‘What Is Good about the Japanese System of Governance?’—The Reception of Imperial Japanese Parliamentarism in Siamese/Thai Political Thought (1880s–1940s)

Abstract

This article identifies the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and the Japanese Imperial Diet opened in 1890 as crucial reference points in the development of Siamese/Thai political ideas from the 1880 s to the 1940s. Before the Siamese revolution of 1932, which introduced a constitutional monarchy, critics of the Siamese absolute monarchy saw in the Japanese Empire the proof that constitutional and parliamentarian government were the necessary foundations of full national independence, progress, and economic development. But the Meiji Constitution would develop its most profound and persistent influence in Siam only after the revolution. At this junction, royalists discovered Japan as an exemplar of a constitutional monarchy with broad royal prerogatives, which they wished to enshrine in Siam as well. The constitutions most informed by Imperial Japan were thus the royalist constitutions of 1947 and 1949. While they were short-lived, the Japanese constitutional influence remains alive in Thailand today in the form of Article 6 of the Constitution of the Kingdom of 2017, which is a translation of Article 3 of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, stipulating the sacrosanct status of the emperor, first adopted in Siam/Thailand in 1932.