Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 10
Chapter X
The Appearance of Liberal Democratic Trends
The success of the carefully controlled revolution of the Meiji leaders was tremendous. In a few decades the oligarchs had made the strong Japan they wanted. They had no detailed plans when they started, but they did have a clear idea of the general objective, and this objective they had attained by firmly leading their people through a series of amazing reforms and changes.
Accustomed to severe feudal rule, the docile populace expected to be led. The oligarchs had no difficulty in controlling the people, and remained the masters of each new situation. Minor set-backs and endless personal quarrels occurred among the leaders, but all major issues turned out as they wished. Nothing got out of hand. Yet, in a country open to influences from all over the world, with an educated citizenry becoming aware of the ideas and ideals of other lands, strict control by a small oligarchy of the actions and thoughts of all the people became increasingly difficult.
It was in the intellectual field that new and divergent currents first made themselves felt. In the early days of Meiji, there had been many able young Japanese leaders who, while no less anxious than the Satsuma and Choshu samurai to make a new and better Japan, were not thinking primarily in terms of military strength. There were men like the young samurai, Fukuzawa Yukichi, who as a student of Dutch in the last years of the Tokugawa, had become aware of Western concepts, and later under the influence of American ideals became a prolific writer, established a great newspaper, and founded an educational institution which was to become Keio University—one of the several great universities of modern Tokyo.
There were also foreigners in Japan, particularly the Christian missionaries, who came largely from America, and they helped found many of the early schools. Here they taught the Christian ideals of the West which, although tolerated by the early Meiji leaders, were quite at variance with their aims and beliefs. Christianity as an organized religion did not spread quickly in modern Japan, but it won a few hundred thousand converts who were drawn largely from the intellectual classes. Through them the ethics and ideals of Christianity had a much more profound influence on Japanese thought and life than one might assume from the fact that less than one per cent of the population became professing Christians.
The culture of the early Meiji period was a strange conglomeration of undigested borrowings from Western civilization mixed with many elements remaining intact from feudal times. In the late years of Meiji, however, the birth of a completely modern and yet indigenous culture was presaged by the appearance of an entirely new literature. This literature was, of course, deeply influenced by Western models. It was so decidedly modern that many of its ideas might have been those of contemporary Russians, Frenchmen, or Englishmen. At the same time, this literature was too good and too sincere to be simply imitative. It was a distinctly Japanese creation, telling the story of the average middle class people with realism, sometimes with deep psychological analysis, and often with considerable humor. In the hands of a master like the novelist Natsume Soseki, a university professor of English, it was a great literature, worthy of standing beside the finest literary works of the Western world. Its appearance toward the end of the Meiji period clearly indicated that, even while the oligarchy ruled, an intellectual class was growing up which was free of the feudal mentality inherited from the Tokugawa and was thinking in terms quite foreign to the oligarchs.
Side by side with the new intellectual class and to some degree merging with it was a second group, also developing opinions divergent from the ruling oligarchy. This group consisted of business men and financiers, who, although in large part made up of former samurai and Daimyo, tended to be more interested in taxes and profits than in military strength and colonial expansion.
The business men had joined with the lesser government officials excluded from the oligarchy in clamoring for a larger voice in the government, and the creation of the Diet in 1890 gave them a place in politics which they gradually improved. Political parties at first had centered completely around the old oligarchs, but as time passed the small ruling circle found it increasingly necessary to win the support of this new politically conscious public. Gradually the great financial and industrial interests began to take control of the parties, although the oligarchs still remained their nominal leaders. At the same time the electorate was expanded by lowering the tax requirement for voting. At the end of the First World War, the tax qualifications stood at only three yen, and the electorate had risen to 1,500,000, thus including the bulk of the middle classes, but not the peasantry and urban proletariat.
Despite these political gains of the middle classes and the appearance of new intellectual trends, Japan entered the First World War apparently under the firm control of a small oligarchy, and then, as the war ended and Japan entered the post-war world, it suddenly became evident that there was no longer a small, clear-cut ruling group, but instead, thousands of bureaucrats, military leaders, business men, and intellectuals, all contending for control of the government. There was even a growing demand that all classes be allowed to participate in politics. Within a few years it also became evident that the intellectual life and even the social patterns in the cities of Japan had become strongly westernized. A new Japanese culture, hinted at in the writings of men like Natsume Soseki, seemed to be emerging.
