Japan
Page 17
Still another economic as well as social problem was that, as the Japanese economy developed, the old ties between employers and employees became less personal, leading to greater friction. Tenant farmers, for example, began to show serious signs of discontent. Although tenancy had been limited to the 45 percent level it had reached by the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a sharp increase in tenant-landlord disputes in the 1920s and some organization of tenants into unions. Urban labor, which was beginning to free itself from its agrarian background, was also becoming restive. More than 300,000 workers were involved in labor disputes in 1919 alone, and by the end of the twenties a like number had become organized into unions. Early in the century, a few small starts at social and labor legislation had been made to meet the changing conditions of an industrializing society and these were somewhat expanded in the 1920s, but as in the case of the Western democracies, the effort lagged badly behind the needs.
To many Japanese the country’s growing dependence on foreign sources of raw materials and markets seemed to be its most serious economic problem. Industrialization and a rapid increase in population had made the entirely self-sufficient Japan of only sixty years earlier into a country dependent on outside sources of iron ore, cotton, wool, and a great many other essential industrial materials, and therefore equally dependent on foreign markets for Japanese exports to pay for these imports. The problem of security was shifting from the military to the economic field. This could already be seen in the heavy emphasis on economic issues in the Twenty-one Demands imposed on China in 1915 and in the eagerness with which Japan took over the German interests in Shantung in China and fished for advantages in the roiled waters of the Russian Revolution. In 1918 it sent a force of 72,000 men to Vladivostok in Siberia in a joint expedition with a much smaller American force, ostensibly for the purpose of bolstering an eastern front against Germany.
Imperial expansion for the sake of military security had slowly merged with expansion for the sake of raw materials and markets, but at the end of World War I a profound change took place that made the two objectives somewhat contradictory. A sense of nationalism had been growing for some time in China. After an emotional student outburst in Peking on May 4, 1919, further imperialistic expansion there began to run into the higher costs of boycotts and determined Chinese opposition. This situation became all the more marked when in the mid-1920s the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek swept northward from Canton and effectively unified much of the country for the first time in several decades. President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, through his Fourteen Points, the Versailles Peace Conference, and the founding of the League of Nations, had championed the concept that strong nations should no longer victimize weak ones through imperialistic conquest, and since the European powers were exhausted by war and satiated by earlier imperial expansion, they felt compelled to accept Wilson’s doctrines.
Japan was faced with a choice between seeking to meet its economic needs through continued imperial expansion, against rising nationalistic opposition and mounting world disapproval, or allowing its economic security to depend on open world trade and international trust. It was Hara’s government that first clearly faced this choice, and it opted for peaceful trade. The decision was in tune with the spirit of the time and the interests of Japanese big business, which stood behind the parties and wished to avoid the double costs of expensive armaments and Chinese trade boycotts. But it was a decision complicated by what had become a naval race among the world’s three major sea powers—Britain, the United States, and Japan. To limit the buildup of naval armaments, the United States called a conference of the major world powers in Washington in the winter of 1921–1922. By the time it met, Hara had been assassinated, but the policies Japan followed were his. It agreed to accept a ratio in battleships, the core of the navies of that day, of three for Japan’s one-ocean navy to five each for America’s and Britain’s fleets. In return, Japan obtained American guarantees that bases would not be built west of Hawaii and British guarantees of the same east of Singapore. Japan also agreed to restore by steps the province of Shantung to China, the first voluntary withdrawal of any of the foreign powers from Chinese territory. In 1922 it withdrew its vastly unpopular military expedition from Siberia as well. Between 1919 and 1926 the Japanese actually cut the percentage of their gross national product that went for military purposes by over half.
Although all these decisions had had wide popular and government support when they were made, many Japanese began to doubt their wisdom when the world economy turned sour at the end of the 1920s and major sections of the Japanese economy deteriorated or stagnated. Japan, they felt, had been duped by the nations of the West. The Western powers, having won vast territories in the past, were now content to call a halt to empire building, leaving Japan with too small an empire to maintain its industrial machine in an age of rising trade barriers and shrinking world trade.
