The First Elected Leaders in Japan’s Capital City: Former Shogunal Retainers in the Tokyo Prefectural Assembly

Abstract

After the Tokugawa shogunate collapsed in 1868, shogunal retainers in the castle town of Edo, now renamed Tokyo, were forced to rebuild their lives under a new regime. A small number of them eventually reemerged as political journalists and, through involvement in progressive political movements, came to lead the city’s newly established local assembly. Focusing on two such assembly leaders, Fukuchi Gen’ichirō and Numa Morikazu, this essay describes how these shogunal-retainer-turned-journalists tried to build political networks around the Tokyo Prefectural Assembly in the late 1870s and the early 1880s. As the new government abolished the feudal status system and gradually introduced representative government, Tokyo’s socio-political structure underwent dramatic change. Fukuchi and Numa’s attempts were therefore exploratory in nature. modernizers though they were, the legacy of Tokugawa Japan and Edo nevertheless deeply influenced them when they approached their local constituencies. Reconstructing their efforts to define representative politics for the new city of Tokyo can help us understand the early-modern to modern transition in Japan’s capital city.