The speed of Japan’s transformation produced a ferment of intellectual activity, but also considerable confusion and even alienation. This was first seen clearly in literature. Literary activity in the early Meiji period had been largely concerned with the translation of Western books and the popularization and adaptation of Western ideas. But, as a more purely native Japanese literature revived around the turn of the century, it showed clear signs of alienation. Caught between the trends of rapid modernization inspired by the West and the traditional, more collective values of Japanese life, the new writers turned inward, away from society and toward their own individual psychological concerns. The greatest of the early writers, Natsume Soseki, who as a professor of English literature at Tokyo University had obviously been greatly influenced by the West, explored the psychological problems of his countrymen with keen perception and often with humor. Others showed a more pessimistic strain. The intensely personal “I novel,” as the Japanese call it, which often focuses on highly individualistic, eccentric, or even bizarre psychological problems, became common and is still characteristic of much of Japanese writing even today.
With the economy, society, and intellectual life all changing rapidly, it is not surprising that the balance among political forces that had given Japan relative political stability between 1900 and 1912 gave way to a period of comparatively rapid political change. The shift started in 1912 with a dispute between the army and the cabinet over the military budget, but behind this incident lay more basic factors.
The death of the Meiji emperor in the summer of 1912 and the accession of his son, whose “year period” was named Taisho, gave rise to a general feeling that an era had ended and a new one begun. This mood was heightened by the new emperor’s mental incompetence and, therefore, his clear inability to exercise the powers theoretically reserved for him by the constitution. The fading away of the genro also contributed to a feeling of change. If the oligarchs had still been in power the crisis of 1912 could not have occurred, but by then they were indeed merely “elder statesmen,” still making the final decision on who the prime minister would be, but by no means in full control of the whole government.
The situation revealed a major weakness of the 1889 constitution—the assumption that an alter ego would exercise the emperor’s powers for him. Perhaps Ito had expected the oligarchy to be self-perpetuating or that some other organ, such as the privy council, would grow to take its place. But neither happened, and the Japanese government began to break up into a series of semiautonomous but balancing elite groups—the high court officials around the throne; the civil bureaucracy, itself divided into a number of quarreling ministries; the military, divided between the mutually jealous army and navy; the Diet, with its contending parties; and behind the parties, big business and the general public. The genro were something of a unifying force, but they were beginning to disappear from the scene. Ito, after serving as resident general in Korea before its annexation, was assassinated in Manchuria by a Korean patriot in 1909. Most of the others died between 1900 and 1916 and the last two, Yamagata and Matsukata, in 1922 and 1924.
The crisis of 1912 started late that autumn when the army, dissatisfied with the budget Saionji, the prime minister, had assigned it, withdrew the army minister from the cabinet, as had been made possible by Yamagata’s 1899 reform, thus forcing the cabinet to resign, since it could not operate without an army minister. As usual, General Katsura was called in to replace Saionji, but the Seiyukai, furious with the army, refused to cooperate with this former army leader. Katsura had the emperor instruct Saionji to request the Seiyukai’s cooperation, but it paid no attention. Katsura then tried to organize a second political party for support, but the attempt came too late, though the party itself was to become the Seiyukai’s chief rival under a series of changing names, the best known being the Minseito, or Popular Government party, which was adopted in 1927. There was a great public outcry called the “movement to preserve constitutional government.” Ironically, what the public was attempting to “preserve” was a cabinet responsible to a parliamentary majority, exactly the system the framers of the constitution had been determined to avoid by having “transcendental” cabinets that would be above politics.
The crisis, known as the “Taisho political change,” indicated that it was no longer possible to rule without majority support in the Diet. It also showed the futility of an imperial appeal to the politicians, and none was ever attempted again. More ominously, it revealed that the military could act on its own by making use of its constitutional prerogative—subordination only to an inactive emperor. To correct this situation, the 1899 ruling that army and navy ministers must be on active service was changed in 1913, but without avail because no prime minister ever dared challenge the autonomy of the armed services by taking advantage of this change.
The crisis subsided early in 1913, when an admiral of Satsuma origin was chosen as a sort of compromise prime minister and formed a cabinet that included six members from the Seiyukai, thus ensuring its support. When this cabinet resigned the following year over a scandal involving the purchase of naval vessels from Germany, it was succeeded by one headed by Okuma, the old oligarch turned politician, who had the support of the party Katsura had formed to oppose the Seiyukai.