Following World War I the party governments faced a series of difficult problems that overburdened their strength. For one thing, parliamentary supremacy was still far from secure. Japan had no long tradition of democratic rule behind it to help its democratic institutions weather such stormy times. The highly conservative House of Peers, unlike the British House of Lords, still had equal powers with the House of Representatives. The privy council and the high court officialdom could still speak for an emperor whose authority, as described in the constitution, appeared almost unlimited. The prime minister did not automatically achieve his position because he was the leader of the majority party in the lower house, as in Britain, but was selected by Saionji, and only then was an election usually held in which he won the necessary majority. There was no deep emotional commitment to democratic principles on the part of most Japanese, and many of them viewed with distaste the open clash of private interests in elections and in the parliamentary process, preferring the older ideal of a harmonious, unified society, governed through consensus by loyal servants of the ruler. In particular, the great financial influence of the zaibatsu and other business groups over the politicians seemed morally unacceptable to people still attuned to Tokugawa prejudices against the merchant class.
In a sense, the “dual structure” of the economy was paralleled by an even more dangerous “dual structure” of society, divided between better educated and largely urban people, who on the whole were in sympathy with the current trends, and less educated and mostly rural people, who were bewildered or repelled by the conditions of the times and looked back nostalgically to older values. Rural Japan remained a vast reservoir of traditional ways and attitudes. As the 1920s progressed, these older attitudes were strengthened by the beginning of another swing of the pendulum away from Western models and back toward those of traditional Japan.
One ominous sign was the lack of wide intellectual support or solid philosophical underpinnings for parliamentary rule. There was a sense of malaise among intellectuals and a groping for concepts more satisfying than the open conflict of interests in a democratic system. Minobe Tatsukichi, a professor at Tokyo University, attempted to bridge the gap between the theoretical powers of the emperor and the reality of parliamentary rule by describing the emperor as the highest “organ” of the state. Although this so-called organ theory was accepted as orthodox at the highest intellectual levels, it had no popular appeal, and at the lower levels, at the military schools, and even among some professors at Tokyo and other universities, the sacrosanct, autocratic powers of the throne continued to be emphasized. A dangerous “dual structure” in political thought was thus also appearing.
Parliamentary supremacy was also undercut by the wave of Marxist ideology that reached Japan in the wake of the Russian Revolution. There had been some socialist and even anarchist thought in Japan since the beginning of the century, but after World War I leftist doctrines became much more widespread and attracted a relatively large proportion of the best minds. Socialism seemed to be a more
comprehensive and orderly substitute for traditional Confucianism than parliamentary democracy. Yoshino Sakuzo, a popular Christian professor at Tokyo University during World War I, had advocated most democratic causes but retained an elitist suspicion of mass rule. Many of his disciples turned to Marxism, seeking to be its elitist vanguard. They and similar groups at other great universities, such as Kyoto and Waseda, became the intellectual core of the Marxist movement after graduation, founding leftist parties and trying with occasional success to enlist the support of the working classes. A Communist party was founded in 1922 but was driven underground almost at once. Other so-called proletarian parties, though constantly dividing in sectarian disputes, managed to remain within the law and in 1928, in the first election after the adoption of universal manhood suffrage, elected eight representatives to the Diet.
The older parliamentary parties, having just won their battle for political leadership with the old establishment, showed no desire to share power with these new forces of the Left. Ironically, in 1925, the very year that the vote was extended to all men, the Diet passed a strengthened Peace Preservation Law, which made it a crime to advocate a change in the basic political system or the abolition of private property. This curtailment of free speech and political activity was scarcely propitious at a time when reactionary forces of the Right were beginning to reassert themselves. It showed how weak the ideological support for democracy still was.