One reason for this rather sudden change was the disappearance of the original oligarchs. The Meiji emperor died in 1912, leaving the throne to his mentally deficient son, who ruled in name until 1926 under the reign title of Taisho. The Taisho emperor was incapable of participating in the direction of government, and in 1921 he had to relinquish even his ceremonial functions to his son, who became the Prince Regent. The death of the Meiji Emperor meant the disappearance of one of the greatest figures in the oligarchy and the elimination of the throne from Japanese politics, except as a symbol, and a tool for those in control of the government.
Ito, framer of the Constitution and four times Premier, had been assassinated by a Korean in 1909. Yamagata, father of the army and himself twice Premier, died in 1922. Two years later only one of the great “elder statesmen” of the Meiji period remained, Prince Saionji, the old court noble and perhaps the least typical member of the whole group.
Meanwhile, a new generation was coming into power. A majority of the generals, admirals, bureaucrats, business men, and intellectuals of the time had been born or at least had grown up since the “Restoration.” These men, for the most part, were the sons of former samurai who had become army officers, government officials, or business men, but they, themselves, had never been samurai. No one group had the prestige or power of the old oligarchy, and on the whole they lacked the common background and singleness of purpose of the Meiji leaders.
Another significant factor was the First World War. It gave a tremendous impetus to commercial and industrial expansion, which helped make the business classes, and particularly the great commercial and industrial interests, increasingly important in Japanese life and politics. They became the heroes of a prosperous new Japan. In addition, the overwhelming success of the Western democracies in the war strongly influenced Japanese thought. The most democratic Western powers, Great Britain, France, and the United States, had emerged victorious, and the least democratic, Germany, Russia, and Austro-Hungary, had collapsed completely. It seemed obvious that democracy made stronger states and was therefore superior to autocracy. This argument was convincing to the average Japanese. There was an upsurge of enthusiasm for real democracy, and the business men of Japan, riding a wave of economic prosperity and responding to a popular demand for democratic government, became the dominant group in politics.
Military officers, professional bureaucrats, and rural landowners all remained extremely influential, but the business men, particularly the representatives of great economic empires like Mitsui and Mitsubishi, dominated the post-war political parties, and these in turn controlled most of the Cabinets. Some of the Premiers were titled men, others were admirals without party connections; but for more than a decade after the First World War the Cabinets were largely party Cabinets, dependent for their authority upon party strength in the Diet. Thus, at last, the Diet became the key organ of government. Political parties often acted as tools of small but powerful private interests, and Japan had its full share and more of political corruption; but democracy, however imperfectly, was becoming the dominant force in Japanese politics.
The new system of party government got its start as early as September 1918, when Hara, the leader of a major political party, was the first commoner and the first professional politician of the new generation to become Premier. Following his assassination by a fanatic in 1921, cabinets came and went with bewildering rapidity, some backed by one economic empire or another, some more influenced than others by army and navy interests and more inclined to a strong foreign policy. But until the sudden collapse of party government in 1932, the general tendency was for the government to reflect the dominance of business interests over the other groups that constituted the ruling elements in Japan.
The Japanese business men of the 1920’s, influenced by the philosophies of the victorious Western democracies, tended to look with disfavor on the high taxes required for large naval and military establishments. They were also inclined to believe that economic expansion—building up a great export trade and acquiring economic concessions abroad through diplomacy—was less costly and more profitable than colonial expansion by war and conquest. This seemed particularly true in China, the chief field for Japanese expansion. The Chinese, with a newly awakened sense of nationalism, were beginning to boycott foreign merchants whose governments were considered to be pursuing an aggressive policy against China. Consequently, military intervention in China cost the double price of lost markets and increased military expenditures.
