Episode 534 – The Imperial Democracy

Facing Backward Podcasts

This week on the Revised Introduction to Japanese History: during the 1920s, Japan’s political system became more democratic and representative–an “imperial democracy” that evolved out of the Meiji system. How did this happen, and why did those democratic gains prove to be so unstable in the long term?

Sources

Jansen, Marius. The Making of Modern Japan

Mitani, Taichiro. “The Establishment of Party Cabinets” in The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol VI: The Twentieth Century

Andrew Gordon’s excellent essay “Social Protest in Imperial Japan: The Hibiya Riot of 1905” for MIT’s Visualizing Cultures program

Another excellent Gordon essay (“Social Conflict and Control, Protest and Repression“) for the International Encyclopedia of the First World War

Takayoshi, Matsuo. “The Development of Democracy in Japan – Taisho Democracy: Its Flowering and Breakdown.” The Developing Economies 4, No 4 (December, 1966)

Shiota, Shobei. “The Rice Riots and the Social Problems.” The Developing Economies 4, No. 4 (December 1966)

Hayami, Yujiro. “Rice Policy in Japan’s Economic Development.” Economic Development Center of the Department of Economics, University of Minnesota

Images

The Hibiya Riots of 1905. Protesters flooded the streets to speak against the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth, which was seen as insufficient in light of Japanese losses.

Suzuki Shoten, a trading firm in Kobe, was burned down by a mob during the 1918 rice riots.

Coverage of the start of the riots in Uozu, from a local paper in Toyama prefecture.

Hara Kei (sometimes referred to as Hara Takashi), protege of Ito Hirobumi and one of the members of the second generation of Japanese leadership. He was also the first politician to serve as Japan’s Prime Minister.

Plaque commemorating Hara Takashi’s assassination at Tokyo station (by the Marunouchi south exit, next to the Shinkansen ticket window).

Transcript

Today, Japan is a functioning democracy–albeit a somewhat messy one, though to be fair most democracies are. And particularly in my own country, we have a habit of giving ourselves all the credit for that as a result of the American-led occupation of the country which took place after World War II.

And to be clear, for all its faults–which we will certainly get into–the Occupation of Japan most definitely did help usher in Japan’s modern democracy.

But I think we Americans–in what is, to be fair, something of a time-honored tradition among us–tend to give ourselves a bit too much credit here in emphasizing the Occupation.

Because the reality is that, much as was the case with postwar Germany, part of the reason that postwar Japan’s democracy succeeded was the existence of a prewar example to point to.

Despite a largely antidemocratic constitution setting up a government run by powerful, unelected, and unaccountable autocrats, imperial Japan did enjoy a brief period of democratic success, known to history as the Taisho Democracy.

That name comes from the Taisho Emperor, who succeeded his illustrious father Meiji after the latter’s death in 1912. Taisho was never a particularly involved emperor. As a child he was a committed Francophile and largely disinterested in politics, much to his father’s chagrin; as an adult, he was hampered by a series of health issues that likely included some psychological issues, though exactly what the issue was remains unclear.

The Taisho Democracy emerged under Taisho’s rule, which lasted until the emperor’s early death in 1926; indeed, opponents of the democratic reforms sometimes blamed the changes on the presence of a weak emperor on the throne whose weaknesses left openings for such challenges to the existing order.

The reality, however, was that the roots of Taisho democracy went back well before the Taisho Emperor’s rule, and lay instead in the foundation of the empire’s politics during the Meiji Period.

You might remember that under the Meiji Constitution, Japan did have a parliament with some limited oversight authority–though only one of the two houses was elected, and that only by the small number of men who paid enough in taxes to qualify for the electorate.

Still, weak though this representation was it did provide some outlet for dissent against government policy–particularly the monopolization of political power by the Meiji autocracy, which in turn was dominated mostly by former samurai from the old Choshu and Satsuma domains.

That dissent crystalized around opposition political parties the names of which I will not bother you with because they promptly began merging and splitting and reforming in a way familiar to anyone with a passion for parliamentary politics and which makes tracking them a massive pain in the rear.

The upshot of all this is that said political parties were on occasion able to pressure the governing oligarchy, primarily using their control of the budget–which had to be approved by the elected House of Representatives which said parties controlled, and which was constantly growing during the Meiji and Taisho periods, meaning that even the constitution’s provision rolling over the past year’s budget if a new one didn’t pass did not do enough to disarm the parties from strongarming the oligarchy.

