To establishment figures such as Shidehara, Matsumoto, and Yoshida, constitutional revision was a frivolous notion, one more bee in the American bonnet, and initially they did not take MacArthur’s statements about it very seriously. Privately, Shidehara told both Konoe and Kido Kōichi that revision was neither necessary nor desirable. In his view, it would be sufficient to simply develop a more democratic interpretation of the Meiji charter.
