Kokutai
The Japanese compound word joins koku (國, "country; nation; province; land") and tai (體, "body; substance; object; structure; form; style").
The 2nd century BC Guliang zhuan (榖梁傳; 'Guliang's Commentary') to the Spring and Autumn Annals glosses dafu (大夫; 'high minister', 'senior official') as guoti metaphorically meaning "embodiment of the country".
Aizawa Seishisai (会沢正志斎, 1782–1863) was an authority on Neo-Confucianism and leader of the Mitogaku (水戸学 "Mito School") that supported direct restoration of the Imperial House of Japan.
He popularized the word kokutai in his 1825 Shinron (新論 "New Theses"), which also introduced the term Sonnō jōi ("revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians").
Aizawa idealized this divinely-ruled ancient Japan as a form of saisei itchi (祭政一致 "unity of religion and government") or theocracy.
For early Japanese Neo-Confucian scholars, linguist Roy Andrew Miller says, "kokutai meant something still rather vague and ill defined.
"[1]: 83 Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916) and Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) were Meiji period scholars who analyzed the dominance of Western civilization and urged progress for the Japanese nation.
The Kokutai-seitai distinction enabled conservatives to identify clearly as Kokutai, National Essence, the "native Japanese", eternal, and immutable aspects of their polity, derived from history, tradition, and custom, and focused on the Emperor.
[3] In order to maintain support for the existing social system and for this view as the state for a machine for conducting foreign policy, the idea of the kokutai was popularized with the Japanese people being liked to one vast family under the rule of the patriarchal god-emperor.
Article 4 declares that "the Emperor is the head of the Empire, combining in Himself the rights of sovereignty", uniting the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, although subject to the "consent of the Imperial Diet".
[9] Nihon shugi is an ideology that values the traditional Japanese spirit and sets the tone of the state and society; it emerged in this period as a reaction to the Meiji government's radical Europeanization policy.
[11] Paradoxically, the Russian-Japanese war emphasised these concerns about the cracks in the unity of the kokutai as it was believed that the principle reason for Russia's defeat was the gulf between the aristocratic officers of the Imperial Russian Army vs. the "salt-of-the-earth" common Russian soldiers, and that if a similar gulf were to emerge in Japanese society, then Japan too would be defeated in war.
[11] The purpose of the Zaigo Gunjin Kai was to solidify support for the kokutai as defined by the Imperial Japanese Army, which marked the beginning of the IJA as a political force.
[13] This militarization of the educational system led to a marked xenophobic and militaristic mood amongst the Japanese people who had been indoctrinated into believing to fight and die for the god-Emperor as the leader of the kokutai was their highest duty.
The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 forbade both forming and belonging to any organization that proposed altering the kokutai or the abolishment of private property, effectively criminalizing socialism, communism, republicanism, democracy and other anti-Tenno ideologies.
[19] Brave warriors united in justice In spirit a match for a million – Ready like the myriad cherry blossoms to scatter In the spring sky of the Shōwa Restoration.
[19] The national debates over kokutai led the Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe to appoint a committee of Japan's leading professors to deliberate the matter.
[13] The document known as the Kokutai no Hongi was actually a pamphlet of 156 pages, an official publication of the Japanese Ministry of Education, first issued in March 1937 and eventually circulated in millions of copies throughout the home islands and the empire.
[23] Brownlee concludes that after the Kokutai no Hongi proclamation, It is clear that at this stage in history, they were no longer dealing with a concept to generate spiritual unity like Aizawa Seishisai in 1825, or with a political theory of Japan designed to accommodate modern institutions of government, like the Meiji Constitution.
The committee of professors from prestigious universities sought to define the essential truths of Japan, which might be termed religious, or even metaphysical, because they required faith at the expense of logic and reason.
[1]: 95 In the 21st century, Japanese nationalists, such as those affiliated with the Nippon Kaigi lobby, have begun using the phrase "kunigara" (国柄, "national character").
