Kōchi: The People on the First Page

Farmers, merchants, craftspeople, boatmen and wet nurses appear at the beginning of Ueki Emori's Minken jiyūron, “On the People's Rights and Freedom.” The author addresses them respectfully, asking permission to interrupt. He has something to explain: each possesses a treasure. It is neither money nor precious stones, but freedom and rights. The book appeared in 1879. A copy now deposited at Kōchi's Freedom and People's Rights Memorial Museum preserves this opening invitation.^[1]

The list gives the word “people” occupations and relationships. A reader need not be a minister, a scholar or even someone already interested in constitutional arrangements to be addressed. Yet appearing in a book's greeting did not confer a vote or oblige an official to hear a petition. Those connections had to be argued over separately.

Around Kōchi, the movement's places are dispersed: a monument where the Risshisha political society operated, sites associated with Itagaki Taisuke, and the modern museum that brings documents together. There is no single surviving assembly room containing the whole story. The materials instead preserve several ways of taking part—studying, reading, publishing, petitioning and listening—and the different limits each encountered.

Five years before Ueki's book, Itagaki and seven fellow signatories had submitted a petition demanding an elected assembly. Itagaki, a former official of the new Meiji government, had left office in the political crisis of 1873. The petition went to the government's Left Chamber on 17 January 1874. The next day it appeared in the newspaper Nisshin shinjishi.^[2]

Its two destinations mattered. The submission asked people holding office to act. Publication made the argument available to people outside the office receiving it. A government could decline the requested institution without preventing the existence of that printed argument.

The petition's authors charged that authority rested with a narrow body of officials rather than with the imperial household or the population. They argued that paying taxes carried a corresponding right to discuss and judge government business. Representation, in their account, would also improve communication between government and governed. These were the petitioners' claims about how an assembly should work, not a description of an institution already operating.^[3]

They anticipated an objection: that the population lacked sufficient knowledge for representative government. Their reply reversed the proposed sequence. Participation itself, they argued, would give people reasons to learn and assume responsibility. Waiting for them to become sufficiently informed before establishing an assembly would postpone the very practice through which that knowledge could develop.

This made education part of a disagreement about timing. Was political participation the result of preparation, or also a means of acquiring it? The petition argued for beginning before the process was complete. It nevertheless left the detailed design of the proposed assembly largely outside its scope. A demand could circulate well before there was agreement about all the rules needed to put it into effect.

In Kōchi, organization acquired a more regular local form. Risshisha was established in 1874 by associates including Itagaki and Kataoka Kenkichi. Its concerns joined political discussion to the livelihoods of former samurai and the education of their children. The society supported a school, commercial activity, legal study and debates. Its site is now marked in Obiyamachi, within the commercial center of the city.^[4]

The school, Risshi Gakusha, had premises of its own. A museum account places its move in 1876 to Itagaki's former residence in Honmachi. A house connected with a political leader thus entered this history as accommodation for teaching, rather than simply as a birthplace or a later shrine to his career.^[5]

A surviving report from the first half of 1877 makes the teaching unusually concrete. It records examinations and attendance. Alongside it, the museum reproduces a curriculum divided into eleven classes. Advanced reading included Bentham on law, Mill on political economy and representative government, and a work on international law. Other classes used English grammar, readers, history and arithmetic. The political books stood within a course of study requiring language and other skills, not by themselves on a list of approved opinions.

The report also distinguishes several measures of a student's work. Term examinations, smaller reading examinations, attendance and arithmetic contributed to the recorded results. A class could be associated with particular books while individual students accumulated different marks. The society's public ambitions were accompanied by routines in which someone had to return, prepare, read and be assessed.

That is a different scale from the petition's appeal to the nation. A school could work intensively with enrolled pupils. Its timetable and graded books provided continuity, but could not reach every person whom a writer might include in an opening salutation. The movement therefore had more than one educational problem: training people who undertook sustained study and addressing those who would never enter that classroom.

