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Japan Past and Present
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