensh (Tokyo, 1958), I, 290 (hereafter SYJJ). See also Nakamura Keiu, Jiy no ri (Suruga, 1871), repr. Meiji bunka zensh (Tokyo, 1927), V (Jiy minken hen), 84 (hereafter JYNR). 22 See Kimura Ki, Bunmeikaika (Tokyo, 1954), 81-122; Ishida, Nihon no seiji to kotoba, I: 32-37; Shind Sakiko, Meiji jidai go no kenky: goi to bunsh (Tokyo, 1981), 32-56; Suzuki Sh ji, Nihon kango to chgokugo (Tokyo, 1981), 137-50; and Yanabu Akira, Honyaku to wa nani ka? (rev. ed., Tokyo, 1985), 107-14.

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histories and geographies of the 1850s, imported from China, as a Chinese translation for the English freedom and liberty. However, jiy took a peculiar turn in the early nineteenth century, when it became associated with selfish and willful as a result of a surprising translation of vrijheid on the part of the Shoguns official interpreters in Nagasaki. Whether through error or value judgement, an unnamed Nagasaki interpreter is credited with producing the memorable Dutch remark that the world situation tends toward greater selfishness every year, in which the original term, vrijheid, is rendered wagamama. The association persisted in Dutch-Japanese dictionaries and was transferred to official uses of English. Where the U.S.-Japan treaty signed by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 demands that shipwrecked sailors and American citizens be free to go where they please, the Japanese version translates this with kany, or openly, and katte ni, or willfully. The Harris Treaty of 1858 substitutes jiy for identical instances of free, thus reproducing the same association of jiy and selfish with the English word free that had earlier occurred in Japanese understandings of vrijheid.23 In the face of this potential confusion Fukuzawa and Nakamura worked to ground liberty in a positive light through a history of political reform and revolution. Both emphasize the expression fuki dokuritsu, unfettered and independent. At the start of The Principle of Liberty, for example, Nakamura explains the right to liberty as the limit placed on a masters privileges. Following Mill, he reiterates the general problem seen in the histories of Greece, Rome, and England of the peoples struggle against the rulers privilege and power of freedom and independence (fuki dokuritsu), which threatened always to turn into tyranny. In order to protect themselves the people invoked their liberty (jiy) and placed a limit on the power of the ruler through the imposition of laws. What is striking about Nakamuras initial characterization of liberty is that he equates jiy and jishu. Freedom from tyranny is the autonomy of self-rule, a state that graces the people with freedom and independence as they displace their former and despotic king.24 Liberty, in the Anglo-American tradition presented here, commands attention as a means toward establishing independent constitutional systems. Moreover, as Nakamura makes clear, because these polities are animated by individuals pursuing their own interests, the greater collective utility of the liberties is served. Following Mill, Nakamura introduces the personal liberties of judgment, occupation, friendly assembly, thought, discussion, and so on. These are all good and useful because they encourage the progressive sequence of exploratory debate, the discovery of truth, the application of knowledge, and the advancement of humankind. But Mill and Nakamura are not blind to a common consequence of constitutionalism, which is that, in the absence of a common
23 24

See Kimura, Bunmeikaika, 137-57. Nakamura, JYNR, 7-8.

