I just uploaded all but two Chapters of Kita Ikki’s Kokutairon and Pure Socialism. These Chapters in question are from the fourth Section of the book. There are two more Chapters which constitute the fifth and final Section. Kita spent the entirety of Section Four describing the correlation between Social-Democracy and the establishment of the Japanese State, which emerged in the wake of the Tokugawa Shogunate during the Meiji Period. He argued that, while the development of such a State remains incomplete, the realization of Social-Democracy in Imperial Japan will achieve such completion. It is here that he began elaborating on concepts pertaining to Japanese Law, the social relations between the State, the Japanese people, and the Japanese Emperor. The overarching argument that said development must be accomplished according to the Japanese National Essence. This meant focusing on the social relations between the Japanese people and their Emperor with regard to the State.
Are the Japanese Emperor and the Japanese State one and the same, presiding over the Japanese people? Or are the two entities mutually separate insofar as the Japanese Emperor is an integral part of the Japanese State? If so, then in what sort of relationship does the Japanese Emperor have with the Japanese State? Does concept of National Sovereignty in Japan belong to the Japanese Emperor or the Japanese State (and by extension, the Japanese people)?
Kita Ikki was convinced that the Japanese Emperor was but an instrument of a Japanese State that has become increasingly democratic since the end of the Edo Period, which concurred with the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It is an argument that remains valid, even in contemporary Japan, where the nation no longer has any colonial holdings and is an important member of the Empire of Liberty, this contemporary world order that America established in the early 20th century. I say this because Japan in recent decades had adopted the characteristics of a Constitutional Monarchy, similar to that of the United Kingdom.
But unlike the UK, Japan according to Kita would undergo a realization of a new conception of National Sovereignty, which he believed will be facilitated by Social-Democracy. This proposed Japanese State will modernize the nation in order to protect it from European colonial empires and encroaching American power across the Pacific. Here, the Class Struggle assumes the perspective of “Proletarian Nations” and “Bourgeois Nations,” instead of just the two entities simply understood as “Classes” existing within any given Nation. In Japan, it is precisely the “Class Struggle” that Kita advocated for the necessity of Universal Suffrage and the democratization of the National Diet to enable greater involvement of the Japanese people within the affairs of the State.
In certain respects, some of Kita’s idea were more or less realized in the decades since he wrote the book in the 1900s. In other areas, they were historical products of the early 20th century. Land reform, Universal Suffrage, and the designated role of the Japanese Emperor within the Japanese State have since been realized in one form or another. It is the idea of a Social-Democratic Japan that remains elusive, so long as the country’s Liberal Democrats continue to govern.
Can Social-Democracy, as it is understood in the Western world, be realized in contemporary Japan?
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