Season 14, Episode 10: The Pax Taisho
I hope it is clear, now that we have reached the end of season 14, that although the Taisho Period was very short - a little less than a decade and a half - it was a very significant time in Japanese history and around the world. In 1912, Japan was a significant player in east Asia, having won a war against Russia and annexed the Korean Peninsula during the aftermath. By 1926 it was clear that Japan’s emergence as a modern world power was no fluke. For the time being, the Empire of Japan was a force to be reckoned with in east Asia.
Regarding imperial expansion and projection of force, there were plenty of achievements for conservatives to celebrate. Regarding the expansion of the electorate, there were also sufficient reasons for liberals to celebrate. Some no doubt believed that the Taisho Period might mark the beginning of a time of expanded rights and freedoms for Japanese citizens, while others worried that a reaction against enfranchisement was inevitable. Certainly some of that reaction had begun before the suffrage law became official. The Peace Preservation Law gave the government very powerful tools for surveillance, censorship, and repression and the state did not wield those tools in vain.
A lot of the intra-political conflict during Taisho boiled down to one important question: what makes a nation modern? The Meiji Oligarchy had coined the phrase “Fukoku Kyohei” which means “rich nation, strong military.” However, while these co-dependent principles were held up by conservatives as critical for Japan’s future, there had always been other ideas in the public square regarding what the state ought to be trying to achieve. The early Meiji Period saw the formation of several grass roots liberal activist organizations like the “Freedom and People’s Rights Party,” who had been agitating that Japan’s citizens ought to enjoy the same freedoms and rights as citizens of their peer nations.
The liberal movements that emerged and continued developing during Taisho were much larger, better organized, and less easy to ignore than their predecessors during Meiji. There are some obvious reasons: the Meiji period lasted forty-four years, during which time larger numbers of Japanese people became gradually more aware of the organization of their peer nations. The rapid changes that occurred in Japanese government, society, and public life during the Meiji Period were considerable, but were mostly top-down reforms whose implementation was frequently uneven. The early Meiji government, under the direction of Okubo Toshimichi, issued sweeping reforms with breakneck speed, often triggering reactionary riots from a populace that was not keen on things like property tax, public education, and mandatory conscription. While these riots were often destructive, however, they were typically scattered, small-scale affairs which failed to dissuade the Meiji government from its purpose of building a wealthy nation with a strong military.
Forty-four years is a long time and the year 1912 looked remarkably different than the year 1868, both in Japan and around the world. Japan now had its own constitution, a prime minister with a cabinet, a bicameral legislative body, regular elections, and a growing, rapidly-industrializing economy. They had also won a war against a neighboring imperial power, and had annexed the Ryukyu Islands, Hokkaido, Taiwan, and the Korean Peninsula. The sovereign’s title of emperor had, for much of Japan’s history, been an archaic designation leftover from the Nara Period, from a time when Japan’s eastern and northern reaches still lay outside the Yamato court’s control and they sought to dominate it militarily. The Meiji Period had made the title of Emperor more than merely honorific or aspirational. Those who advocated for Japan to become a powerful, modern empire to avoid being absorbed by another powerful, modern empire had accomplished their mission. For the first time in perhaps a thousand years, Japan was legitimately an empire.
During those forty-four years of Meiji reforms, counter-reforms, and finally constitutional status quo, entire generations of Japanese people reached adulthood having no personal memory of what came before. The domination of the shogunate, which had impoverished most of the nation for the benefit of the military government, was something they learned about in school and read about in books. The increasingly industrializing, expanding, and capitalist nation of Japan was all they had ever known. In most measures of social progress - income, employment, standard of living, etc. - life among common people in the Meiji Period was far better than it had been under the Edo Shogunate. However, the new generations which were coming of age during Taisho wanted more for themselves, their families, and their nation.
With the Edo Period restrictions against leaving the country repealed, some Japanese people began to travel throughout the Meiji Period, especially for education and special training. When they returned to Japan, usually to take jobs in either one of the burgeoning federal bureaucracies or the private sector, they brought more than just souvenirs home with them. Combined with efforts like the Meiroku and other intellectual publications of the Meiji Period, this helped foreign ideas percolate in the rich soil of Japan’s expanding social, aesthetic, and political consciousness.
