Season 14, Episode 9: Taisho Democracy
In 1925, the Japanese Imperial Diet passed a law named “Futsu Senkyo Ho,” which means “The Universal Manhood Suffrage Law.” This law radically expanded the lower house electorate to every Japanese man over 25. The electorate grew from around three million to twelve million and Japanese politics would have to adjust to appeal to the additional nine million voters who now shared political power. However, this expansion of democracy came with a few significant strings attached.
On September 2,1923, the day after the tragic Great Kanto Earthquake, Emperor Taisho appointed a reliable old conservative as the new Prime Minister to replace the late Kato Tomosaburo. Yamamoto Gonnohyoe, the decorated Navy veteran who had previously served as Prime Minister in 1913 in the wake of the Taisho Political Crisis, was called upon once more to make things right. He had resigned from that position in disgrace after the Siemens bribery scandal became public knowledge, although there never was any evidence that he was directly involved. A lot had changed in the ten years since his last premiership, both with the nation and with Gonnohyoe himself.
In his previous term, he had rescinded the rule governing the appointment of army and navy cabinet ministers that had given the military far too much leverage over the civilian government and precipitated the Taisho Political Crisis. This time around, he busied himself with the gargantuan task of rebuilding Tokyo and its surrounding metropolitan areas which had been devastated by the earthquake. After the Kanto Massacre, which we discussed in the previous episode, rebuilding efforts proceeded apace and by most accounts Gonnohyoe’s second time in the big seat was going much better than his first. However, bad news was just around the corner.
To fully appreciate the incident which brought Gonnohyoe’s second premiership to a screeching halt, we need to introduce someone who will play a much larger role during the next two seasons: Crown Prince Hirohito. The crown prince was only eleven when his father took the throne in 1912 and while he was not chronically ill to the same degree as his famously sickly father, he still endured his share of physical ailments. The president of his primary school prescribed a regimen of extra physical activity to help him overcome his naturally weak constitution. He excelled in scholarly studies and seems to have inherited his father’s fascination with foreign cultures and languages. His status as the heir apparent was solidified by imperial proclamation in 1916, and in 1921, at the age of twenty, he embarked on a world tour, making history as the first Japanese crown prince to travel abroad. His official visits included Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and many other European nations as well as the recovering battlefields of the recent first world war.
Upon returning to Japan, he was declared Sessho, or “regent,” in November of 1921. It has been a while since we’ve discussed a Sessho on this podcast. Feels like old times. The primary reason for Crown Prince Hirohito’s promotion was that his father, who was frequently very sick, had begun to suffer from serious mental illness which was making it difficult for him to fulfill his duties as sovereign. Hirohito attended meetings in his father’s place and probably gained a better idea about his future duties as Tenno.
In April of 1923, the crown prince visited Taiwan, where he stayed at the finest hotels and ate a rich fare of traditional Chinese and Taiwanese cuisine. This colonial feast is somewhat reminiscent, at least in my mind, of the hundred-plate-dinners enjoyed by Heian Period emperors, who ate different food originating from every corner of Japan as a symbolic projection of their power and authority. Later that year, the Great Kanto Earthquake struck and ultraconservative elements within the police and military spurred the Kanto Massacre, which was motivated in part by a desire to eliminate leftist elements operating in Japan.
The final months of 1923 were spent trying to rebuild the cities of Kanto, especially Tokyo, by clearing wreckage, demolishing unsalvageable structures like the Ryounkaku skyscraper, and burying the dead. However, members of the radical leftist movements were still seething over the state-sanctioned murders of their comrades and one of them was determined to strike back.
