The present paper attempts to identify one aspect of government politics in Japan following the end of the 1st Sino-Japanese War through a discussion of the independence gained by governors of the Bank of Japan (BOJ) from the Ministry of Finance. At the time it was established in 1882 under the Finance Ministry of Matsukata Masayoshi 松方正義, the BOJ was strictly controlled by the Ministry until the appointment in 1889 of Kawada Koichiro 川田小一郎, who after the Sino-Japanese War rose to the position of main policy-maker for the Bank and engineered its independence from the Finance Ministry based on the concept of "trust". In this way, the power base of the BOJ governorship can be found not only in the Banks' relationship with the Finance Ministry, but also from its relationship to the postwar national economy that was experiencing a substantial expansion in investment demand. In actuality, the BOJ was able to tackle in earnest the issues involved in building a national monetary network through the process of returning the banks established under the 1872 National Banking Act to the private sector, which began in 1883. However, the BOJ's economic enhancement, which was enabled by its political prominence, could not ultimately respond to the demand for capital funds in Japan's remotest regions and thus drew a great deal of discontent within the banking industry. The expansion of the unique role of the BOJ as a central bank deeply involved in financial policy-making due to the great economic recovery following the War also prepared the mechanism by which great expectations boomeranged into bitter criticism of the very fundamentals upon which the BOJ stood. The political consequence of this mechanism was the issue of how the BOJ was to be taxed. From the end of 1897, when the first postwar depression began and the political importance of the Ministry of Finance increased in the midst of demands for fiscal austerity measures, it was the Kensei Party's Cabinet 隅板内閣 that had to face the issue of how to control the BOJ, which Finance Minister Inoue Kaoru 井上馨 had failed to solve under the third Ito Hirobumi Government. The Kensei Party's successful solution involved balancing demands for aggressive monetary policy with demands for the decentralization of the banking industry through a plan to establish banks large enough to compete with Japan's central bank. It was in this way that taxing the BOJ was legitimized and the central bank made a part of the fiscal issues of the day. Consequently, the power base of the BOJ governorship was dismantled from the economic side through an offensive waged by a political party intervening in fiscal policy-making through the legislative process, and so on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, fiscal and monetary policy-making was once more consolidated under the control of the Ministry of Finance.

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This article takes up details about how subjects were supposed to express sorrow for their deceased sovereigns in the articles on mourning (Buki-jo 服紀条) contained in the Taiho 大宝 Ritsuryo 律令 Code on funerals and burial of the dead as adopted from Chinese rituals and legal codes of the Tang Dynasty. The author examines customs regarding mourning in 8th and 9th century Japan, which originated from China, especially those regarding mourners themselves, in order to further clarify the process by which the Ritsuryo state adopted its system of ritual and decorum and the formation of its monarchical system of rule. To begin with, the Tang Dynasty precedents specify two separate groups of mourners : bureaucrats who must mourn the deceased emperor as his "imperial subjects" (chen 臣) and commoners who are obliged to mourn for only three days. This distinction originated from the ancient classical ritual institutions that traditionally discriminated between literati and the common people; then during the Tang Period, the adherence to divisions among mourners staunchly argued by Chang Gun 常袞 and Cui Youfu 崔祐甫 were attempts to strongly impress upon people the importance of those divisions and demand strict conformance to them. In Japan, on the other hand, at the time that Chinese mourning customs were introduced (between the deaths of Empress Jito 持統 [AD 702] and Emperor Monmu 文武 [707]), commoners (hyakusei 百姓), who had no tradition of participating in the funeral rites of their paramount chieftains, were not abruptly enlisted as were their counterparts in China, while the bureaucracy acted as the sole mourners at first. It was only at the time of the death of Empress Genmei 元明 (721) that commoners were first perceived as mourners, then when Empress Gensho 元正 (748) died, their actual participation was enlisted in the midst of growing concerns about the importance of kingship. Then, with the expressed aim of inculcating imperial rule as transcending and overriding local society, status divisions were not established between bureaucrats and commoner mourners. And so, during the 9th century, which was characterized by the break up of traditional local society and the expansion of provincial-level administration, from the time of the death of Emperor Kanmu 桓武 (806), or maybe Emperor Jun'na 淳和 (840), tumulus construction was abandoned in favor of shallow graves, and commoners were exempted from mourning as part of the government's appeasement effort aiming at strengthening monarchical rule. The author concludes that the adoption of Chinese ideas by the Japanese state during the 8th and 9th centuries can be interpreted as stemming from clear decisions about domestic affairs and carefully planned measures to deal with the situation.

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