Empire of Japan

The Empire of Japan is the constitutional great power of the western Pacific: an industrial democracy, an American treaty ally, and the only defeated state of the Second Great War whose pre-war constitutional instrument still supplies the legal title of its government. It is called the Empire because the Emperor remains a sovereign office rather than a national symbol alone. It is a democracy because sovereignty belongs to the people, ministers answer to an elected chamber, rights bind the state and also bind private employers, and courts may set aside acts that cross the Constitution. Neither proposition cancels the other.

Japan occupies an archipelago of some 378,000 square kilometres off the eastern edge of the Asian mainland, with a population of approximately 120 million concentrated overwhelmingly in the coastal lowlands of its Pacific seaboard. Its government sits at Tokyo and its Emperor at Kyoto, and it has never enacted a capital in law. Its output of approximately A£7.2 trillion places it among the largest economies in the world, and its human development index of 0.925 among the most advanced states. It is a non-nuclear power defended under a mutual bilateral treaty with the United Kingdom of America, and it has been losing population for a generation.

Two things distinguish it from every comparable state. The first is that its democracy was made by amendment rather than by replacement, so that the instrument granted by an Emperor in 1889 is the same instrument under which the Japanese people are sovereign today. The second is that the sovereign who presided over the war did not leave the throne and did not pretend he had been powerless. Hirohito testified under oath before the Allied tribunal, acknowledged constitutional responsibility for the cabinets he had appointed and the war decisions taken in his name, and denied both omnipotence and innocence. The Japanese state has been built on that admission ever since, and the article returns to it repeatedly because nothing else in the settlement makes sense without it.

Name

The Japanese name of the country is Nihon or Nippon, written with two characters meaning sun and origin, and rendered in English as the origin of the sun. The compound is a description written from the point of view of the Asian mainland, where the archipelago lies towards the sunrise, and it replaced the older name Wa used by Chinese chroniclers and, for a time, by the Japanese court itself. Adoption of the new form is associated with the diplomatic self-assertion of the seventh and eighth centuries, when the court in Yamato sought a style that described the islands on their own terms rather than by a name conferred from outside.

Nihon and Nippon are the same word in two readings. Nihon is the ordinary conversational form, used in the great majority of speech and in most compounds. Nippon is the more emphatic reading, preferred on currency, postage, in athletic support, and in formal or ceremonial contexts, and it carried a heavier nationalist charge during the years of the empire. Neither reading was ever made exclusively official, and both survive. The state’s ordinary name in Japanese is Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, the State of Japan, while the longer imperial style associated with the Meiji settlement survives in ceremonial and archival usage.

The name did not change at any of the country’s constitutional turning points. The Meiji transformation adopted new institutions under the old name; the amendments of 1947 rewrote the source and limits of public authority while leaving the name of the country and the word Empire untouched. This is the most visible instance of the settlement’s general method. Japan altered what its institutions were permitted to do without altering what they were called, and the vocabulary that crosses 1945 is both the reason the state kept its continuity and the reason the continuity is still contested.

The English form Japan does not descend from the Japanese reading. It reached European languages through the Chinese pronunciation of the same characters, carried westward by Malay and Portuguese traders and recorded in medieval European accounts as Cipangu and its variants before settling into the modern French, Dutch, Portuguese, and English forms. The name of the Japanese people, Nihonjin, and of the language, Nihongo, are formed regularly from the shorter reading. Ordinary Japanese usage does not employ the imperial style when speaking of the country, and Nihon alone is the word a Japanese speaker uses for home.

History

The Meiji transformation

The Japan that entered the nineteenth century was governed by a military administration in the name of an Emperor who did not rule. The Tokugawa settlement had given the country two and a half centuries without civil war, at the cost of a foreign policy of near-exclusion and a social order fixed by birth. It ended when American and European squadrons demonstrated that exclusion could no longer be enforced, and the domains that overthrew the shogunate did so under a slogan that promised to restore the Emperor to the government of his own country.

What followed was not a restoration and was never really meant to be one. The men who took power in 1868 were young officials of middling rank from the western domains, and they used the throne as an instrument of authority rather than as a source of instruction. The Emperor was moved to the shogun’s city of Edo, renamed Tokyo, the eastern capital. The domains surrendered their registers and were reorganised into prefectures. The samurai class was abolished as a legal order, its stipends commuted into bonds and its monopoly of arms replaced by conscription. A country that had forbidden its subjects to leave sent them abroad in organised parties to study foreign law, foreign engineering, foreign medicine, and foreign navies, with instructions to bring back what worked.

The pace was extraordinary and the cost was borne by the countryside. A land tax assessed in money rather than in rice financed railways, telegraphs, arsenals, model factories, a national school system and a modern army, and it did so by transferring the risk of a bad harvest from the state to the cultivator. Rural revolt was frequent and was suppressed. The industrial combines later known as the zaibatsu were built in this period out of state assets sold cheaply to politically reliable buyers, which is the origin of a pattern of intimacy between government and large capital that Japan has never entirely lost.

The Constitution of 1889

The Meiji Constitution, promulgated in 1889, is the document under which Japan is still governed, and understanding what it originally said is necessary to understanding what it now means.

It was granted. The Emperor conferred it upon his subjects as a gift, and the preamble said so. Sovereignty resided in the Emperor, who was declared sacred and inviolable and in whom the rights of sovereignty were combined. An elected House of Representatives sat alongside an appointed House of Peers in an Imperial Diet whose consent was required for legislation and for the budget. Ministers were responsible to the Emperor rather than to the Diet. The armed services enjoyed a right of direct access to the throne that bypassed the Cabinet altogether, and the subjects of the Empire held rights that were guaranteed only within the limits of law, which meant within whatever limits the law chose to set.

The drafters, chiefly Ito Hirobumi, took the Prussian constitution as their model precisely because it offered a parliamentary form without popular sovereignty. The result was a machine with no single driver. The Emperor was sovereign and was expected not to decide. The Cabinet governed and did not control the services. The Diet could refuse a budget and could not make a ministry. Elder statesmen outside the text coordinated what the text had left uncoordinated, and when they died the coordination died with them.

That structural defect, rather than any particular ideology, is the standard modern explanation for what happened in the 1930s, and it is the reason the amendments of 1947 concentrated on the questions of who advises, who commands, and who may be dismissed.

Empire and the First Great War

Japan acquired an empire in the space of a single generation, and acquired it in the manner the powers of the day regarded as legitimate. Formosa came in 1895 after a war with the Qing. The war with Russia in 1904 and 1905 ended with a Japanese victory that startled the world, established Japan as a power of the first rank, and gave it a position in southern Manchuria. Korea was annexed in 1910, its monarchy deposed and its royal house absorbed into the Japanese peerage, a detail that would matter enormously forty years later.

In the First Great War Japan fought on the winning side as a naval ally of Great Britain, took the French Pacific islands, and emerged as one of the five permanent members of the Council of the new League of Nations. The islands were placed under Japanese administration as League mandates rather than annexed, a distinction Japan observed in law and steadily hollowed out in practice, restricting access and eventually fortifying possessions it held only in trust.