The issue was consistent enough that one of the Meiji oligarchs, Ito Hirobumi, took it upon himself to form his own political party, the Rikken Seiyukai (Constitutional friends of the Government) to contest elections and try and disarm the opposition.

This sort of worked–but it also came off as an approval of party politics by one of the seniormost figures of the Meiji oligarchy, and in time the Seiyukai too would become somewhat oppositional to the unelected oligarchy.

The parties could also use their national platform–a perk, after all, of elected office–to try and publicly humiliate the governing oligarchy in order to undercut its authority.

After all, proceedings in the Diet naturally got a lot of publicity, and if that publicity could be directed against the government, well, that was naturally a pretty powerful weapon in the hands of a smart politician.

If that’s all a bit abstract, consider an example: in January of 1914, a massive scandal wracked Japan’s politics as it emerged that leaders within the Imperial Japanese Navy had taken huge kickbacks from the German industrial firm Siemens in exchange for guaranteeing extremely lucrative military procurement contracts to the company.

The scandal only emerged when a disgruntled former Siemens employee named Karl Richter stole incriminating documents and then leaked them to the Reuters news agency.

The resulting scandal of course made huge headlines, which the opposition parties took full advantage of to demand a series of hearings into the corrupt dealings. Things came to a head when then Prime Minister (and former admiral) Yamamoto Gonnohyoe submitted his budget for the year.

At this point, Prime Ministers were appointed directly by the emperor (which is to say, by the emperor’s advisors in the unelected oligarchy), and so PM Yamamoto had no loyalty to the political parties.

His budget included a huge fleet expansion bill and big tax increases to pay for it. The budget ended up completely deadlocked as it got wrapped up in the very public debate around the scandal, and in the end Prime Minister Yamamoto had to resign to bring things back under control.

Scandals like this were one way for the parties to grow their platform. The other was good old fashioned protest and political violence–which, despite the image some people have of Japan as some sort of “harmonious society” was a feature of its politics throughout the 20th century.

The first big protest movement took place in 1905, in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War–which you’ll recall Japan did win, but less as a result of its own decisive successes and more as a result of the complete trainwreck that was late czarist Russia.

Still, that wouldn’t be the impression you’d have as an average Japanese citizen in 1905; state propaganda heavily played up the idea that Japan was winning the war securely and decisively, and that everything in the war effort was going great.

Which was why the final peace deal that emerged in 1905 was something of a shock to the citizens of Tokyo–who had expected, in line with said propaganda, a peace treaty hugely favorable to Japan, and one which in particular included a massive indemnity, a cash payment by Russia to Japan.

This last bit was important because Japan had (as most countries do) taken out big loans to pay for the war–the indemnity was supposed to essentially erase the cost of the war by making Russia pay for said loans, ensuring that Japan could both enjoy the fruits of victory and avoid raising taxes in the aftermath to redress the financial balance.

Instead, the peace deal negotiated in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (with American President Teddy Roosevelt as the mediator, for which he got a Nobel Peace Prize) included no indemnity. Japan simply had not won decisively enough to be able to make that kind of demand from Russia.

Indeed, from a certain perspective, Japan didn’t get much of anything in exchange for over 80,000 dead (compared to 17,000 against China 10 years earlier) and a MASSIVE expenditure of cash. Russia agreed to let Japan dominate Korea, but realistically that had already been the case. It ceded the southern part of Sakhalin island to Japan, but that frigid island was of little strategic or economic value. It ceded its position in southern Manchuria to Japan, but that position was in the form of a lease from China for lands used to build and maintain what became the South Manchuria Railway–valuable, to be sure, in terms of a stronger economic position in China, but not an outright colony.

So yeah, in a certain sense Japan didn’t get that much from a war that had demanded a LOT of sacrifices. And when that news broke, oh my were people pissed off.

A coalition of nationalist journalists, university professors, and politicians who had previously supported the war effort began to criticize the deal when word of it reached home, and called a rally in Hibiya Park just south of the Imperial Palace for September 5, 1905. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police–who, unlike American cops, were an arm of the national government controlled by the powerful Home Ministry–banned the gathering as an illegal disturbance of the peace, but despite this over 30,000 people showed up on the day and overran the barriers set up around the park to enter. After a 30 minute rally full of speeches condemning the treaty, the group dispersed–but that wasn’t the end of things.

