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Studies of the Early Meiji Period have until now been mainly articulated around the issue of continuity and discontinuity between the Edo and Meiji eras. Thus Tokyo has become the central locus of production of multiple discourses on Japanese modernity, urbanity and culture. / This work adopts a discontinuist approach by considering each era as two entirely distinct, although related, historical assemblages. For this, I focus my study on the conditions of production of Tokyo as a modern urban space. The entry into modernity is the crossing of a threshold. As Edo is marked by the order of the general equivalent and the law of the sumptury, Tokyo is produced in abstract space. We shift from an essentially heterogeneous space to a homogeneous, fragmented and hierarchized space. Following Henri Lefebvre, I try to analyze the production of modern abstract space as it is associated with a new mode of control of social space through administrative policies, cartography and urbanism.

The thesis is concerned with three so-called "incidents of intense violence" (gekka jiken) that occurred between late 1882 and late 1884: the Fukushima, Kabasan, and Chichibu incidents. All three revolts occurred simultaneous to, and were connected with, the rise and fall of the "freedom and popular rights movement" (jiyu minken undo), especially with its principal institutional expression, the Jiyuto or "Liberal Party." One of the most important of the connections between the revolts and the Jiyuto is that of their overlapping leadership. For the most part, local Jiyuto leaders served as the leaders of these three revolts. Due to this fact, and the other equally important one of the critical extent to which the local Jiyuto leaders embraced the ideological principles of the national Jiyuto—as opposed to the pragmatic, perhaps cynical, approach toward these principles taken by the national leadership—the "natural right" basis of the Liberal's ideology and its corresponding endorsement of the "right of revolution" filtered down to the farmers, hunters, day-labourers and others who participated in these incidents. Notions of "natural right" were used as guiding principles to govern the aims of their revolutionary organisations and as explanations to justify their attempts to overthrow the government. Popular songs, poems, the courtroom testimony of those participants arrested, the content of their revolutionary manifestos, their statements of aims as presented in their organisational charters, the content of lectures given in peasant villages, by local Jiyuto organisers, and the like attest to the beginnings of a strong liberal-democratic undercurrent existing in the early 1880's among Japan's common people (heimin). These findings call into question the conclusions regarding the early failure of democracy in Japan reached by such noted Western scholars as E. H. Norman, Robert Scalapino, and Nobutaka Ike. This is due partly to the fact that each of these scholars analysed Japan's politics of this period almost exclusively at the level of national, elite figures and thereby ignored the impact that the popular rights movement had upon local politics and rural folk. By neglecting local politics, the above-mentioned scholars prematurely drew the conclusion that Japan's common people acted as a collective Atlas who patiently bore the burdens of modernisation upon their peasant backs in obedient silence. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

In 1868, the Meiji government decided to establish a military system that would improve not only the fighting capacity but also the military discipline of Japan's army. On the one hand the Meiji leaders rebuilt Japan's army with inspiration from Western models, initially the French. On the other hand they adopted from Western countries modern military justice system, that helped to shape gradually the Japanese navy and army in the 19th century.;This thesis delves deep into the introduction and evolution of the military justice system in the Meiji era, in an effort to explain how it helped reshape military discipline within the Imperial Japanese Army. Utilizing a range of primary sources, it studies the creation and enforcement of the military justice system from a military history rather than legal history perspective. It is hoped that this thesis reveals the crucial role that the military justice system played in Japan's military modernization during this period. The findings also explain why military discipline of the Imperial Japanese Army began to decline again after the Russo-Japanese War.

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This is a study of some of the works of the Japanese novelist, Ozaki Koyo (1867-1903). The aim has been to identify the legacy that the fiction of the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) left in his work, so comparatively little attention has been paid to his life or to works that throw no light on this question, such as his adaptations and translations of western literature. Koyo's fiction was influenced by two distinct literary traditions from the Tokugawa period. His interest in ninjobon, a genre of romantic novel, spanned his creative life and imparted to his works a tendency towards complex romantic plots and a concern for realistic dialogue. For a few years, however, this source of influence yielded to another: Koyo was involved in the revival of the works of Ihara Saikaku which took place in the years around 1890, and this profoundly affected his language and style for several years. Attempts to imitate Saikaku's fiction also enabled him to experiment with uses of the narrator that were foreign to ninjobon writers, and he became progressively more interested in probing the minds of his characters. He took these developments further in his last two novels, stimulated both by the western fiction he had read and by current literary fashions. In Tajo takon he used the narrator to express his rejection of views of marriage imported from the West; in Konjiki yasha he combined the qualities of ninjobon with a study of usury. Apart from revealing some of the areas in which Meiji fiction was indebted to tradition, Koyo's works show that the influence of Tokugawst fiction was not always as harmful as it is often supposed to be.

