著者

池田 勇太

出版者

公益財団法人史学会

雑誌

史學雜誌 (ISSN:00182478)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.118, no.6, pp.1144-1180, 2009-06-20

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This article offers an hypothesis for analyzing the process by which the ideas held by civil affairs bureaucrat Kinoshita Sukeyuki (1825-1899) about local parliamentary government were formed during the early Meiji Period. In the reforms aimed at how to govern the new nation emerging during the Restoration era, Confucian ideas were employed in an attempt to make a transition to direct rule over the people via state power and authority. However, with the replacement of feudal domains (han 藩) with prefectures and the dismantling of the feudal ownership system, the old framework for civil governance collapsed, and an increase in personal freedom occurred within a mood of autonomy and liberty, to a degree beyond anyone's initial expectations. In light of such a new situation, there were those, including Confucian intellectuals, who called for the introduction of publicly elected local assemblies. It was Kinoshita Sukeyuki who offered a plan to reorganize the villages of Karatsu Domain after the transition to direct han civil governance, based on the edification of the common people and their employment in local affairs of governance. Kinoshita, who would later propose a village system incorporating a deliberative body, which he initially thought would exclude the lower classes from the electorate, was forced by widespread popular uprisings opposed to the Restoration government measures to propose that peasant representatives (hyakushodai 百姓代) be made assembly members and that the lower class villagers (komae 小前) be included, in order to eliminate the legitimacy of other rebel groups. He came to think that 1) prefectural and national assemblies should first be indirectly elected from city ward and village assemblies and 2) edification policy should be fitted to the level of social mores by raising public sentiment. In the background to this was the assumption of an unstable structure facilitating popular rebellion, due to the sudden disappearance of feudal ownership and the rapid expansion of individual freedom within the underdevelopment of a governance system to replace feudalism. For that reason it was necessary for early Meiji civil government to smooth relations between upper and lower classes, and Kinoshita thought the answer lay in publicly elected popular assemblies. In the face of such new conditions, Kinoshita himself went through a transition from a Confucian view of civil government paternally protecting the people to raising issues about how to empower a fully matured nation. This is the chaotic background on which issues about political participation by the people were formed during the early Meiji Period.