History of Japanese Nationality - Practices Initiated in Meiji Period

Practices Initiated in Meiji Period

Nationality practices during the first decades of the Meiji government were shaped by pressure to conform to western norms. Meiji oligarchs saw adopting the technology and institutions of western powers not only as essential to regaining sovereignty rights lost in the unequal treaties but also as an effective means of national strengthening. Like the reforms of other modernizing states, the legal and institutional changes of the early Meiji period involved rationalizing the population, making the relationship between the individual and the state more direct, and codifying the rights and obligations associated with that relationship. By the late 1880s, Japanese leaders were increasingly preoccupied with the idea of cultivating a distinctive sense of the nation, or kokutai (国体) among Japanese subjects. This goal led to the emergence of new nationality practices—such as compulsory education, elections, and voluntary organizations—which, unlike earlier reforms based on borrowing from western models, were strongly shaped by the emerging ideology of Japanese nationalism.

The following is a list of nationality practices initiated during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Though these practices and the ideology that informed them changed over the course of the Meiji period and subsequent decades, they remained the core of Japanese nationality practice through World War II.