[서평] 천황 지배 이데올로기의 형성과 그 정당화 : 호즈미 야츠카의 역할을 중심으로

This thesis examines how the ideology of the Tennō’s rule was created in Japan and how it was justified legally, politically, and morally, mainly through the works of the Constitutional scholar Yatsuka Hozumi. In the whirlwind of Imperialism in the late 19th Century, the world was forced to either rule or be ruled. Japanese leaders observed the role of Christianity as a medium of national unity in the Western countries and decided the absolutization of the imperial system as the functional equivalent to Christianity. Thus, the Constitution of the Japanese Empire was enacted, stipulating that the Tennō, who historically had no real political power, was the absolute ruler. Yatsuka Hozumi, the first constitutional scholar in Japan, was the first to develop theories to justify the ideology of the Japanese Tennō’s rule in a Western legal context, and dedicated himself to providing theories that justified the political and national morals related to the Tenno’s rule. Hozumi, of whom it is often asked whether he himself believed in his own doctrines, is nearly forgotten today because of the eccentricity of his doctrine. In this paper, both inspired and based on Takashi Uchida's book “The Birth of Legal Science” (2018), I attempt to show that, no matter how strange it may seem, Hozumi's theory was a form of Japanese reception of Western jurisprudence.