Bold and provocative, Kyu Hyun Kim's The Age of Visions and Arguments makes large claims about the transformative power of “ordinary” people, the vitality of political discourses, and the weakness of the state in early Meiji Japan. The book is a history of the movement to establish a national assembly (kokkai kaisetsu undō), which Kim refers to as the parliamentarian movement, and its scope extends beyond our current, narrow understandings of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement. Indeed, it is, at its heart, about the emergence of a public sphere in the years between the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the promulgation of the Imperial Constitution in 1889.

Kim's embrace of the concept of the public sphere—in, as he points out, this first effort to apply the idea to early Meiji Japan in the English-language historiography—gives coherence and thus weight to his many and varied insights about Meiji...

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