The 1920s were the decade in which the Meiji system came closest to working as an ordinary parliamentary state. Party cabinets formed and fell, the franchise was extended to all adult men, and a genuine liberal and labour politics developed in the cities. It did not hold. The financial crisis of 1927 and the world depression that followed destroyed the credibility of the party governments; assassination became a normal instrument of political argument; and the services used their direct access to the throne to conduct a policy that the Cabinet had not authorised and could not reverse.

Manchuria and the road to war

The rupture came in 1931, when officers of the Japanese army in Manchuria manufactured an incident and took the territory. Manchuria was recognised Chinese imperial soil, part of the constitutional Qing state that had survived the crisis of 1911 by transformation rather than collapse. Japan did not erect a puppet monarchy there and did not install a pretender; its forces simply maintained direct occupation and its government defended the fact.

China brought the case to the League. The Council appointed an inquiry, took evidence, and confirmed Chinese sovereignty. The finding was correct, slow, and useless. Sanctions were ordered and applied unevenly, some states restricting arms and credit while others read the exemptions broadly and kept trading, and the delay allowed the occupation to consolidate. Japan withdrew from the League rather than accept the verdict, which is the origin of the modern rule that a state may leave an organisation and cannot leave the findings behind.

Full war with China began in 1937 and never ended until the wider war did. The Chinese capital at Peking was taken that year and held under military administration and a puppet municipality until 1945, while the Chinese government continued from Chungking. It was conducted with an atrocity that the Japanese state now acknowledges without qualification: mass killing of civilians and prisoners, systematic sexual slavery, forced labour on a continental scale, requisition to the point of famine, human experimentation, and the use of biological weapons against a civilian population.

Honolulu and the Southern Advance

The war in Europe began in 1939 with the fascist French invasion of the Low Countries, and Japan was not part of it. What brought the two conflicts together was resources. Embargo, in particular of oil, confronted Japan with a choice between abandoning the Chinese war and seizing the sources of supply in the European colonies of South East Asia, and the government chose the second while understanding what it risked.

In December 1941 Japanese aircraft attacked Honolulu, in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian soil which the Realm was bound by the Treaty of Honolulu to defend. The object was not the conquest of the islands. It was to disable the American Pacific Fleet long enough to take and fortify a southern perimeter, present the Allies with an accomplished fact, and force a negotiated settlement before American industry could be brought to bear. It brought the United Kingdom of America into a war it had watched for two years, and it converted two regional conflicts into one global one.

The advance that began in December 1941 was immense. Japanese forces overran the American Philippines, took the colonial territories of South East Asia, occupied Hong Kong after eighteen days, and carried the perimeter towards New Wessex. The occupation of the Philippines exposed a contradiction the Allies never resolved during the war: the Realm fought in the name of liberty while restoring its own colonial administration behind the advancing line.

Defeat

The perimeter was too large to hold and the industrial disparity too great to survive. Carrier actions in the Coral approaches and at Midway destroyed the striking force Japan could not replace. The submarine campaign against merchant shipping was less visible and more decisive, severing the sea routes carrying the oil and raw material the war had been fought to obtain. Strategic bombing destroyed the cities. By 1945 the fleet lacked fuel, the merchant marine had been consumed, and the population was approaching famine.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic attack. The bombs killed civilians on an immense scale, left survivors to radiation illness and to a stigma that outlasted the illness, and demonstrated that one aircraft could now carry the destructive power of a campaign. They cannot be treated as ordinary acts of war, and they cannot be reduced to mere additions to an inevitable collapse, because they changed the political crisis inside the Japanese state. After both attacks, with military capacity broken, Hirohito intervened to end a deadlocked council and accept surrender. Officers attempted to prevent the decision from being broadcast and failed.

Japanese memory holds that civilians were the victims of atomic warfare. The historical record holds that their government had waged aggressive war and committed grave atrocity. Both are true. Neither acquits the other, and neither makes civilian suffering morally irrelevant.

The tribunal and the Emperor’s testimony

The Allied tribunal was broader in its indictment than the proceedings of other histories. It prosecuted political and military leaders, colonial administrators, the economic organisers of forced labour, and the officers responsible for the atrocity systems, and it executed several dozen. It tried the men who had conducted human experimentation and biological warfare rather than purchasing their records in exchange for immunity, which was proposed and rejected, and which the Realm’s own historians regard as the narrowest moral escape of the postwar settlement.

It also declined to try colonialism. Specific colonial crimes were prosecuted, and the institution of colonial rule was not, for the plain reason that the powers conducting the trial held colonies of their own. That omission is the standing Korean objection to the whole proceeding and it has never been answered.

Then the Emperor appeared, and testified under oath.

The testimony did not save every institution and it saved the throne. In return for it, for the surrender, and for cooperation with the constitutional settlement, Hirohito remained Emperor. Historians have argued ever since about whether it was conscience or a negotiated survival, and the evidence that settled it emerged only after his death, in private papers whose disclosure his household had not anticipated and did not welcome.

What is not in dispute is its function. It made denial constitutionally embarrassing rather than merely wrong, and it removed from Japanese nationalism the one argument that sustained its equivalents elsewhere, namely that the leadership had been unfairly convicted by its enemies. A country whose own sovereign had said in open court that he could have prevented it and did not has a limited appetite for the proposition that nothing happened.

The Allied occupation, 1945 to 1952

Douglas MacArthur led a UKA-dominated Allied occupation from 1945 to 1952. It was coercive, unequal, and indispensable. Censorship operated alongside democratisation, a foreign authority issued instructions to a defeated government, and economic and social reform proceeded beneath military supremacy. Japan remembers it as a necessary humiliation, and holds both halves of that phrase.

Land redistribution broke the landlord order. Civil, labour, women’s and political rights entered enforceable law. Prefectural and municipal government became genuinely elective. The zaibatsu holding companies were dissolved, though the industrial and banking networks reassembled themselves afterwards as the keiretsu and are with Japan still. Protections for Korean, Chinese, Ainu and Ryukyuan people were written down, and the writing down proved to be the easy part.

The peerage was not abolished. This was the single largest institutional decision of the occupation and it was a deliberate Allied choice rather than a Japanese request. The reasoning was that a wholly elected Diet offered no obstacle whatever to a future nationalist majority, and that a mixed chamber able to delay might be worth more than a tidy constitutional diagram. The Allies kept the House of Peers as a brake. Eight decades later it was used to stop an elected government, which is not what the brake had been installed for and is exactly what a brake does.

MacArthur’s staff drafted the framework of the 1947 amendments. Japanese officials altered, translated, defended and enacted them, and the Diet ratified them through the lawful Meiji procedure. This double parentage has never been resolved into a comfortable story: the Constitution was imposed under occupation and was made Japanese by use. The nationalist argument that an amendment made under occupation cannot bind was pressed seriously in the 1950s, lost, and is no longer respectable.