The distinction survives even though the old rooms do not. The report, preserved by Kōchi's municipal library and reproduced by the museum, records an institution doing repeated work. The marker supplies a neighborhood; the document supplies activities that a stone alone cannot recover.

Ueki's 1879 greeting takes a route unlike the school's sequence of English books. The preface asks its reader to consider a familiar list of valuable things. Money, gold, silver and jewels are offered as possible answers to the question of the treasure. Each is displaced by the author's answer: rights and freedom. The comparison supplies an entry into his argument before he has required the reader to master a technical vocabulary.^[1]

The form of the page assists that invitation. Reading glosses accompany the Chinese characters, while the prose uses conversational turns. The author closes the preface by asking for attention to the writing, presenting the reader's effort as a counterpart to his own. At its foot he signs as the youngest brother of thirty-five million people. This is a chosen relationship with his audience, not a claim that thirty-five million people read the book.

The museum's study of the volume also identifies an appended song, the Minken iroha uta. Its account connects the lyrics with the use of familiar tunes to convey political ideas. The appendix offered a further possible route beyond solitary reading: words could be learned and repeated aloud.^[6]

None of these devices lets us count the readers persuaded or identify every occasion when the song was sung. Their more immediate significance is visible in the object. The author supplied several aids to entering the subject: a respectful address, a question about value, pronunciation guides and a song. They do different jobs. A gloss helps someone pronounce a character; a familiar comparison gives that person something to consider; repetition offers a way of retaining words.

Placed beside the school report, the booklet makes the range of the undertaking clearer. Intensive instruction and an accessible introduction were not interchangeable. Nor did either automatically create an electorate. They prepared different kinds of encounter with political language while the institutions to which that language referred remained contested.

Risshisha also had to decide how its arguments should leave Kōchi. During the Satsuma rebellion of 1877, some members considered armed action. Others, including Ueki, opposed that course and prepared a petition to the emperor. Its requests included an elected assembly, constitutional government, reduced land taxation and the abolition of conscription.^[7]

Kataoka presented the document at the emperor's temporary residence in Kyoto. It was rejected within days on the stated ground of disrespectful content. The surviving copy in the National Diet Library has an accompanying memorandum concerning the rejection. What remains is therefore both a proposal and a record of its treatment.

The episode separates agreement on a grievance from agreement on action. A political society could contain people considering different responses to the same government. The document records one course taken; it does not make the entire membership uniformly committed to it.

In 1880, the effort acquired a broader organizational scale. Associations formed a League for the Establishment of a National Assembly. Kataoka and another delegate, Kōno Hironaka, attempted to submit its request to two central institutions, the Grand Council of State and the Senate. Neither received it.^[8]

This was an obstacle before debate over the proposal's merits. The associations could convene, prepare a text and choose representatives. They could not compel an official body to accept the resulting document. Their own procedures gave the request collective authorship without granting it a recognized place in government business.

Meanwhile, the preparation continued. The league later asked participating organizations to bring constitutional proposals. This required another kind of writing: not simply asking for an assembly, but setting out the powers it might possess. A political society's work could persist through a refusal, while changing the kind of document it produced.

Readers also encountered limits on what could reach them. A group of small publications acquired by the Kōchi museum records repeated changes of title and format in 1882–1883. Their publisher, Kōchi Jiyū Shinshi-sha, was involved with the local movement's press. One of the journals belonged to Hatsuyōsha, a political association in Ushioe.^[9]

The sequence begins with a booklet issued in June 1882. In July, its thirteenth number changed to newspaper format under the title Kōchi Jiyū Shinbun. It served as a substitute for the suspended Doyō Shinbun. Later notices show another change being prepared, this time to a magazine called Kōchi Jiyū Shinshi.

The similar names should not conceal the different objects. A newspaper issue and a booklet-form magazine offered different containers for continuing publication. The surviving notices discuss permission, suspension and prohibition alongside plans for the next title. The means of reaching readers had become part of the news given to them.

Five issues of the magazine survive in the museum's acquired group, dated from November to December 1882. The first reports the prohibition of the newspaper. The magazine itself then ceased. Another publication appeared in January 1883; the museum identifies it as a probable successor, rather than a conclusively documented continuation under an unchanged organization.

