The history of Japanese nationality as a chronology of evolving concepts and practices begins in the mid-nineteenth century, as Japan opened diplomatic relations with the west and a modern nation state was established through the Meiji Restoration.
Pre-modern Japan Until the Meiji Restoration, Japanese people were subject to both the local authority of the daimyō and the national authority of the Tokugawa shogunate, who pledged allegiance to the Emperor. A concrete example of the shōgun acting directly on Japanese people as a nationality would be blanket recall of Japanese people from all other nations during the sakoku period, which resulted in the end of communities like Nihonmachi in Vietnam.Innes, Robert L. The Door Ajar: Japan's Foreign Trade in the Seventeenth Century. PhD diss. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1980.
The idea of Japan as a nation was a topic for scholarly inquiry during much of the Edo period. For example, by Hayashi Shihei (1738–1793). This book, which was published in Japan in 1785, deals with Chosen (Korea) and the kingdom of Ryukyu (Okinawa) and Ezo (Hokkaido).Cullen, Louis M. (2003). A History of Japan, 1582–1941: Internal and External Worlds, p. 137. The widely distributed Nihon Ōdai Ichiran by Hayashi Gahō (1618–1688) identifies and describes a number of Goryeo and Joseon missions to Japan as well as Japanese missions to Imperial China.
Scholarly formulations of Japanese nationhood—notably those of the kokugaku school and late Mito school—exerted considerable influence on both Japanese nationalism and the practice of Japanese nationality in the Meiji period.Susan L. Burns, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) 5, 187-219; on the late Mito school, see Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: the New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986) 8–16, 141–144.
Practices initiated in Meiji period Nationality practices during the first decades of the Meiji government were shaped by pressure to conform to western norms. Meiji oligarchs saw adopting the technology and institutions of western powers not only as essential to regaining sovereignty rights lost in the unequal treaties but also as an effective means of national strengthening. Like the reforms of other modernizing states, the legal and institutional changes of the early Meiji period involved rationalizing the population, making the relationship between the individual and the state more direct, and codifying the rights and obligations associated with that relationship. By the late 1880s, Japanese leaders were increasingly preoccupied with the idea of cultivating a distinctive sense of the nation, or kokutai (国体) among Japanese subjects. This goal led to the emergence of new nationality practices—such as compulsory education, elections, and voluntary organizations—which, unlike earlier reforms based on borrowing from western models, were strongly shaped by the emerging ideology of Japanese nationalism.
The following is a list of nationality practices initiated during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Though these practices and the ideology that informed them changed over the course of the Meiji period and subsequent decades, they remained the core of Japanese nationality practice through World War II.
Legal practices As part of its modernizing program, the Meiji state replaced the feudal class system with a much simpler set of status distinctions. In 1872, the koseki (戸籍), or family registry, system was established, requiring each family to register with the local government and notify authorities of births, marriages, adoptions, divorces, and deaths in the household. The implementation of the koseki system meant that all families adopted a family name, a privilege which had previously been reserved for the warrior class. Members of the burakumin (部落民), or outcaste group, were legally emancipated in 1871. This made their legal status equal to other , though the koseki of former burakumin families retained a record of that status, facilitating de facto discrimination.Babu Gogineni, "The Buraku People of Japan," (International Humanist and Ethical Union, 2006), On the other end of the social hierarchy, the status of samurai was gradually phased out. Samurai stipends were commuted into government bonds in 1872 and former members of samurai households became commoners. A small peerage, modeled on the British Peerage, was created from a combination of and former daimyō. Its members received a small stipend and, after 1899, were eligible to sit in the Upper House of the Diet.
Changes in personal status law were accompanied by the promulgation of comprehensive new law codes. A Criminal Code, 刑法 (1882) Civil Code 民法 (1898), and Commercial Code 商法 (1890), were drafted with the cooperation of foreign experts. These legal codes are a clear example of the effect of the effort to revise unequal treaties on nationality practice in Meiji Japan. Because removing extraterritoriality provisions required convincing western powers that Japanese courts met modern standards, Meiji leaders moved quickly to implement a western-style legal system. This meant that being governed by western style laws—applied uniformly throughout the nation—became part of being a subject of the new Japanese nation-state. The Meiji-era legal codes remained the basis of Japanese law until the end of World War II.
Obligations to the state The principal obligations associated with being a subject of the Japanese state were payment of taxes and, for men, military service.