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understanding of good and evil, the population may divide into larger and smaller factions. Of course, Nakamura states, people will turn to the government for direction, but at the same time they still want to guard against the unfair interference of government. Mill and Nakamura seek to persuade their readers that in this absence of moral unanimity, it is far better that everyone acknowledge a general principle of liberty than not, for liberty grants far more benefits than it harms public well-being. Where Kat and Tsuda saw liberties as structural propositions of constitutionalism, Nakamura imagines a new form of social dynamism, animating each individual for what promises to be a progressive collective whole.25 Two changes thus occur with the introduction of the liberal interpretation of liberty. First, in demonstrating its utility in multiple situations, liberty is reified as a general concept. The liberty of discussion works to advance mankind, liberty of occupation grants us the well-being of suitable work, the liberty of assembly serves us well for support in times of need, and so on. Nakamura sensibly translates Mills title as The Principle of Liberty because his central argument concerns the general applicability and utility of the abstraction. Second, liberty is grounded in the individual, acquiring a much more internalized point of reference than Kat and Tsudas principle of discretion. For example, where they treated the liberty of thought in terms of the objectified act of thinking, akin to comparable acts like speaking and writingall of which are tempered by an external standard of discretionNakamura locates liberty within the individual. Mill states that the first appropriate region of liberty is the inward domain of consciousness, and hence we must have freedom of thought.26 Where Kat and Tsuda juxtaposed a persons free actions to the laws of the domain, the people, or some collective understanding of discretion, Nakamura sees the individual agent in juxtaposition to other such individual selves, against whose propensity to combine in a tyrannous majority one must always be on guard. What is potentially disturbing about this interpretation of liberty is that its typically negative presentation, that one is free from the interference of others, never returns logically to the principles of a free polity grounded in law. As Blandine Kriegel has argued, the liberal version of liberties abandons the state protection of those human liberties that were the reason for establishing a constitutional system in the first place.27 The rights to life, home, and personal security, which Kat and Tsuda included in their enumerations of rights, no longer matter per se. Instead, we are to imagine a self-interested people whose autonomy is defined less by self-rule and more by the exclusion of external interference.
25 26

Ibid., 15-17. Ibid., 16-17. 27 Kriegel, The State and the Rule of Law, 35-36.

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This conundrum is acute in the third volume of Conditions in the West, where Fukuzawa is baffled by the French Revolution. France follows the precedents of England and the United States: the winds of freedom blow across the country in the face of tyranny, and the National Assembly proclaims independence. Although a republic is established, crudeness and violence grow, with the surprising result of freedom in name, but not at all in reality.28 The confusion generated by the reigns of Napoleon and Charles X redirects Fukuzawas narrative from liberty back to the question of rightsestablishing the rights of participatory government through law. Clearly, the fact that true liberty is in danger of being undermined by selfish or willful behavior compels Fukuzawa to add a second set of clarifications regarding liberty. He points out that liberty is a matter much more serious than granting a child who has finished his homework the permission to go outside and play; it has nothing to do with polite requests or likes and dislikes. Rather, quoting the American proclamation give me liberty or give me death, he concludes that liberty is a principle devoted to saving the people from misery, a case of not interfering with the natural rights of the inhabitants of the country: simply putto invigorate the work of mind and body, to work together without interfering, to aim for the prosperity of each person.29 For both Fukuzawa and Nakamura, the way out of this impasse follows the path taken by Kat and Tsuda: to impose external limits on liberty. For Fukuzawa the conception of duty provides a solution. Fukuzawa makes clear that freedom comes with the body, and since both are granted by Heaven, they cannot be taken away by another man or the nation. In that regard he admits that we are most free in the state of nature, a condition of barbarism to be sure, but that this freedom is the freedom to starve, the freedom to be destroyed by force which is not a true freedom at all. Hence we must remember that people are members of families and belong to nations, and these associations impose upon us natural limits to liberty, which Fukuzawa calls duty. These begin naturally: each mans effort to preserve his own person is extended to his family. From this follows the more general duties to prevent trouble for others and to obey the law. Because it forces us to consider other persons in human interaction, duty intervenes to keep the free individual from utterly selfish behavior. In fact it is duty that holds the human community together.30 By contrast, in a surprising set of additions to Mills essay Nakamura enlists Christianity as a corrective for the human propensity to err on the side of selfishness. At issue for Nakamura, much as in Fukuzawas history of France, is the difference between true and false freedom. True freedom is limited. As Nakamuras friend and spiritual counselor Edward Warren Clark states in a
28 29 30

Fukuzawa, SYJJ, 581. Ibid., 486-87. Ibid., 392-95.