Some protestors began to scuffle with police. Others, led by the hawkish politician Kono Hironaka, marched towards the imperial palace to continue the protest. Still others began to attack buildings associated with the government, such as the nearby offices of the Foreign Ministry or the pro-government newspaper Kokumin Shinbun and the headquarters of the state-run streetcar line.

The result was a massive riot that lasted for three days, from September 5 to the 7th, and which was only brought under control because the government of Prime Minister Katsura Taro declared martial law (which remained in place until November).

When it was all over, 15 streetcars, several buildings, and over 70 percent of Tokyo’s koban–the small police substations scattered across the city–had been destroyed. Over 2000 people were arrested, though only only 104 of those arrests went to trial (87 were convicted). 17 people died in the riots, with hundreds more being injured.

The Hibiya Riots, as they’re known, were of course hugely disruptive to the life of the city and a signal of the unpopularity of the Portsmouth Treaty specifically. But they’re also very important to the evolution of Japanese democracy, because the riots were not, in the end, just about the unpopularity of the peace deal.

Many of the speeches at Hibiya Park were critical of a government perceived as unaccountable to the people, which had made big promises about how the war was going and what people would get in exchange for their sacrifices and then walked those promises back without any thought.

Protest rhetoric was extremely critical of “clique government”, by which was meant the power of the former Satsuma and Choshu samurai who dominated imperial politics from behind the scenes. By contrast, they would demand “constitutional government” that gave more power to elected representatives in the Diet and was thus more reflective of the actual will of the people.

And while the Hibiya Riots were not successful in either ending clique government or revising the Treaty of Portsmouth (which went into effect the day the riots started, so it wasn’t like it could be changed), they also were not the last of their kind.

Tokyo would be wracked by eight more such riots over the course of the next 13 years, though none except the very last one would reach the same scale as the original.

These protests would generally be triggered by one of three issues. The first was reports of government corruption–indeed, the very same Siemens Scandal we talked about early in this episode saw a riot in Tokyo from February 10-12, 1914 (435 people arrested, and the grounds of the National Diet itself being stormed by protestors who felt the body was being too soft on corruption).

The second was criticism of clique government and a demand for a more representative state, an idea that would usually crop up at all these protests even if it wasn’t always a focal point.

The last was anything to do with tax policy or finance–several of the riots were triggered by either news that the government planned to raise taxes (which, how dare it demand more of the people without giving them more in return), or planned to hike fare for the streetcar system.

Seriously, two of the riots were about streetcar fare increases–people really did not want to have to pay more to commute.

So ok, why does all this matter? Well, for starters in a certain paradoxical sense it was all indicative of the tremendous success of government policy. We haven’t spent much time in our overview of this period on education and social policy, but one of the main concerns of the imperial government was the creation of a genuinely national Japanese identity. Before the end of feudalism, very few people outside of the samurai class would have seen themselves as part of a collective “Japan”, and identified themselves instead with their home village or at most the feudal domain or province in which they lived.

The idea that someone living in Kagoshima was tied by some shared political destiny to someone in Aomori on the other end of Japan was rare outside of the educated feudal elite.

And so one of the big projects of the new government was to convince the people of the new Japan that they were kokumin, people of the nation–not just residents of the places they lived, but part of a shared national community. Education and social policy were geared to this very end, intended to produce a sense of identification among the people of Japan with each other and with their government.

And by the 20th century, this had worked–but the Hibiya Riots showed that if anything, it worked too well. To quote the historian Andrew Gordon, “in matters political the people had views of their own, which they were more than willing to express in word and deed. They took various steps to appropriate public and imperial spaces… In their anger at being excluded, the crowd asserted that Hibiya Park belonged to the people, not the state.”

Gordon also notes that among those arrested during the Hibiya riots the universal sense was that the rioters were supporters of the emperor who had been angered by the wrongheaded policies of the emperor’s advisors, “in essence offering condolences to the emperor for the bad policies of his officials.”

So yes, the state had succeeded in forging a national Japanese identity–but now the people who held that identity were using it to challenge the government’s power and demand more influence and say for themselves.

The other reason the riots matter is that it would be the last of these riots that formally inaugurated the Taisho Democracy–the 1918 Rice Riots.

Now, as the name might imply these were in fact riots over the price of rice–which by 1918 had begun to skyrocket around the country. In part, that was because of demand; Japan’s population had continued to grow throughout this period, from an estimated 44 million in 1900 to over 55 million by the end of 1918. Despite the heroic efforts of Japan’s farmers, domestic output just couldn’t keep up.