During the first several decades of the Meiji Period, it was difficult for many liberal groups to mount effective action to shift Japan’s overton window toward progressive reform like increased suffrage and greater influence for democratic mechanisms in government. Because the Meiji government was trying to transform nearly every aspect of Japan from an isolated semi-feudal state into a modern nation capable of national defense and self determination, they held the initiative in the battlefield of ideas. However, once the constitution was put in place in 1890 and a rough political status quo settled into place around the turn of the century, the government’s focus shifted away from transforming society toward preserving what gains they had made and ensuring that it could not be threatened by wide-eyed dreamers and radicals. The power that the constitution vested in the sovereign was meant as a check against any future changes which threatened to push the nation out of balance, as they saw it, but on the few occasions when that power was leveraged, it proved immensely unpopular.
Some researchers dislike the term “Taisho Democracy” because it implies some singular democratic push that is limited to Taisho itself. Most would say that the popular outcry for increased suffrage, representation, and civil rights began at the close of the Russo-Japanese War, when the Hibiya Riots erupted in response to public dissatisfaction with the treaty that ended that terrible war. Most of the people who engaged in that three-day riot had no voting rights themselves but that would not stop them from expressing their opinion by any means necessary.
The political activation of Japan’s working class inspired paranoia among the wealthy and among the upper political class. The Meiji Period had witnessed an influx of far-left ideas, though so far they had been limited to small groups of discontented commoners. Ultraconservative elements greatly disliked the tolerance which these groups mostly enjoyed during the Meiji Period, and that tolerance would come under scrutiny when authorities uncovered an allegedly massive plot to assassinate Emperor Meiji using explosives. As events during the Taisho Period would prove, a small group of discontented rebels could still cause irreparable damage thanks to the availability of guns, explosives, and people willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause.
The question of balancing reforms was already an old one by the time the Taisho Period came around but that didn’t mean there were any easy answers. Many European countries, especially France, had embraced a more liberal political status quo and had yet to suffer a communist overthrow. Others, however, like Russia, had created liberal engines to satisfy their discontented commoners only to end up getting violently overthrown regardless. Historically, the hard truth about social and political change is that there are very few easy answers or obvious solutions, and unintended consequences can sometimes overcome even the best-laid plans for positive change. Obviously the individual national histories of any given nation usually added an extra layer of complication regarding which reforms worked and which only made the populace eager to grab even more political power, complications which usually revolve around intangibles like culture and common history.
When examining the specifics of conditions in Japan during the Taisho Period, especially which conditions led to the massive expansion of suffrage, it’s important to keep the sovereign themselves in mind. There is, of course, ongoing debate about Emperor Meiji and the specific role he played in the governance of Japan. The government always preferred to portray him as an active, thoughtful leader who was responsible for nearly every aspect of Japan’s modernization and improvement during the period which bears his name. As we discussed last season, evidence suggests that he was more likely a figurehead who deferred to men like Ito Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomo to decide various policies, but his image as the champion of Japan’s progress was important. It was illegal to directly criticize or mock the emperor and, because of Meiji-Tenno’s reputation, practically unthinkable. His chronically ill son, however, was a different matter.
The political crisis which bears his name was partly the fault of Emperor Taisho. Katsura Taro asked him to order the navy to provide a minister and he had issued that order. The unpopularity of that decision caused Taro’s final run as prime minister to amount to 62 days and was likewise humiliating for the new emperor. Rumors flew in national newspapers throughout the nation that the new sovereign was really nothing more than a puppet for the genro, the privy council, and various other groups of elites pulling the emperor’s strings behind the scenes. Because of the emperor’s sickly constitution, such assessments were almost certainly not far from the truth.
By 1921, even the government could no longer pretend that the emperor was just as active as his father. Reviving the title of Sessho for Crown Prince Hirohito allowed them to continue with official actions which required the sovereign’s signature or official approval, as the regent could now do that on his behalf. However, the emperor was far from the only person in Japan to be subjected to horrific illness.
