{"id":370,"date":"2026-05-29T04:42:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T04:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/?p=370"},"modified":"2026-05-29T04:42:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T04:42:17","slug":"whose-general-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/?p=370","title":{"rendered":"Whose \u201cGeneral Will\u201d?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Imperial House Law and a Debate Without Its Principal<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Emperor’s position rests, as Article 1 of the Constitution provides, \u201con the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power.\u201d The debate now advancing in the Diet over revising the Imperial House Law moves precisely in the name of this \u201cgeneral will.\u201d A \u201cwill of the legislature\u201d concerning measures to secure the number of imperial family members is about to be assembled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But let us pause and ask: whose will is this general will? Who determines it, and through a procedure of what gravity? And\u2014is the one who must live that position in the flesh counted within this \u201cgeneral will\u201d at all? This essay turns one and the same question upon both the politicians who would hasten the reform and the commentators who would measure it by opinion polls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I.  The General Will Is Not an Opinion Poll<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One commentator, criticizing Tar\u014d As\u014d for \u201cseeking to move the imperial house for the sake of his own legacy,\u201d concludes that \u201cwhat the public desires is the birth of a female\u2014and even a female-line\u2014emperor.\u201d But this single sentence carries a twofold difficulty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, the quality of the figures. The most recent polls show support for a female emperor holding steady at around seventy percent, with acceptance of a female-line emperor exceeding sixty. These are indeed large majorities. Yet a female emperor (a woman ascending the throne) and a female-line emperor (succession through the maternal line) are distinct questions with distinct structures of assent\u2014and the proportion who say they do not understand what \u201cfemale-line emperor\u201d even means is reported to reach ninety percent. One cannot read the figure for an option whose meaning has not landed as straightforwardly \u201cwhat the people want.\u201d Between \u201cfinding acceptable\u201d and \u201clonging for\u201d there remains, still, a distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, and more fundamentally, there is a category error. The \u201cgeneral will\u201d of Article 1 is not the result of a momentary poll, nor the mood of opinion at a given hour, nor the numbers of a single newspaper’s survey. A poll is no more than the aggregation of respondents’ instantaneous reactions, at one point in time, to one particular framing of a question. It may be a trace of the popular mind, but it does not, of itself, carry weight enough to ground the form of the nation’s symbol in perpetuity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here lies the irony. The very commentator who faults As\u014d for \u201cforcing his personal conviction through in the name of the general will\u201d himself thins that will, in another manner, by equating \u201ctoday’s opinion\u201d with it. Only the palanquin differs\u2014\u201ctradition\u201d in one case, \u201cpublic opinion\u201d in the other; the maneuver of enlisting the general will as warrant for one’s preferred direction is the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II.  Where Is the Principal?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here I wish to touch a fissure that almost no one questions head-on. Within the \u201cpeople of Japan\u201d that Article 1 installs as the subject of the \u201cgeneral will,\u201d is the Emperor himself included?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Formally, he is not. The Constitution sets out the Emperor in Chapter I and the \u201crights and duties of the people\u201d in Chapter III, dividing the two structurally. The Emperor holds no franchise and is recorded not in a family register but in the imperial genealogy. Read literally, the \u201cgeneral will\u201d of Article 1 makes the Emperor an object to whom the position is granted by that will\u2014not a subject who shapes it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet it is precisely this formalism that lays bare an inversion. The very person designated as symbol is wholly shut out from forming the \u201cgeneral will\u201d that is the ground of his own position. Freedom of occupation, freedom of marriage, even the freedom to abdicate\u2014none may be decided by his own will. The party most deeply affected can be neither the subject of the decision nor the subject of an opinion upon it. The cost of being a symbol is borne by that person alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, when the Emperor Emeritus signaled his wish to abdicate while living, the government of the day avoided institutionalizing it\u2014on the grounds that it would \u201cundermine the stability of the throne\u201d\u2014and disposed of the matter through a one-time special measure. The rare will the Emperor himself expressed was processed, by the institution, as an exception. This was the moment at which the principle\u2014that the principal’s voice is not counted in forming the \u201cgeneral will\u201d\u2014actually operated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As\u014d, and the commentators who invoke public opinion alike, debate the \u201cmethod\u201d of succession: adoption of a male-line male, a female branch house, acceptance of the female line. But the one who must live that method in the flesh never once appears in the debate as a subject. Even with the proposal to adopt from former princely houses\u2014how far may the \u201cgeneral will\u201d decide the single life of the person being adopted in? This vantage is missing from the debate as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III.  Isomorphic with History: The Emperor Carried Aloft<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To carry the Emperor aloft as a symbol enlisted for one’s own political ends\u2014this maneuver has recurred throughout Japanese history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fujiwara regents, the cloistered emperors of the insei era, the warrior governments that borrowed imperial authority: each, in its own form, operated the figure of the Emperor as a source of its own legitimacy. But the maneuver was carried out most nakedly, and most thoroughly, in the modern era. The Meiji government remade an Emperor of whom most of the populace had scarcely been conscious into the center of national integration. It installed myth as the foundation of the national polity, made the Emperor visible as a living deity, and inscribed him into the body of every subject through the official portrait and the Rescript on Education. This was less an inheritance of tradition than a political reinvention of the Emperor for the purpose of building a modern state. The wartime military took it to its extreme, prosecuting war in the Emperor’s name under the shield of the independence of the supreme command\u2014ultimately beyond even the Emperor’s own will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do not mean to say that the present conduct of Mr. As\u014d or Ms. Takaichi is equivalent to that of the Meiji state or the military. The scale, the violence, and the consequences are altogether different. The one was bound up with state violence, war, and tens of millions of deaths; the other is no more than peacetime maneuvering over an institutional reform conducted within democratic procedure. To set them side by side as equals would dishonor history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet the two are isomorphic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However