Power and Dissent in Imperial Japan: Three Forms of Political Engagement, (Paperback)

This volume examines the careers and intellectual positions of three prominent Japanese "dissidents" in the later Imperial period--Minobe Tatsukichi, Sakai Toshihiko, and Saitō Takao--as individual responses to the new forms of authority that appeared after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The principles to which each adhered--the rule of law, socialist egalitarianism, and representative government--contributed to the new ideas about authority and the individual in post-Restoration Japan. They also remain fundamental (at least in theory) in today's Japanese polity and society.

The study reaffirms the serious limitations of the pre-war Japanese political system, its structural and institutional problems, and deep-rooted ambivalence about democratic change.