Parliamentary government in prewar Japan was thus constrained by formal and infor
mal institutions. It faced ideological challenge and organized attacks from emperor- centered radicals on the right and a wide range of activists on the left. By the late 1920s it commanded only tepid support from “natural” allies such as the press and many intellectuals. How, then, did political parties manage to share power and form cabinets from 1918 through the early 1930s to the extent that they did?
Parties joined the ruling elite in part because their leaders were extremely practical politicians who had come to see bureaucrats and military men more as allies than as opponents. In social terms, the party leaders were little different from elites in the bureaucracy and military. They included wealthly landlords and business leaders, some retired bureaucrats who sought a continued public role in politics, and some urban
professionals such as lawyers and publishers or journalists. These men attended the same elite higher schools and imperial universities. Their families came from similar privileged economic backgrounds. They belonged to a handful of exclusive golf clubs founded in the early years of the twentieth century. Their children married each other.
Party rule had a practical economic foundation as well. It delivered important goods to significant numbers of people. When party cabinet ministers controlled public works or education budgets, small town mayors or business leaders or school prin
cipals had good reason to support the party in power. In exchange for delivering votes, or pledging to do so, they might see railway lines directed through their cities, harbors dredged in their ports, or schools built in their towns and villages. The promise of such favors, which were called “pork-barrel” benefits in the American political world of this era, was alluring in Japan as well. It was a key factor allowing the minority party, once in power, to consistently win the next election. On the other hand, press reports of such dealings, as well as outright vote-buying, turned more idealistic voters against the parties and undermined their legitimacy.
Parliamentary rule was also sustained from the 1910s through the early 1930s by shared political attitudes among party and nonparty elites. Few party leaders saw democracy as an end in itself. They considered it rather a means to ensure the position of emperor and empire, national power, and social order. To the extent that rulers and a wider public believed that party rule was achieving these goals, it gained legitimacy.
Party men, bureaucrats, and the mainstream of the military agreed on a basic politics of divide and rule. On one hand, voting rights would be extended, and men of substance and status would represent the will of the people in parliament. In the words of a leading Seiyu¯kai parliamentarian, politics in this new era were “rooted in the people (minponshugi) and tackle[d] social problems.”11 But all elites agreed as well that visions of economic democracy or political attacks on the imperial institution were beyond the pale. Under the Seiyu¯kai in 1920, Hara Kei moved harshly against a strike at the nation’s largest steel mill. In the days following the September 1923 earthquake, as they tolerated and sometimes incited the massacre of thousands of Koreans, government forces also moved violently against those seen as political out
laws in a series of notorious acts of state violence. The police murdered the feminist writer Ito¯Noe, her famous anarchist lover Osugi Sakae, and their nephew. In a second ¯ attack, the police together with army troops rounded up and killed the union leader Hirasawa Keishichi and nine other labor activists. These figures hardly represented a major immediate threat to Japan’s rulers, but many of those in the elite, especially in military and court circles, and some in the bureacracy, took a harsh “zero tolerance”
approach to radical ideas. Political party leaders seem to have agreed. The parties scarcely murmured a word in protest at these acts. Under the Kenseikai in 1925, the Diet passed a repressive Peace Preservation Law. It made criticism of the emperor a capital offense and criticism of “the system of private property” punishable by up to ten years in jail. Under the Seiyu¯kai in 1928, police launched a massive crackdown on the JCP. They arrested sixteen hundred people and prosecuted five hundred. Police arrested another seven hundred accused as communists in a roundup the following year.
The parties thus ruled as partners of other elites. They shared social ties. They traded economic favors and political patronage. And they agreed in fundamental ways
on their ideological commitments: They accepted some degree of democratic partici
pation, but they supported empire and the emperor as foundations of the political order.
But through the 1920s, an important strategic division also emerged among parties and within the bureaucracy and the military. Some argued that imperial Japan should be a democracy for men of capital and landed property only. Others maintained that national power and social order would best be secured by making Japan a considerably more open, democratic society for all men, or even for women, as long as they stayed within the boundaries of acceptable thought and behavior.
Both these avenues were explored in the 1920s. The more conservative program of imperial democracy is associated with the Seiyu¯kai party and with bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. It dominated national policy in the im
mediate wake of World War I. The Seiyu¯kai moved cautiously to broaden the scope of legal participation in politics. Hara supported a lowered property tax qualification for suffrage, which the Diet ratified in 1919. The change increased the size of the electorate to three million men, about 5 percent of the population. And the Seiyu¯kai did recognize at least an expanded role for women on the margins of politics in 1922 by amending the law of 1900 that denied all political rights to women. They were now given the right to attend political meetings, although not other rights such as joining political organizations. But Hara consistently opposed universal suffrage even for males in these years: “It is too soon. Abolition of property tax [voting] restrictions, with the intent to destroy class distinctions, is a dangerous idea. I cannot agree.”12 His home minister supported workplace councils to win employee loyalty, while refusing to recognize more autonomous union activity. In 1919 he played a key role in founding a think tank called the Harmonization Society with state and corporate financial sup
port. The body’s mission was to study social problems and promote harmony between labor and capital. The Seiyu¯kai also sought to bolster the position of small-scale landowners in the countryside. In 1920 it further set up a committee in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce to consider reform of tenant farming, but faced with landlord opposition, it shelved plans to write a law giving legal rights to tenant farmers.
