The Japanese Privy Council1

For more than a decade, the Privy Council has been the subject of political controversy in Japan. Today, a group of liberals look upon the Council as an obstruction to the progressive development of parliamentary government and urge its reform, if not abolition. Under these circumstances, there is a tendency to subject the Council to considerable scrutiny from a utilitarian viewpoint. What is its purpose? Does it adequately fulfill this purpose, or does it obstruct the present trend of representative government in Japan? What reforms in its structure and functions are to be recommended? The answers to these questions are suggested largely by the varying liberal or conservative views of the various critics.An evaluation of the achievements of an organ of government such as the Privy Council may be guided by several standards of value. One standard aims to measure the success of the institution in achieving the purpose of the states men who were the architects of its being. Another attempts to measure the success of the institution in promoting what is generally accepted at the present time by intelligent persons as good government. Measured by the first of these standards, the Privy Council would probably disappoint the author of the constitution, or at least disappoint his expectations as expressed in the almost naive language of the celebrated Commentaries on the Constitution wherein the Council was designed “to serve as the highest body of the emperor's constitutional advisers,” and was “to be impartial, with no leanings to this or that party, and to solve all difficult problems.”