Those farmers ran into the same problem that had plagued Japanese agriculture since the dawn of recorded history–even with advances in farming technology and field reclamation, the fact remained that in such a mountainous country there was only so much land that could be farmable, and only so much you could get from that land.

The Meiji oligarchs attempted to redress the issue by gearing the colonial empire towards providing the home islands with food–what became South Korea in particular was during the years of Japanese rule essentially the breadbasket of the empire–but even this could not keep up with demand, and so prices rose.

This was a huge issue for rice in particular; during the feudal period, most of the population hadn’t actually been able to afford rice, but by the early 20th century rice was estimated to make up somewhere around 70% of the nation’s caloric intake (by comparison, during the postwar years it dipped to around 50%).

Yet the price of rice was not an issue the government cared much to address; official state policy was far more concerned with avoiding importing rice at all costs because of a concern that buying rice from overseas to keep prices under control would negatively effect Japan’s balance of trade.

So instead, the Meiji Oligarchs pushed a rice tariff through the Diet that put massive import duties on any foreign rice (though rice from the colonies was exempted), in effect keeping prices deliberately high in the name of national economic policy.

All this came to a head in the summer of 1918, as rice prices–which had been climbing–more or less doubled from the spring to the summer, at a time where blue collar workers were on average already spending around 27% of their annual income on rice (for white collar workers it was closer to 18%; for comparison, in 1953 the average was 12.9% for the whole country, and in 1963 it was 7.4%).

Why? Well, for one, much of Japan’s transport capacity was wrapped up in shipping goods to the Allies of WWI–which, to be fair, brought a LOT of money into Japan’s economy, but which also meant that there was a lot less capacity to move rice around the empire, making moving said rice even more expensive (which was of course tacked on to the final sale price).

For another, government agents were busily buying up huge volumes of rice for themselves–building a stockpile to support a planned and ultimately disastrous attempt to send the Imperial Japanese Army to Siberia to intervene against the Communists in the burgeoning civil war in Russia.

That intervention would, of course, end in failure after several years–but nobody knew that in 1918. In preparation, the army bought up huge volumes of rice to feed its soldiers–driving the price up further, while taking advantage of laws for “national security” to force the sale of said rice below market rate.

So all told, not a great time for farmers or for average city folks looking to be able to afford dinner–and so one July evening in 1918, women in the fishing village of Uozu in Toyama Prefecture along the Japan Sea Coast began protesting outside the offices of the local government against the shipping of rice out of the prefecture to the cities, and demanding that they be allowed to buy rice at subsidized prices.

Press coverage of the protest then saw copycat movements spring up around the country, and before long Kobe, Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo were paralyzed by their own mass protests against the price of rice.

The protests then transformed into riots as city dwellers in particular attacked the shops of rice dealers and burned them to the ground, as well as going after police stations and koban. In many cities, the riots were also matched by strikes called by factory workers against wages that they increasingly couldn’t afford to feed their families on.

And of course, all along the way the rioters–and supporters of the movement in the press–attacked the government for its regressive and “unconstitutional” policies in suppressing dissent and opposing popular participation in government.

The riots paralyzed the country–it’s estimated that some 10 million people participated across 33 cities, 104 towns, and 97 villages stretched across 36 of the 47 prefectures of the Home Islands. Both the police and 50,000 army servicemen had to be pressed into service to bring the riots under control with 20,000 arrests of which over 8100 were charged with a crime–with 94% of those being convicted, usually resulting in a fine but in some cases more serious penalties (up to life sentences).

Still, while the state crackdown ended the riots by September, they did not solve the core issue of the cost crisis. That would be solved by a combination of policies state bureaucrats derisively called “ame to muchi”–sweets and the whip. Sweets, in this case, meant donations by both the government and large businesses to support relief efforts as well as the government-backed sale of cheap rice to depress prices.

The whip, meanwhile, saw bans on public meetings and censorship of the press in the name of “public safety”, in addition to heightened police presence around the country.

But the issue of popular dissatisfaction with the government remained unresolved, and here is the most important legacy of the crisis. The Prime Minister at the time of the riots, Terauchi Masatake, was forced to resign in humiliation as the country was paralyzed under his leadership–but who would replace him?

The Meiji Constitution gave that power not to the Diet but to the Emperor and his counselors, the unelected Meiji oligarchs. By this time, many of the old leaders were dead–the architect of the Meiji Constitution, Ito Hirobumi, had been cut down by a Korean nationalist assassin in 1909. The seniormost among them was Yamagata Aritomo, a staunch conservative and architect of the Imperial Japanese Army. But even the normally unflappable Yamagata was terrified by the riots and their potential to destabilize the country.

