abroad. They were in complete sympathy with the authoritarian rule at home and the strong expansionist program abroad of the Meiji leaders, and the post-war liberalism and internationalism seemed to them signs of weakness and perversion. From the Meiji leaders they had inherited a compelling nationalistic urge to make Japan even stronger, but too much nationalistic and militaristic indoctrination had robbed them of the breadth of view of the Meiji leaders they sought to emulate.
Ultra-nationalist and militarist sentiments from time to time found expression in political parties, but these essentially reactionary elements, with their inherent distrust of representative government, leaned more to direct action through private pressure groups and extra-legal cliques than to political action by means of the ballot-box. Ultra-nationalistic secret societies quite naturally developed as one of their major forms of political expression. Some of these exerted considerable influence on Japanese politics by terroristic activities and virulent propaganda directed against their opponents. The best known of these ultra-nationalistic secret societies was formed by anti-Russian propagandists who, believing that the Amur River in Siberia should be Japan’s frontier, named their group the Amur Society. A literal translation into English has given us the very sinister sounding name of Black Dragon Society.
The reactionaries all tended to look to the armed forces as their idols and champions, for the army and navy were less tainted with the prevailing democratic views and business man’s ideals of the 1920’s. The