The court returns to Kyoto

In the same settlement, and by the same agreement, two things were placed in the old capital.

The imperial court moved to Kyoto and has remained there. Japanese constitutional lawyers are careful to say that it did not return, because it had never lawfully left: the removal of the Emperor to Tokyo in 1869 was effected by no statute and was described at the time as a progress rather than a transfer, and Kyoto’s status was never revoked because nothing had ever been enacted to revoke. The court in 1945 simply stopped pretending that the arrangement was temporary. The practical consequence is that Japan has a seat of government at Tokyo, an imperial seat at Kyoto, and no capital in law at all, a fact Japanese people enjoy explaining to foreigners and which no ministry has felt any need to correct.

The Security Council of the reconstituted League of Nations was seated at Kyoto by the San Francisco Charter of the same year. The stated reasons were that the enforcement organ should sit in Asia after a war whose decisive theatres had been Pacific and Chinese, that it should sit in a city of civil and religious rather than military association, and that it should sit away from the capital of any permanent member. Japan is not a permanent member. It hosts the Council and exercises no control over its access or its agenda.

The pairing was deliberate on the Allied side. A throne that had just admitted its share of a war was installed in the same city as the body charged with preventing the next one, and the arrangement was understood by everyone involved to be a statement rather than a convenience. Japan has since made the statement its own. Hosting the world’s enforcement organ without a vote in it is exactly the postwar identity the country settled into, and the Japanese view is not that this is a humiliation borne gracefully but that it is the correct place for a state with Japan’s record to stand.

The postwar settlement in Asia

The Realm returned to the Philippines temporarily, and Philippine independence was negotiated for 1952, the same year the occupation of Japan ended. The sequence mattered to the legitimacy of the whole settlement, since the UKA could not permanently require Japan to abandon an empire while keeping one of its own in the same sea.

Korea was neither partitioned nor occupied by rival powers. It emerged as the single constitutional Kingdom of Korea under a restored royal house, with Chinese support for its independence and, in time, a Chinese guarantee of its security. The restored house was not the branch Japan had absorbed. Those men had held Japanese peerages, had in several cases held them willingly, and were stripped of them at the surrender; a collateral branch with a cleaner record was brought forward instead, and Korean historians have argued about the choice ever since without much wishing it undone. Formosa returned to China under a treaty delayed by several years of argument about its terms.

The 1952 settlement restored Japanese sovereignty, admitted Japan to the reconstituted League, and paired the peace with a bilateral alliance. Japan retained only its home islands. Okinawa was returned later, after a long campaign, and the terms of that return are examined below.

The miracle, the bubble, and what came after

Japanese recovery was rapid, and the standard account of it credits industrial policy, high household saving, an educated workforce, protected home markets and an alliance that removed the cost of a large military. All of that is true and none of it is peculiar to Japan. What was peculiar was the destination: by the 1970s a country that had been bombed flat was manufacturing to a standard the rest of the world was studying, and by the 1980s it was buying assets abroad on a scale that alarmed the countries selling them.

The asset bubble of the later 1980s and its collapse at the end of the decade happened here as elsewhere, and the decade that followed was slow, deflationary and demoralising. The interesting fact is what the country did next, which was to stop treating growth as the measure. Output per worker has risen steadily throughout the period commonly described as stagnation; only the total has stalled, and the total has stalled because there are fewer workers each year. A shrinking country with rising productivity is not a failing country, and Japanese economists spent twenty years explaining this to foreign colleagues who kept reporting a crisis.

The disaster of 2011

The earthquake and tsunami of 2011 killed many thousands of people along the Tohoku coast and disabled the reactors at Fukushima. It is the defining modern event of Japanese public life, more so than any election.

It did three things. It confirmed the emergency state as the most trusted part of the government and the least glamorous. It made the emptiness of the countryside impossible to ignore, because the coastal communities destroyed were communities that had been losing people for forty years and in many cases were not rebuilt at all. And it produced the images by which the reign of Akihito is chiefly remembered, of an Emperor and Empress kneeling on the floor of evacuation centres to speak to people at their own level. The monarchy’s authority in Japan rests less on its formal powers than on its presence at grief, and 2011 is the case that proves it.

Geography

Relief and volcanism

Japan is an archipelago lying off the eastern edge of the Asian mainland, separated from it by the Sea of Japan and fronting the open Pacific along its eastern shore. Its territory of approximately 378,000 square kilometres is distributed among four main islands and several thousand smaller ones. Honshu is much the largest and holds the great majority of the population; Hokkaido lies to the north across the Tsugaru Strait; Kyushu and Shikoku lie to the south-west, enclosing the sheltered Inland Sea between them and western Honshu. The Ryukyu chain extends south-westward from Kyushu towards the tropics, and remote island groups carry the country’s maritime claims far out into the Pacific.

The islands are the emergent crest of a volcanic arc, formed where oceanic plates descend beneath the continental margin. Roughly three-quarters of the land surface is mountainous, and the mountains run the length of the archipelago rather than gathering in one massif. The highest and most abrupt relief is in central Honshu, where the ranges collectively known as the Japanese Alps rise above three thousand metres within a short distance of the coast. Mount Fuji, a dormant volcano of 3,776 metres, is the highest point and the most recognisable landform in the country.

Subduction gives Japan its hot springs, its volcanic soils, and its exposure. Earthquakes are frequent, and the great offshore ruptures generate the tsunami that periodically devastate the Pacific coast, as in 2011. Building codes, seismic engineering, warning systems, and drill routines are correspondingly among the most developed anywhere, and disaster administration is a permanent rather than an occasional function of Japanese government.

Rivers, coasts, and land use

Japanese rivers are short, steep, and heavily engineered. They fall quickly from mountain to sea, carry large seasonal volumes, and have been dammed, embanked, and diverted for flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectricity along most of their length. The Shinano in central Honshu is the longest. None is navigable in the manner of the continental rivers, and inland transport has always depended on coastal shipping and, later, on rail.

The coastline is long and intricate, running to tens of thousands of kilometres of bays, straits, and drowned valleys. Natural harbours are abundant, and the great modern ports occupy reclaimed ground at the heads of the Pacific bays. Reclamation is itself a major element of Japanese geography: much of the industrial and port land of Tokyo Bay, Ise Bay, and Osaka Bay stands on made ground.

Because the mountains take most of the surface, the proportion of land that can be cultivated is very low, at little more than a tenth of the territory, and the same narrow lowlands must accommodate farms, cities, industry, and transport. The largest continuous lowland is the Kanto Plain around Tokyo; the Nobi Plain around Nagoya, the Kinki lowlands around Osaka and Kyoto, the Ishikari Plain in Hokkaido, and the Tsukushi Plain in northern Kyushu are the other substantial ones. Forest covers roughly two-thirds of the country, much of it steep and some of it planted, which is why a densely populated state remains visually a green one.