In early 1918, a deadly new strain of influenza emerged. It is believed to have been first identified in the United States, where it was spread to Europe through the US’s involvement in the first World War. While both Entente and Central Powers alliances enforced a fairly strict press censorship during the war, the country of Spain had maintained neutrality throughout, which is why the earliest public reports of the new flu emerged in uncensored newspapers in Spain. The disease would therefore come to be known, somewhat unfairly, as the Spanish Flu.
There were at least three waves of the disease, the first beginning in the spring of 1918 which was worse than the average flu but generally survivable for the young and healthy, occasionally deadly for the elderly and infirm. The second wave, which arose in the fall of 1918, was far deadlier and was spread worldwide partly because of massed celebrations that erupted at the end of the first World War.
In Japan, the flu arrived during the second wave at the end of 1918. Its effects were devastating to the nation, and to the world at large. Estimates for the number of deaths worldwide typically range between twenty-five and fifty million, though outlying estimates are as low as seventeen million and as high as one hundred million. All four of these figures have dramatically negative effects on the populations most affected as labor shortages and subsequent goods shortages caused out-of-control inflation and rising prices.
Like many other places, Japan preferred to think of the terrible flu as the fault of foreigners. During the terrible outbreak of 1918 and the not-quite-as-bad-but-still-terrible outbreak of 1920, people in Japan generally referred to the epidemic as “Sumo-Kaze” or “The Sumo Flu,” blaming Sumo wrestlers who had competed in Taiwan.
Though it is difficult to be certain because of the technological limitations of the time, it is estimated that around half a million people in Japan died of the global flu epidemic of 1918-1920. Throughout the epidemic, scientists came to recommend that people should wear masks over their nose and mouths in public to prevent the spread of this airborne illness. While this measure was still somewhat uncertain at the time, those nations which adopted masking mandates sooner experienced far fewer casualties than those which waited longer. In Japan, wearing a mask over one’s face was still somewhat controversial at the time but as the deaths from the flu mounted, people gradually came to wear face masks when in public. After the epidemic passed, it remained common practice for people in Japan to wear nose-and-mouth masks whenever they were sick as a way of slowing or even preventing the spread of their illness. It is a practice which remains in place today. If you travel to Japan and see some people wearing medical masks, they probably have a cold.
While the people of Japan blamed Sumo wrestlers who had traveled to Taiwan for bringing the flu to Japan, the element of xenophobia that had allowed for some of the worse excesses of the Edo Period was obviously still present in Japan during the Taisho Period. Incidents like the Kanto Massacre make it plain that foreigners were still looked upon with suspicion by the Japanese. Although the Japanese government could hardly be blamed for creating a race-based understanding of history and the world at large, they certainly did little to promote good feelings among different peoples living within their borders. The assumption of Japanese superiority to their neighboring east Asians was taken for granted by the casual observers of regional politics, and the Japanese leadership had no shortage of people who were willing to demonize peoples and cultures outside of Japan for their own personal gain.
The demonization of foreign peoples had real consequences for said foreign peoples who were living under Japanese occupation, namely the Koreans and the Taiwanese. On the peninsula, the Korean people had been given a robust public education system for their children with the catch that the Korean language was banned in the schools in favor of Japanese and the history classes taught Japanese-centric history. One might imagine that the Japanese government’s intention on the Korean peninsula was the gradual replacement of Korean culture with Japanese culture, except that Korean people were still forbidden from holding higher provincial offices in the occupation government.
In Taiwan, things were, in many ways, far worse. The final decades of the Meiji Period had witnessed multiple armed uprisings against Japanese occupation, often from various ethnic groups. However, the Taisho Period saw the largest of these uprisings, which is referred to as the Tapani Incident. While previous so-called “rebellions” had largely stemmed from either local Han groups or indigenous groups, the Tapani Incident was the product of coordination between multiple ethnic groups, both indigenous and Han.