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preface to The Principle of Liberty, In some, there is a certain restless spirit which brooks no restraint, either from civil code or from individual conscience, & which feigns itself free in proportion as it is independent of rightful rule. In fact this false freedom is the licentious delusion of total independence, which can only be corrected by heeding the example of the true liberator of mankind, the Messiah who came to unchain the captive, not from a temporal, but from a spiritual despotism.31 Key to this true freedom is the capacity to love. While Mills text concerns the limits of government, the problem for mankind, Nakamura adds, is to emulate Gods limitless love for man. The difference between Gods love for man and mans limited institutions, Nakamura implies, highlights the rightful limitations on mans control over other men, for liberty ultimately refers to Christian promise and responsibilityself-development to the glory of God.32 In other words both Fukuzawa and Nakamura understand that liberty grounded in the individual imparts a progressive dynamism to the community, but both recast the independence of the individual as a bounded autonomy by linking him to family and others through duty and love. Neither condones the licentious delusion of unrestricted, false freedom. Religious Liberty: Personal Faith and Collective Worship In addition to providing the momentum for standardizing jiy as the translation word for freedom and liberty, the liberal interpretation of freedom introduced by Fukuzawa and Nakamura is crucial for a second reason. It defined freedom of conscience as a right internal to the individual, out of reach of political authorities, so that it immediately became the reference for religious liberty, defined as the freedom of personal faith. Nakamura in particular is to be credited with linking this internal freedom of conscience to religious liberty. Although Nakamuras additions to Mill stressed the value of Christian belief for liberty and civilization, Mill himself judged religious belief a prominent site of social tyranny, especially because of the close relation between religion and (to him oppressive) middle-class morality; as a consequence Mill found most praiseworthy the great religious leaders assertions of freedom of conscience. Suppressing freedom of religion, like the suppression of any liberty, harms human development; and religion, like so many aspects of social life in Mills world, can only benefit from the liberty of thought and discussion, which, for the Christian, serves to forge a living belief.33 But to my knowledge no Japanese in the early Meiji period was willing to accept Mills scenario of an actively inquiring citizenry taking the lead as the minimal state observed from the sidelines; nor did anyone imagine organized
31 32 33

Nakamura, JYNR, 4. Ibid., 18-19. Ibid., 12, 18-19, 24-30.

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religions in a position to infringe on the freedom of individuals. Rather, writers in the 1870s largely accepted the role of the state in supervising religion as valid. Given the presence of Christianity in the Shimabara Uprising (defeated in 1638) and the several riotous cults affiliated with popular forms of Buddhism during the Tokugawa period, the Shoguns use of legal bans to suppress socially objectionable forms of religion was a normative precedent.34 Accordingly, discussions of religious liberty in the early Meiji period developed along the lines first suggested by Kat Hiroyukis translation of Johann Kaspar Bluntschlis Allgemeines Staatsrecht, the first installment of which appeared in 1872. On the one hand each individual had a personal right to faith; on the other hand groups had a right to worship the religion of their collective choice. Because these two rights overlapped in the space of public worship, the state too had a right to involve itself in religious matters, if only to protect public order.35 What offended a number of scholars was the states attempt to prescribe one national religion above others as suitable for all Japanese people. Debates over religious liberty were precipitated by the new Meiji governments official policy toward religion on two fronts. First, the policy of uniting politics and religion, which was decreed in April 1868 and reinforced with the subsequent promulgation of the Three Standards of Instruction in April 1872, attempted to establish a newly constructed Shint as the national doctrine of Japan and to put Buddhist sects under the domination of a Shint hierarchy. Second, the reiteration of the official Tokugawa ban on Christianity in April 1868 generated controversy by continuing the arrests and deportations of Japanese Christians from southern Japan between 1867 and 1870. Although the two series were independent developments, they provoked a common set of arguments whose outcome provisionally affirmed a principle of religious freedom. The first set of events draws us immediately into the problem of naming religion in the early Meiji period. Variously described as saisei itto (one road of ceremony and administration) or seiky itchi (union of administration and instruction), this policy of uniting politics and religion consistently points to political administration as one half of the combination, while the other half vacillates between the expression of religious practices and the content of religious teachings. For religion during the first fifteen years of Meiji was translated with multiple combinations of Chinese characters referring to Buddhist sects, terms for worship or ceremony, for faith or belief, for religious or philosophical doctrines or schools, and for religious or philosophical law or principles. Although these words covered a range of faiths and programs of instruction from

34 Umeda Yoshihiko, Sh ky h ni tsuiteEdo bakufu kara Meiji seifu e, Shint shky, 26 (1961), 37-55. 35 [J. K.Bluntschli], Kokuh hanron, tr. Kat Hiroyuki (Tokyo, 1872-76), repr. Meiji bunka zensh (Tokyo, 1971), supp. II [= XXXI] 187-201.

