Taisho democracy

Emperor Taisho ruled for a brief period between 1912 and 1926, when the Showa emperor, who would reign until his death in 1989, succeeded him. For many historians, the Taisho period appears
like a small window of calm in the middle of a century of war and struggle for Japan. Intellectuals and activists such as Yoshino Sakuzo advocated a kind of democracy called minponshugi (rule for the people), which he argued was compatible with Japan’s constitutional monarchy. At the same time, constitutional lawyers such as Minobe Tatsukichi argued that the emperor might best be considered an ‘organ’ in the overall structure of the state, rather than as coterminous with the nation as a whole. Meanwhile, internationalists like Nitobe Inazo placed their faith in the emergence of a new world order that would recognize diversity and multicultural membership; Nitobe himself was an undersecretary-
general of the League of Nations from 1920 and a founding director of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (the forerunner of UNESCO).
Against this background, a new middle class was emerging in the rapidly growing urban centres. This was the birth of the so-called salaryman (sarariman) – the ubiquitous, white-collared worker.
But this period also saw a new class of white-collared women working as ‘office ladies’ or as attendants in shops. In general, women in these jobs were very poorly paid, but they featured in popular culture as icons of modern life: flashy and fashionable, immersed in the consumerism of products and fads, and often represented as morally liberal, selling kisses as well as Western clothes to their customers. These were the moga or modan gaaru (modern girls). The new middle class (which contrasted with the ‘old middle class’ of former samurai families) was represented as liberal and free, moving regularly between different jobs at different companies and enjoying the trappings of modern life.

This new way of life cohabited with a new culture, and the Taisho period saw the Japanese enthusiastically embrace many American pastimes: baseball and jazz being the most pervasive.

But there were also developments in Japan’s own artistic ferment, with arguably modern Japan’s greatest authors, such as Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Tanizaki Juni’ichiro, writing darkly beautiful short stories and novels that contemplated questions of individual and cultural identity in Japan’s rapidly changing society. At the same time, there was a flourishing of avant-garde poetry and art. The advent of the ‘one yen’ book, the further development of national and local newspapers, and the establishment of rental stores for novels, magazines, and manga (graphic fiction) brought these materials to an ever wider and increasingly educated public.

Of course, this middle class image of Taisho Japan was not the whole story. The working class factory workers that so characterized the Meiji period found their conditions largely unchanged. Again, it was young women who bore the brunt of this, with men toiling under similarly harsh conditions in heavier

industry. However, the Taisho period also saw the working classes becoming increasingly conscious of their plight and their power: workers began to organize into unions and ‘friendly societies’, even the burakumin began to participate in social activism in the form of the Suiheisha (Levellers’ Association).

Local disputes and strikes increased in number throughout the 1920s, as activists started to embrace liberal and even communist ideas.

The image of the Taisho period as a war-free haven is at least partially premised upon the economic boom that Japan experienced during the years of the Great War in Europe.

During the war years, Japanese industrial output increased by a factor of five as it sought to supply European and domestic demand, and its exports surged (especially textiles).

This failure at Versailles was not well received back in Japan, where protests erupted in the streets. For many commentators at the time (and since), this looked like another example of Western racism, echoing the duplicity that the Japanese perceived at the time of the Triple Intervention. The feeling of injustice was severe, especially since Japan at the turn of the 1920s had become a modern, constitutional democracy with an imposing empire and a flourishing economy: it had met all of the objective criteria to join the club of modern nations, but it was still being refused entry. It seemed, finally, that being modern was not enough: modern Japan would never be considered an equal partner in international affairs for as long as it was Japanese. This was the one thing that Japan could do nothing about, and indeed it was becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of maintaining its distinctive identity. Events at Versailles added fuel to the fires of Japanese romantics and chauvinists who were striving to rediscover, reinvent, or simply protect ‘Japaneseness’ in the modern state.

Only two years later, Britain allowed the Anglo-Japanese alliance to lapse and instead proposed a five-way naval agreement involving the USA, France, and Italy. The so-called Washington Naval Treaty of 1921, one of a number of such treaties to be signed over the next decade or so, obliged the signatories to maintain a fixed ratio of naval power (measured in tonnage of capital ships and aircraft carriers). As far as Japan was concerned, the key ratio was Britain:USA:Japan, which was set at 5:5:3, meaning that Japan would always be less powerful than the two nations that thwarted its racial equality clause. But, perhaps the last straw for those in Japan who saw a systematic racism at work in the Anglo-American world was the enactment of the 1924 immigration laws in the USA, which specifically prohibited the immigration of East Asians.

Unfortunately, this perception of an unsympathetic international environment coincided with economic collapse in Japan, which followed the wartime bubble, and natural catastrophe in the form of the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which left 150,000 people dead or missing and about half a million residences in Tokyo levelled. By the end of the Taisho period, Japan was in depression, the zaibatsu conglomerates (such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Sumitomo) were beginning to take over the economy

as private banks failed, and they were cultivating ever-closer connections with the political parties and the military. This meant that wealth was being concentrated into fewer hands, and more of the urban population was struggling to maintain their way of life.

Hence, by the start of the increasingly militaristic Showa period, Japan was ripe for change once again: the democratic window appeared to be closing.