Skip to content
How Countries Constitute ThemselvesLesson 16 of 19

16 · After defeat: Japan 1947 and Germany 1949

This course is open while its review is still in progress. Every course here gets a source-by-source citation review before it is marked reviewed; this one has not finished that process yet. How review works

The last two cases share a starting point, total defeat in the Second World War and occupation by the victors, and split into two different routes from there. The comparison is the lesson: how much did the defeated nation write its own constitution? Japan and Germany answered differently, and the difference is contested enough to teach with care.

Japan, 1947: imposition after defeat

After Japan's surrender, the country was occupied under General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). When the Japanese government's own draft revision (the Matsumoto draft) was judged too conservative to satisfy the Allies, SCAP's own staff drafted a model constitution in about a week in February 1946, and pressed the Japanese government to adopt it. The draft was translated, revised, and passed through the Diet with some amendments, then promulgated on 3 November 1946 and took effect on 3 May 1947 (The Constitution of Japan, 1947; National Diet Library, Birth of the Constitution of Japan).

The text broke sharply with the old order: sovereignty moved from the Emperor to the people, the Emperor became "the symbol of the State," and Article 9 renounced war, with the people forever renouncing "war as a sovereign right of the nation" (Constitution of Japan, 1947, art. 9). This is the imposition route: the core text originated with the occupier, not the occupied.

The disagreement you must teach: how "imposed" was it?

Here the honest move is to hold a real dispute rather than pick a side.

The positionThe case for it
Imposed (the "oshitsuke" thesis)SCAP wrote the draft, on a deadline, and pressed it on a defeated government with little real choice; the initiative and the pen were the occupier's
More Japanese than it looksJapanese officials negotiated changes, the Diet debated and amended it (including the Ashida amendment to Article 9), and Japanese reformers had floated similar liberal ideas; and the people have kept it, unamended, for generations

Both readings rest on real facts, and serious scholars hold each. The course does not declare the Japanese constitution simply "illegitimate because imposed" or simply "freely chosen," because neither is the whole truth. What it insists on is precision: the DRAFTING initiative was the occupier's, AND there was genuine Japanese input and lasting Japanese acceptance. A constitution's origin and its legitimacy are different questions, and a document can begin under pressure and still be owned by a people over time.

Germany, 1949: reconstruction under occupation

Germany was defeated and occupied too, but its western zones took a different route. In July 1948 the Western Allies handed the German state minister-presidents the "Frankfurt Documents," authorising them to convene a body to draft a democratic, federal constitution. The drafting was done by Germans: a convention of experts prepared a draft at Herrenchiemsee in August 1948, and then the Parliamentary Council (Parlamentarischer Rat), made up of delegates chosen by the Land parliaments and chaired by Konrad Adenauer, wrote the text in Bonn. It was adopted on 8 May 1949, approved by the Allied military governors, ratified by the Laender, and promulgated on 23 May 1949 (Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949).

Two deliberate choices mark it as reconstruction rather than pure imposition. The Germans called it the "Basic Law" (Grundgesetz), not "Constitution" (Verfassung), on purpose, to signal that it was provisional pending the reunification of a divided Germany, and its original closing article looked forward to a future constitution adopted by the whole German people once reunited. Germans drafted their own text, inside a framework the Allies set and subject to Allied approval.

The comparison, which is the whole point

Put the two side by side and the four-route taxonomy earns its fourth row.

Japan, 1947Germany, 1949
Who drafted the core textThe occupier's staff (SCAP)The defeated nation's own delegates
The occupier's roleWrote and pressed the draftSet the framework and approved the result
The routeImposition after defeatReconstruction under occupation

Neither nation was free the way the US Convention or the South African assembly was free; both drafted under a victor's power. But the DEGREE of that power differed, and pretending Japan and Germany sit on the same route would flatten a real distinction, just as pretending they sit on the same route as an uncoerced convention would flatten another. Both constitutions, once made, produced durable parliamentary democracies, which is its own comment on how far a constitution's later life can outgrow the conditions of its birth. This is historical and comparative description, not legal advice.

Sources

Also saves the next lesson, so you can keep going offline.

Sign in to track your progress