'The People with whom Resides Sovereign Power’: Environment, Citizen Activism, and Popular Sovereignty in Postwar Japan

• In Event: Current Challenges to Japanese Constitutionalism

Abstract

The two defining characteristics of the Constitution of Japan are popular sovereignty and renunciation of war. The latter is in Article IX, and much debate has centered on how far it can be stretched by interpretation or legislation, and whether it should be amended. Here I shall focus instead on the meaning of the first principle, proclaimed in the first sentence of the preface to the constitution and in Article I, the fact that sovereignty lies with the people. I do this through the lens of Japan’s postwar environmental history and citizen activism. I argue that, as with the renunciation of war, it is only through practice that the principle of popular sovereignty is given life and meaning, and that it is continually defined and redefined through practice.
The big question after the constitution took effect was whether and to what extent Japan’s citizens would retain the constitution, make it their own, and use the rights and freedoms it granted them to make themselves truly sovereign. Environmental historians study the mutual interactions between the environment and human beings, and also the environment-related interactions among human beings and our institutions. Minamata is often called a shukuzu, or miniature portrait, of modern Japan, and the four so-called “solutions” to Minamata disease involve the exercise of virtually all of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the constitution. Each of these four “solutions” might therefore be seen as a key moment and a partial measure of the health of popular sovereignty.

Author

• Timothy George, University of Rhode Island