The business men, acting through the government they now controlled, soon started a reversal of the old policy of colonial expansion through military force. In 1922, the Japanese withdrew from Siberia the last of their troops, which together with British and American forces had landed at Vladivostok, Russia’s principal Far Eastern port, in 1918, shortly before Hara had come to power. On this expedition the Japanese had sent far more than their share of troops in an obvious effort to fish for possible rewards in the troubled waters of the Russian Revolution, but the new government considered the venture unprofitable and withdrew completely.
In the winter of 1921–22, at the Washington Conference, Japan joined the United States and the principal European powers in recognizing the territorial integrity of China and renouncing the generally accepted policy of cutting up the “Chinese melon.” Japan also agreed with other members of the “Big Five” to limit their respective naval establishments. The ratio of capital ships was set at five for Great Britain and the United States, three for Japan, and 1.67 for France and Italy. This ratio, it was thought, would give Japan definite naval supremacy within her own waters but confine her fleet to the western Pacific.
This same winter, by a separate treaty with China, Japan restored to China the area around Kiaochow Bay and the economic concessions in contiguous parts of northern China once held by Germany. Japan also agreed to withdraw all her military forces from these areas. In 1925, the civilian government forced through a reduction of the standing army, and four of the twenty-one divisions were eliminated—a considerable cut in military strength and a saving to the tax-payer. Thus the Japanese business men called a halt to colonial expansion and asserted their right to limit and even to pare down the national military establishment.
From 1927 to 1929, the cabinet of Baron Tanaka, an army general and leader of a major political party, reversed the trend away from militarism. He used Japanese forces in North China to block the northward advance of the new Chinese Nationalist government, but eventually he had to withdraw these troops. His successors returned to the dominant business man’s policy of conciliatory diplomacy with a view to further expansion of a lucrative export trade.
While a greatly enlarged ruling class of military leaders, bureaucrats, and business men, under the dominant influence of big business interests, controlled the democratic post-war regime, other classes were beginning to come on the political scene. With the intelligentsia and underpaid office-workers in the van, city dwellers of lower economic status were waking to a new political consciousness. These men, too, belonged to the new generation and were the products of the new education. University professors, teachers, writers, doctors, lawyers, and office-workers, usually with from fourteen to eighteen years of formal education, were thoroughly conversant with the intellectual and political trends of the Western world. Even the city laborers, with their elementary education, could read the newspapers, which exposed them to influences from all quarters. The educated populace demanded a share in government, and with the democratic tide of the day, this demand could not be denied. In 1919, the electorate was doubled, increasing from 1,500,000 to 3,000,000; and in 1925, a universal manhood suffrage bill was passed, making a total electorate of 14,000,000 voters. Now the whole adult male population of Japan, peasants and city workers along with the middle and upper classes, could vote.
Since the lower classes, however, were politically untutored, they took little interest in politics. The peasantry seemed almost untouched by the strong democratic trends in the cities, and only a small element in the city proletariat, largely under the leadership of middle class intellectuals, expressed itself in political action. With the backing of white collar workers and some laborers, intellectuals founded liberal and left wing parties, such as the Social Democratic and the Farmer Labor, and later the Social Mass Party, born of a union of the two earlier parties. Even a Communist Party was organized, embracing a few radical thinkers and very small groups of laborers and peasants, but it was early liquidated by the thorough and ruthless Japanese police. Of the other parties, only the Social Mass made any impression in the Diet, and that was not until the 1930’s, after the Diet had relapsed into relative insignificance.
Although the new parties were not too influential in practical politics, they were significant. During the 1920’s, the city intellectuals and white collar workers became a strongly liberal group, not unlike the liberals in the United States who stood slightly left of center. In the 1930’s, when the rest of Japan was disowning democracy and liberalism, and the business men were weakly surrendering leadership to the militarists, the intellectuals and white collar workers in the middle class districts of the large cities rolled up huge majorities for the few liberal politicians who were allowed to run for election.
