Senchū Hassaku: The Eight Points That Quietly Wrote the Meiji Constitution

On a summer evening in 1867, the steamship Yūgao was making its way east through the Inland Sea from Nagasaki to Hyōgo. On board were two men: Sakamoto Ryōma, the runaway samurai and naval entrepreneur from Tosa, and Nagaoka Kenkichi, his fellow Kaientai officer. The ship had been hired to deliver a load of arms to the Tosa domain — arms that would, within months, be used in the war that toppled the Tokugawa Bakufu. As the ship sailed, Ryōma dictated and Nagaoka wrote. The document they produced was eight short paragraphs long. It later acquired the title Senchū Hassaku — 'The Eight-Point Program in the Cabin.'

It was a sketch of how Japan should be governed after the shogunate fell. It was written by a thirty-one-year-old ronin who had no government position, no formal authority, and three months left to live. The Meiji government that took power five months later would adopt almost every one of its eight points.

The Eight Points

Translated and condensed, the points were as follows. First, that political authority should be returned by the shogunate to the imperial court, in a peaceful transition. Second, that an upper and lower chamber of consultative assembly should be established to take part in government. Third, that capable men of all ranks — daimyō, samurai, and even commoners — should be appointed to office on the basis of merit. Fourth, that diplomatic relations with foreign powers should be reopened on the basis of just treaties, replacing the unequal treaties forced upon the bakufu. Fifth, that ancient laws should be reviewed and a new constitutional code drawn up. Sixth, that a navy should be expanded and modernized to defend the realm. Seventh, that an imperial guard should be established to protect the capital. Eighth, that a uniform currency should be established and the rate of exchange with foreign powers regularized.

These eight points, taken together, describe with remarkable accuracy the Japan that would emerge under the Meiji government — bicameral legislature, abolition of class privilege, treaty revision, written constitution, modern army and navy, unified currency. What was startling, in 1867, was not that any of these ideas was new — most had been discussed in some form by reformers of the previous decade — but that anyone had assembled all of them into a single coherent document.

How It Reached the Top

Ryōma did not have the political standing to propose this kind of program directly to the imperial court. What he had was a position as the trusted intermediary between the Satsuma and Chōshū domains, the two great Western anti-bakufu powers, and the Tosa daimyō Yamauchi Yōdō, who was politically aligned with the moderate faction at court.

Within weeks of leaving the cabin, Ryōma had handed the document to Gotō Shōjirō, a senior Tosa retainer. Gotō presented it to Yamauchi Yōdō, who recognized its political value immediately. Yōdō, in turn, used the eight-point program as the basis for the formal Tosa proposal to the bakufu in October 1867 — the proposal that asked the shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu to surrender authority back to the emperor peacefully. Yoshinobu accepted. The Taisei Hōkan ('Restoration of Imperial Rule'), announced on November 9th, 1867, ended 264 years of Tokugawa government.

The document Ryōma had dictated in a steamship cabin had moved, in less than four months, from a private sketch to the operational basis for the political transition that founded modern Japan.

What He Did Not See

Ryōma was assassinated in his lodging at the Ōmiya inn in Kyōto on December 10th, 1867 — three weeks after the formal Restoration. He was thirty-one. The investigation has never produced a fully accepted answer to the question of who killed him. The leading candidates are Sasaki Tadasaburō of the Mimawarigumi (a bakufu-aligned police unit), the Shinsengumi, or assassins from the Kii branch of the Tokugawa. No motive other than political opposition has ever been seriously proposed.

He did not live to see the Meiji government implement his proposals. The first of them — bicameral assembly — was prefigured in the Charter Oath of 1868 (April 6th) and gradually realized through the Council of State, the prefectural assemblies, and finally the Imperial Diet of 1890. The constitution he had wanted was promulgated on February 11th, 1889. The unified currency he had proposed was the yen, established in 1871. The treaty revision he had envisioned was completed in stages between 1894 and 1911. By the time the program was fully realized, Ryōma had been dead for almost half a century.

Why the Document Mattered

The Senchū Hassaku is sometimes credited as Japan's first modern constitutional document. That is too strong: it was a political program, not a constitution, and most of the institutions it proposed had been discussed before. What was decisively new about it was its unity — its insistence that all eight measures had to be undertaken together, that you could not have one without the others. A modern Japan was bicameral and constitutional and class-blind and treaty-revised and uniformly currencied; nothing less constituted modernity.

That is the sense in which a thirty-one-year-old ronin in a ship's cabin was the operational author of a new state. The ideas were already in circulation. The integration was his, and it travelled, intact, from the cabin to Kyoto to history.

"Once you decide to do something, do it without hesitation."