Minobe Tatsukichi (1873-1948), professor of constitutional law on the Tōdai Faculty of Law, was one of prewar Japan's foremost legal scholars. The emperor-organ theory is the doctrine with which his name is associated; it held that the emperor was an organ of the state; the repository of sovereignty, he was still a constituent part of the larger entity, the state. Hozumi Yatsuka (1860-1912) and Uesugi Shinkichi (1878-1929), both also professors on the Faculty of Law, provided the theoretical underpinning for an alternate doctrine. Citing conservative European legal theorists (and paraphrasing France's Louis XIV), they argued that the emperor was the state. The two positions framed the legal debate under the Meiji Constitution.

Mark Selden: In discussing the US-China relationship or Chimerica, you note the 200-strong US delegation that visited Beijing at the very moment that the US was toppling the DPJ administration of Hatoyama Yukio as evidence that the US will not back Japan in the current dispute with China over Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands.

However, the US has made a number of contradictory statements, including some suggesting that it would view the issue within the framework of its obligation to defend Japan under the Japan-US Security Treaty. Moreover, the US has moved aggressively to insert itself into other territorial issues, notably those involving the clash between China and Vietnam/Philippines in the South China Sea. The situation is in fact volatile. How are we to understand the Diaoyutai clash in the context of wider territorial conflicts in the region?

Japan's swing to the right in the December 2012 Lower House election placed three-quarters of the seats in the hands of conservative parties. The result should come as no surprise. This political movement not only capitalized on a putative external threat generated by recent international territorial disputes (with China/Taiwan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and with South Korea over Takeshima/Dokdo islands). It also rode a xenophobic wave during the 2000s, strengthened by fringe opposition to reformers seeking to give non-Japanese more rights in Japanese politics and society.

This article traces the arc of that xenophobic trajectory by focusing on three significant events: The defeat in the mid-2000s of a national “Protection of Human Rights” bill (jinken yōgo hōan); Tottori Prefecture's Human Rights Ordinance of 2005 that was passed on a local level and then rescinded; and the resounding defeat of proponents of local suffrage for non-citizens (gaikokujin sanseiken) between 2009-11. The article concludes that these developments have perpetuated the unconstitutional status quo of a nation with no laws against racial discrimination in Japan.

For a number of years, The Asia-Pacific Journal has paid attention to Okinawa as the point where major contradictions within the national, regional, and global system are sharpest, and to Okinawan civil society as the seed-bed of some of the most advanced democratic thinking in contemporary Asia, with great significance for the future of Japan, the region and the US-Japan relationship.