The Concept of ‘Oriental Despotism’ in Modern Japanese Intellectual Discourse

Abstract

This article explores the historical semantic changes of the concept ‘Oriental despotism’ in modern Japan. In premodern Japanese political discourses, the term sensei (despotic rule) was already widely known among Confucian scholars via the ancient Chinese classic Zuo Zhuan. However, it was the introduction and wide circulation of Montesquieu’s De l‘esprit des lois (The Spirit of Law, 1748) in the early Meiji period that instilled in the modern Japanese language the concept Toyoteki senseishugi (Oriental despotism), a complex orientalist explanation of Asia’s authoritarian system of rules. Though first a concept that informed the Meiji authority of the civilizational hierarchy of different forms of government and warned of the need for constitutional democracy, Oriental despotism became, in the course of Japan’s growing encounters with its Asian neighbours after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the theoretical premise of a ‘stagnant Asia’ and served as an ideological justification for Japan’s expansion in Asia. This article analyses the different perspectives, arguments, and rhetorical manoeuvres of the Japanese political and social scientists who most actively contributed to the discourse on Oriental despotism from the early Meiji period to the postwar era. It identifies four independent yet related discourses on Oriental despotism in modern Japan and argues that the influx to Japan in the 1930s and 1940s of theories on society’s modern transformation had ultimately determined how this concept would be interpreted, applied, and understood in postwar Japan.