In 1915, this alliance of disaffected ethnic groups, many of whom had been formerly prosperous under China’s governance, stormed police stations throughout the capital city of Tainan, overwhelming local police. Many of the rebels were members of a new religion which was growing in popularity among the Taiwanese. The members of this new movement had undergone a ritual which they believed would render them invulnerable to bullets and other modern weaponry.
Although the rebels’ numbers were significant - around one thousand five hundred - they were no match for the Japanese army, who stormed their positions and restored order very quickly. The Tapani Incident would mark the final time that members of the Han ethnic group living on Taiwan would rise up in rebellion against their colonial masters, though the indigenous groups would continue to occasionally stage small-scale guerrilla actions against the occupiers.
For the general populace of Japan, things like the March First Movement and the Tapani Incident were generally perceived to be the work of criminals, malcontents, and rustic luddites. The status quo of the Meiji period, which so many in Japan’s government worked to uphold during Taisho, was that Japan was an empire who rightfully annexed Korea and Taiwan. Even the more liberal newspapers often gave little thought to whether Korea and Taiwan deserved self-determination, often assuring their readers that Japan’s influence over those formerly independent nations was primarily charitable - that they were leading Korean and Taiwanese people into a bright future where they would eventually enjoy the same rights and privileges taken for granted by Japan’s citizenry.
In retrospect, this was obviously wishful thinking. The typical policy that emerged after decades of Japanese rule was not uplifting the people already living in these new colonies, but giving them a choice between assimilating or going extinct. This was especially clear on the Korean peninsula where the public schools forced Japanese language onto the Korean pupils. The disenfranchisement of Korean smallholders by the agricultural reforms dealt a terrible blow to the local economy of the peninsula and fed resentment when the parcels, some of which had been worked by the same family for many generations, were sold to Japanese developers and speculators.
While Hara Takashi and other liberal leaders sought a more humanitarian approach to their colonial administrations, they always stopped short of granting the Korean people the kind of enfranchisement and civil rights enjoyed by the Japanese populace. What essentially emerged throughout the imperial domains was a two-tiered system of belonging, wherein Japanese citizens were eligible for higher office in local government while the native residents of these domains were treated as second-class citizens who were expected to give up their cultural, linguistic, and ethnic identities and assimilate to becoming facsimiles of Japanese people. Those who decided to adopt the Japanese way were still not really considered Japanese by the government, however, and thus weren’t eligible for government jobs in their own communities.
Life in Japan proper, meanwhile, had its shares of ups and downs. The Rice Riots of 1918 showed that the citizenry was still very much capable of organizing mass violence when they felt the situation called for it. The tendency from reactionary conservatives was to crack down on communist and socialist elements, assuming they were manipulating the people who would otherwise live happy, contented lives if not for these troublemakers stirring them up.
When the right to vote was extended to all men over the age of 25, fear of an imminent communist power grab led the government to likewise make cracking down on aforementioned troublemakers that much easier. It was considered a give-and-take, but it was one that was rife for potential abuse which would begin emerging just after the death of Emperor Taisho. Liberal optimists hoped that the Peace Preservation Law would not be needed - that expanding the voting franchise would help provide a release valve for the political tensions which were clearly spurring the common people to organize riots to express their discontent. Now, that discontent could be expressed at the ballot box and all organizing energy spent on electioneering.
The Japanese military, however, was arguably the most conservative wing of the government and their top brass was generally unhappy with the Diet’s decision to expand voting rights. While the military had been given a relatively blank check during the Meiji Period, the Taisho Period witnessed some of the most significant push back against the encroaching political influence of the military, whose image had become irreparably damaged by the repeated scandals which had become public knowledge. The death of Emperor Taisho and the subsequent elevation of his son, crown prince Hirohito, presented an opportunity for a new beginning, a fresh start. It was an opportunity which every political faction in Japan would attempt to seize, but which the military would ultimately prove among the most successful. They were determined to leave the failures and political defeats they suffered during the Taisho period behind and relished the chance to restore the good old days of Meiji during the reign of Emperor Showa.
This is the final regular episode of Season 14. Next time, we will discuss the more radical elements that came into their own during the Taisho Period - the communists, socialists, and anarchists.