Though Okuma himself had been a major political figure ever since the 1870s, a real change of leadership was taking place. The strong man of his cabinet was the foreign minister, Kato Takaaki. A product of the new age, Kato had gone through the new educational system and had become a successful foreign ministry bureaucrat and, in 1914, the president of the anti-Seiyukai party. Now, as foreign minister in 1915, he paid no attention to the genro when deciding to make the Twenty-one Demands on China. In 1914 Saionji was succeeded as president of the Seiyukai by Hara Kei, like Kato, a new type of leader. Descended from a very high samurai family of a domain in northern Honshu, Hara, as an outsider to the old Satsuma-Choshu clique, had battled his way to the top, first as a newspaperman critical of the government and then as a Seiyukai politician who had been the strong man behind Saionji all along. He was an astute politician skilled in pork-barrel politics, who used his usual cabinet post as home minister to reward electoral districts that voted Seiyukai with the plums of government spending and to win the cooperation of bureaucrats with promotions. He had no compunction about frustrating army wishes for strategic, broad-gauge trunk railway lines, using the railway budget for more politically advantageous small branch lines instead. Feeling himself an outsider, he refused to be rewarded with a title of nobility. Thus the two strong leaders of the two main political parties were both entirely products of the new age.
When the Okuma cabinet resigned in 1916, Yamagata tried to return to the old system of “transcendental” cabinets under one of his protégé generals from Choshu, but the experiment proved a failure; the cabinet, faced with the rice riots over the high price of this staple food, resigned in 1918. Bowing to the inevitable, Yamagata finally accepted a real politician as prime minister. He chose the wily and ingratiating Hara over Kato, who Yamagata thought was arrogant, disrespectful, and Anglophile. With the formation of Hara’s party cabinet in September 1918, the politicians’ small share of power through partial budgetary control in 1890 had expanded to full control of the cabinet. In slightly less than three decades, Japan seemed to have traveled the whole way from the creation of a feeble national assembly to responsible parliamentary government, a process that had taken centuries in England.
Hara had led the fight for parliamentary supremacy, but he was scarcely a liberal by modern standards. He refrained from carrying out the now-insistent popular demand for universal male suffrage. Instead, he compromised with a further reduction of the tax requirements for voting to 3 yen in 1919, which increased the franchise to about a quarter of the male heads of families. He also abandoned Yamagata’s large electoral district system for one-seat constituencies of the Anglo-American type, through which major
parties could operate more easily.
Hara proved a skillful leader and, if he had enjoyed a prolonged period of power, might have profoundly affected the later course of Japanese history. But unfortunately he was assassinated by a demented youth in November 1921, and his Seiyukai successor, Takahashi Korekiyo, proved much less competent and resigned within seven months. Starting in 1922 there was a two-year return to successive nonparty prime ministers, two admirals and a bureaucratic protégé of Yamagata, but none of their cabinets met with much success. The first of these cabinets, although it lasted the longest, was actually dominated by the Seiyukai; the other two lasted only four and five months each. When the last of the three cabinets saw its supporters hopelessly outvoted in the election of May 1924, it resigned, and Japan returned to party cabinets, with Kato finally having his chance as prime minister. Since all the original oligarchs were now dead, the choice this time was made by Saionji who, because of his descent from the ancient court aristocracy and his own long service as prime minister, had been added to the group. He was to remain the “last genro” until his death in 1940.
Kato’s government dropped all tax qualifications for voting in 1925, thus achieving universal manhood suffrage at last. Britain itself had not accomplished this until 1867, and it was no mean achievement for Japan, less than sixty years after the abandonment of a feudal system of government and only thirty-five years after the establishment of its first national assembly. In this same reform, a “middle size electoral district system,” a compromise between Yamagata’s “large” and Hara’s “small” systems, was adopted. According to the new system, three to five seats were assigned to each electoral district, but the individual voter had only a single vote. The result was a reasonably close approximation to proportional representation. This system and many of the election regulations instituted at this time are still in force today. In 1926 another political reform, this time in the field of local government, loosened central government control over local politics somewhat. The counties, which had been the lowest level of direct central government control, were abolished, and municipal mayors were chosen by the locally elected assemblies.
Unfortunately, Kato died in 1926 and was succeeded by a less competent lieutenant. In 1927 the cabinet passed back into the hands of the Seiyukai, by now under the presidency of General Tanaka Giichi, who after heading the army had switched to parliamentary politics as the way to supreme political power. Two years later the cabinet returned to the hands of the other party, by then called the Minseito, but from 1931 to 1932 it was once again controlled by the Seiyukai.
The years from 1913 to 1932, which saw the rapid rise of parliamentary power and then the leadership of party cabinets, have been called the period of “Taisho democracy.” This term is not limited to political matters, but includes the broad range of liberalizing tendencies and the swing of the pendulum back to enthusiastic borrowing from the West that characterized these years. Behind these trends lay the great expansion of the Japanese economy, which peaked during World War I, and the enthusiasm for liberal Western concepts that swept Japan when the outcome of the war proved to be the triumph of Britain, France, and the United States, the major Western democracies, and the downfall of the more autocratic nations—Germany, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
There was a general loosening of old social patterns during this period, at least in urban areas. A great worldwide influenza epidemic in 1918 together with the great Kanto earthquake and fire of September 1, 1923, helped accelerate the rate of social change. This cataclysm, which destroyed half of Tokyo and most of Yokohama and took approximately 130,000 lives, helped sweep away old ways and cleared the ground, literally, for new cities and, figuratively, for a new society.
