In 1885 a very advanced civil service system was also adopted, based on the German model. At first, graduates from Tokyo University automatically qualified for the bureaucracy, but soon an excess of candidates made it necessary to add qualifying examinations. These were later opened to all university graduates, though Tokyo University graduates still predominate in the higher civil service today. Both the cabinet and civil service systems as established in 1885 have continued to operate without basic change ever since.
The constitution contained a section on the rights of the people, including most of the civil rights then generally accepted in the more advanced Western nations, but these rights were carefully circumscribed by phrases such as “within the limits of the law.” The great innovation of the constitution, of course, was the popular national assembly it created, and great care went into planning for it. Voting and assemblies were first experimented with on the local level, with very limited electorates and powers for these bodies. Prefectural assemblies were first tried in 1879, then village, town, and city ward assemblies in 1880, and finally city assemblies in 1888.
On the basis of this experience, a national House of Representatives was created through the constitution, with an electorate limited to adult males paying at least 15 yen in direct taxes and with powers confined to the passage of laws and the budget. The voting qualifications restricted voters to 1.26 percent of the population, which represented about 6 percent of Japanese families—about the same proportion of the population as the samurai class had been, but made up largely of landowning peasants instead. The naturally very conservative House of Peers enjoyed equal powers with the House of Representatives, further limiting its role. The bicameral legislature formed by these two houses was called the Diet in English, perhaps to make it seem less like the British Parliament. The oligarchs took care to reserve all executive powers for themselves as the self-selected ministers of the emperor, and they accepted the advice of German political scientists that the crucial pursestrings of budgetary control be kept out of the hands of the Diet by a provision in the constitution that if the Diet refused to vote an acceptable new budget, the previous year’s budget would continue in effect.
The constitution was promulgated as a gift from the emperor to his people on February 11, 1889, and the first Diet was elected and convened in 1890, on the schedule promised nine years earlier. The constitution has usually been regarded by later historians as having been so conservative that it doomed democracy in Japan to failure from the start. Western commentators of the time, however, felt that the Japanese were trying to move too fast in changing their political system and usually counseled a slower pace. The real wonder is not why the oligarchs did not create a more liberal system, but why they shared as much power as they did with the elected representatives of the people. One reason, of course, was the continual pressure from the parties founded by Itagaki and Okuma and a rising public opinion in favor of representative government, though the oligarchy was now so strong that it could quite safely have created a more restrictive constitutional system than it did. Another reason was the conviction of at least some of the oligarchs that, as in the democracies of the West, a constitution and national assembly would strengthen Japan by winning greater support for the government from the people and would avoid revolutionary pressures by allowing opposition sentiments the fairly harmless escape valve of parliamentary debate. Perhaps most important, however, was the hope of impressing the West with Japan’s progress toward “civilization.”
This last reason was by no means unfounded. The successful inauguration of constitutional government, together with a complete remodeling of the legal system in accordance with Western practices, did induce the British to agree in 1894 to give up their extraterritorial privileges by 1899, when the new legal system was to go fully into effect, and the other powers quickly followed suit. All that then remained to remove the “unequal treaties” was to win back full control over Japanese tariffs, which was accomplished by 1911. At last Japan stood on terms of full legal equality with the West.
Whatever the new constitutional system did for Japan’s image abroad, it proved far less satisfactory to the oligarchs themselves, differing greatly from their expectations. They had failed to realize that the great social and economic changes they had initiated were just beginning to take hold as the first post-Restoration generation was coming to the fore. Their vision in the 1880s of what a stable and permanent political system for Japan should be was rapidly being undermined by the swift economic, social, and intellectual developments they had themselves sponsored. Industrialization was advancing rapidly, and business enterprises were growing tremendously in size, profitability, and influence; the lives of the people were changing under these new conditions, and Japan was becoming rapidly more urbanized; education was becoming truly universal at last; higher education was expanding rapidly, as the government founded new universities, by then called imperial universities, and as many private institutions, which were to grow into huge universities, were organized to teach the new legal system; new concepts kept pouring in from the West, and intellectual life was burgeoning and becoming more diverse; mass public opinion was becoming a significant force; and this public opinion was being fed by rapidly growing newspapers and magazines, founded largely by political outsiders who, as critics of the government, gave a basically antigovernment tone to the press that is still detectable today.
Under these conditions the constitution worked much less smoothly than the leaders had hoped it would. In addition, they had made some serious miscalculations. The House of Representatives proved to be no tame debating society, much less a claque to muster popular support for the government. The political parties had gained electoral skills and parliamentary experience through the local assemblies, and the men elected to the first and all subsequent lower houses proved to be overwhelmingly opposed to the oligarchy, which they dubbed the Satsuma-Choshu (or Satcho) clique. The opposition representatives in the lower house quickly coalesced into two major parties, the Liberals (Jiyuto), who were Itagaki’s followers, and the Progressives (Kaishinto), who supported Okuma. Realizing that control of the budget was their one clear avenue to a share in political power, they zeroed in on it, slashing it severely in 1890, and it took a great deal of political maneuvering on the oligarchs’ part to limit the cuts to 8 percent.