On December 27, 1923, Crown Prince Hirohito was traveling to the opening session of the Imperial Diet when a young man approached his carriage and fired a pistol into the vehicle’s interior. A chamberlain was injured but the crown prince was not. Police were quick to subdue the gunman, a 25-year-old man whose father was a member of the Imperial Diet. He had rejected his father’s politics and instead adopted a kind of communist vanguardism, believing that his example would be followed by others and a revolution similar to that which had overtaken Russia would soon erupt in Japan. A significant factor that spurred him into action was the Kanto Massacre, though he also claimed he was avenging Shusui Kotoku, an influential Japanese anarchist writer and thinker who had been executed for supposedly taking part in the High Treason Incident of 1910, which we discussed toward the end of the previous season.
The whole affair was dubbed “The Toranomon Incident,” named for the intersection where the attempted assassination took place. The defendant would later claim that he was perfectly sane in his actions and the courts agreed, though he was proclaimed to be insane at his sentencing and given the death penalty nearly a year later.
In the immediate wake of the Toranomon Incident, political turmoil ensued. Prime Minister Yamamoto Gonnohyoe resigned as a way of apologizing for the lapse in the crown prince’s security. In his place, Kiyoura Keigo was appointed as the new premier, an appointment which was made out of reactionary fear.
As far as prime ministers go, Kiyoura Keigo was an oddly archaic choice. Throughout the Meiji Period, he had served in a variety of roles in the Imperial government, especially in law enforcement. In 1891 he was made a member of the House of Peers, the aristocratic upper house of the Imperial Diet, he received a number of promotions and official awards for his service. He was obviously chosen for his conservative credentials as a member of the titled aristocracy and he made it clear with his cabinet appointments that he intended to govern as a conservative. Nearly every member of his cabinet was a member of the Kazoku aristocracy.
He had been offered the position of prime minister previously, just after the Siemens Bribery Scandal caused the ouster of Yamamoto Gonnohyoe’s government in 1914, but had declined at the time, likely fearing that he might be blamed for any residual scandals left over from previous administrations. In January of 1924, he accepted the post and set about forming his government. However, a lot had changed in the ten years since he was last offered the job and he does not appear to have been in any way equipped to handle the rough-and-tumble nature of Taisho Era Politics.
During the earlier decades of constitutional government, it was common for a prime minister to occasionally be selected from the Kazoku nobility and to form their cabinet from their fellow peers. However, party politics had long since come to dominate the regular flow of political power in Japan and such non-partisan cabinets were an unwelcome throwback for the now long-established political parties that wrangled over control of the lower house.
Kiyoura Keigo thus found himself presiding over a hostile lower house whose Seiyukai majority saw no reason to support his government. For several months he tried to push legislation through the lower house only to have all of it indefinitely tabled. He had been pushed past his limits and so in the early part of his term he exercised the nuclear option available to Japanese prime ministers: he dissolved the lower house.
In May of 1924, no single party won a majority in the House of Representatives, but three separate entities controlled between them a decent majority. These were two recently-formed liberal parties called Kenseikai and Kakushin respectively, and the Seiyuhonto, a splinter party whose members were originally part of Seiyukai. As for Seiyukai themselves, this election was a bloodbath, resulting in the loss of over one hundred forty previously-held seats and leaving them with a paltry 30.
However, while Seiyukai had been muscled out of their lower house majority, this did not mean that Kiyoura Keigo could expect a docile, cooperative parliament to enact his agenda. In the absence of a clear majority, a coalition soon formed: Kakushin and Kenseikai joined with Seiyukai to create a coalition majority specifically to oppose the prime minister’s agenda. The two larger parties were liberal constitutionalist parties who wanted to enact the long-awaited popular reforms so feared by conservatives. Seiyukai had generally been fairly conservative themselves, but agreed to support liberal reforms as part of their coalition agreement. Seeing that his situation was untenable, Kiyoura Keigo resigned along with his cabinet.