And that’s why Yamagata threw his weight behind a choice that I think in any other circumstance he never would have made.

He decided to back not another member of his inner circle–the usual approach when the job was vacant–but an outsider politician by the name of Hara Takashi.

Hara is an interesting figure in the broader arc of Japanese history. He was born in 1856 into a minor samurai family from what was then Nanbu domain (now a part of Iwate Prefecture in the north of Honshu). His family’s domain was on the losing side of the civil war of 1868, and so Hara was forced to make his own way in the world, moving to Tokyo as a young man to pursue any opportunities he could find.

He would spend some time first as a journalist and then as a bureaucrat in the Foreign Ministry, before leaving the bureaucracy to go back to journalism. In 1900, he made yet another career change, leaving journalism behind to join the newly formed political party known as the Rikken Seiyukai.

This party–the Constitutional Friends of Government–was brand new in 1900, the brainchild of Ito Hirobumi, one of the architects of the government oligarchy. Ito hoped to construct his own pro-government party to contend for influence in the parliament, having seen the plans of his fellow oligarchs get stymied by the influence of the liberal politicians in the Diet. He built the Rikken Seiyukai out of a combination of pro-government politicians and ex-bureaucrats whom he convinced to go into politics.

As an aside, we’ve talked a bit about elite bureaucrats in this period already but I really want to drill home an important point here–when we talk about bureaucrats in Japan, we’re not talking about the same thing as bureaucrats in America. In the US, government bureaucracy is not seen as a very glamorous field of employment; by contrast, in Japan, for a very long time it was THE elite field. Japan’s bureaucracy was built by the Meiji oligarchs to implement their vision of the country through policy, and only the best and brightest were to be allowed in the door. Bureaucrats were culled by selective examination from the nation’s most elite universities–most notably Tokyo Imperial University itself–and given an enormous amount of largely unaccountable power under a government that was way more centralized than what you see in the US.

As a result, particularly during the imperial period, Japan’s bureaucrats tended to be rather anti-democratic–after all, how could the rabble know better than them, the educated elite?–and defined by an attitude of kanson minpi–revere the bureaucrat, despise the people.

Hara was not the typical ex-bureaucrat turned Seiyukai politician; among other things, he was fond of projecting a more populist image. For example, he constantly referred to himself as a heimin (commoner), despite the fact that his samurai lineage technically made him shizoku (a sort of hereditary knighthood that didn’t really offer any legal perks)–and even as he rose politically, he refused any sort of honors or ennoblement that would “separate him from the people.”

Particularly after Ito Hirobumi’s assassination in 1909, Hara would come to dominate the Seiyukai, which became the conservative party of prewar Japanese politics. And so he was the man Yamagata turned to in 1918 to take over as Prime Minister.

And Hara said yes–becoming the first politician to take the spot of Prime Minister in Japanese history.

That said, he was appointed to that job–and at any rate, Hara was not exactly a popular champion and never really worked to ingratiate himself with the masses of the people whose cause he supposedly championed. Unlike the leaders of the liberal opposition parties, Hara (like most of his Seiyukai followers) had never been a part of older liberal movements like the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement–he’d been a bureaucrat instead. In the Diet, he became famous not for championing liberal causes like the expansion of suffrage rights but for his mastery of pork barrel politics, cutting deals with the military to support railroad expansion bills they wanted in exchange for their backing of infrastructure bills that would win him and his supporters votes.

He even went out of his way to ingratiate himself personally to Yamagata, whom he correctly perceived as the most powerful man in politics–and who rewarded him by trusting him in 1918.

Hara was, simply put, not really a liberal or a man of the people–or even a particularly convicted democrat–but a politician who saw a chance for personal advancement by taking advantage of a political moment.

And to be fair, he did get what he wanted–but at a cost. After three years in office, he would be assassinated by a right-winger in Tokyo Station on his way to a party conference; said right-winger blamed Hara for putting the interests of the Seiyukai above the broader needs of the nation as a whole.

Still, Hara’s time in office had set a new precedent, and going forward there was now an informal expectation that the PM be a politician from the largest political party–though that expectation was never really written in stone. Still, attempts to move away from it tended to provoke political pushback–for example, a 1924 attempt to select the non-politician, non-party ex-bureaucrat Kiyoura Keigo as Prime Minister resulted in all political parties in the Diet coming together in a “Protect the Constitution” movement that shut down the entire parliament. Kiyoura would make it only six months in office before resigning because of an inability to even get the Diet to consider a single law.