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Buddhist sects to Chinese philosophical schools, Christianity, and Shint, what they all share is the notion of a set of beliefs or instructions which presumably inform a code of behavior. As James Ketelaar has rightfully remarked, the key term ky shifts gradually from doctrine to religion during these early years of Meiji.36 As an official policy, uniting politics and doctrine meant that Shint priests and advocates of Japanese Nativism advised the oligarchy and the Meiji emperor to return to the model of imperial rule established by ancestral Emperor Jimmu, articulated as matsurigoto, when politics and religion were one and the same.37 Practically, this meant creating an Office of Shint within the Meiji government (replaced with the Ministry of Doctrine in 1872), on the model of Jimmus ancient administration, and indoctrinating the people with the new Shint teachings, the official goals of which were to revere the spirits (kami) of the land, to illuminate human morality, to rectify the hearts of the people, and to fulfill duty, all of which would instill service to the Imperial Court.38 Four years later, the Three Standards of Instruction reiterated similar goals. In sum, the union of politics and doctrine was an attempt by the new government to unify talk of morality, the cult of Shint, and loyalty to the Emperor as a project for mobilizing the new citizenry. What was once nameable as one, matsurigoto, had become the duality of politics and religion that had to be rejoineda bureaucratic measure that provoked talk of liberty.39 The second set of events prompting calls for religious freedom was the ban on Christianity. The reintroduction of foreigners to Japanese ports after the establishment of a treaty-port system beginning in 1858 allowed American, English, and French religious personnel to serve their countrymen in Yokohama, Nagasaki and elsewhere. Although traveling in the countryside and proselytizing among the Japanese people were forbidden, French Catholic priests in the Nagasaki area defied Japanese law, encouraging local hidden Christian groups to practice their faith publicly after a hiatus of two and a half centuries (following the Shoguns ban in 1614). The Shoguns representative in Nagasaki ar36 James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton, 1990), 125. 37 See Burkman, The Urakami Incidents, 168-70, and on matsurigoto, H. D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago, 1988), 16466; and Maruyama Masao, The Structure of Matsurigoto: the basso ostinato of Japanese Political Life, in Themes and Theories in Modern Japanese History: Essays in Memory of Richard Storry, ed. Sue Henny and Jean Pierce Lehmann (London, 1988), 27-43. 38 Jinshin no kis o ichi ni subekuseiky itchi no goshushi o seny, Dajkan nisshi, 1871.7.4.; repr. Shinbun shsei Meiji hennen shi, ed. NakayamaYasumasa (1934-36; repr. Tokyo, 1982), I, 383-84. Hereafter SSMHS. 39 See Abe, From Prohibition to Toleration; Burkman, The Urakami Incidents; Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs, 43-135; Muraoka Tsunetsugu, Studies in Shinto Thought, tr. Delmer M. Brown and James T. Araki (1964; repr. New York, 1988), 203-8; and Notto R. Thelle, Buddhism and Christianity in Japan: From Conflict to Dialogue, 1854-1899 (Honolulu, 1987), 10-17.