The next year Matsukata, who was then the prime minister, dissolved the Diet, making do with the previous year’s budget. In the election that followed in 1892, the government made use of every means of intimidation, coercion, and bribery open to it through its control of the police and local governors. This proved to be the most corrupt and violent election in Japanese history, but the government still failed to win a majority. Clearly the oligarchs had given away more power than they had intended. The German political theorists had been wrong, because their trump card—continuing last year’s budget—was not adequate in a rapidly growing economy. The oligarchs were forced to make compromises with the Diet, and thus the politicians had a foot firmly in the doorway to power.
Appalled by this situation, some of the more conservative oligarchs suggested scrapping the constitution entirely, but this was not easy to do. It had been sanctified as a gift from the emperor, and its early failure would have made the country lose face before the West, indicating that Japan was indeed not yet a “civilized” land. Ito, the constitution’s chief author, was particularly determined to make it work. As prime minister for a second time in 1893, he managed to get the budget passed through clever political maneuvering, dissolved the Diet again in 1894, and in 1895 found that the government was supported by the Diet because of popular patriotic enthusiasm over the war then in progress against China. He also managed to work out a sort of compromise by giving Itagaki the powerful post of home minister, in charge of the police and local government, in return for the support of his party. Matsukata followed suit, when he returned as prime minister in 1896, by obtain
ing the support of Okuma’s party in return for making Okuma foreign minister.
The parties, however, kept raising the price for cooperation. When the Liberals demanded four cabinet seats from Ito in his third round as prime minister in 1898, he balked, and the oligarchs, treating Itagaki and Okuma as merely wayward members of their own group, asked them to try their hands at organizing a cabinet. The resulting experiment was a dismal failure, lasting only three months. The two leaders and their party followings were jealous of each other, and the bureaucracy and military proved uncooperative.
Yamagata then took over for a second turn as prime minister, determined to attempt to readjust the system to make it work better. In order to keep the cabinet “transcendent,” that is, above politics, as the original intention had been, he strengthened the police laws and controls over political activity. To make the military doubly secure from political interference, he established in 1899 the rule that army and navy ministers must be generals or admirals on active service and therefore under military control. To protect the bureaucracy from political influence, he made all ranks up through the level of vice-ministers open only to professional bureaucrats who had entered through the examinations for the bureaucracy. To make it more difficult for big parties to develop, he introduced an electoral system of large electoral districts with up to thirteen Diet seats each, but with each voter having only one vote. This made candidates of any major party run against other members of their own party and was expected to open the way for the election of more government supporters in a roughly proportional representation system. To get his reforms enacted into law, however, he had to make some concessions to the politicians. These included an increase in Diet seats, the adoption of the secret ballot, and the lowering of the tax qualification for voting to 10 yen, which almost doubled the electorate.
But the struggle between the cabinet and the Diet continued, and Ito, back as prime minister for the fourth time, was finally permitted by the other oligarchs to do what he had long advocated—to form his own political party. In 1900, combining his bureaucratic following with the political line stemming from Itagaki, he formed the Seiyukai, which was to be the major political party for the next few decades and was to act as the supporter of the cabinet for most of that time. By 1901, however, Ito, now party president as well as prime minister, had wearied of the constant bickering of day-to-day politics, and none of the other oligarchs, averaging around sixty years in age by this time, was willing to take up the heavy burden of the prime ministership, which none of them ever assumed again. Although they remained very influential and continued to exercise the emperor’s theoretical prerogative of selecting the prime minister, they withdrew into the background somewhat, becoming, indeed, the genro, or “elder statesmen.”
When Ito resigned in 1901, Yamagata’s protégé, General Katsura Taro of Choshu, was selected to succeed him; when he resigned at the end of 1905, he was followed by Ito’s protégé and successor as president of the Seiyukai, Prince Saionji Kimmochi of the old court aristocracy, who had imbibed a considerable number of liberal ideas from a long sojourn as a student in France and England. Katsura and Saionji alternated in office until 1912, with the Seiyukai participating fully in the cabinet under Saionji and on the whole supporting it under Katsura. Japan’s parliamentary experiment was clearly succeeding and had reached a balance of forces that gave more than a decade of relative tranquillity to the political scene. It was not working quite in accordance with Ito’s original plan, but at least it had survived its perilous infant years. For the first time, a parliamentary body in a non-Western country was becoming an established and meaningful part of the political process. In fact, it was showing signs of following the same line of evolutionary development taken by the mother of parliaments in London, though many ups and downs still lay ahead.
During the years that Japan was making this start in its own particular form of constitutional government and was winning legal equality with the West, it also was becoming a major military power and was establishing its own small empire. In those days, no conflict was seen between what we now would consider contrasting trends toward liberalism and conservatism. After all, England and France were not only leading democracies but the greatest empires of the time. Japan’s military power and empire were built in clear imitation of such countries, with the purpose of giving it greater security from the West and prestige among the world powers.
