Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

This was nowhere more apparent than in the concept of “the people,” which was central to the Americans’ notion of popular sovereignty, with all the evocative historical and cultural connotations of “We the People” that were embedded in the American experience. The Japanese had no comparable tradition of popular sovereignty. The Meiji Constitution spoke of “subjects” (shinmin) rather than “people” as such, and Matsumoto and his aides were faced with the question of what word to use to use for “people” in their adaptation. One possibility was jinmin, the term commonly used in translations of the U.S. Constitution or Abraham Lincoln’s classic formulation of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” In contemporary usage, however, jinmin had socialist and communist connotations and conveyed a sense of the people resisting authority. Although an initial government translation of the GHQ draft prepared by the Foreign Ministry rendered “people” as jinmin, Matsumoto and satō discarded this in favor of kokumin, an inherently more conservative term. Written with two ideographs denoting “country” and “people,” kokumin is an everyday word that carries connotations of the people harmoniously merged in the nation. There is no intimation here of a potentially adversarial relationship between the people and the nation, the state, or the highest authorities—including, of course, the emperor. On the contrary, as the government subsequently took care to explain, the concept ...