アメリカの日本占領と民主化の言論――戦前の門閥政治体制の解体と岩淵辰雄――

抄録

This article examines the impact of Japanese civil intellectuals’ activities which advocated pursuing socially fair democracy on Japan’s democratic transformation and the U.S. transplantation of the democratic regime to Japan. It was the proposal of dem ocratization based on the dissolution of the privileged peer classes by Tatsuo Iwabuchi, a political commentator, that had some political influence on Japanese democratization in the early stage of the U.S. occupation from civil society. Iwabuchi pointed out the war responsibility of the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, who advised the Emperor. He also persuaded Prince Konoe, who was the highest ranked peer, to renounce his peerage. Then, Iwabuchi committed to make a civil constitution draft, which prescribed to abolish the House of Peers and the Privy Council. His activities which intended to correct the inequality of social position sought a type of democracy that gave priority to the rcalization of social equality.

While the basic framework of previous studies regarding the U.S. occupation of Japan consists of the demands of General Headquarters Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ) and responses by the Japanese Government, this study reexamines it from the following two perspectives, by focusing on Iwabuchi and other Japanese civilian opinion leaders. The first perspective pays attention to the domestic and international impact of the civilians’ opinions for democracy. The second perspective classifies the concept of democracy into several types while it has tended to be regarded as the single unified political idea. From these perspectives, this article argues that GHQ highly evaluated advocating democracy which emphas ized fairness by civil Japanese, and their democracy movement functioned as a catalyst to promote the transportation of the democratic regime from the U.S. to Japan.

This article suggests that the activities that asserted the socially fair type of democracy by Iwabuchi and intellectuals around him contributed to solve the GHQ’s problem of democracy from above. This is because they put GHQ in a position of the guardian for correcting inequality. The role of which Iwabuchi particularly carried out was indicating the direction toward democratic Japan by pursuing the dissolution of the prewar lineage based political system as a breakthrough. This explanation especially fits to the impact of his activities on Japanese social-democratic intellectuals, and indirectly on New Dealers in GHQ. Moreover, to conservative GHQ officers, Iwabuchi’s activities should have impressed the possibility of achieving democracy in Japan by showing the fact that there was a Japanese intellectual who advocated democrattzation by dissolving the lineage based political system. Since the activities by the Japanese civilians including Iwabuchi dealt with the contradictory position of GHQ, it is probable that GHQ decided to refer to their constitution draft. This inference suggests that the idea of socially fair democracy, which was advocated by the Japanese intellectuals with the consideration of their country’s situations at that time, was reflected in Postwar Japan’s constitution based on GHQ’s draft.