Constitution data: Japan versus other countries
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| G.W. and the Constitution Convention, 1787 |
One of the purposes of constitute.org is to help people who draft constitutions refer to and cross-reference between the articles in the constitutions of other sovereign nations.
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| Constitute Project Logo |
Some, especially Americans whose Constitution is old and Japanese whose Constitution has never been amended, may think, "how many people outside of scholars need to reference the world's constitutions? It's not like constitutions are written often." Surprisingly, this is not true:
- Every year an average of five (5) new constitutions are written
- Every year an average of thirty (39) constitutions are amended or revised
- Since 1789, more than 900 constitutions have been written
- Only 50% of most constitutions last more than nineteen (19) years. Thomas Jefferson himself predicted in 1789 that a constitution "naturally expires at the end of 19 years". So far, he's been correct.
According to the Comparative Constitutions Project data, there are only three (3) constitutions so far that have been drafted with the influence of an occupying force:
- the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan,
- the Republic of Iraq,
- and of course: the State of Japan.
When the Americans were helping to draft the new post war Constitution, known as the SCAP Draft (formed from SWNCC-228: The Reform of the Japanese Governmental System), they did so in a record time for such an important document. According to an article in the Atlantic about the need for the U.S. to revise its Constitution:
When 24 military officers and civilians were given a single week to craft a constitution for occupied Japan in 1946, they turned to England. The Westminster-style parliament they installed in Tokyo, like its British forebear, has two houses. But unlike Congress, one is clearly more powerful than the other and can override the less powerful one during an impasse.Two comments about this above paragraph:
- The original American draft called for a unicameral, or one house, style parliament (which is interesting, because the U.S. Congress is bicameral, like the British/Westminster parliament). Unicameral parliaments are actually the more common form of parliament used by the states of the world. The Japanese insisted on a bicameral system — probably because the previous so-called Meiji Constitution was bicameral: the House of Representatives & the House of Peers. The change from unicameral to bicameral was the only major concession that the American GS made for Occupied Japan.
- The Americans did not just "turn to England" to write the Japanese Constitution. The referenced and consulted the constitutions and legal founding documents from many other countries, not just Britain.
Looking to overseas documents for reference is nothing new; for the constitution before that (The Constitution of the Empire of Japan aka the Meiji Constitution), the Japanese sent an overseas mission to Europe to study the documents over there. It was primarily from the German Empire and Prussia that Japan crafted their first constitution, although the constitutions of other European countries and America were studied.
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| CCP: investigating the sources and consequences of constitutional choices |
Looking at the data analysis and rankings done at the Comparative Constitutions Project, we can see some interesting facts about the Japanese Constitution as to how it compares to other constitutions of the world:
When the Japanese Constitution was enacted
The current Japanese Constitution was created (1946) along with quite a few others right after World War Ⅱ, slightly before the constitutions of the German Federal Republic aka [West] Germany (1949) and Italy (1947). With respect to rights and other provisions such as the military, it's no surprise that these former Axis Power countries, learning the lessons of war and having new constitutions all drafted within a relatively close time period, have articles in them that resemble each other with respect to democracy, freedoms & rights, and the military. However, Japan is the only one who has not amended its Constitution: Italy has amended its constitution 15 times, and Germany has amended its constitution 58 times. |
| Histogram of newly enacted constitutions |
The majority of constitutions that were enacted from 1988 to 1994 come from former Soviet bloc countries. The earliest constitution? United States (1789) The newest constitution? Syria (2012); soon to be Egypt (2013).
Scope and Length of the the Constitution of Japan
In the textbook "The Endurance of National Constitutions" (2009; Elkins, Ginsburg and Melton), it was found that when you dissected all the world's constitutions, you came up with about 92 major topics. When you make a graph of the percentage of the topics covered, you get a chart that looks something like this:
Japan has a coverage of 36%, or less than 34 topics. New Zealand has the lowest scope (26%) and Kenya has the highest at 81%. This doesn't mean that much of New Zealand's laws are ambiguous. It just means that New Zealand operates a lot on unwritten constitutional conventions (statutes, court decisions, letters patent, orders in council, etc) rather than using a supreme document above all others.
Additionally, many topics are irrelevant to other countries. For example, topics regarding constitutional monarchies (such as Japan) would be irrelevant for a country that was a republic.
For reference, the United States has 49% coverage.