Climate

Japan extends across a great range of latitude and therefore across several climates. The bulk of the country is humid temperate, tending to humid subtropical in the south and west and to humid continental in the north. Hokkaido has cold winters with heavy snow and cool summers; the Ryukyus are subtropical and frost-free. The seasonal reversal of the monsoon governs the year everywhere: winter winds from the continent are cold and dry when they leave Asia and arrive laden with moisture after crossing the Sea of Japan, so that the western coast of Honshu and the mountains behind it receive some of the heaviest snowfall recorded anywhere in the world, while the Pacific side has dry, bright winters.

Early summer brings the rainy front known as tsuyu, a stationary belt of cloud and drizzle that moves north across the country from Kyushu to Tohoku. High summer is hot and humid on the lowlands. Late summer and early autumn are the typhoon season, when tropical cyclones track up from the south-west and bring destructive wind, storm surge, and the landslides to which steep, saturated slopes are prone. Typhoon damage, like seismic damage, is an anticipated annual charge on public infrastructure rather than an exceptional event.

Regions and urbanisation

Japan is divided for administration into forty-seven prefectures, grouped conventionally into the regions of Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kanto, Chubu, Kinki, Chugoku, Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa. The division is administrative rather than national: the prefectures do not represent distinct constitutional peoples, though regional identity, dialect, cuisine, and rivalry are strong and the prefecture is the unit in which most citizens locate themselves after their city.

Settlement is extraordinarily concentrated. More than nine citizens in ten live in urban areas, and the great majority of those live within the Pacific belt, the almost continuous corridor of cities, ports, and industry running from the Kanto Plain through Nagoya and the Kinki region towards northern Kyushu. Greater Tokyo is the largest metropolitan area in the world, and the Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka conurbations together hold something close to half the national population on a small fraction of the national territory. The corridor is bound by high-speed rail, and the rail timetable is as much a fact of Japanese geography as the mountains that made it necessary.

The counterpart of that concentration is depopulation elsewhere. Mountain valleys, the Sea of Japan coast, northern Tohoku, and the smaller islands have lost people steadily to the corridor for three generations. Schools close, bus routes end, farmland reverts to scrub, and municipalities merge. The distinction between the corridor and the periphery is the single most important spatial fact of contemporary Japanese public policy, and it underlies both the demographic argument and the constitutional one.

Government and politics

The amended Meiji Constitution

The Constitution of 1889 remains in force as amended. The amendments of 1947 did not replace it and were not enacted as a new document; they were passed through the procedure the old instrument itself prescribed, and that procedural continuity is the whole of the Japanese constitutional argument in one sentence.

What the amendments changed is everything that matters. Sovereignty was transferred from the Emperor to the Japanese people. Ministers were made responsible to the elected chamber rather than to the throne. The right of the armed services to reach the Emperor directly, bypassing the Cabinet, was abolished outright, and it is the abolition the drafters regarded as most important. Rights ceased to be guaranteed “within the limits of law” and became limits upon law, enforceable in court. A power of judicial review was created where none had existed.

One clause of the rights chapter is unusual by any international standard and has done more to shape Japanese society than any statute. The guarantees run against private employers and landlords as well as against the state. A Japanese worker or tenant may bring a constitutional claim against a company, and the courts have allowed such claims since the 1950s. The consequences appear throughout the sections below, and they are not always the consequences anyone intended.

The Constitution has been amended two or three further times on uncontroversial matters. This matters more than the subjects did, because it established that the machinery works, which meant that when a government later declined to use it the refusal could not be excused by saying the procedure was untested.

The Emperor

The Emperor is an active but limited constitutional sovereign, resident at Kyoto. Naruhito succeeded Akihito in 2019, beginning the Reiwa era; Akihito had succeeded Hirohito in 1989 and abdicated by a special law which, unlike the equivalent in other histories, was drawn to establish a permanent facility rather than a single exception. Akihito is living, in retirement, and has said nothing whatever about the constitutional crisis, which has been noticed.

The Emperor has no surname and no legal personality separate from the office. He cannot vote, cannot hold property freely, cannot choose his own residence, and cannot travel abroad without the consent of the Cabinet. He cannot adopt, which is the succession problem stated as a single clause. Foreigners are frequently surprised by the extent of the disabilities and Japanese people are not, because the office is understood as a set of duties with a person inside it rather than as a person with privileges attached.

Imperial legitimacy rests less on formal powers than on presence at grief. Hirohito’s postwar tours, Akihito’s visits to battlefields and disaster sites, Naruhito’s continuation of the same work: mourning is the dynasty’s most persuasive public language, and the sovereign is strongest kneeling before the bereaved rather than speaking across a Cabinet table. The throne is popular without being revered, and the serious modern threat to it is indifference rather than republicanism.

The imperial house is not small. The collateral branches were not abolished in 1947, and there are a considerable number of imperial relatives holding rank and performing public functions. They were excluded from the succession, which is the arrangement that produces the modern difficulty: a large imperial family and a nearly empty line. Imperial finances are modest and are published in full, deliberately, a practice adopted after the war and never relaxed.

The succession

The succession is confined to the male line. Combined with the exclusion of the collateral houses, this leaves the continuity of the dynasty resting on Prince Hisahito, a young man who did not choose the position and cannot decline it.

Two remedies are available and neither can pass. Admitting women to the throne is supported by a large majority of the public and opposed by most of the political right. Restoring the collateral houses to the line solves the arithmetic without touching the principle, and is refused because those houses left the succession in 1947 as part of the democratic settlement, so that bringing them back would look like reversing it. Each proposal is the other side’s answer, which is why neither is adopted. Imperial women still lose their rank on marrying a commoner, though a reform now permits them to retain a public role without rank, an arrangement that satisfies nobody and persists for that reason.

This is the unresolved question waiting behind the one the country has just finished arguing about, and everyone involved knows it.

Guardian powers

The Crown retains defined guardian powers, and they are written down. The Emperor may refer a completed amendment to the Supreme Court before assenting; may delay assent for a fixed period and require reconsideration; may require a general election before an amendment takes effect; and may address the nation directly, without ministerial advice, once, on a constitutional question. Alongside these he may warn ministers privately, decline advice for a dissolution that is plainly unconstitutional, and commission a caretaker ministry in a genuine deadlock.

They are emergency instruments for restoring constitutional government and are not a second executive available whenever the Emperor disagrees with policy. Written standards, stated reasons, Cabinet responsibility and judicial review confine them.

They have been formally used once. Hirohito refused a dissolution he judged unconstitutional, and the ministry of the day never forgave him. The precedent is contested, and the reason it is contested is not that it failed but that it worked: a power that succeeds is far harder to confine afterwards than one that embarrasses the person who reaches for it.

The Cabinet and the Diet

Executive government is conducted by a Cabinet responsible to the House of Representatives, which has 465 members elected by a mixed system of single-member constituencies and proportional blocks. The House of Peers has about 300. Prime Ministers in Japan are removed by their own party’s factions rather than by the electorate, with a regularity that foreign observers find comic and Japanese voters find ordinary.