The peasantry had not yet awakened to politics, and the urban proletariat was hardly strong; but without doubt the city workers were on their way to becoming a force in Japanese society and politics. Their medium of expression was more the labor union than the political party. Japanese labor unions, which had grown rapidly during the prosperous war years, were strong enough by 1919 to exert considerable pressure through strikes, and strikes became a definite part of the Japanese scene in the 1920’s. By 1929, union membership had grown to well over 300,000 and promised to keep on growing. It seemed but a matter of time before the proletariat would join with city intellectuals and white collar workers to form a strong, possibly dominant political force in Japan.
Paralleling these political changes in Japan during the 1920’s were even more startling changes in Japanese society and culture. The rural areas and small towns were being modernized only very slowly, but a whole new social structure and life were beginning to appear in the cities. Tokyo naturally took the lead in cultural as well as political changes, for it was both the capital and the greatest city of Japan, with a population which reached about 7,000,000 in 1940. The great earthquake and fire of September 1, 1923, accelerated the speed of social change in the Tokyo area. This tremendous cataclysm, which in three days took close to 100,000 lives and completely destroyed about one-half of Tokyo and almost all of Yokohama, helped to sweep away old, outworn modes of life, and cleared the ground literally for a new city, and figuratively for a new culture.
Downtown Tokyo became a city of wide thoroughfares and of many great steel and reinforced concrete buildings, resembling in sections the cities of Europe and America more than those of Asia. The Marunouchi district around the main Tokyo railway station was the pride of the nation and a symbol of the new modernized Japan. Other cities followed Tokyo’s lead, and soon modern office buildings of steel, school buildings in concrete, large movie houses, an occasional great stadium, and sprawling railway stations were the typical architecture of Japanese cities.
Family solidarity, paternal authority, and male dominance remained the salient features of Japanese society, but increasingly the younger generation in the cities joined the world-wide revolt of youth and began to question time-honored social customs. College students, attracted to liberal or radical political philosophies, embraced the freer social concepts of the West, and there was a growing demand on the part of youth to be allowed to make marriages of love rather than marriages arranged by families through go-betweens. Women office workers became a feature of the new social system, and under occidental influence, many middle class Japanese men began to treat their wives almost as social equals. The women of Japan began slowly to free themselves from their traditional position as domestic drudges.
The symbol of the 1920’s in Japan, as in the United States, was the “flapper,” called by the Japanese the moga, a contraction of the English words “modern girl,” and the male counterpart of the moga was naturally called the mobo. Moving pictures, either from Hollywood or made in Japan on Hollywood patterns, had a tremendous vogue, and American jazz and Western social dancing were popular with the more sophisticated. Taxi-dance halls appeared; all-girl musical comedy troupes rivaled the popularity of the movies; Western style and Chinese style restaurants became numerous; and there was a mushroom growth of so-called “cafés”—small “beer joints,” where cheap victrolas 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. Baseball and tennis were already extremely popular. Now they concentrated on track and field sports as well, with a view to making better showings at the Olympic games, and they actually came to dominate the Olympic swimming events. Golf links were built for the rich, and the middle classes took up skiing. Baseball, however, remained the great national sport, and university and middle school baseball games drew crowds comparable to those attending major college football and big league baseball games in the United States.
There were many other less striking but even more significant aspects of the new culture of the Japanese cities. The great literary movement started in the time of Natsume Soseki continued with growing vigor. Thousands of books poured off the Japanese presses, and the literature of the whole world became available in cheap translated editions. Great Tokyo and Osaka newspapers grew to have circulations in the millions, and popular magazines of all varieties were published. Higher education was sought by more and more young men from all classes, and higher education for women finally achieved a slow start. There was much and often brilliant scholarly activity in many scientific fields and in the humanities. A growing taste for good Western music was seen in the organization of symphony orchestras and in huge audiences for visiting Western musicians. The city people of Japan were beginning to share in the rich intellectual and cultural life of the Western world.
The leaders of the early Meiji period had transformed Japan into a strong military and industrial power, but the democratic political concepts, the broad intellectual life, and the liberal social trends which flowered spontaneously from the state they created were something they themselves could never have imagined or understood. The carefully controlled revolution of the Meiji period was developing into a runaway liberal movement of the urban middle classes.