Was Japan's Constitution Really “Won Through Noble Sacrifice”? The Inconvenient Reality of Defeat
Recently, I watched a documentary about Japan’s prewar Special Higher Police, commonly known as the Tokko.
The Tokko was a police organization that suppressed people whose ideas were considered inconvenient to the state.
What I found particularly interesting was the method it used to make arrested dissidents renounce their beliefs.
Torture was used, but psychological pressure involving the prisoner’s family was apparently surprisingly effective.
“Your parents are crying because of you.”
“Do you understand how much trouble you are causing your family?”
No matter how strongly someone believed in a cause, invoking their family made them vulnerable. It was a truly insidious method based on a keen understanding of the Japanese psyche.
As I watched the documentary, a thought occurred to me once again.
Perhaps it was a good thing that Japan lost World War II.
The Freedom Japan Gained Through Defeat
Some people may read that and angrily accuse me of holding a masochistic view of history or being brainwashed by America.
But in prewar Japan, merely holding ideas the state considered undesirable could put someone under police surveillance and lead to arrest or imprisonment.
When I look at China today, I sense something similar.
I would not want to live in that kind of society.
From the Meiji era onward, Japan developed parliamentary and party politics. Even so, it was unable to stop the rise of the military and eventually became a society in which even freedom of speech was severely restricted.
If there had been no war, the Japanese people might have been able to develop a mature democracy on their own.
But that is not what happened in reality.
After Japan’s defeat, the American-led occupation forces arrived and introduced a new constitution and political system.
Japanese officials also participated in drafting the Constitution of Japan, but it is a fact that the occupation authorities took the lead in shaping its basic framework.
From the standpoint of national independence, this is a humiliating story.
But the result was a society in which freedom of speech and fundamental human rights were guaranteed.
I believe that was a good outcome.
What matters more to me is not where the constitution came from, but what kind of society it created.
The Beautiful Story of “Noble Sacrifice”
There is one phrase, however, that I have never been able to accept since childhood.
It was an explanation I heard from teachers at school:
“Japan’s present constitution was born from the noble sacrifices of many people.”
Even then, that explanation made me uncomfortable.
Who, exactly, sacrificed themselves, and for what?
The people who died in the war were not fighting to obtain the Constitution of Japan.
On the contrary, they were mobilized to fight in defense of the state system that existed at the time.
To say that their sacrifice allowed Japan to “win” its present constitution seems to reverse the actual story.
It is also true that some people in prewar Japan were persecuted for seeking freedom and democracy. But their movement did not transform the state or bring the present constitution into being.
The decisive turning point was defeat and occupation.
We did not win democracy through our own efforts. We happened to obtain it through defeat.
Describing this as something “won through noble sacrifice” seems to me an excessively convenient rewriting of history.
If Something Imposed on Us Is Good, That Is Good Enough
Even today, some people argue that the Constitution of Japan should be revised because it was “imposed” on the country.
But I do not really understand this reasoning either.
Even if something was imposed on us, we should continue using it if it is an excellent system.
Conversely, even if the Japanese people created a system themselves, we should fix it if it is flawed.
What matters is its substance, not who created it.
What puzzles me is that both the political right and left seem determined to give the constitution’s origins some special significance.
The right criticizes it as something “imposed by a foreign country,” while the left turns it into a beautiful story about something “obtained through noble sacrifice.”
From my perspective, both narratives are unnecessary.
The constitution introduced as a result of defeat ultimately brought enormous benefits to Japanese society.
Should that not be enough?
History Does Not Need a Beautiful Story
I do not take lightly the sacrifices of those who died in the war.
But I resist assigning a different meaning to their deaths after the fact.
The people who died in the war did not lose their lives to create the Constitution of Japan.
And the Japanese people were unable to change the prewar political system through their own efforts alone.
As a result, after passing through the catastrophe of defeat, Japan acquired a system that guaranteed freedom and democracy.
I believe we should accept this history as it is.
Saying that the constitution was “obtained through noble sacrifice” certainly sounds inspiring.
But the people who died in the war might object to being turned, without their consent, into the heroes responsible for creating the constitution.
We lost the war. As a result, we obtained a good constitution.
That is all there is to it.
There is no need to force even history lessons into an uplifting story.