The Seiyu¯kai administration of 1918–21, and the “transcendental” cabinets of 1922–24, also put in place a more elaborate set of social welfare programs of the local and national government. Hara’s cabinet created a Social Affairs Bureau in the Home Ministry in 1920, charged to address issues such as unemployment, labor dis
putes, and tenant farmer protests. It pushed a health insurance law and a revised factory law through the Diet in 1922. The insurance law required all medium and large-scale companies to create health insurance unions for all employees, funded by a combi
nation of worker and company premium payments, or to allow the employees to join a new government-administered insurance plan. The factory law raised minimum sums for death and injury benefits and sick pay.13
In addition, local governments beginning with Osaka in 1918 improvised a low- cost system to provide counseling and moral support to the poorest families in the nation. It drew community leaders into the administration of the system, giving them the unpaid position of “district commissioner.” The commissioners made the rounds of indigent households in their neighborhood, counseling them on hygiene, offering
job introductions, exhorting them to save, and introducing them to various sources of private charity or public relief. By the late 1920s, the Home Ministry had endorsed the district commissioner system as “the central institution of social work” in Japan.14 These various programs were significant. But they were clearly limited by the government’s reluctance to spend its money on social problems. The Privy Council thwarted the will of the Diet by refusing to allocate funds to implement the new insurance and factory laws. The district commissioners by the late 1920s mounted strong campaigns calling on the government to provide more generous poor relief, with little immediate result.
Politicians in the Kenseikai/Minseito¯ did come forward with a more liberal version of imperial democracy, in an alliance with a new generation of Home Ministry bu
reaucrats. The latter were impressed that liberal reforms had brought a degree of social stability to postwar Europe, especially Britain. A more expansive social policy became the order of the day under the Kenseikai cabinet headed by Kato¯ Ko¯mei in 1924. Kato¯
won passage of the Tenant Farmer Dispute Mediation Law, which offered implicit legal recognition to tenant farmer unions. Over the next sixteen years, nearly two- thirds of all recorded tenant disputes were mediated under this law.15 Kato¯ also pushed to reform the Peerage and reduce its power, although without success. But he did push through the most famous reform of the era in 1925: universal male suffrage. All men over age twenty-five who were not on public assistance were granted the right to vote.
The Kenseikai in 1926 then called for a three-part program of “universal suffrage for industry”: a law to give legal standing to labor unions, a labor disputes conciliation bill, and the repeal of the anti-union clause in the Public Order Police law of 1900.
The union bill failed because of opposition from Ministry of Agriculture and Com
merce bureaucrats, the Seiyu¯kai party, and most business federations, but the other measures became law. The Kenseikai also succeeded in allocating the funds to put into practice the changes approved in the factory law and health insurance laws of 1922. And the Home Ministry in 1926 directed prefectural authorities to respect the spirit of the labor union bill even though it had been defeated in the Diet. Taken together, these steps were very significant. They offered working people social support and the implicit right to organize and to strike.
The Kenseikai/Minseito¯ cabinets also broadened political and civil rights for women. After the modest political reform of 1922 that freed them to attend political events, women’s groups continued pressing for rights still denied them: the right of political association, the right to vote, and the right to hold local public office. In 1929 Prime Minister Hamaguchi, his foreign minister, and his home minister held an unprecedented meeting with leading female suffragists to ask for their support for the government’s policy of tight budgets and fiscal austerity. The prime minister in exchange promised to support female suffrage and civil rights. He was moved to take this step by the severity of the economic crisis as well as his liberal belief that ex
panded participation would bring stability in the long run. Women’s groups optimis
tically interpreted this get-together as recognition that women were on their way to becoming full members of the body politic.
These Kenseikai/Minseito¯policies sought to give excluded groups a voice and a stake in the system. Under universal manhood suffrage, new working-class parties
formed immediately to challenge the so-called established parties, but they fared poorly in the first universal suffrage election in 1928. The Minseito¯, on the other hand, gained new support in the industrial districts of major cities. The party’s labor reforms bolstered the standing of relatively moderate unions whose leaders claimed it was possible to work within the existing political order. In these ways, the Minseito¯’s more inclusive version of imperial democracy seemed to be working to promote social order and win votes. The party maintained a working alliance with some in the bureaucracy, business world, and military.
But other elites were critical of these reforms. Many zaibatsu leaders, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Agriculture Commerce, and many in the Seiyu¯kai party viewed these steps as dangerously radical. At the same time, intellec
tuals disillusioned with chronic party corruption gave tepid support, at best, to the Minseito¯ social liberalism. Some of these critics turned their discontent with the Min
seito¯ into a broader attack on political party governments more generally. As long as a modicum of social order was maintained, the economy avoided a major collapse, and the empire appeared secure, one party or the other could pursue its agenda and keep the support of allies in the bureaucracy, the military, and the business community.
But this hold on power was tentative.