Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 603, The Birocrats, Part 2.

Whenever we talk about the Meiji period bureaucracy, there's a phrase that always comes up,

one of the four character compounds that are a constant in both Chinese and formal Japanese.

The phrase in question is Kanson Minpi, roughly translated, honor the bureaucrat,

despise the people.

And if you look at the historical image of the pre-1945 bureaucracy in Japan, that phrase

pretty much embodies everything about their mindset.

That mindset, in turn, arguably defined a lot of the pre-1945 political order itself.

At least one prominent political scientist who lived through the imperial era,

Ro Yamama Masamichi, wrote that in retrospect the defining

feature of Imperial Japan was how it transformed the country from what he called

Ho-Kentiki-Kestkka, a feudal police state, to Chuōshukentiki-Khanriokka, a centralized bureaucratic

state. The fundamental idea of Imperial Japan that the emperor was an overarching sovereign of the whole

country was according to Royama fundamentally an illusion.

The emperor was controlled by his advisors, the former samurai and court nobility who had

architected the overthrow of feudalism in their successors,

and that much is pretty uncontroversial.

But more importantly, according to Royama, was the fact that the Meiji State had successfully

replaced the old samurai class with two new pillars of its regime, loyal servants with a vested

interest in maintaining this new order because they were now the new

elite. The first he said was the military. The second, of course, was the bureaucracy.

That the bureaucracy was one of the new pillars of the new government order was so fundamental

...