Length of the Constitution
There is not necessarily a correspondence to the amount of topics covered and the length of a constitution, however: |
| Length does not correspond to coverage. |
Japan's English language version of its Constitution is the tenth (10th) shortest constitution in the world, coming in at just under five thousand (4,998) words. Perfect lunchtime reading material. The shortest constitution? Jordan. Its constitution is 2,270 English words. New Zealand and Iceland's "constitutions" are just a little shorter than Japan's, weighing in at 4,736 and 4,089 words respectively.
The longest constitution in the world? That would be the Republic of India, whose 146,385 words (448 article in 22 parts, 12 schedules, and 118 amendments) is more than twice as long as the runner-up in length, the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria: a mere 66,263 words. To put that in perspective, there are 138,020 words [depending on the manuscript versions] in the Greek language New Testament.
The United States Constitution is 7,762 words.
Amount of Rights in the Constitutions
Chapter Ⅲ of the Japanese Constitution is titled "Rights and Duties of the People", and consists of thirty (30) articles. The CCP has looked through all the rights enumerated in different constitutions of the word and found 117 of them. How do all the countries rank? |
| CCP's 117 rights coverage |
Just because one country has more rights doesn't mean all people consider that country to be more free. For example, the right to bear arms is one of the 117 rights. Only five (5) countries in the world spell out how its people are entitled to bear arms in its constitution: Guatemala, Haiti, Iran, Mexico, and the United States of America. On the other hand, 167 constitutions of the 189 listed talk about freedom of religion.
Executive & Legislative Power, and Judicial Independence
Amongst 189 countries, Japan's Constitution ranks as follows:- For legislative power, there are 28 countries in the world with more legislative power than Japan. There are 28 countries with the same amount of legislative power as Japan, and there are 133 countries with less legislative power than Japan
- For executive power, there are 162 countries with more executive power than Japan. There are only nine (9) countries with less executive power than Japan.
If the Japanese executive gains the power to declare a state of emergency (which is being proposed in the LDP amendment), then there will be 28 countries with less executive power than Japan. - Eighty nine (89) countries have more judicial independence than Japan; Fifty seven (57) countries have less judicial independence.
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| Caveat: comparing the different branches of government is like comparing apples to oranges |
Most people naturalize do so for very pragmatic reasons: to secure a permanent life in Japan for their family, for their finances, or for the quality of life. I think that very few people think about the legal meaning of becoming a national of another country of Japan. Conversely, people that have lived in Japan for what can be considered a lifetime (decades) yet choose to never become legally Japanese — usually stopping at permanent resident status — choose not to usually for identity/cultural loyalty reasons or "safety net" reasons (they want to retain the ability to be a national in their original countries), not because they have a discomfort with the government system.
However, the written signed oath a naturalization candidate makes to the Minister of Justice (法務大臣) — not the Emperor (天皇陛下), the Prime Minister (総理大臣), or anybody else — connects you to the legal concept of the sovereign State of Japan (日本国), and the oath that a naturalized citizen signs (宣誓書) is an oath to the supreme/highest law of Japan, the Japanese Constitution, as well as the laws below it.
The Oath is a serious thing. I have read stories of not a few naturalized citizens that naturalized yet afterwards expressed surprise that the laws or Constitution of Japan were different from the laws of their home country (especially family law). Even if a Japanese national, natural-born or naturalized, is no longer living in the country of Japan, the laws of Japan may still apply to them and they may have to answer to them, depending on the circumstances.
Thus, even though there is no civics test for becoming Japanese, I encourage those interested in it to at least familiar themselves at least with the Japanese Constitution. Now there's a tool that allows one to easily browse it, looking for the sections that are important to you, and allowing one to compare sections to comparable sections in other countries. Comparing countries according to their constitutions is a bit of a wonky thing to do, but it can't hurt.
I would encourage anybody that is seriously considering naturalizing to another country to at least study the government and its laws, as from a legal perspective this is what you're connecting yourself to when you do it in most modern countries. Even if you never plan to get involved with the government or even vote. It's a shame that there's no "citizenship test" as part of the naturalization process for Japan, as there is for some other countries, like the United States.
One final word of caution about getting too excited about a Constitution. Just because something is written in a constitution doesn't mean it's going to or not going to affect your daily life. That all depends on the legislature and the laws it writes to implement a part of the constitution, the executive and how it enforces those laws, and the judicial in how it interprets the laws. Thus, living a long time in Japan and experiencing and observing how the rights and responsibilities affects Japanese nationals is also invaluable. Thus, the longer you live in Japan, the better you will be at making an informed decision about whether changing your nationality is right for you.
