明六社員의 정치관과 그 성격

Political Views of the Meirokusha Members

For an emerging modem state of Japan, it was imperative and limitive to keep an independent country under the Western pressure, the unequal treaty system There must have been an unanimous goal of the ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’ to strengthen the country. In 1873 (the sixth year of the Meiji reign), famous intellectual leaders of the so-called ‘national celebrities’, formed the Meirokusha(Meiji Six Society) in the hope of enlightening the tradition-bound Japanese society at that time. It is significant that many of the writings by the Meirokusha members tended to be coincided with the goal set by the Meiji government, conceivably due to their understanding of the international condition which Japan had to meet and their elite-consciousness to the people who were shown benighted. For the notables of the enlightenment and experts on the Western learning, on the other hand, the Meirokusha intellectuals must have kept in their minds for the universalistic goal of the natural rights and individual freedom Both the particularistic goal of securing Japan’s independence with strength and the universalistic goal of heightening the state of natural individual right should have concurrently been pursued by them as the modem intellectual leaders in the early 1870’s. This essay discusses the columns and articles on the political matters carried mainly on the Meiroku Zasshi, the official journal of the Society, because the period of 1874-1875, when the Journal was published regularly and the Meirokusha were most active, signified the political laxity and the almost unconditioned ideas, thereby, bloomed out in public. May the political ideas and postures by the Meirokusha members have changed since then, the Meirokusha activities, at the certain period, took the important position throughout the Meiji intellectual history and played the role of reservoir for the political movement of the next generation, the so-called Popular Rights Movement. The ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’ connected the two categories of particularistic national independence under foreign pressure and universalistic modem citizenry rights. The individual concept of the ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’, as a method by the Meirokusha members, inclined toward either one of the two categories, which represented the stance of each one within the whole spectrum of the political views, ranging from Kato Hiroyuki to Fukuzawa Yukichi. The Meirokusha had never been the homogeneous group identified with the Meiji government ideologues, but the intellectual society concerned about the Japan’s dilemma between the modernity and national strength.