Downtown Tokyo became a city of wide thoroughfares and steel and reinforced concrete buildings, with sections resembling the cities of Europe and America more than those of Asia. The Marunouchi district around Tokyo’s main railway station became the pride of the nation and a symbol of the new Japan. Other cities followed Tokyo’s lead. Modern office buildings, school buildings, large movie houses, great stadiums, and sprawling railway stations became the typical architecture of urban Japan. The morning newspaper, long daily commuting by train and streetcar between home and office, and the quick break for lunch came to typify a new urban life style.
UPI
Destruction in Tokyo resulting from the great Kanto earthquake and fire of September 1, 1923.
Family solidarity, paternal authority, and male dominance remained salient features of Japanese society, but increasingly the younger generation in the cities joined the worldwide revolt of youth and began to question time-honored social customs. College students embraced the freer social concepts of the West, and there was a growing demand on the part of youth to be allowed to have marriages of love rather than marriages arranged by families through go-betweens. Women office workers became a feature of the new social system, and many middle-class Japanese men began to treat their wives almost as social equals. The women of Japan slowly began to free themselves from their traditional position as domestic drudges.
The mass culture of the modern West was also manifested in Japan. As in the United States, the symbol of the twenties was the “flapper,” called by the Japanese the moga, a contraction of the English words “modern girl.” Moving pictures, made either in Hollywood or in Japan on Hollywood patterns, had a tremendous vogue, and American jazz and Western social dancing became popular with the more sophisticated. A growing taste for Western music was evident in the organization of symphony orchestras and in the huge audiences that gathered to hear visiting Western musicians. Taxi-dance halls appeared; all-girl musical review troupes rivaled the popularity of the movies; Western and Chinese restaurants became numerous; and there was a mushroom growth of so-called cafés, where gramophones ground out American jazz and emancipated young men enjoyed the company of pretty young waitresses of doubtful morals.
The Japanese threw themselves into Western sports with enthusiasm. Tennis was already extremely popular, but now they concentrated on track and field sports as well, with a view to making a better showing at the Olympic Games, and they actually came to dominate the Olympic swimming events in the 1930s. Golf links were built for the rich, while young people took up skiing. Baseball, however, was the great national sport, and university and high-school baseball games drew crowds comparable to those attending major college football and big league baseball games in the United States.
Great changes were occurring not just in life styles but intellectually as well. Thousands of books poured from the presses, and the literature of the whole world became available in cheap translated editions. Great Tokyo and Osaka newspapers came to have circulations in the millions. Higher education expanded rapidly. In 1918 some private colleges were granted university status, and by 1935 there were forty-five imperial and private universities. The first women’s college was founded in 1901, and it was followed by others, turning out a thin stream of educated women. In scholarship and the sciences, Japanese began to produce work that drew international attention. On the basis of a broadly expanded mastery of modern technology, business firms began to enter a great number of new and more advanced fields, establishing the roots of many industries that were to flourish greatly after World War II. Meanwhile the zaibatsu combines expanded enormously, and the patterns of industrial organization that were to prove very advantageous to Japan after the war were gradually developed and refined. In all ways urban Japan was changing and in doing so was drawing ever further away in thought and habits from the rural parts of the country.
On the surface, it may have seemed that Japan, already having managed the transition from a feudal state to a modern, centralized nation, was now succeeding in making the even more difficult passage from an authoritarian society to a modern, liberal mass democracy. But this proved not to be the case. Beneath the surface much remained unchanged, and the mo
dern attitudes and ways of life were largely limited to the cities. There were also many unsolved problems, some of which were coming to a head.
The return of the Europeans to the markets of Asia after World War I compounded the difficulties of adjusting Japan’s overexpanded wartime economy to postwar conditions. Japanese economic growth in the 1920s was the slowest of any decade from the 1880s to World War II. Agriculture did poorly, since no significant new technological advances were made, and Japanese farmers had to compete with the low-wage production of Japan’s new empire in Taiwan and Korea. As the decade progressed, conditions worsened: Bank failures swept the country in 1927, and in 1929 the worldwide depression hit, cutting deeply into foreign trade. Between 1925 and 1931 the prices for rice, Japan’s chief agricultural product, and for silk, its chief export, plummeted by over 50 percent. People in sections of rural Japan faced starvation, and cases of desperate farm families selling their daughters into prostitution were highly publicized by the press. The whole economy was in a state of crisis.
Another economic problem had also reached serious proportions by the 1920s. This was what the Japanese have called the “dual economy,” which was a deep division between the highly productive modern industries on the one hand and agriculture and the traditional, low-productivity handicraft industries and services on the other. The people of rural Japan, half the population, were in the lower section, left far behind by the industrial progress of the cities and resentful of their own declining relative position. The appearance of a “dual economy” has characterized rapidly industrializing countries everywhere, but in Japan this problem was particularly severe because of the speed of the nation’s economic growth. The situation was at its worst during the period following World War I.
Japan Page 16