Japan has often been described as a traditionally imperialistic nation, but this is far from accurate. Japanese pirates had harassed neighboring countries from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and Hideyoshi had overrun Korea from 1592 to 1598, but otherwise the Japanese had kept much to themselves. The proposed expedition against Korea that had split the ruling group in 1873 had been designed as a welfare measure for the impoverished samurai class and in any case was never attempted. As a compromise, however, a small expedition had been sent to Taiwan in 1874 to punish a few aborigines for killing some mariners from the Ryukyu Islands. China’s payment of an indemnity to Japan because of this incident established, according to Western law, that the Ryukyu Islands were legally part of Japan and not a tributary state of China. They had in fact become a subfief of Satsuma in 1609, and their inhabitants were linguistically and culturally a close variant of the Japanese people, although, under their own kings and tributary to China, their international status had hitherto been ambiguous. Now they were fully incorporated into Japan and made the prefecture of Okinawa in 1879.
Japan settled its northern frontiers in the islands north of Hokkaido by a treaty with Russia in 1875, exchanging Japanese claims to the large island of Sakhalin for Russian claims to the Kuril Islands. The next year Japan became the first country to establish modern treaty relations with Korea, employing the same techniques of naval power Perry had used to force the Tokugawa shogunate to open its doors to the West. Thereafter Japan exercised increasing political influence in the peninsula and began to regard it as a strategic area in terms of security. As China still considered Korea to be its tributary state, rivalry for control over the peninsula began to arise between Japan and China, with reformist elements in Korea looking to Japan for support and conservatives opposing Japanese penetration. In 1885 China and Japan agreed to withdraw their respective military forces from Korea and notify the other if they were to be sent back in. A rebellion of a conservative religious group in 1894 did bring the armies of both countries back into Korea, and this soon led to war between them.
To the amazement of the West, the now thoroughly modernized forces of the small island nation easily triumphed over the Chinese giant. The Japanese swept through Korea and into Manchuria, destroyed the Chinese fleet, and occupied the port of Weihaiwei in North China. The Treaty of Shimonoseki, agreed to on April 17, 1895, brought an end to the Sino-Japanese War. In it, China ceded to Japan the island province of Taiwan, the nearby Pescadores Islands, and the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula in southern Manchuria, paid a large indemnity, accepted the full independence of Korea, and accorded the Japanese the same unequal diplomatic and commercial privileges the Westerners had extorted from China.
In an age of rampant imperialism, the Westerners, far from condemning the Japanese for their aggressions, applauded them as being apt pupils. They went on to teach the Japanese how ruthless the game of imperialism could be and how unwilling Westerners were to accept other races as full equals. Russia, France, and Germany banded together to force Japan to return the Liaotung Peninsula to China, since Russia had its eyes on the ice-free ports of this area. Three years later these same powers cynically seized new slices of China, the Russians taking the Liaotung Peninsula for themselves. Even Britain followed suit by taking Weihaiwei, the port the Japanese had occupied in North China.
The Japanese swallowed this humiliation, but they began to foresee an inevitable clash with Russia, which was already dominant in Manchuria and was extending its influence into Korea. Not wishing to face a coaliti
on of European powers again, the Japanese sought a Western ally. This they found in Britain, which was not averse to seeing its Russian rival embroiled in war in East Asia and was eager to share the growing burden of world naval supremacy in distant areas. The resulting Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, which guaranteed that Russia would not be joined by other Western nations in a war with Japan, was the first entirely equal military pact between a Western and non-Western nation.
The stage was now set for a showdown with Russia. Choosing their time in February 1904, the Japanese set a new pattern of modern warfare by first crippling Russian naval strength in East Asia and then declaring war. Russia was far stronger than Japan, but had the disadvantage of having to fight the war at the end of a single-track railway several thousand miles long. Its military operations were further hampered by revolutionary movements at home. The Japanese were consistently victorious, bottling up the Russians in the Liaotung Peninsula ports, which fell after costly assaults, and driving their other armies northward through Manchuria. Russia sent its European fleet from the Baltic Sea around Africa to the Pacific, but the entire Japanese navy waylaid and annihilated it in the straits between Japan and Korea. Although Russia was being soundly trounced, Japan was so exhausted that it welcomed the peace arranged by President Theodore Roosevelt, who greatly admired Japanese efficiency and pluck. A treaty signed in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, terminated the Russo-Japanese War on September 5, 1905. In it Russia acknowledged Japan’s paramount interests in Korea, transferred to Japan its lease of the Liaotung Peninsula and the railways it had built in southern Manchuria, and ceded the southern half of Sakhalin in lieu of an indemnity. Japan, the military ally of Great Britain, the victor over Russia, and the possessor of an expanding colonial empire, was becoming a true world power.
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