The fundamental question that a constitution must answer is its own legitimacy: How can a constitution persuasively lay claim to its own legitimacy? This paper answers to this question through the case study of Japanese political thought. This self-referential difficulty of constitutional legitimacy must ask for the help of rhetorical narratives and tropes which invent and articulate communal ethos in order to establish stable political order.

A particular focus of this paper is on the metaphor of body politic in the political discourse on the Meiji constitution in early 20th century. The legitimacy of the Meiji constitution rested on the mythical narrative of Kokutai, which claimed the emperor’s unbroken line and external reign of Japan. The early 20th century saw intense scholarly debates on Kokutai around the issue of constitutional legitimacy expressed in the originally medieval metaphor of body politic. I argue that the metaphor of body politic is a key trope to understand intellectual efforts of establishing constitutional legitimacy in progress at that time. The intellectuals I examine in this paper include Shinkichi Uesugi, Tatsukichi Monobe, and Ikki Kita, each of whom developed a unique argument on the “representable-ness” of Kokutai as constitutional legitimacy.

This paper aims to reveal the essential rhetorical nature of constitutional legitimacy, which has been overlooked due to the lack of rhetorical inquiry as an established method within the field of Japanese political thought. Rhetorical inquiry looks at the persuasive effect of texts aiming at discovering communal ethos. Accordingly, I reframe the above intellectuals’ work as their rhetorical inquiries for the invention and articulation of communal ethos within Japanese political community.