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rested sixty-some villagers in July 1867, and as the numbers increased to some 4000 in the course of a year, the new Meiji government inherited the problem. It quickly became an international issue as the Meiji oligarchy tried on the one hand to placate southern lords opposed to Christianity and western intrusions and on the other hand to secure the support of the western powers as the oligarchy commenced the work of state-building. Needless to say, the western powers would be satisfied with nothing less than a repeal of all laws prohibiting Christianity.40 But like the union of politics and religion simultaneously underway, the ban on Christianity, in addition to its rationale of preventing such corrupting foreign influences, was publicly justified by the need to respect the kami of the land, illuminate the moral relations between lord and subject, and protect the state so as to preserve loyalty and affection.41 In other words both sets of religious policy indicate that the new government hoped to enlist the support of the Shint cult and traditional forms of morality in their efforts to foster obedience to the emperor and the new administration. Reactions to this religious policy came accordingly from two directions and prominently in 1872. As one might expect, Japanese Buddhists objected to both government interference with their practice of religion and the relegation of Buddhism to a secondary status in relation to official Shint. The intelligentsia associated with the Meiji Six Society objected to the governments religious policy as a matter of principle. In these memorials and subsequent debates the arguments returned to three main points: that politics and religion comprise two different spheres of activity, that choice of doctrine or religious faith is a matter for the individual to determine, and that freedom of religion was but one element of the progress of civilization to which Japanese leaders must be committed. Implicit in these three arguments was a set of negotiations over the boundaries of religion in a civilized domain: what is the appropriate unit of religious faith, the individual, community, or nation? And what is the appropriate sphere of religious faith, private or public? In opposing the union of doctrine and administration Shimaji Mokurai, a charismatic leader of the Jdo Shin sect, offered the first extended differentiation of sei and ky. The former, political administration, has to do with ordering the form of human affairs, such as departmentalizing countries, domains, and areas; as a particularizing effort its practical goal is to urge people to study hard and improve themselves. The latter, doctrine (or religion), has to do with divine affairs, the ordering of the internal heart, and the connecting of all domains, a universalizing effort inclining people to the good.42 Nishi Amane, in addressing the Meiji Six Society, reiterated the point that politics and religion comprise two
Burkman, The Urakami Incidents; and Umeda, Sh ky h ni tsuite. Yasoky yokuatsu no h saku, Kybush nisshi (1872); repr. SSMHS, I, 453. 42 Shimaji Mokurai, Sanj ky soku hihan kenpakusho, in Gendai Nihon shis taikei, ed. Yoshida Kyichi (Tokyo, 1965), VII, 61-70.
40 41

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different spheres of activity; but as if to reassure the ruling oligarchy, he added that religion cannot interfere with Japans body politic, since the latter is properly the sphere of secular law and obedience thereto. Hence Nishi made specific recommendations for the Meiji government: the Ministry of Doctrine should have no control over religion other than to prevent disturbances, should take no notice of what is in peoples hearts (since rulers are not gods) and should establish prohibitions on arguments between sects. Controlling religion, in other words, should be limited to licensing shrines and temples and restricting outdoor services and it should not intervene in peoples choice of religion or ecclesiastic ranking.43 In similar responses both Kat Hiroyuki and Nakamura Keiu added warnings that historical cases like that of the Reformation in Europe demonstrate that the union of politics and religion is a bad policy, since it oppresses human knowledge and brings disorder to the world. Religious worship and freedom of conscience concern the individual, who believes what is in his heart, while the governments appropriate sphere of action is external, to use law to protect morality and duty and to look after public benefit and collective advantage. In that regard, Kat pointed out, the government has the right to prohibit religious practices that harm public order, like polygamy among the Mormons or suicide among Indian widows. But one should follow the example of the United States Constitution and those of the individual states, which typically prohibit laws interfering with religious liberty.44 Religion, in other words, had its properly personal and internalized domain of action that, whether directly or indirectly, contributed to progress and civilization. Religious freedom, then, was both acceptable and necessary as an individual choice and internal practice. But what if the government wanted to create a national religion? Was it, as a matter of principle, forbidden to do so? On the one hand this intelligentsia agreed that religious liberty was one of the fundamental freedoms of man. A frequent explanation for this position, aside from the perfunctory justification that it was a mark of civilized government, was that because human nature is such that some people are good and some bad, belief cannot be forced on everyone with uniform results. What is good and true to one will not necessarily appear so to another.45 The same could be said of the
Nishi Amane, Kymon ron, parts 1 and 2, Meiroku zasshi, 4 (n.d.), 5b-8b, and 5 (n.d.), 3b-6a. The English translation by William Braisted is not always reliable for my purposes, but see his Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1976). 44 Kat Hiroyuki, Beikoku seiky, parts 2 and 3, Meiroku zasshi, 6 (n.d.), 3b-6a, and 13 (1874),1-4a; Nakamura Keiu, Seigaku ippanj ni g no zoku, Meiroku zasshi, 15 (1874), 2b-4b. See also Mori Arinori, Shky , Meiroku zasshi, 6 (n.d.), 6a-12b; and Religious Freedom in Japan: A Memorial and Draft of Charter (Washington, DC, 1872); as well as Kykai ritsurei, an unpublished report prepared by the Translation Bureau of the Daj kan in 1874, repr. Meiji seifu honyaku sk ruisan (Tokyo, 1987), XII, 327-81. 45 Shimaji, Sanj kysoku hihan kenpakusho, 65f; Nishi Amane, Ky mon ron, parts 1 and 2, Meiroku zasshi, 4 (n.d.), 5b-7b and 5 (n.d.), 3b-6a; and Kat Hiroyuki, Beikoku seiky , part 1, Meiroku zasshi, 5 (n.d.), 10b-13.
43