These objects preserve an interrupted sequence, not a smooth expansion of influence. A short life in print did not necessarily mean that the writers had run out of things to say. It could record an administrative obstacle and another attempt to find a usable form. Conversely, changing the title did not guarantee that the new publication would be allowed to continue.

At the Risshisha monument, “discussion” can sound like a single activity conducted in one hall. The publications extend it into a local network of associations, publishers and prospective readers. They also preserve the work needed to keep that network supplied when the previous title could no longer appear.

The question of who could participate became particularly concrete for Kusunose Kita, a Kōchi woman who headed her household. In 1878, a newspaper reported her challenge to the prefectural authorities: she paid taxes as a household head, as men did, but lacked their electoral right. Tax liability and political entitlement, already linked in the 1874 petition, were being brought together in a specific local claim.^[10]

The dispute concerned more than whether a woman could listen to political discussion. Kita attended Risshisha's speeches and observed assembly proceedings. The museum's account distinguishes these activities from making speeches herself, for which it reports no surviving record. A person could be deeply engaged as a listener and petitioner while still challenging a separate exclusion from voting.

In 1880, regulations for Kōchi's Kami-machi council included women in the franchise. The prefecture initially required a male restriction. The town continued negotiations for three months, after which the provision was accepted; neighboring Kodakasaka village adopted a similar rule. These were local arrangements, not a nationwide grant of women's suffrage. A change to the town-and-village council law in 1884 ended the local latitude on which they depended.

The episode gives “participation” several distinct meanings within a few years. Listening to a speech, presenting a claim and voting under a local rule did not carry identical permissions. Nor did achieving one secure the others permanently. A rule accepted for one locality could later be displaced by a national framework.

Women also appeared as speakers and participants in Kōchi's political gatherings. Museum curator Hamada Miyū points to the seventeen-year-old Ōhara Chitose speaking at a gathering and to female students attending a large meeting. These examples sit uneasily beside a contemporary newspaper's assertion that the region had produced no woman rights activist.^[11] The contrast is between a published description and documented activities, not evidence that all participants enjoyed equal standing.

Ueki's constitutional proposal of August 1881 gave institutional detail to concerns that his introductory book had presented conversationally. It placed legislative authority with the population, proposed a central role for an assembly and envisaged a federal arrangement influenced by the United States and Switzerland. It retained an emperor with military and diplomatic responsibilities. This was his proposed constitution, prepared in the context of Risshisha's drafting work, not the constitution later enacted.^[12]

The different form required different decisions. A preface could address farmers and wet nurses together without specifying an electoral procedure. A constitutional draft had to assign powers and describe relationships among institutions. Moving from one to the other did not simply mean making the same sentences more formal; it meant answering questions the greeting had left open.

When Japan held its first House of Representatives election in July 1890, the franchise was restricted to men aged at least twenty-five who paid at least fifteen yen in direct national taxes. Ueki and Kataoka were among those elected from Kōchi. Their political work entered an assembly, but the electorate did not encompass everyone whom Ueki had addressed eleven years earlier.^[13]

Kōchi's memorial museum opened a century later, in 1990. Its collection and published studies preserve documents that do not all belong to one continuous institutional archive: a privately owned book on deposit, a school report held by the municipal library, and publications brought into the museum through later collecting.^[14] Their present proximity is a work of historical gathering. The building is not a surviving headquarters from which the nineteenth-century campaign was directed.

The scattered sites become more informative through these particular materials. The old residence was available for a school; the society required premises; publishers supplied texts; petitioners sought a receiving institution. Each connection made some activity possible without settling every question about public rights.

The people on Ueki's first page were invited to hear an argument. Whether they could publish a reply, have a petition accepted, vote in a town council or choose a national representative depended on other arrangements. Kōchi preserves that distance between an inclusive address and particular powers—not as an empty interval before parliament, but as years filled with study, argument, changing publications and claims that required separate answers.