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Fragmented Legitimacy: The Rhetorical Construction of Constitutional Legitimacy in Postwar Japan

ABSTRACT In the light of constitutional transition from the Meiji Constitution (1889–1946) to the Constitution of Japan (1946-), Japanese intellectuals faced the issue of constructing new constitutional legitimacy in place of the previous one. This legitimacy-building became fragmented between the postwar liberal and conservative: while the former regards the liberal values in the postwar constitution as a new legitimacy, the latter attributes the traditional emperor system to it. However, the extant scholarship has not analysed the details of this fragmented discourse as a whole. This paper examines how the four notable Japanese postwar intellectuals from both liberal and conservative sides –Miyazawa Toshiyoshi, Maruyama Masao, Tsuda Sōkichi, and Watsuji Tetsurō – used rhetorical tropes to account for new legitimacy. The paper studies the intellectuals’ tropes from three rhetorical axes: target audience (particular-cosmopolitan), legitimate source (historicity-normativity), and historical identity (continuity-discontinuity). In doing so, it makes two claims. First, the fragmented frameworks of the postwar constitutional legitimacy are the matter of different tropological constructions of rhetorical/persuasive discourse. Second, the postwar fragmentation of constitutional legitimacy reflects the foundational condition of the contemporary debate over constitutional revision: Japan as a whole has not yet legitimised the postwar constitution as their own.