The Meiji Constitution and Article 28 (1889)

In the winter of 1867, the new magistrate of Nagasaki, Kawazu, sent for Takagi Sen'emon of Urakami. It was night. An officer carrying a lantern led him into the great hall of the Tateyama office, and the attendants withdrew until the two men were alone.¹Kawazu spoke gently. Sen'emon was ill, and the magistrate thanked him for walking so far. The Christian teaching, he said, was a good teaching; that was why no one would be put to death for it. But it was still forbidden, and the others had all recanted. "You are the only one left."¹

Sen'emon explained his faith: God had been before all things and made all things, and he could not turn from God even for the shogun. Kawazu tried another road. The Buddha also taught people to honour their parents and do good to others; why not do the same things under the Buddha's name? Then he made his real offer. Christianity was good, he agreed, but it did not yet have the shogun's permission. Until it did, why not take a small detour, "and simply believe in your heart"?¹

Sen'emon answered: "I cannot believe in the heart alone."¹

Kawazu offered more. He would excuse Sen'emon's own household from worshipping at shrines and temples. Sen'emon said that he had parents, brothers and neighbours, and if they were not all allowed, he could not accept it for himself alone. "The more you examine us, the more we want to keep it."¹Kawazu said that he had lived three years in France and knew the teaching was good. All he asked was this: outwardly follow the Buddhist law and keep Christianity in your heart; just do not practise it in the open.¹When the interview ended he pressed a little money on the sick man to buy food. Sen'emon thanked him warmly and would not touch it.¹

Twenty-two years later the Japanese state wrote down, in its highest law, almost exactly the bargain Kawazu had offered.

When the notice boards against Christianity came down in 1873 and the Urakami exiles went home, nothing in law said that Christianity was permitted.²The historian Helen Ballhatchet sums up the years that followed: there were still cases of persecution, Christian burials remained difficult until at least 1884, and the legal position of Christianity stayed ambiguous until the Constitution of 1889.²

The Catholic Church used those years to rebuild. In 1874 Iwanaga Maki and her companions formed a community of Japanese women at Urakami under Father de Rotz; Japan, a single vicariate under Bishop Petitjean since 1866, was divided into two vicariates in 1876 and three in 1888.³Priority was given to a Japanese clergy. Twenty-three Japanese priests were ordained between 1882 and 1894, after fifteen years of training, and most of them came from families that had held religious posts in the hidden communities: the sons of the baptizers and the keepers of the calendar.³

The Constitution was promulgated on 11 February 1889. Among the ministers who countersigned it was the Minister of Education, Viscount Mori Arinori.⁴On that same morning, as Thomas John Hastings records, a right-wing assassin broke into Mori's home and killed him, for allegedly committing an act of disrespect at the shrine of the Imperial Household at Ise.⁵Mori had been one of the leading figures drawn to Western ideas of the individual. Hastings introduces the killing with one word: "Ominously".⁵

Article 28 reads, in the official English translation of 1889 by Itō Miyoji:

In the Japanese text: 「日本臣民ハ安寧秩序ヲ妨ケス及臣民タルノ義務ニ背カサル限ニ於テ信教ノ自由ヲ有ス」.⁷

Itō Hirobumi, the chief author of the Constitution, explained the article in his Commentaries, published in English in his name. He called freedom of religious belief "one of the most beautiful fruits of modern civilization". "The cruel treatment of those of a heterodox faith," he wrote, "or the exclusion of them from the enjoyment of certain portions of public and civil rights, are already historical facts of the past." And: "Freedom of conscience concerns the inner part of man and lies beyond the sphere of interference by the laws of the State."⁸

He went on to describe the long struggle of conscience "through dark and thorny paths" until it came "out into the radiance of open day", and he said no state had the right to impose an oppressive measure on "abstract questions of religious faith".⁸

He did not mention Urakami. His one example of the old cruelty was European: in the German states, he noted, political rights had been denied to the Jews until 1848.⁸The American missionary historian Otis Cary, writing in 1909, observed that it was "but a little over seventeen years since men and women had been sent into exile for their religion" in Japan itself. He found it "amusing" that Itō turned to European history as though for the last instance of persecution, but said the forgetfulness could be forgiven in view of what Itō declared.⁹Sen'emon, who had come home from Tsuwano, was still living at Urakami when the Commentaries appeared.¹⁵

Itō then drew the line. "Belief and conviction are operations of the mind." But "as to forms of worship, to religious discourses, to the mode of propagating a religion and to the formation of religious associations and meetings, some general legal or police restrictions must be observed for the maintenance of public peace and order." No believer, he added, could "place himself outside the pale of the law of the Empire, on the ground of his serving his god", or free himself from his duties as a subject. Freedom of belief was complete "so long as manifestations of it are confined to the mind".⁸

This was, in effect, what Kawazu had asked of Sen'emon in 1867: believe what you like in your heart. The Urakami Christians had already shown, at Tsuwano and in the horse stable at Wakayama, that their faith would not stay in the heart. They prayed the rosary aloud on the road, said the orasho over the dying in the dark, and asked first, when they came home, for a church.¹⁰

Still, the gift was real, and Catholics welcomed it. For the first time since 1614 the faith was lawful in Japan by the country's own law, not merely tolerated under foreign pressure. Ballhatchet notes that the clause "was welcomed at the time".²For Catholics in particular it closed a long story. Sen'emon himself, who in 1867 had refused the magistrate's detour, lived to see the day; he died at Urakami in 1899.¹⁵The historian Thomas Burkman, who wrote a study of the Urakami incidents and the struggle for toleration, calls the Constitution's statement of religious freedom and Itō's support for it "firm indications of a liberal trend during the Meiji period".¹¹

The Church grew into the space it was given. In 1891 the vicariates became four dioceses, and Bishop Osouf of Tokyo was made an archbishop.³Catholic periodicals such as Koe appeared from 1891.³At Urakami, the families who had come home from the "journey" were building their church on the ground where their ancestors had once been made to tread on holy images.¹²

But the limits were real too. Burkman points out that the article rested on the view that the individual was subordinate to the state, which could limit his freedom for national purposes. Under that clause, he writes, a number of faiths, Islam among them, were banned until after the Second World War. In his account, full religious freedom in law came only with the Constitution of 1946 and the Religious Juridical Persons Law of 1951.¹¹Ballhatchet notes that in the nationalist mood of the 1890s Christians were attacked as disloyal.²Restrictions on foreigners, including missionaries, lasted until treaty revision in 1899.²Hastings links the change of mood to the Imperial Rescript on Education of 30 October 1890, which placed the Imperial Household at the centre of national piety.⁵

The Jesuit historian George Minamiki explains a quieter move. Because Article 28 guaranteed freedom of religion, the government worked to separate state Shinto from the sectarian Shinto churches and from the category of "religion" altogether; otherwise, he notes, it could not have been imposed on the people. In 1900 it split the office for shrines and temples into separate bureaus.¹³When in 1932 students of the Catholic Sophia University were ordered to pay respects at Yasukuni Shrine, the question of what the state could require of a believer, under the "duties of subjects", came to a head.¹³

The freedom of 1889 was a freedom "in the heart". The hidden Christians had kept their faith in the heart for two hundred and fifty years, because they had no choice. Their children wanted what Sen'emon had wanted: to believe aloud.