This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

The 1889 Meiji constitution: how it actually worked, the establishment of the Diet and the shifting roles and interests of the parties. A Japanese classic translated by one our leading authorities.

A careful analysis of Japan's dealings with its legal system through a time of unprecedented change (1868- 1960). A must for scholars of Japanese studies, historians and jurists alike.

Less noticed in the West than wars, terrorism and economic trends has been the historic development since World War II of constitutional government and law in Asia. Lawrence W. Beer has been a close observer of Asian linkages among law, politics, culture, and national security issues for over fifty years. His perspectives have been refined during long residence in Asia, especially Japan, by substantial friendly interactions with Asian legal scholars, judges and attorneys involved in the world of human rights constitutional law. This volume, which will be widely welcomed by students and researchers, brings together a selection of Beer’s many works previously published in diverse venue, but no longer easily accessible. The collection opens with a review of constitutionalism in Asia and the United States and concludes with a recent examination of Japan’s rejection of war: ‘Japan’s Constitutional Discourse and Performance’. By way of Afterword, the author offers an in-depth review of ‘Globalization of Human Rights in the 21st Century’.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Japan’s Holy War reveals how a radical religious ideology drove the Japanese to imperial expansion and global war. Bringing to light a wealth of new information, Walter A. Skya demonstrates that whatever other motives the Japanese had for waging war in Asia and the Pacific, for many the war was the fulfillment of a religious mandate. In the early twentieth century, a fervent nationalism developed within State Shintō. This ultranationalism gained widespread military and public support and led to rampant terrorism; between 1921 and 1936 three serving and two former prime ministers were assassinated. Shintō ultranationalist societies fomented a discourse calling for the abolition of parliamentary government and unlimited Japanese expansion. Skya documents a transformation in the ideology of State Shintō in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. He shows that within the religion, support for the German-inspired theory of constitutional monarchy that had underpinned the Meiji Constitution gave way to a theory of absolute monarchy advocated by the constitutional scholar Hozumi Yatsuka in the late 1890s. That, in turn, was superseded by a totalitarian ideology centered on the emperor: an ideology advanced by the political theorists Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko in the 1910s and 1920s. Examining the connections between various forms of Shintō nationalism and the state, Skya demonstrates that where the Meiji oligarchs had constructed a quasi-religious, quasi-secular state, Hozumi Yatsuka desired a traditional theocratic state. Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko went further, encouraging radical, militant forms of extreme religious nationalism. Skya suggests that the creeping democracy and secularization of Japan’s political order in the early twentieth century were the principal causes of the terrorism of the 1930s, which ultimately led to a holy war against Western civilization.