Tōyō Dai-Nihonkoku Kokken-an

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The Tōyō Dai-Nihonkoku Kokken-an ( Japanese 東洋 大 日本国 国 憲 按 , about "draft constitution for the state of Greater Japan in the Far East") was a draft constitution by Ueki Emori in 1881 for the Japanese Empire . It was one of the most radical bourgeois drafts of a constitution to emerge from the freedom and civil rights movement that demanded a constitution and parliamentary representation from the Tennō and Meiji oligarchies. The draft reached the public through the press, but was also considered too radical by liberal representatives of the government.

The draft constitution contains many civil rights that were only realized in the post-war constitution , and many more, including an explicit right of resistance to the overthrow of a tyrannical government. The draft did not affect the institution of a hereditary emperor (but instead of Tennō called it kōtei , a term that is otherwise used for foreign monarchs), and also assigned it considerable powers. Despite the extensive civil rights, the draft contained sovereignty shared between the people and the monarch instead of popular sovereignty. The legislature should exercise a directly elected rempō rippōin ("federal legislature ") from a chamber. With the replacement of thePrefectures by states ( shū ), united in a federation ( rempō ), the draft also contained the basis of a federal order for Japan.

The Meiji oligarchy around Itō Hirobumi did not take into account the more radical ideas of the civil rights movement and based the creation of the Meiji constitution on the Prussian and British models. However, the draft inspired later draft constitution and after the Pacific War the work of Kempō Kenkyūkai around Takano Iwasaburō , one of several civil groups who developed drafts for a post-war constitution; these drafts in turn influenced the draft constitution of the occupation authorities.

literature

  • Kyōko Inoue: MacArthur's Japanese Constitution: a linguistic and cultural study of its making , University of Chicago Press 1991, p. 62 ff. (Contains the text of the draft constitution in Appendix Five, p. 133 ff.)
  • Makiyo Hori: The Constitution of Japan: A Logical Extension of the Ueki Draft Constitution (1881) and the American Constitution's Bill of Rights in: Joseph Barton Starr (Ed.): The United States constitution: Its Birth, Growth, and Influence in Asia , Hong Kong University Press 1988.

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