Keigo’s ouster from the premiership had been led primarily by one especially charismatic member of Kenseikai named Kato Takaaki. Although I only mentioned his name for the first time at the end of the previous episode, Takaaki was one of the driving forces behind Japan’s domestic and foreign policies throughout the 1910s. He spent much of the late Meiji Period in various diplomatic roles, learning from Okuma Shigenobu and then becoming the envoy to Britain where he helped craft the foundation of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902. He regularly served as Minister of Foreign Affairs throughout the nineteen-aughts and was back in that cabinet position once again when the first World War erupted in 1914.
Under Takaaki’s leadership, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs became increasingly powerful and influential. He nearly overreached himself, however, when at his insistence the Foreign Ministry transmitted the twenty-one demands to China, which they did without consulting the genro. This hostile relationship vis-a-vis the genro would continue well into his premiership, which began in early June of 1924 in spite of their misgivings. He formed a cabinet which was mostly composed of coalition members but also included Baron Kijuro Shidehara, who was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Shidehara would continue in that role long after the end of Takaaki’s premiership and in many ways his policies would influence Japan toward a productive and peaceful relationship with Britain and the United States, at least for a while. We’ll have more to discuss about Baron Kijuro next season.
Political coalitions can be tricky things, especially in a parliamentary system. No matter how much any of the parties have in common, sometimes all it takes is one falling out, even over a minor issue, to bring the whole thing crashing down in a deluge of realignments, resignations, and no confidence votes. However, Takaaki’s experience in diplomacy clearly was not limited only to his skill in dealing with foreign powers. The coalition held fast and enacted their liberal reforms.
Although they had previously held a fairly consistent conservative line, Seiyukai agreed to support what would become the crown jewel of Kato Takaaki’s time as prime minister. In late March of 1925, the Imperial Diet passed a law named “Futsū Senkyo Hō,” whose English translation is “The Universal Manhood Suffrage Law.” The onerous tax requirements previously enforced to determine the electorate were swept away at last, at least for Japanese men who were 25 or older. The right to vote in general elections was now expanded further than it ever had been, in spite of conservative concern that the masses might elect communists or socialists. However, before that law was officially promulgated in May of 1925, another law came into effect which was aimed at preventing just such a dire eventuality.
Two weeks before the Universal Manhood Suffrage Law was made official, another law called “Chian iji hō” or “The Peace Preservation Law” had been put in place. Versions of this law had been floating around the Diet since 1921, and pressure increased for its passage in 1922, when the Japanese Communist Party was officially founded. This law gave the police at every level increased authority to surveil suspected radicals and made certain ideologies practically illegal. At the heart of the law was the term “Kokutai,” which is one of those words that means a lot of things all at once. It is often translated as “system of government” or “sovereignty,” but it could and does also mean “national identity” and/or “national character.”
The Peace Preservation Law explicitly criminalized forming an organization which tried to alter Japan’s “kokutai,” specifying only that criticizing the system of private property was now a criminal act. As you might surmise, this law was seen as an existential threat by Japan’s leftists but, as you also might surmise, this law could be used against almost anybody. The word “kokutai” could be interpreted very broadly and it often was. By the time the law was repealed in 1945, it was responsible for the cumulative arrests of over 70,000 people.
Kato Takaaki was many things, but he certainly wasn’t a communist. When the deals were being made for the coalition government, they had agreed to pass a law that aimed to not only curb leftist influence, but outlaw that influence entirely. Ironically, earlier that year Takaaki had concluded the “Soviet-Japanese Basic Convention” which normalized diplomatic relations between the Empire of Japan and the Soviet Union.
In spite of the objectively repressive “Peace Preservation Law” the “Universal Manhood Suffrage Law” represented the capstone of many decades of liberal activism in Japan. The First World War had been reported in popular western media as a war of autocracy versus democracy and while this is not strictly accurate, that did not stop people from believing it was true. The popular perception at the end of that war was that democracy had won and would continue to win, continue to spread, and continue to make the world a fairer, more just, and all around better place. When they expanded the Japanese electorate in 1925, the Imperial Diet was seen as enjoining this trend by expanding the role of democracy in Japan.