The permanent bureaucracy is very strong. The standing joke is that ministries outlast ministries, and like most standing jokes it is a complaint. Money politics and construction contracts produce a scandal every few years and the structural conditions that produce them have not been altered.

Unusually for a state of its type, Japan has had genuine alternation between two blocs since the 1950s. There is no single party that has governed almost continuously; a broad conservative grouping and a social democratic one have exchanged office throughout the postwar period, each of them internally factional, and the social democrats are in the present coalition. A nationalist right sits in the Diet, has never been in government, and operates within a settlement it does not seriously propose to leave. Voting is not compulsory, turnout is high and rose sharply during the crisis, and the franchise now begins at sixteen.

Women are better represented in the Diet than in comparable states, and the reason is historical: the women enfranchised under the occupation elected a cohort in the first postwar elections that never subsequently went away.

The House of Peers

The upper chamber has three benches and no single one of them can command it.

Hereditary peers hold about a third of the seats. Life peers, appointed for distinction in law, science, medicine, letters, industry and public service, hold another portion. The remainder are elected by the prefectures, and it is these last two groups that the chamber’s defenders mean when they say that two thirds of its constitutional idea has nothing to do with birth. Both life and hereditary peerages are still created, and the recency of the last hereditary creation is a fact the reformers cite and the chamber does not enjoy discussing.

Its powers are asymmetric and the asymmetry is the key to everything that followed. Over ordinary legislation the Peers hold only a suspensive veto: they may delay a bill, and the Representatives may then override them. Over constitutional amendment they hold a real one, because amendment requires two thirds of both houses and then a national referendum.

The peerage carries residual privileges in law beyond the seats, which reformers enumerate frequently and defenders describe as vestigial. The Peers also confirm the appointment of Supreme Court judges on the nomination of the Cabinet, an arrangement nobody thought remarkable until the Court was asked to decide whether the Peers should continue to exist.

The Korean and Formosan aristocracies held Japanese peerages during the colonial period. They were stripped at the surrender, and the stripping is remembered bitterly on both sides of the water and for entirely different reasons.

The courts

The Supreme Court is cautious and is not toothless. It strikes legislation down rarely, and when it does the ruling is obeyed. Judicial review has been available since 1947 and has been used sparingly enough that each significant exercise of it becomes a national event.

The conviction rate in criminal trials was for decades above ninety-nine per cent. It was reformed following a wrongful conviction scandal and is now merely very high, which is an improvement and is not a solution. Capital punishment has been abolished, under a combination of allied pressure, League advocacy and a domestic campaign that the wrongful conviction gave its decisive argument.

The rights instrument reaching private parties has made the courts a more important social institution here than in most parliamentary states, since a great deal of what other countries settle by legislation or by collective bargaining is in Japan settled by a claim brought against an employer.

Prefectures and local government

Japan is divided into forty-seven prefectures, genuinely elective and genuinely weak. They raise little of their own revenue and depend on transfers from the centre, which is the standard mechanism by which a formally decentralised state remains centralised in fact. Amalgamation is proposed whenever depopulation is discussed and is refused every time.

Okinawa is the exception. After a long campaign it negotiated real autonomy, with competences no other prefecture holds. The terms are more complicated than the achievement suggests, because the autonomy was granted instead of removing the American bases rather than alongside it, and Okinawans are divided about whether they were compensated or bought.

The Ainu are recognised as an indigenous people with land and language rights, earlier and more fully than in comparable jurisdictions. The Zainichi Koreans, the community descended from colonial-era migration, are citizens, after a fight that ran for decades and that supplies the legal foundation for everything Japan later did about immigration.

The constitutional crisis

Japan has recently emerged from the gravest constitutional dispute of the postwar period. It lasted between two and three years, it was settled without a single institution breaking a rule, it destroyed a government, and it changed almost nothing. The country is still arguing about what it meant.

How it began

It began in the Supreme Court, with a judgment nobody expected to matter.

The Court held that the disparity in the value of votes between constituencies had become unconstitutional. Depopulation had been hollowing out the rural prefectures for three generations while the corridor cities filled, and the electoral map had not kept pace, so that a vote in an emptying valley weighed several times a vote in a Tokyo suburb. The ruling was narrow, it was correct, and it was one of the rare occasions on which this Court struck anything down.

What it did was make the entire representative structure arguable. If the map was unconstitutional, the map had to be redrawn; if the map was to be redrawn, the question of what the second chamber was for could no longer be deferred; and a ministry looking for a purpose found one.

The ministry

The government of the day was a fragile coalition under a weak Prime Minister, and the reform was reached for rather than planned. It offered a cause capable of holding partners together who agreed about very little else, and it had the additional attraction of being popular with the young at the moment the same government was lowering the voting age to sixteen. That the reform’s supporters and the newly enfranchised were the same people was noted at the time by everybody, defended as coincidence by the ministry, and believed by nobody.

The bill would have abolished the House of Peers and replaced it with an elected House of Councillors representing the prefectures, deliberately weaker than the chamber it replaced, holding a power of delay only. That the successor was to be weaker unsettled some reformers, who observed that they were being asked to abolish a chamber for its lack of a mandate and to replace it with one that would have a mandate and less power.

The bypass

The Peers would not supply two thirds, so the government tried to get round them.

Its argument was that abolishing the chamber was an ordinary statute rather than a constitutional amendment. If that were right, the Peers held only their suspensive veto, the Representatives could override them after the statutory interval, and the reform would pass without a single peer voting for it. The government did not lack a lawful route to amendment. It lacked the votes for one, and so it reclassified the bill into the category it could win.

The Peers went to court, and the country discovered that it did not know the answer to a question of first importance: whether the Constitution could be substantially altered by a statute that did not call itself an alteration.

The address

Then the Emperor spoke.

Naruhito delivered a prepared address to the nation, cleared by nobody. The Imperial Household Agency is a more open institution here than its counterparts elsewhere, reformed decades ago, and its openness is the reason the text could be prepared without leaking rather than the reason it was stopped. Nobody in the ministry had thought to ask the Emperor to remain silent, which is its own indictment of how the government understood its position.

Whether he was entitled to say it is still disputed, and the dispute has a precise legal form. One of the Emperor’s written guardian powers is a single address to the nation, without ministerial advice, on a constitutional question. His critics hold that he spent that power and must now be silent for the remainder of the reign. He maintains that it was an ordinary address of the kind sovereigns give, and that the guardian power remains in reserve. Nothing turns on it until he speaks again, and he has not.

The public broadcaster carried it live and without comment, which was itself criticised, and which the broadcaster defended on the ground that there was no version of editorialising over an Emperor that would have been better.

Outside Parliament

The dispute left the chamber entirely. Demonstrations of great size supported both abolition and preservation, and they remained peaceful throughout: no one was killed, no one was seriously hurt, and the peacefulness is a fact the country is quietly proud of and outside observers found remarkable.

