Dr Chris Harding

people in Japan began to read, either in European languages or in translation, the constitutions from places like the US and France, and they worked out how politics worked in Britain as well.

And they sat down and they said, OK, what kind of democracy do we want in Japan?

The decision the Japanese leaders made was we want a kind of mixture of a Prussian-style, you know, top-down state, of course, with the emperor at the top, a mixture of that with...

a kind of Neo-Confucian arrangement where everyone knows their place and they show a certain amount of respect.

The idea that Japan would become a French style democracy overnight was thought to be completely ridiculous.

It's actually quite interesting to see how these models look from a Japanese point of view.

If you're playing catch up as a brand new country in a rough neighbourhood, one of the things you can't do as far as these leaders were concerned is

basically spaff all your energy up the wall by arguing with each other in a democratic system which involves rival parties.

Everybody has to come together, singing from the same hymn sheet if you're going to progress at the speed you need to progress at.

So they said, democracy is basically for the birds.

We will have a national diet, you know, a national parliament.

Exactly.

So a tiny percentage of Japanese men can vote for these people.

And even then, these people, it's kind of a talking shop.

the way the Japanese leaders see it, they retain power as this tiny clique.

The way they see it is it's a way of making people feel important.

And it's a way of getting, I think, a certain amount of buy-in.

So that if you're a relatively wealthy Japanese man who reads his newspaper and pays his taxes, you want to feel that your voice is heard a bit, right?

And so that's a way of doing that.

But the idea that you'd have democracy in a more radical sense would be giving into chaos, I think, as far as they see it.