Abstract
ABSTRACT This article aims at clarifying the influence of Joseph de Maistre on the monarchical idea of Kuga Katsunan. Whereas the first generation of Japanese intellectuals in the Meiji era like Fukuzawa Yukichi tried to unconditionally absorb and assimilate European ideas and knowledge, Kuga Katsunan learned from de Maistre how to resist the Europeanisation of Japan. Kuga’s nationalism maintained Japan’s ‘independence’ without, however, rejecting European ideas and knowledge, and considered Japanese nationalist ideas and knowledge as the new ones that were born internally from the spontaneous development of a set of Japanese traditional ideas and knowledge. These values derive, concretely, from the communitarianism of knowledge that Maistre developed against the individualism of the Enlightenment. According to Joseph de Maistre’s thought on the sovereign, the sovereign’s function consists in connecting all nations to their national reason. This thought influences Kuga’s ideas on the emperor of Japan: his emphasis on Japan’s ‘unbroken line of emperors’, on the emperor’s coordination of three political powers, on the Constitution’s superiority to the emperor, and on the emperor’s lack of any particular inclination.
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