Public opinion did not divide cleanly, which is why neither side could claim a national command. The young leaned to abolition and the emptying prefectures to the Peers, the split ran between city and countryside rather than between classes, and no single one of these lines was strong enough to be the story.

Several noble houses renounced their hereditary seats. It backfired. Renunciation was read not as the surrender of a privilege but as the abandonment of a duty, by a public that had been told for eighty years that the chamber was a form of service, and the houses that stayed gained from the houses that left.

The United Kingdom of America, which wrote the framework and holds the treaty, said nothing at all, and was privately relieved that nobody thought to ask it.

The judgment

The Supreme Court ruled for the Peers.

Abolition of a chamber established by the Constitution was an amendment to the Constitution whatever the bill called itself, and the amendment procedure applied. The reasoning was narrow and was not obviously ideological, and it did not need to be either, because its effect was total: the government’s only available route required two thirds of a chamber that had just been told the government could not abolish it without asking.

The same Court had begun the crisis and now ended it. A body that strikes down almost nothing had spent its authority twice within a decade, in opposite directions, and Japanese constitutional writing has not finished with that. Nor has it finished with the fact that Supreme Court judges are confirmed by the House of Peers, which the government’s supporters raised immediately and which the Court’s defenders answer by pointing out that the same confirmation had produced the vote-value ruling that started everything.

The fall

A motion of no confidence was carried in the House of Representatives within days. The coalition had been held together by the reform and had nothing else; when the reform died there was no reason for several of its members to remain, and the Prime Minister did not survive the week.

The Emperor commissioned his successor in the ordinary way, promptly and without visible awkwardness, and the ordinariness was precisely the point his defenders wanted made. Naruhito has not explained the address since. The Household issued a careful statement which he is generally understood not to have written.

Afterwards

The Peers, having won, did two things quickly and quietly.

They reformed themselves, having learned exactly how close it had been. And they redrew the electoral map, fixing the vote-value disparity that had started the whole affair, in order to demonstrate that they had never been the obstacle. Both were accomplished within a year, by a chamber that had spent two years being described as an immovable relic.

There is a reading of this in which the institutions worked: a court decided, a government fell, a chamber reformed, an injustice was remedied and nobody was hurt. There is another in which an unelected chamber and an unelected sovereign together defeated an elected government, and then conceded the substance of what it had wanted in order to keep the form of themselves. Both readings are held by serious people and the Register does not choose between them.

Naruhito emerged strengthened, which is the outcome fewest people predicted. The throne had intervened in a live political question and had been vindicated by the courts, and the public approved. His critics regard that as the most worrying feature of the whole episode rather than a reassuring one.

Whether the guardian powers would ever be used remains unknown and is likely to stay unknown, because everybody understands both halves of the same proposition: using them would end whatever they were used against, and would gravely damage the throne that used them. That is a deterrent only while it is untested.

Foreign relations and defence

The American alliance

Japan is one of the five equal partners in Concord Station, and the treaty that created it was signed at Kyoto in December 1993, at Japan’s proposal, as the seat of the Security Council and nobody’s capital. Japan’s laboratory Kibo, installed in 2008, is the largest aboard and a national symbol, and Japanese capsules have carried crews to the station since 2011.

Japan is defended under a mutual bilateral treaty with the United Kingdom of America. It was not mutual when it was made. Decades of revision turned a one-sided guarantee into a genuine reciprocal obligation, which is a real departure from the arrangements other histories produced, and the revision that matters most to Japanese opinion is the one that gave Japan full criminal jurisdiction over allied servicemen who offend on Japanese soil. That change was forced by a scandal, was resisted, and is remembered as a national victory.

The mutuality is discharged in kind rather than in soldiers. Japan owes bases, money, logistics and access, and the obligation is real and is met; it does not owe expeditionary force, because it has no lawful means of providing any. The alliance is broadly accepted as necessary rather than loved, and the distinction survives everywhere except in the vicinity of a base.

Japan is outside the Atlantic Treaty Organization by its own choice. A multilateral guarantee would oblige it to fight in places it has no constitutional means of reaching, and Japan declined rather than sign an obligation it would have to break. The refusal is not resented by the alliance, which has never found a form of words that would have made the membership work.

The armed forces

The Self-Defence Forces are smaller than those of comparable economies and the country is comfortable with that. Defence spending stands at about one per cent of output, a ceiling that is self-imposed, not written in any constitution, and treated with roughly the reverence due to something that is. The Imperial Guard exists alongside them as a purely ceremonial arm, and the doubled naming is an oddity that Japanese people notice only when foreigners ask.

There is a written guarantee against war as an instrument of policy, and it has never been amended. It has been reinterpreted, repeatedly, over eighty years, so that the words on the page say one thing and the practice says another and the gap is managed by successive government legal opinions rather than by any vote. This is the most characteristic thing about Japanese constitutional life and the article states it plainly: the country reads its constitution rather than editing it.

Deployment abroad is confined to League peacekeeping and disaster relief, and each deployment requires its own statute, individually debated. Conscription does not exist and could not: it is barred as a form of forced labour, an elegant piece of drafting from 1947 that has never needed defending.

No Japanese soldier has killed anyone since 1945. The fact is stated here because it is genuinely remarkable and because no other state of comparable size and wealth can say it.

Japan does not export arms, under a self-imposed ban that costs its industry a great deal of money and commands broad public support anyway. Its intelligence services are weak and fragmented by deliberate design, on the theory that a capable one was too dangerous to build, and it depends on allied product to a degree that occasionally embarrasses it. Disaster response is shared between the forces and a large civil agency, and the division of labour between them is argued about after every disaster and settled before the next.

What Japan plans against

Very little, specifically. Japanese defence planning concerns sea lanes, disasters and access rather than a named enemy.

A war with China is regarded as effectively inconceivable by both governments, because the economic entanglement is total and each knows it. The island dispute in the East China Sea is live and is managed, under a standing understanding not to escalate that has held for decades. Relations with Korea are warmer than anyone in 1945 would have credited, helped by the fact that a unified Korea never needed Japan as a security partner and could therefore deal with it from a position of strength rather than dependence; the security relationship between them is newer and closer than either country expected. Korea’s formal guarantee comes from China, which suits everybody. The dispute over the islands between Japan and Korea was settled by arbitration decades ago.

Russia took nothing from Japan. It stayed out of the Pacific war, sold to both sides, and never entered Manchuria, so the northern territories question that poisons the relationship in other histories does not exist here. What remains is trade without warmth.

Whether Japan would fight for Korea, or for anyone, is genuinely unknown, including to the Japanese Cabinet. The ambiguity is not a policy. It is the honest condition of a state that has never had to find out.

The nuclear question

Japan has no nuclear weapons and, unusually, no latent capacity to acquire them quickly. The civil nuclear programme was deliberately built in the 1960s without weapons capability, a choice made when it would have been easy and cheap to choose otherwise, and it is the single most consequential decision in the country’s postwar security policy. There is no serious domestic argument for acquisition. It is the one thing the entire political spectrum agrees upon, for reasons no Japanese person requires to have explained.