different in scale and in nature, the form of the maneuver recurring within them is the same: to leave the Emperor out of the reckoning as a party in his own right, and to design only the method of succession in the service of one’s own ends. If Mr. As\u014d is projecting the wishes of his late brother-in-law and his late ally onto the method of succession, making of it the \u201cfinal flourish\u201d that crowns his own political life, then he is using the imperial institution as an apparatus for completing a personal narrative. If Ms. Takaichi’s insistence on male-line males is pursued as the realization of a particular political value\u2014\u201cdeparture from the postwar regime\u201d\u2014then she is turning the succession into an occasion for professing political conviction. In each case, the institution is being moved not for the sake of those who must live it, but for the sake of their own purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between the Meiji deification and today’s debate over revising the Imperial House Law lies an immeasurable rupture. But on the single point of carrying the principal party aloft as an object, the two stand upon a continuous structure. It looks moderate now. But looking moderate is not the same as standing on a different structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV.  Separating the Two Tasks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here I wish to draw a clear line between two tasks that are often bundled together. One is the declining number of imperial family members\u2014a task genuinely pressing now. The other is the principle by which the succession is to be continued. The two differ utterly in their degree of urgency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a matter of fact, there are presently three persons qualified to succeed, and the next generation, too, already includes a male with the qualification to succeed. Succession through the male line is secured, at least for the next reign. If so, the grounds for the urgency\u2014that the method of succession must be fixed all at once while the legislature holds its majority\u2014are not so strong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The decline in the number of imperial family members is, to be sure, a real task. But much of it can be addressed by the proposal that female members retain their status after marriage, thereby securing those who carry out public duties. This is a domain where consensus is relatively easy to reach and where there is reason to move with some dispatch. As far as the creation of female branch houses, one may proceed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem lies in the gesture of bundling the method of succession\u2014above all the proposal to adopt male-line males from former princely houses\u2014into the same package, to be processed all at once. The principle of succession is not a matter of \u201cmaking up for hands that are short now.\u201d It is a matter of deciding by what logic of lineage the imperial line will continue for how many generations to come\u2014the domain in which the general will ought, by rights, to be accumulated over the longest time. Bundle the urgent task (numbers) with the non-urgent one (principle), and the thing that need not be hurried is carried along, hidden within the thing that must. The bundling is itself a technique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And once a point on which consensus has not ripened is made a fait accompli during a period of majority, turning the direction afterward becomes exceedingly difficult. To wall off, while one can, the future options that majorities in the polls already find acceptable\u2014a female emperor, acceptance of the female line: beneath conduct that looks like undue haste, such a motive shows through. This is nothing other than the maneuver of fixing in advance, by procedure, a matter that ought to be \u201cbased on the general will\u201d\u2014before that will has formed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urgency is no justification for walling off the other options. Let the female branch houses proceed. But as for the method of succession, there is\u2014there genuinely is\u2014time to accumulate the general will with care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V.  A Procedure Commensurate with Permanence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

How, then, is the \u201cgeneral will\u201d to be made manifest? That there is no decisive answer here is the very heart of the matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The procedures for determining the will admit of several gradations of gravity. The thinnest is the opinion poll. Next is the popular will mediated through elections\u2014though the Imperial House Law rarely becomes a central electoral issue, and choosing a government can hardly be said to authorize its succession policy. Indeed, in surveys of those elected after the 2026 lower-house election, support for a female emperor fell into the forties, and a clear divergence opened between popular opinion and that of the legislators. Above this stands the resolution of the Diet as a representative body\u2014the level at which proponents would construe \u201cassembling the will of the legislature\u201d as \u201cembodying the general will of the people.\u201d Heavier still, one might demand cross-party, long-horizon deliberation, or a process of national consensus-building. The Constitution wrote \u201cbased on the general will,\u201d but it did not write by which procedure that will is to be fixed. Who fills this blank, and with what force, is exactly what is now contested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the decisive thing is the scale of time. The institution of imperial succession is a mechanism that must function not for one reign or one administration, but across generations. If so, the \u201cgeneral will\u201d that grounds it must, to be commensurate, be not a momentary majority but an accord capable of enduring across generations. Move it by instantaneous opinion, and it becomes a thing movable again by the next instant’s opinion\u2014undermining, of its own accord, the very stability of the throne that this reform is supposed to seek.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As\u014d’s \u201cfinal flourish\u201d and the commentator’s \u201copinion of the moment\u201d suffer the same malady: a temporal scale too short for the essence of the institution. For precisely the same reason that one should not hasten for the sake of someone’s trauma, someone’s bequest, or someone’s term of office, neither should one force the matter through on a passing poll. \u201cCareful handling\u201d is not a mere call for prudence. It is a demand that the gravity of procedure and the scale of time be made commensurate with the permanence of the institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The legitimacy of revising the Imperial House Law is measured neither by the intensity of an initiator’s passion nor by the figures of a momentary poll. It is measured by how faithful it is to the \u201cgeneral will of the people.\u201d And that will cannot truly be satisfied while the principal party is still being carried aloft as an object. To look squarely at the asymmetry by which the symbol himself is shut out from the will that grounds his position\u2014and to run alongside it a second principle: how to weave the dignity and will of that person into the institution. Without this, there can be no permanent or essential institutional design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question to ask is not whether the public \u201cdesires\u201d the female line. It is that for no proposal has a will yet formed that could endure across generations\u2014and this very fact is the quietest and the strongest rebuttal to forcing the foundation of this country through on one individual’s conviction, or on the opinion of a passing moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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