The study of land ownership of the Japanese Imperial Household

Focusing on the elimination of the Imperial Property, Goryochi, in Hokkaido

Abstract

In an attempt to answer the question of why the imperial household in pre-World War II modern Japan owned land, this article takes up the case of the real estate owned in Hokkaido (Hokkaido Goryochi 北海道御料地) and the process by which it was removed from the imperial household's holdings in 1894. The author begins by pointing out the disagreement that arose between those who held the viewpoint that the Goryo land holdings should be allocated to the reclamation projects conducted by the Hokkaido prefectural government and those who thought that the land should be preserved as forest in the interest of stimulating private sector supply and demand and public land conservation. The former opinion was held by not only the Hokkaido government, but also the Imperial Household Ministry and Ministries of Internal Affairs and Agriculture and Commerce, while the latter opinion was advocated by Yamauchi Tokusaburo (山内徳三郎), a mining engineer and head of the Sapporo branch of the Household Ministry's Goryo land Bureau.
Behind the central Household Ministry's support for the Hokkaido government's reclamation argument and Minister of Interior Inoue Kaoru (井上馨)'s claim that selling off public forest land would strengthen the base of local autonomy lay the true aim of decreasing the imperial family's assets and rationalizing their management. Needless to say, Yamauchi was unable to stop the elimination of the Goryo land, despite support from Shinagawa Yajiro, influential power broker in the interior affairs and commerce bureaucracy.
This dispute enabled the author to identify two different kinds of concept regarding imperial family real estate ownership. The first was the Goryo land should contribute to the economic base of the imperial family; that the imperial family should always own real estate in order to strengthen its economic base. That is to say, the choice of real estate holdings depended on their profitability. In contrast, the second type of concept was that the imperial family should contribute to such national goals as improving private sector supply and demand and promoting public land conservation. For example, during the late 1880s and early 90s, the imperial forest land in Nagano and Shizuoka, as well as its mineral holdings, were considered necessary for the protection and promotion of private sector production, while the Hokkaido holdings were expected to help stimulate private sector supply and demand and public land conservation. Moreover, while such aims were essentially the duties of national government administration, the actual situation gave rise to the claim that only the imperial family was capable of realizing them.
The author concludes that the conventionally held concept of imperial family landownership as a means to strengthen the family's economic base was only one of several concepts held at the time. Therefore, the task remains to find the historical process and factors leading up to the focus on profitability alone.