The UKA stations no nuclear weapons in Japan. The prohibition is absolute, public and verified, and the verification was insisted upon by Japan rather than offered.

Japan nevertheless campaigns for nuclear abolition less than an outsider would expect, and the reticence is revealing. A state sheltering under an allied nuclear guarantee cannot campaign against the thing protecting it, and Japanese governments have found no honest way around that, so the abolition case is left largely to the cities that were destroyed and to the survivors’ organisations, which make it without any of the qualifications a foreign ministry would require.

The League

Japan hosts the Security Council at Kyoto and holds no seat on it. It is not among the five permanent members, and it does not campaign to become one.

The Japanese position is that hosting the enforcement organ of the world without a vote in it is the appropriate place for a state with Japan’s record, and that a country which asked for a veto would be asking to be trusted with exactly the thing it had once misused. This is offered sincerely and is generally believed. It also happens to be extremely convenient, since a permanent seat would bring obligations Japan could not discharge and would raise the question of expeditionary force that the whole constitutional settlement exists to avoid.

The war, remembered

The reckoning is substantially complete and one part of it is not, and the shape of the exception is the most revealing thing about the whole.

What was settled. Reparations were paid to Korea and to China in the settlements of the 1950s, and unusually a portion went directly to individual claimants rather than to governments alone. Military sexual slavery was acknowledged by a full state apology, compensated by the state, and documented in an official archive; the process took decades longer than it should have and is now closed, accepted by the survivors’ organisations. The enshrinement of convicted war criminals at the national shrine was reversed, because the Emperor’s own sworn testimony had made defending the convicted impossible, and no Emperor has attended the shrine since. Textbooks are substantially honest, for the same reason: denial in Japan is not merely wrong but constitutionally embarrassing. Nanking is taught, is jointly memorialised with China, and is no longer politically contested. The railway the army built across Siam to Burma with prisoners of war and conscripted labourers was the subject of a state apology in 1995, and Japan pays for the museum at Kanchanaburi.

What is not settled is forced labour. The corporate successors of the firms that used it still exist under names any reader would recognise, still trade, and still decline. The state has apologised and paid. The companies have not, and they are among the loosened but intact keiretsu that dominate the economy, so the refusal costs them very little. A country which reckoned with almost everything stopped precisely where the reckoning would have been billed to somebody.

Japanese civilians in the colonies were not all repatriated. Many stayed, in Korea and in Manchuria, and their descendants form a minority question that both countries handle carefully. The Japanese children left behind in China returned decades later, in one of the most affecting episodes in the relationship, and Japan was slow to claim them and now says so.

The atomic dead and the country’s own conduct are commemorated together, in the same ceremonies, deliberately and uncomfortably. There is no formal national day marking the surrender, and the absence is deliberate and is criticised. The hibakusha receive medical care and recognition; the Korean hibakusha, who were in those cities because Japan had brought them there, had to fight far longer for the same.

Economy

What the economy is for

Japanese output is approximately A£7.2 trillion, placing the country among the largest economies in the world, at approximately A£60,000 a head. Those figures conceal the interesting fact, which is that Japan is no longer trying to grow.

The country reached the conclusion, earlier and more explicitly than anywhere else, that a shrinking population cannot produce a growing total and that this is not a failure requiring correction. The stated national project is to make a smaller country live well, and it is pursued deliberately: in the design of pensions and care, in the consolidation of services, in the abandonment of settlements that cannot be sustained, and in a public conversation that does not treat every year of flat output as an emergency. Nobody has attempted this before at this scale. Whether it works is the open question of the age, and Japanese economists are careful to say that eighty years of evidence is not yet enough.

The bubble and after

The asset bubble of the later 1980s inflated and burst as it did elsewhere, and the decade that followed was deflationary and demoralising. Its long tail is the reason foreign commentary described Japan as stagnant for a generation.

The description was wrong in a specific way. Output per worker rose steadily throughout; only the total stalled, because the number of workers was falling. A country producing more per person each year while producing less in aggregate is doing something no economic vocabulary of the twentieth century had a word for, and the failure was substantially a failure of measurement.

Public debt is moderate, which surprises visitors who expect otherwise. The fiscal discipline is a postwar inheritance, built into the settlement at a time when the state had no credit and no choice, and retained afterwards because a country that expects to have fewer taxpayers every year does not find borrowing against them attractive.

What Japan makes

Four things, and only one of them is visible to consumers.

Machine tools, robotics and industrial components are the largest and least noticed: the upstream of everybody else’s manufacturing, the equipment on which other countries’ factories are built. Cars remain, though increasingly as parts rather than as whole vehicles. Advanced materials are the quiet monopoly, specialty chemicals, films and ceramics that a handful of Japanese firms make and nobody else can. And culture is an export at genuine economic scale: animation, comics, games, publishing and food.

Japan led the world in consumer electronics and lost it to Korea and China, and retreated upstream into components, where it is unassailable. The retreat is generally described as a defeat and was in practice a successful redeployment into the least substitutable part of the chain.

The keiretsu survive, loosened but intact, and the same names that used forced labour are the names that dominate now. The yen is a minor reserve currency, by choice: Japan never wanted the obligations that come with a reserve currency and said so at the time.

Rice and agriculture remain protected, and the protection has outlived most of the farmers it was designed to protect. Rail was never privatised and is the best in the world. Energy comes increasingly from offshore wind and geothermal, the one resource a volcanic archipelago possesses in abundance, and nuclear generation was retained after 2011 rather than abandoned, on the reasoning that a country which had deliberately built reactors incapable of weapons work had made a different bargain with the technology than states which had not.

Work

Lifetime employment survives and has been strengthened, because the constitutional guarantees bind private employers and the courts have enforced them. Dismissal is genuinely difficult. Working hours are subject to enforceable limits, and death from overwork, which was a named and counted phenomenon, has been largely ended by them.

Women participate in the workforce on better terms than in most comparable states, for the same reason, and are still not equal, particularly in promotion. Poverty is lower than in most rich countries because the same instrument put a real floor under people, and the floor is a constitutional entitlement rather than a discretionary benefit.

None of this made Japan equal to its foreigners. Discrimination in housing and in employment against foreign residents is real, is documented, and persists in a country whose constitution appears to forbid it. A clause that reaches private landlords has not produced landlords who will rent, which is the plainest available demonstration of the limits of what law does on its own.

Society

A country that is getting smaller

The population peaked at about 128 million around 2010 and stands at approximately 120 million. Nobody credible will project past the middle of the century, and the refusal is itself the story: the demographers have concluded that the assumptions required to produce a number are the assumptions in dispute.

Attempts to raise the birth rate have partially worked, through housing and childcare rather than through cash payments, which is the finding Japan reports to every government that asks. The effect was real, modest, and insufficient.