Historians have emphasized the shortcomings and failures of the period of “Taisho democracy.” This is natural because of what was soon to follow—the collapse of democracy and the tragedy of World War II. But Japan’s failures at this time were not really worse than those of the West. Even countries like Britain and the United States handled the problems of the interwar decades poorly, while Italy turned almost at once to fascism, and Germany was taken over by Hitler’s Nazi regime in the early 1930s. In fact, the failure of democracy in the West encouraged many Japanese to look upon fascism as the wave of the future. Seen in longer perspective, however, the positive aspects of the period of “Taisho democracy” stand out as probably more significant than the negative ones. It was the political and social ideas of this period that were to reemerge after Japan’s defeat in World War II as the solid foundation for the democratic Japan of today, and the industrial advances of the period underlay Japan’s postwar economic “miracle.”
11
THE RISE OF MILITARISM
The rather sudden shift from the liberalizing trends of “Taisho democracy” during the twenties to the imperial expansion, militarism, and ultranationalism of the thirties has often dominated the discussions of modern Japanese historians. To many observers, it has seemed that naturally authoritarian and militaristic characteristics of the Japanese people finally reemerged after a period of apparently successful but actually superficial “Westernization.” To support such views, some cite the seven centuries of rule by a feudal military class, which had come to an end only a few decades earlier, the importance the Meiji leaders placed on creating a strong military, the oligarchic nature of their rule, and the decidedly authoritarian core they tried to give to their constitution of 1889.
Other factors, however, argue against this interpretation. For more than two centuries during the period of late feudalism under the Tokugawa, Japanese society had been extraordinarily peaceful, orderly, bureaucratic, and nonmilitary. The emphasis on military power had been forced on Meiji Japan by the predatory nature of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century. At the same time there was the spontaneous demand by large numbers of Japanese for greater freedom and a share in political rule, which produced a basically parliamentary government by the 1920s. Finally, no major people since World War II have shown themselves to be more confirmed pacifists than the Japanese. Japan, like most other lands, was authoritarian in the past, and like any country with a feudal background it had a broad streak of militarism. But on the whole the Japanese have not shown any special propensity for militarism and authoritarianism that distinguishes them from the people of other nations.
One might compare what happened in Japan in the twenties and thirties with developments in Italy and Germany during this same period, although there were almost as many differences as similarities. All three nations were characterized by unsatisfactory domestic conditions arising from severe economic problems, deep cleavages in life styles and ways of thought among different sections of the population, and national dissatisfaction with their international position as “have not” countries. But Japan’s specific transition to militarism and authoritarianism was quite different from the road taken by Italy and Germany.
In Japan there was no charismatic leader, no clear-cut Fascist or Nazi type of philosophy, no mass party to support the leader, and little suppression of the opposition by force. The change was made strictly within the ambiguities of the 1889 constitution by a series of small adjustments among the various forces that constituted the political balance of power. In the twenties the Diet, with the backing of big business interests and public opinion, was beginning to take the leading role over the court officialdom, the bureaucracy, and the military. By the end of the 1930s it was the military, aided by foreign wars and heavy indoctrination of the people, that had clearly taken the driver’s seat. In many ways Japan, like Italy and Germany, was moving toward totalitarianism, which, whether of the Right or Left, might be defined as authoritarian rule over a modern educated people through the government’s attempt to control their lives and thought completely. The Japanese government, however, remained much more pluralistic and far less harsh in the control it exercised than did the rightist and leftist totalitarian states of Europe.
There was a long background to the return to authoritarianism and the upsurge of militarism and ultranationalism that swept Japan in the thirties. Until recently, authoritarian rule had been taken for granted; seven centuries of feudalism had made rule by military men seem natural; and the way Japan had been forced open by the West against its will naturally spawned a strong nationalistic and militaristic reaction. During the Meiji period there had already been signs of what was later to be called ultranationalism. At first it had been part of the general protest movement of outsiders against the government, most spectacularly manifested in the samurai uprisings of the 1870s. Slowly, however, this ultranationalism became a separate movement, stressing support for revolutionary movements against Western domination in other Asian lands and subsequently championing the expanding empire of Japan as the best way to stop the West’s subjugation and perversion of the East.
