In 1889 Hozumi returned to Japan and gradually shifted away from
legal positivism, but he did not reject his positivist heritage outright. Within a very few years after his return, attacks from the left together with issues of interpretation of the
Meiji constitution led him to seek in ancestor worship and the family state concept the true source of Japan's greatness. In his analysis of the state, Hozumi speaks of
kokutai (national body/structure) and
seitai (government body/structure). Hozumi defines
kokutai anew. He gives
kokutai a specific legal meaning without stripping it of its historical and ethical connotations. For Hozumi
kokutai refers to the locus of sovereignty. Two forms of
kokutai are important: monarchy and democracy. In a monarchy the locus of sovereignty lies in the monarch and in a democracy in the people. And the form of
kokutai is also important for the kind of constitution a country has. He distinguishes two kinds, the authorized constitution and the national contract constitution. Authorized constitutions are ordained by a sovereign at his own will, while national contract constitutions arise from an agreement among sovereign individuals. The term
seitai is used by Hozumi to denote the specific governmental organization under a given
kokutai. An important distinction is the difference between a despotic
seitai and a constitutional
seitai. A despotic
seitai contains all powers in an undivided form while a constitutional
seitai is characterized by the division of powers. Hozumi rejects the
monogenic idea of human development, postulating that different races of humanity arose and developed in isolation enabling them to form idiosyncratic modes of governance/culture. Thus, ethnic groups are formed from the political and moral unity of groups of people under one sovereign, who becomes the symbol of ultimate moral and political authority, i.e. the one common ancestor of a group. As a result, Hozumi argues that humans, by nature, form societies that revolve around an unquestioning loyalty (
kodoshin) to their sovereign and one in which individuals and society are dissolved into each other--a state summed up by the concept of
godo seizon or amalgamated existence. This is what he considered to be the hierarchical, monarchist form of
kokutai. However, Hozumi believes that this harmonious state of things was, in most places, shattered by the introduction of universalist belief systems, e.g. Buddhism, Christianity, and Confucianism, which exalted the concept of the individual as being independent of the state and instead related to a transcendental universal entity. Hence, these universalist beliefs led to the breakdown of the primordial social orders and separate law from morality. This phenomenon would lead to the formation of more egalitarian
kokutai where total obedience to the state was no longer seen as second nature. For Hozumi, Japan's greatness stems from its adherence to the primordial form of
kokutai epitomised by what he considered to be the eternal dynastic rule of
Amaterasu Okami and her subsequent reincarnations as the successive emperors of Japan. Thus, the emperor was the sovereign and the father of the people whose authority was sacred and inerrant. In his view, democracy is characteristic of European
kokutai, but the Japanese
kokutai is monarchical and so the Meiji Constitution is an authorized constitution. ==Legacy==