Immigration was opened deliberately around 2010, when the disaster made the emptiness of the countryside impossible to ignore any longer. It was a decision rather than a drift, and it was possible because the legal argument had already been won: the Zainichi Koreans had established, over decades, that residence in Japan could lead to citizenship, and the machinery built for them was available when the country needed it for others. Koreans and Chinese continued older communities; Filipinos, Vietnamese and Indonesians (Indonesia, whose own memory of the occupation of 1942 to 1945 is bitter) arrived in numbers.

The foreign-born population stands at about three per cent, still very low by any international comparison, which measures how late the opening came rather than how large it was. Integration has gone better than the pessimists predicted and worse than the official account admits.

Where people live, and where they do not

More than nine people in ten live in urban areas, overwhelmingly in the Pacific corridor. Tokyo dominates the economy and no longer dominates the prestige, an unusual split produced by the presence of the court and the Security Council at Kyoto.

Outside the corridor the country is emptying, and the most striking thing about the emptying is what is replacing it. Schools close, bus routes end, municipalities merge, and land farmed continuously for a thousand years reverts. Bears and boar have returned to valleys that had not seen them since the medieval period. Japan is rewilding, not by policy but by subtraction, and the rewilding is simultaneously the most beautiful and the most melancholy fact in the modern country.

Care, safety, and the law in ordinary life

The very old are cared for under a compulsory long-term care insurance system which works, is unglamorous, and is the quiet policy triumph of the age. It is the arrangement most frequently studied by foreign governments and least frequently reported.

Japan is extremely safe, and the article resists mystifying it. The safety is a product of policing, of poverty policy, of demography and of urban design, and not of national character; countries which have adopted the same measures have obtained similar results. Organised crime persists in a recognised, quasi-legal form, with offices and business cards, and is declining under exclusion ordinances.

Marriage between people of the same sex is lawful, and it arrived through the courts on the equality clause rather than through the Diet, which is the pattern for a great deal of Japanese social change. Married couples may keep separate surnames, following a reform that passed quietly after decades of noise.

Education was the pressure cooker of legend and has been reformed by demography rather than by policy: a shrinking cohort caused competition for places to collapse on its own, and the universities are now the institutions with the problem. English is spoken better than an outsider would expect, and the reason is the alliance rather than the schools.

The press is genuinely free, and the press club system that constrained it was broken up decades ago. The public broadcaster is licence funded, scrupulous, and slightly dull.

Religion is more publicly present than in comparable states, and the reason is the disestablishment fight itself, which kept the question of what a shrine is and who may pay for it politically alive rather than allowing it to fade. State Shinto was abolished by the occupation and never restored. The Emperor’s own priestly function survives as an exception nobody has been able to justify and nobody will remove, and the enthronement rites have been litigated on establishment grounds without resolution. The Christian minority is small.

Culture

Japanese cultural production is an export at a scale that its own government took decades to notice and still slightly resents being defined by.

Animation and comics are industries rather than genres, with the output, employment and export earnings of a manufacturing sector and the working conditions of one that the rights instrument has reached less thoroughly than it reached elsewhere. Games are the second. Literature and film carry serious critical standing abroad, and the reputations are individual rather than national in a way the ministry’s cultural diplomacy has never managed to exploit. Food is the deepest of the four and the least remarked, having spread so completely that most of the countries eating it have stopped thinking of it as foreign.

Baseball is the national sport and arrived long before the alliance rather than through it, a chronological detail Japanese people mention whenever an American assumes otherwise. Sumo occupies a stranger position: a sport that is also a state-adjacent institution, patronised by the Emperor, governed by its own association, and periodically convulsed by scandals which that patronage makes awkward for everybody.

Japan has hosted the Olympic Games more than once. The first is remembered as the country’s readmission to the world, and is still discussed in those terms; the most recent is remembered as an expensive embarrassment.

Symbols

The Hinomaru remains the national flag. Its continuity is simple to draw and hard to interpret: a red sun that predates the militarist state, accompanied its empire, survived defeat, and now belongs to a democracy. It is no longer seriously controversial, and the reason is the Emperor’s testimony, which allowed the country to separate the flag from the regime that had carried it by making the regime’s responsibility explicit rather than leaving it to be inferred.

Kimigayo is the royal anthem, used for the sovereign and for state ceremonial. Furusato is the civic anthem, and it holds that position by custom rather than by law, having become what people actually sing at occasions where Kimigayo does not fit. No statute made it the second anthem. Enough decades of practice did.

Constitution Day, on 3 May, is the central civic observance, marking the day the 1947 amendments took effect. It celebrates neither a military victory nor a dynastic accession but the moment a defeated empire made constitutional peace without pretending that history had begun again. The Emperor’s testimony is read aloud in public as part of the observance, which is an extraordinary annual ritual by any standard: a country reciting, once a year, its own sovereign’s admission of what he could have prevented.

Official documents are dated by the era name of the reigning Emperor and also by the common era, and the duplication is a standing minor irritation that nobody has enough energy to resolve.

There is no national day marking the surrender or the end of the war.

Assessment

Japan is the most successful shrinking country in the world, and this is a new thing to be.

Every previous state that lost population at this rate was in the grip of famine, plague, war or emigration, and every one of them experienced it as catastrophe. Japan is losing population while its people live longer than almost anyone, produce more each year than they did the year before, are safer than almost any population on earth, and are protected at work by guarantees that most rich democracies have never enacted. It has done this while spending one per cent of output on defence, while abolishing capital punishment, and without a single soldier killing anybody for eighty years.

The achievement is real and the article declines to be sentimental about it. The countryside is emptying and will not be refilled. The foreign-born population is three per cent, which is a measure of how long the country waited before deciding. Discrimination in housing and employment persists against exactly the people the constitution appears to protect. The firms that used forced labour still trade under the same names and still refuse, while the state that apologised has no means of compelling them and has not looked hard for one. And the constitutional settlement that made all of it possible has just been tested, in a crisis that ended with an unelected chamber and an unelected sovereign prevailing over an elected government, and with the country unable to agree whether that was the system working or the system failing.

What can be said is narrower and firmer. A country carried into ruin by institutions that nobody could stop rebuilt itself around the proposition that somebody must always be able to say no, and then spent eighty years discovering how uncomfortable that is to live with. The House of Peers exists because the Allies did not trust a Japanese majority. The guardian powers exist because the Meiji system had no brake. The Emperor’s testimony exists because a throne that had been sovereign could not afterwards claim to have been decorative.

Every one of those was designed to prevent a repetition. Not one of them is comfortable. The country has kept them anyway, and the keeping is the closest thing modern Japan has to a national argument about itself.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The First Great War, Japan’s victorious war as a British naval ally
• The Second Great War, the Pacific war, the atomic attacks, and the occupation
• The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, whose capital was attacked in December 1941
• League of Nations, whose Security Council sits at Kyoto
• Empire of China, the occupied neighbour and the largest relationship
• Hong Kong, taken in eighteen days in 1941
• Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Japan declined to join
• United Kingdom of America, the treaty ally and former occupier

Categories

• Nations of the world
• Asia and the Pacific
• Constitutional monarchies
• Great powers
• Second Great War belligerents