At first, the leadership in the pan-Asian movement came from activists from western Japan who, being closest to the continent, were perhaps more conscious of the problems in other Asian countries than were other Japanese. An organization called the Genyosha was founded in Fukuoka in northern Kyushu in 1881, and in 1901 this spawned another organization called the Kokuryukai. This name has been dramatically translated as the Black Dragon Society, but it was actually based on the Chinese name for the Amur River and signified that Japan’s natural strategic frontiers were on this northern boundary of Manchuria.
The imperialistic pressure groups became increasingly involved in reactionary political causes at home, and the whole movement became larger and more influential after World War I. Certain conservative bureaucrats of high standing founded more intellectually respectable nationalistic societies, and several popular propagandists appeared. These men, for the most part, looked back to the authoritarian and agrarian traditions of the past, and like the Meiji leaders before them drew the cloak of imperial sanctity around their own ideas. They claimed that what they advocated was the true kokutai, or “national polity,” and asserted that they represented the real “imperial will.” While both terms had long been in use, it was at this time that they became widely popularized.
The ultranationalists drew encouragement from the successes of the Italian Fascists and later the German Nazis, and t
hey commonly looked for leadership to the army and navy, which were strictly modern institutions based on Western models. Nevertheless, the ultranationalists were fundamentally anti-Western, at least on a selective basis, being firmly against the democratic, individualistic, and capitalistic aspects of the West. They saw party politicians as the venal lackeys of selfish moneyed interests, epitomized by the zaibatsu, which was used as a term of opprobrium, and they regarded the current social trends of the cities as the utter corruption of beautiful traditional Japanese ways. Naturally there was a strongly sympathetic response to such ideas among rural Japanese and others who were in the lower half of the “dual structure” of the economy and society. For them, with their lesser educations, the nationalistic indoctrination of the modern school system proved more important than the new horizons education had opened for others. Most families had remained internally authoritarian; there was still an easy acceptance of hierarchy; elitist assumptions were strong on the part of leaders of all sorts; and the old Confucian ideals of social harmony and conformity still had a much greater appeal than the individualism of the West and the admitted clash of interests of parliamentary government.
Such traditional attitudes strengthened in the late 1920s as Japan’s economic problems worsened and the pendulum once again swung away from imitation of the West. These trends also took on strongly racist overtones, as Japanese came to feel that, despite Japan’s status as one of the great world powers, Westerners were still not willing to accept them as full equals on racial grounds. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 Japan had argued for the inclusion of a clause on “racial equality,” but this had been blocked by the United States and Britain because there was strong opposition in America, Canada, and Australia to Oriental immigration. Moreover, throughout the Occident there had been for decades much racist talk of the “yellow peril.” In the United States, Orientals had been declared ineligible for naturalization on racial grounds, and California and other western states denied them the right to own land. California went so far as to put Japanese children, like Chinese children before them, into segregated schools. To ease the strains of this situation, Japan and the United States had in 1908 worked out a Gentlemen’s Agreement that virtually ended Japanese immigration. Despite this, Congress passed an Exclusion Act in 1924 that applied specifically to Japanese as aliens ineligible for citizenship. This was deeply resented by all Japanese as a gratuitous insult. Though really a part of American rather than Japanese history, it is worth noting that anti-Oriental racism in the United States was to reach its peak in the early days of World War II, when the whole Japanese population of the West Coast, loyal, native-born nisei citizens and their inoffensive, elderly, immigrant parents alike, were driven out of their farms and homes and herded into virtual concentration camps. Not until 1988 were some amends made by the payment of a paltry $20,000 to each of the surviving internees of the camps.