ALTERNATIVE UNDERSTANDINGS OF POWER IN MEIJI

Abstract: Unlike building railroads, writing treaties and conducting diplomacy was by no means a new practice in Meiji Japan (1868–1912). Performing these transac-tions in the terms of international law, however, required new techniques to control the discourse. The scholars and state aggrandizers who translated international law into Japanese at the time did not cause Japan to become the imperialist nation it did. Their fluent use of this discourse, however, legitimated Japan’s imperialist claims within Japan and abroad. Although international terms empowered the powerful, the potential meaning of many of the terms inspired those trying to resist domination. For the architects of the Japanese empire, however, controlling Japa-nese sovereignty meant controlling the legal terms of governance wherever Japan ruled. The permitted discourse of legitimate Japan circumscribed expression throughout the geographical boundaries to which the new regime aspired. Tech-niques of control included obvious means such as banning books, but on a deeper level it meant negating definitions that challenged how Japan constituted its sov-ereignty within Japan and abroad. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of th