In the late eighteenth century, the British East India Company discovered that opium grown in colonial India sold well in China, where it was, however, illegal. Mounting tensions caused by the illegal trade led to an Opium War in 1840–1842, won by Britain and leading to the establishment of a “semi-colonial” treaty port system in China. Mid nineteenth-century China was also wracked by multiple rebellions, including the massive Christian Taiping Rebellion. Yet the Qing Dynasty not only survived but also experienced some revitalization. Meanwhile, in 1854 a U.S. Navy squadron pressured Japan to end its seclusion policy, and a similar treaty port system was established in Japan as well. In 1867 the last Shogun resigned, and in 1868 power was returned to the Japanese imperial government in the Meiji Restoration. Meiji Japan embraced rapid Westernization in the name of an allegedly primordial imperial line. Japan then pressured Korea into granting it treaty port privileges, and, after defeating China in a war fought over Korea, Japan eventually reduced Korea to an outright colony. Starting with the seizure of Saigon in 1859, Vietnam was colonized by France.

The identity of the Japanese Constitution of 1946 is defined by the unusual story of its making process. This constitution was already born with both internal and external disharmony. The new constitution fundamentally changed the former constitution of the Meiji regime; however, it did not replace the former imperial constitution but revised it by using its amendment clause. The continuity between the former and latter regimes was disconnected in a substantive sense but maintained in a procedural sense. This is the internal disharmony. This twisted legal inconsistency can often arise in hard times after losing a war, but it was of grave concern to Japanese legal scholars who tried to justify such legalistic chaos as the “August Revolution.” Nevertheless, it was not the new constitution itself that brought about the revolutionary impact, but the Potsdam Declaration as a condition of surrender imposed by the Allied Forces on the Japanese Government. The Constitution of Japan was not unjustly imposed by the Allied Forces but was legitimately imposed by the Potsdam Declaration, which the Japanese Government itself accepted upon its defeat in the war. More precisely, it is a constitution based on an imposed revolution. This is the external disharmony.