According to parliamentary theory, an executive that is made and unmade by the Lower House of the legislature alone is responsible to that House. But an executive whose existence is not solely dependent on the legislature is not responsible to the legislature. In such systems, usually the main branches of government have specific functions, possess limited rights of veto over one another, and have independent existences. They are known as separation-of-powers systems. The purpose of the thesis is to discover whether the prewar Japanese polity approximated more closely to a parliamentary system or a separation-of-powers system. Its method is to identify all the political institutions which made and unmade the executive in 1890-1940. When institutions are not easily identifiable, for example, when a cabinet resigned because of public rioting, the influences responsible for Cabinet changes are translated into politico-institutional forces. Because there was always a struggle over the selection of Prime Ministers and then over Cabinet seats, the selection of Prime Ministers is examined separately from the formation of cabinets. A classification of the reasons for Cabinet composition and its rise and fall is used to determine whether institutional relationships are better understood in terms of parliamentary or separation-of-powers theory. The results of the investigation reveal that: i) Each of the prewar political institutions had a separate identifiable function and tried to have the executive pursue the policies it desired in matters related to its function. ii) Each institution possessed a limited veto power over each of the others and used this power to ensure that the Cabinet included representatives from it. The Cabinet regularly consisted of representatives from most institutions: the two Houses of the Diet, the Army, the Wavy, and the Civil Service. iii) Each institution had an existence independent of each of the others, and only the Cabinet never had an independent power base. Usually at least three institutions had to support a new Prime Minister before he could assume office, and usually two had to conspire to force his resignation. Because only rarely could any single institution on its own raise or pull down an entire ministry, the existence of the Cabinet was separate from each individual institution and the Cabinet was not responsible to any. Separation-of-powers theory alone emphasises the lack of the executive's total dependence on the legislature, or on any other institution for that matter. The need for at least three institutions to raise and two to pull down a ministry indicates that the Cabinet never had a completely independent existence. Not having its own separate power base, it was the joint creation of other institutions. Though its existence was separate from each individual institution, its rise and fall was not independent of combinations of other institutions. The prewar Japanese polity, however, bore only a slight similarity to a parliamentary system, in which the executive is entirely dependent on the Lower House of the legislature. Because only very rarely could the Lower House of the legislature on its own pull down an entire ministry, only occasionally were parliamentary type forces present, and the polity functioned regularly as a separation-of-powers system. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

Esta dissertação intenta investigar como a condição de vida da escritora Higuchi Ichiyô vai modificando o seu pensamento literário levando-a à criação do universo da obra Nigorie (Enseada de águas turvas) tentando desvendar seus ideais sociais. A partir de sua visão perspicaz sobre as condições sociais do país, Ichiyô foi a primeira escritora da época a expressar de forma tão direta a tristeza das mulheres abandonadas por uma sociedade desumana. Considerando a importância da vivência pessoal de Ichiyô, um estudo sobre sua vida faz-se necessário para compreender a trajetória percorrida pela autora até a obra em questão. Ichiyô viveu nos arredores dos bairros de prostituição e manteve contato direto com o mundo das meretrizes, e essas experiências serviram-se de subsídios para a sua criação literária. Nigorie descreve a limitada e infeliz vida das mulheres socialmente degradadas que trabalham em um bairro de prostituição clandestina e os homens que o freqüentam. Sente-se em Nigorie um desejo velado de Ichiyô em denunciar ao mundo essa triste realidade e protestar contra a pobreza e o sistema social japonês de sua época. / This dissertation intends to investigate how the condition of life of writer Higuchi Ichiyô starts to modify her literary thought leading her to the creation of the universe of her work Nigorie (Troubled Creek) attempting to reveal her social ideals. From her talented vision on the social conditions of the country, Ichiyô was the first writer of her time to express in such a direct way the sadness of the women abandoned by an inhuman society. Considering the importance of the personal experience of Ichiyô a study upon her life becomes necessary to understand the trajectory the author went through as far as her work inherently. Ichiyô used to live in the outskirts of the prostitution quarters, keeping in touch with the world of prostitutes. These experiences turned into subsidies for her literary creation. Nigorie describes the limited and unhappy life of socially degraded women who work in a quarter of clandestine prostitution as well as the men who frequent it. It is felt in Nigorie a hidden desire of Ichiyô in denouncing this sad reality to the world, and besides, her intention to protest against the poverty and the Japanese social system of her time.