Bold and provocative, Kyu Hyun Kim's The Age of Visions and Arguments makes large claims about the transformative power of “ordinary” people, the vitality of political discourses, and the weakness of the state in early Meiji Japan. The book is a history of the movement to establish a national assembly (kokkai kaisetsu undō), which Kim refers to as the parliamentarian movement, and its scope extends beyond our current, narrow understandings of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement. Indeed, it is, at its heart, about the emergence of a public sphere in the years between the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the promulgation of the Imperial Constitution in 1889.

Kim's embrace of the concept of the public sphere—in, as he points out, this first effort to apply the idea to early Meiji Japan in the English-language historiography—gives coherence and thus weight to his many and varied insights about Meiji politics and opens an avenue for comparative analysis, even if it does not fundamentally change the contours of the debate about the influences of popular political energies or the power of the state. In an introduction that manages to be both exceedingly clear and theoretically rigorous, Kim defines the public sphere as a “mediating agency as well as a field of discourse and action in which the members of the state and civil society could participate and interact” (p. 5). For Kim, this “locus vivendi” (p. 5) for interconnection and contestation was, in particular, a “national public sphere (kokumin kōkyōken)” (p. 9) in which consciousness of Japan as a modern nation-state and an inchoate notion of the citizen-subject (kokumin) were shaped.

Broken into four main parts, the book begins by examining the seeds for the public sphere that were planted in the late Tokugawa period, when the term kōgi yōron shed its previous definition of “public authority” and began to mean “public deliberation” and, later, “public opinion.” Kim convincingly argues that the idea of deliberation and power sharing as “necessary conditions for successful national integration and legitimation of central political authority” (p. 28) had Japanese roots in the Bakumatsu years, predating the Westernizing push of the early Meiji period. The fledgling Meiji state, too, allowed for a certain degree of enfranchisement and growth of the news media (without relinquishing its desire for control) in the name of modernization, at least until the mid-1870s, when public opinion could increasingly be read as questioning the legitimacy of the Meiji state.

It is the second part of the book, about how parliamentarian discourse was translated into political activism, all within a consolidating public sphere, that may be the most compelling illustration of Kim's larger claims about the allure of freedom to, and the political impact of, those outside the government. Discussions of metropolitan intellectuals and local notables demonstrate how ideas and practice were intertwined. And chapter 6, on the public lectures and speeches that flourished in the early 1880s, is a much-needed treatment of a significant phenomenon in the political culture of this period that has been woefully understudied in English. Here, Kim comes closest to defining “ordinary people” in broad, grassroots terms, hinting at audiences that might have consisted of those who were not literate and of certain economic means.

State responses to political activism are the subject of the third part of the book, in which Kim argues that the Meiji state attempted to consolidate its power and suppress civil society and yet did not succeed in drastically curtailing the independence of the public sphere, largely because of internal disagreements about how to deal with the parliamentarian movement. The oppressive actions of the Meiji state are framed here, not as the continued heavy-handedness of a powerful state, but as a reaction cobbled together in response to the strength of parliamentarian opposition. In this context, the Hokkaidō Colonial Office scandal and the ouster of Ōkuma Shigenobu in 1881 reflect a moment when a vibrant public sphere was able to express criticism about government corruption, and the state was able to come together in the face of a perceived threat. That neither civil society nor the state was the “unambiguous ‘winner’ in the struggles for the future of the Japanese political system” (p. 258) seems to be a theme that bridges this section of the book with the next, which addresses the drafting of civic constitutions, the establishment of opposition political parties, and the Grand Solidarity Movement. But here, the narrative is more one of “‘victory’ for the parliamentarian forces” (p. 443) than of defeat, painted as these developments are as the culmination of parliamentarian discourse and political activism.

Taken as a whole, The Age of Visions and Arguments unequivocally demonstrates that arguments that frame the parliamentarian movement simply in terms of weaknesses and failures, and that only examine the period from the perspective of the state, do not capture the ambiguities revealed by an approach that considers the lively and contentious interaction between the state and civil society. Kim's reminders that the Meiji state did not emerge fully formed, and that “ordinary people” had a substantial role in shaping the course of Meiji politics, are most welcome. In making these claims, Kim clearly demonstrates a fluency in the trends of Japanese historiography, but it might have been interesting if he had done more to highlight works in English that could be seen as sympathetic with his larger arguments, be it Mary Elizabeth Berry's research on the circulation of information and an early modern public (timing of publication permitting), or Carol Gluck's groundbreaking book on the relationship between the state and civil society in the creation of ideology later in the Meiji period. But this is a very minor wish.

One omission that is controversial, as noted by Kim himself, is the “violent incidents” (gekka jiken) of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement. I admittedly have a particular interest in these incidents, which figure in my own research on political violence, but in no way insist that they deserve lengthy consideration. In fact, Kim's points that the violent incidents were quite different from one another and should not necessarily be considered the culmination of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement are very well taken. Nonetheless, to exclude them from the book entirely is to pass up an opportunity to substantiate the argument that “neither parliamentarian discourse nor the public sphere played a crucial role in the outbreak of these incidents” (p. 416) and to situate them (or not) against the backdrop of the parliamentarian movement, as only Kim could.

The Age of Visions and Arguments is a nuanced, meticulously researched, and theoretically rigorous book that deserves to join the ranks of classics on Meiji politics and must be read by those interested in the public sphere or the political and intellectual history of nineteenth-century Japan.