Hermann Roesler and the Making of the Meiji State. Johannes Siemes

Among the foreign advisers of the Meiji government Hermann Roesler was the most influential. He was the only one who played a role in the innermost circle of the government leaders in the decisive years of the formation of the Meiji state and who had an immediate share in the most secret deliberations for the drafting of the constitution. It is very strange, therefore, that this man, who of all the foreigners who influenced the making of modern Japan, played the greatest role, is still so little known. For nearly half a century the part he played in the forming of the Meiji state was a well-kept state secret. The first among Japanese historians who seems to have had some understanding of his importance was Yoshino Sakuzō,¹ the great political thinker of the Taishō democracy and the founder of the modern constitutional history of Japan. After having come by chance into possession of some very revealing documents on constitutional questions written by Roesler in the critical years of 1881-82, he became convinced that Roesler was a key figure in the Meiji government and he labored to trace the effect of his work in Japan. Then from 1933 on the private papers of Prince Itō were published and for the first time the figure of Roesler came into full light. Relying on the Itō papers and other documents of Itō's collaborators which were also made accessible at about the same time, Suzuki Yasuzō, in an article in Monumenta Nipponica in 1941-42, gave the first comprehensive account of Roesler's work in Japan.² The study of Suzuki, published as it was in Japan in the opening days of the Pacific War, seems to have gone unnoticed outside of Japan. Foreign scholars writing on the making of the Meiji Constitution continued to pass on only fragmentary and highly inaccurate information about Roesler.³ Since that first study a good number of additional documents shedding light on Roesler's work have been discovered, so that today a much more complete presentation of his collaboration in the making of modern Japan is possible than Suzuki was able to give.

Roesler is considered by most Japanese historians as a strong antiliberal reactionary whose ideal was the Prussian system of state. On the other hand, Itō Hirobumi writes in 1882 from Berlin, after having met the Prussian constitutionalist, Rudolph von Gneist: 'I have discovered that Roesler is inclined to freedom. He is an adversary of Prussian politics.'⁴ In Germany he was remembered as a violent adversary of Bismarck. An adequate understanding of what his real intentions for Japan were presupposes a knowledge of the great scholarly works he wrote in Germany before his coming to Japan. In them we can trace the background of the ideas he proposed in Japan. They reveal him not only as an adversary of Bismarck's state, but as a great scholar whose whole work is centered round the idea of 'social freedom.'

Footnotes

1 吉野作造

2 Monumenta Nipponica, 1941, IV, 53-87, 428-453; 1942, V, 347-400. The article is entitled 'Hermann Roesler und die japanische Verfassung.' This study forms the substance of Suzuki Yasuzō's 鈴木安蔵 book, Kempō seitei to Roesler 憲法制定とロエスレ (The Making of the Constitution and Roesler), Tokyo, 1942.

3 See Nobutaka Ike, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan, Baltimore, 1950, Hugh Borton, Japan's Modern Century, New York, 1955, and Beckman, The Making of the Meiji Constitution, Lawrence, Kansas, 1957.

4 Shumpokō tsuitō-kai 春畝公追悼会, ed., Itō Hirobumi den 伊藤博文伝(Biography of Itō Hirobumi), II, 305.

Hermann Roesler in 1885.

PART ONE

HERMANN ROESLER

HIS

BACKGROUND

AND

THOUGHT

CHAPTER ONE

Roesler's work in Germany

Hermann Roesler was born in Lauf, near Nürnberg, in 1834, and died in Bozen (Tyrol) in 1894. Before coming to Japan he had played a fairly important role in Germany in the fields of economic science and law. He was professor at the University of Rostock from 1862 to 1878 and during these years he published an imposing series of scholarly works. His principal studies are the following: Über die Grundlehren der von Adam Smith begründeten Volkswirt-schaftstheorie (Erlangen 1868, 2. A. 1871), Das soziale Verwaltungsrecht (2 Bde, Erlangen, 1872-77), and Vorlesungen über Volkswirtschaft (Erlangen 1878). His writings prove him to be an outstanding economist and jurist. His importance lies above all in his sociological approach to law. This approach, which prompted him to make an intensive study of such fundamental economic phenomena as capital, labor, value, price and income, afforded him penetrating

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