What emerged in the aftermath of Hara’s death was a sort of bizarre political frankenstein that we, today, call the Taisho Democracy–a combination of political movements, constitutional structures, and party politics that produced, if not a functional democracy, then something that at least resembled it.

For a start, while the emperor and his advisors retained a lot of power on paper in the 1920s, practically speaking they had a lot less influence than had been the case. For one thing, the old leaders of the Meiji Era were dying out; Yamagata Aritomo, for example, passed away in 1922. They were replaced, of course; the emperor’s privy council, his closest advisors, remained a potent political force. But the members of that council no longer enjoyed the incredible authority that had once belonged to guys like Ito Hirobumi or Yamagata Aritomo, who had in essence built the modern Japanese state.

For another, by the 1920s it was clear that you couldn’t just put whoever you wanted in the PM’s seat and expect people to go along with it–the political parties simply wouldn’t stand for it. And without the parties, you couldn’t get anything done in the Diet–which the Constitution of 1889 did specify was necessary to pass laws, and you know, govern.

And so, it became conventional over the course of the 1920s to appoint as PM the head of the largest party in the Diet–though the law never mandated this, practically speaking it was the only way to actually accomplish anything.

Still, it’s important not to overstate the nature of the political change that’s occuring here. As Takayoshi Matsuo put it in his article on the Taisho Democracy, the parties had three options as they accumulated more power. The first was to genuinely attempt to challenge the existing constitutional order and build a new structure that invested real power in the Diet, likely by means of trying to force amendments to the constitution. The second was to go along with the existing status quo. The third was to not try and change the state structure, but to position themselves as its new managers rather than letting the emperor’s advisors take that role. And this final option was the one they chose.

The Taisho Democracy, in other words, was a period of gradual reform. If you picture the Japanese government as this tangled web of influence and power, all that’s really changing here is who is at the center of that web–now the parties instead of the oligarchs. And that control was always unstable; between 1918 and 1931, Japan saw no less than 11 different prime ministers in office as coalitions constantly broke and reformed in the face of new political crises.

It’s also worth noting that the parties themselves had somewhat complicated relationships with the people they claimed to represent. The Seiyukai in particular remained rather conservative throughout this period, and backed initiatives sponsored by conservative bureaucrats and the military to (for example) expand police powers to deal with “subversion” and to suppress anarchist, communist, and socialist movements.

Even the more liberal parties, whose names I will not bother you with because they were constantly changing as the parties split, merged, and reformed, generally didn’t oppose these measures even as they pressed (for example) for the expansion of voting rights.

In 1925, they actually won that one, with the right to vote being extended to every man over the age of 25. A similar bill to extend voting rights to women cleared the House of Representatives but stalled out in the upper House of Councilors.

Overall, I think it is fair to say that the political parties of the Taisho period were very much of the urban middle class–representative mostly of the wealthy, educated, and influential, who were their core constituency. The broader masses never really saw themselves as benefitting from said parties.

Still, it’s important not to understate the Taisho Democracy either. Mass protest and the political maneuvering of Hara Takashi and the Seiyukai had won some important changes to how politics operated in imperial Japan–and over the course of the 1920s, a broader political liberalization did follow.

At least in some areas–both political parties were still very anti-leftist and happily went along with, for example, the 1925 Peace Preservation Law which essentially criminalized any form of left-wing organizing. Nor did either political party express much concern, for example, with Japan’s imperial expansion–though both generally felt that the empire as it existed by the 1920s was more or less all Japan needed, and that further expansion was not necessary.

Still–one can’t help but wonder what would have happened if this system had been allowed to continue to develop. After a few decades, would Japan have transformed into a more mature democracy on its own? Could the Empire of Japan have liberalized under the influence of a growing democratic movement?

But we can’t ever do more than wonder, because by the late 1920s two poles of opposition to this growing liberalism would emerge–first in the state bureaucracy, where the elite bureaucrats were furious at what they saw as political meddling in their prerogatives, and then in the military, where officers began to fume that liberal politicians were undercutting Japan’s strategic position with their weak-minded peacenik ways.

Next week, we’ll see how this opposition will crush the nascent Japanese democracy and fling the country into not one but two unwinnable wars.