Tatsukichi Minobe

Tatsukichi Minobe (美濃部 達吉, Minobe Tatsukichi^?, May 7, 1873 – May 23, 1948) was a Japanese statesman and scholar of constitutional law. His interpretation of the role of the monarchy in the pre-war Empire of Japan was a source of considerable controversy in the increasingly radicalized political environment of Japan in the 1930s.

His wife was the daughter of Dairoku Kikuchi, and his son Ryokichi Minobe was governor of Tokyo (1967–1979).

Minobe was born in Takasago city, Hyōgo prefecture to a doctor of Chinese medicine. He graduated from the law school of Tokyo Imperial University in 1897, where one of his mentors was future Privy Councilor Ichiki Kitokurō. He went to work for the Home Ministry, and was sent for further studies to Germany, France and the United Kingdom, returning to Japan in 1902 to take up a position as a professor at Tokyo Imperial University.

In 1912, Minobe published a work on constitutional interpretation, which came to be known as the “emperor organ theory”. Per Minobe, the “State”, or kokutai was supreme, and even the emperor was only an “organ of the State” as defined through the constitutional structure, rather than a sacred power beyond the state itself. Minobe used the metaphor of the head of the human body to describe the role of the emperor. This thesis was influenced by the work of German legal philosopher Georg Jellinek, whose work, Allgemeine Staatslehre (General Theory of the State) was published in 1900, and also by the British concept of a constitutional monarchy. Minobe warned that the emperor’s right of supreme command over the military needed to be carefully limited by the Diet of Japan if Japan were not to end up with a dual government in which the military would become completely independent and above the rule of law and unaccountable to civilian authority.

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