However, every political system has its excesses and crazy tendencies. While Germany was applauded for adopting a republic in place of its imperial autocracy, the events of the Russian revolution caused the upper rungs of allegedly democratic societies to quake in their boots. Perhaps too much democracy could be a bad thing. What if the people made the wrong choice?
Throughout the history of the modern world, demagoguery and know-nothing populism are large-scale threats to democratic republics from which it seems no nation is immune. The Peace and Preservation Laws were meant as a counterbalance to prevent the nation lapsing into something similar to Soviet Russia but its enforcement was one-sided and thus blind to threats to democracy that might come from the other side of the aisle. Throughout the Taisho Period, conservatives in Japan bemoaned the rising power of the Imperial Diet’s lower house, which had formerly been largely subordinate to the genro and the privy council. Now the Diet’s power was greater than ever as a larger electorate would mean increased political influence for commoners.
Because of the passage of Universal Male Suffrage, political developments during the Taisho Period are sometimes referred to under the umbrella term “Taisho Democracy.” This term is sometimes contested by period historians and I will admit that democracy itself is something of a loaded word here. It is, of course, wrong to think that Japan became a full-fledged democracy during this period. Many high offices throughout the nation, including prefectural governors, were appointees, not elected officials. There was only one quasi-democratic organ of national politics and until nearly the end of the period in question, its electorate was among the monied class of Japan, not the common people. Nevertheless, I think it is fairly accurate to say that there was a trend toward democracy during the Taisho Period, which is how the term Taisho Democracy should be understood.
The era itself began with a political crisis precipitated by a prime minister appealing to the emperor to order a minister to serve in his cabinet. The outrage which ensued caused Katsura Taro, a man who had been among the most respected former prime ministers in the nation, to serve the second-shortest single term as prime minister in all of Japanese history. For such a short span of time - just fourteen years - the Taisho Period seems to have suffered a glut of scandals, most of which resulted in resignations, cabinet reshuffles, and new premier appointments.
The common people of Japan certainly seem to have been clamoring for an increase of their political power throughout Taisho, sometimes in positive ways and other times in ways that make most of us uncomfortable. Protests against corrupt government officials and mass expressions of popular anger were nothing new but during Taisho they seem to have taken on a more dangerous life. Most of these popular gatherings were explicitly not peaceful and they nearly always caused property damage including burned-out police stations and vandalized offices of newspapers whose views the public was roundly rejecting.
The darker side of this seeming increase in community political spirit was expressed during the Kanto Massacre, in which mobs of otherwise normal members of the community were manipulated by police and others in high authority to turn their fear and anger toward a marginalized group. In many ways, the fruits of the Meiji Period are evident during Taisho - the crowds targeting politicians rather than the emperor seems to indicate that the rather nationalistic public school curriculum was working as designed. However, the Toranomon Incident in which a young man fired a pistol at Regent Hirohito’s carriage - an attempt which bore striking similarity to the successful assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie - indicates that perhaps not everyone was willing to turn their wrath toward elected officials alone. As the successful assassination of Hara Takashi shows, however, there were plenty of working class conservatives willing to kill for their political beliefs as well as leftists.
Kato Takaaki died on January 28, 1926 having served as prime minister for about six months. He was replaced immediately by Wakatsuki Rejiro, his former Home Minister, who would be by default the first prime minister of the Showa Period. On December 25, 1926, Emperor Taisho died of a heart attack. He was 47 years old.
His son, Hirohito, who had been serving as the Sessho and essentially doing the job his father was too constantly ill to perform, was enthroned shortly thereafter and a new era and posthumous name proclaimed: Showa, which means “Enlightened Peace.” Unfortunately for the new emperor, for Japan, and for much of the world, most of the Showa Period would not be remembered as an era of enlightened peace.
Next time, we will take one last look over the whole of the turbulent Taisho Period to examine the status quo that it created, both in Japan, and throughout the world.