Tanaka Shozō (1841-1913) and Early Meiji Democracy by ICSIN published on 2020-09-18T07:34:25Z The mid-nineteenth century saw the Meiji government adopt a wide array of new institutions and laws to become a modern nation-state; central to these was the promulgation of the Meiji constitution in 1889. This talk will look at Tanaka Shozō, politician and political activist, and his ideas about constitutional monarchy as a way to think about the adoption of democratic ideas and institutions in Japan and other parts of the world. Shozō and his contemporaries grappled with new ideas about society, economy, and politics using the rich vocabulary of their heritage and drawing upon earlier popular struggles to think and act in new and modern ways. The talk will focus on two aspects in particular: his conception of democracy, and his ideas about who creates knowledge. Shozo confronted the problems that government policies were creating and this struggle points to the ways democratic ideas and institutions were not just borrowed models, but shaped by political practice.