The Land Tax Reform (地租改正) of 1873 established a system of private land ownership and instituted monetary taxation. As a result, payment of taxes became linked to one's individual status as a subject of the Japanese nation-state and was no longer a function of feudal status or place of residence.Marius B. Jansen The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 366–367. Under the Meiji Constitution, direct payment of taxes to the national government became the basis for political participation at the national level.
The Conscription Act (1873) was part of a sweeping military reform, replacing the independent samurai armies of the feudal domains with a national conscript army. Reporting for the conscription exam at age twenty became a common experience for all Japanese men and military training exposed young men to nationalist ideology. Initially, about 5 percent of eligible men were drafted, serving four years active duty and three years in the reserves. During the First Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War, conscription rates rose to about 10 percent.Jansen 336, 421. Military conscription rates were extremely high during the Second World War.
Political rights The Meiji Constitution (1890) outlined a limited set of political rights. Men who paid 15 yen in annual taxes to the national government had the right to vote in elections for the Lower House of the Diet, making just over 1 percent of the population eligible to vote in the first national election in 1890. In 1900, the property qualification was lowered.Jansen 415, 447; Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 67. In 1925 the General Election Law (普通選挙法) extended the franchise to all men aged 25 or older. In the 1920s, there was a movement for women's suffrage. Proposals to extend suffrage and other political rights to women were debated in the Lower House of the Diet, but failed to become law.
Political rights were most important during the period of Taishō Democracy. Yet, even during this decade of flourishing political parties, the importance of political rights for ordinary people was muted by the dominant role of non-elected groups in Japanese politics. The significance of voting rights was also limited by a series of increasingly repressive Peace Preservation laws designed to mitigate the potentially destabilizing effects of popular party politics and prevent the spread of leftist ideologies.
Education The most significant aspect of education as nationality practice in this period is the advent of compulsory primary education. Universal primary education was first articulated as a state goal in the Education Act of 1872. Since much of the responsibility for funding the new schools fell on local governments, its implementation was uneven. Nevertheless, the school system expanded rapidly. The vast majority of Japanese children could expect to attend four years of primary school by around the start of the 20th century. Initially, national education policy was focused on practical goals and had minimal ideological content. In the 1880s, however, anxiety about over-enthusiastic westernization mounted and the need to educate subjects who would be enfranchised by the awaited constitution became apparent. These concerns spurred debate about how the education system should promote moral conduct and strengthen national sentiment. The key document in this respect is the Imperial Rescript on Education (1882).Gluck 109–127.
A system of higher education was also established. State-sponsored exchange students were an important part of the Meiji modernization program.
Voluntary associations The government fostered the development of an expanding number of voluntary associations which acted as channels through which ordinary people were exposed to nationalist ideology. These served to organize, indoctrinate, and mobilize various sectors of the population, including students, wives and mothers, and Shinto priests.Gluck, 10–13, 197–198.
Nationality practice and territorial expansion, 1874–1945 Previous sections of this article deal with nationality practice in Japan without reference to the fact that the boundaries of Japan were changing during the period discussed. The boundaries of Japan were changing during the period discussed. This section addresses nationality practices in Japanese-controlled territory in light of this fact. During the period of imperialist expansion, the term naichi (内地), or home territory, was used to distinguish Japan proper from its colonies. Though, historically, its exact meaning varied, this section uses it in its narrowest sense, to refer to Honshū, Shikoku and Kyūshū.
Okinawa Until the late 19th century, both Qing China and the Satsuma Domain had claimed the Ryūkyū Kingdom as a tributary state. In the 1870s, the Japanese government maneuvered to establish direct sovereignty over the Ryūkyū Islands. As part of a settlement with Qing government after the 1874 Japanese incursion into Taiwan, the Qing government renounced its claims, clearing the way for direct Japanese rule. The Ryūkyū King Shō Tai was declared a vassal of the Meiji court and his kingdom designated Ryukyu-han (琉球藩), or the feudal domain of Ryukyu.Note that feudal domains had been abolished in the rest of Japan the previous year, see Abolition of the han system During the first years of Japanese control, King Shō Tai retained nominal authority, but Ryukyu was largely ruled by the Naimushō office in Naha. In 1879, the Japanese government tightened control over Ryukyu, forcing the King to withdraw and declaring Ryukyu a prefecture (Okinawa-ken 沖縄県).George H. Kerr, Okinawa: The History of an Island People, (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2000) 363–352.