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states preferences. As the compilers of a survey of Religious Laws undertaken by the Translation Bureau of the Dajkan (Supreme Executive Council) concluded, countries too have their preferred religions and teachings about ones duty to God, all of which may differ. Therefore, the best policy was that of the U.S., which did not attempt to produce correct personal behavior in religion.46 On the other hand acknowledging an individuals religious freedom did not preclude the governments right to establish a national religion. At best the debate in 1874 concluded in a draw, for the two sides took the debate about religious freedom into the matter of the governments duty to protect public peace and morality. In libertarian fashion Nakamura argued against any government involvement in religionand even, as some of his fellows had suggested, to encourage public morality. In an essay determined to allay concerns over a conflict of interest between Christianity and Japanese sovereignty Nakamura observed that the English pray daily for the prosperity of the Queen, and because the people share in the responsibility of national administration, the joint rights of sovereign and people encourage the ruler to cherish the people and the people to appreciate the law. To assume that the people are stupid and must be ordered from above is to encourage the people to think of rebellion. Rather, Nakamura cautioned, religion is food for the spirit and must be left to peoples discretion.47 Mori Arinori, playing devils advocate for the opposing view, enlisted Emeric Vattell and Robert Phillimore on international law to relate the issue of a national religion to that of religious liberty directly. The crux of Moris argument depends on differentiating the two fundamental forms of religion: religion in the heart of the individual and religion expressed externally in a publicly established form. According to Vattell, the individuals right to freedom of religion pertains only to resisting official orders to worship a particular religion; one cannot be forced to believe what one does not approve. At the same time, however, one does not have the right to harm social interaction by doing as one likes in public. Hence, when all the people worship one deity or honor one religion, the government can rightly support such a national religion. In the absence of such unanimity the ruler nonetheless has both a duty to plan for the peoples well-being and a right to select a national religion, according to what he personally finds most true and good. But he does not have the right to order or oppress the people. In light of Vattell, in other words, Moris version of national religion is at best a description of majority habits and not a prescription for national behavior.48

Ky kai ritsurei, 328-29. Nakamura Keiu, Seiky mu mujun no hei, in Keiu bunsh, 13, 16-17. 48 Mori, Sh ky, 6a-12b.
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The point to be drawn from this discussion of the proper spheres of religion and government is that as Meiji intellectuals began to determine the appropriate activities of government and the respective duties proper to individuals and government, they differentiated a domain of personal freedom as a private, interior space from the public domain of law and order. That is, they absolutized the individuals personal right to faith but invoked the governments duty to maintain public order as a way to justify its interference with a groups collective right to public worship. As we have seen, Fukuzawa and Nakamuras liberal interpretation of freedom minimized government but restrained the individual through his duties to others. Ultimately, however, the earlier tradition of civil liberty, represented by the Dutch-based texts on law, proved most compelling for Japanese considerations of liberty: when individual discretion lapsed and personal behavior threatened public well-being, law was the appropriate measure for restraining individuals. This general consensus arrived at in the debate on religious liberty had immediate consequences for the debates over the liberty of the press (1873-75) and the peoples right to criticize the governmentwhat would become known as the freedom and peoples rights movement. For the distinction between an absolute right to freedom of conscience or faith, defined as internal, and the external manifestation of that faith as a qualified right to freedom of religion meant that in the debate over publicizing opinions, which is necessarily a public activity, individual liberty is largely meaningless when confined to the internal domain of thought or conscience. What united the Meiji leadership and intellectuals in the debate over religion was the general commitment to both the goal of constitutional government and the governments duty to maintain peace. The liberal valorization of the individuals personal freedom proved to be the easily dispensable aspect of a theory of liberty in 1870s Japan. It was a fine line between not oppressing the people in matters of religion, by forcing them to believe, and oppressing the people in public discussion, by restricting the expression of their opinions. But in the interests of promoting law and public order and the general progress of civilization, state leadership was incomparably more useful than individual liberty. DePaul University.