After the conclusion of the war, Japanese leaders gained a free hand in Korea. Korean opposition to Japanese "reforms" was no longer tolerated. Ito Hirobumi, sent to Korea as resident general, forced through treaties that gave Korea little more than protectorate status and ordered the abdication of the Korean king.
Ito's assassination in 1909 led to Korea's annexation by Japan the following year. Korean liberties and resistance were crushed. By 1912, when the Meiji emperor died, Japan had not only achieved equality with the West but also had become the strongest imperialist power in East Asia.
Japan had abundant opportunity to use its new power in the years that followed. During World War I it fought on the Allied side but limited its activities to seizing German possessions in China and the Pacific. When China sought the return of former German holdings in Shantung province, Japan responded with the so-called Twenty-one Demands, issued in 1915, that tried to pressure China into widespread concessions ranging from extended leases in Manchuria and joint control of China's coal and iron resources to policy matters regarding harbours and the policing of Chinese cities.
While giving in on a number of specific issues, the Chinese resisted the most extreme Japanese demands that would have turned China into a Japanese ward. Despite its economic gains, Japan's World War I China policy left behind a legacy of ill feeling and distrust, both in China and in the West. The rapaciousness of Japanese demands and China's chagrin at its failure to recover its losses in the Treaty of Versailles (1919) cost Japan any hope of Chinese friendship. Subsequent Japanese sponsorship of corrupt warlord regimes in Manchuria and North China helped to confirm the anti-Japanese nature of modern Chinese nationalism.
The part played by Japan in the Allied intervention in Siberia following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918 caused further concerns about Japanese expansion. One of the principal reasons for the disarmament conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1921-22, was to reduce Japanese influence. A network of treaties was designed to place restraints on Japanese ambitions while guaranteeing Japanese security. These treaties included a Four-Power Pact, between Japan, Great Britain, the United States, and France, that replaced the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and a Five-Power Naval Limitation Treaty (with Italy) that set limits for battleships at a ratio of five for Great Britain and the United States to three for Japan.
An agreement on the fortification of Pacific island bases was intended to assure Japan of security in its home waters. Finally a Nine-Power Pact would, it was hoped, protect China from further unilateral demands. Japan subsequently agreed to retire from Shantung, and, shortly thereafter, Japanese armies withdrew from Siberia and northern Sakhalin. In 1925 a treaty with the Soviet Union extended recognition to the U.S.S.R. and ended active hostilities.
Thus, by the mid-1920s Japan's great surge forward in Asia and the Pacific had ended. This brought hope that a new quality of moderation and reasonableness, based on the absence of irritating reminders of inferiority and weakness, might characterize Japanese policy.
Constitutional government
The inauguration of parliament in 1890 was accompanied by a vigorous and often obstreperous opposition in the lower house, and it was only a general determination to convince Western skeptics that constitutional government could work in Japan that forced party and government leaders to cooperate. The first cabinets, led by Yamagata Aritomo, Matsukata Masayoshi, and Ito, maintained the principle that the government, which represented the emperor, must be aloof from parties and that the lower house should approve government requests.
This policy failed because the parties tried to increase their power and patronage and therefore sought cabinets responsible to the Diet. Only the Sino-Japanese War produced the kind of unity the constitution's makers had envisaged. Thereafter, the oligarchs formed alliances with the two parties, usually exchanging cabinet seats for support in the lower house. These arrangements proved unsatisfactory, however, when party leaders raised their sights. In 1898 Itagaki and Okuma combined forces to form a single party, the Constitutional Party (Kenseito), and were allowed to form a government. But their alliance was brittle as long-standing animosities and jealousies enabled antiparty forces among the bureaucracy and oligarchy to force their resignation within a few months.
A discernible division developed among the dwindling group of Meiji leaders. Yamagata Aritomo dominated the army and much of the bureaucracy. In power for two years after the Kenseito cabinet, he strengthened legal and institutional safeguards against rule by political parties and secured an imperial ordinance that service ministers should be career officers on active duty; this gave the army and navy power to break cabinets. Meanwhile, Ito Hirobumi endorsed the party trend by forming the Friends of Constitutional Government Party (Rikken Seiyukai) in 1900, which enlisted most of the former followers of Itagaki's Jiyuto. Thereafter, practical political goals of power and patronage softened the hostility between oligarchs and politicians.
After 1901 both Ito and Yamagata retired from active participation in politics, and until 1913 cabinets were led by their protégés Saionji Kimmochi and Katsura Taro. Basic decisions on politics and policy, however, continued to be made by the elder statesmen, who advised the emperor on all important matters and selected prime ministers by rotating power between the two principal factions. Saionji was the last leader recruited into this extraconstitutional body. With the death or enfeeblement of the first generation of oligarchs, the pattern of political manipulation changed. No subsequent group could match the prestige of the Meiji leaders. The Meiji emperor died in 1912 and was succeeded by a son who took the reign name Taisho ("Great Righteousness"; reigned 1912-26); but mental illness prevented him from approximating his father's fame. The growing prestige and power of businessmen found expression in their control of the political parties and resulted in an increasing role for professional party politicians. The genro's last attempt to seat Katsura in 1912 ended in failure, while his successor, Admiral Yamamoto Gonnohyoe, was discredited by scandals in naval procurement. Okuma Shigenobu emerged from retirement to head a cabinet during World War I and was succeeded by a military cabinet under General Terauchi Masatake. In 1918, however, discontent with Terauchi's reactionary posture and administrative incompetence combined with the rising power of the party professionals to bring about the appointment of Hara Takashi (Hara Kei) as prime minister.
Hara was the first nontitled person to hold that office, and his appointment marked the first party cabinet. His assassination in 1921 cut short his cautious efforts to rein in military and bureaucratic power and extend the franchise. After several short-lived cabinets, a successful party cabinet was organized by Kato Takaaki in 1924. The army was reduced in size, moderate social legislation was enacted, and universal manhood suffrage extended the franchise to some 14 million voters. Meanwhile, Japan avoided stronger involvement in the civil war in China and pursued a conciliatory course with the Soviet Union, despite demands from nationalists, who utilized alleged outrages in China and the discriminatory U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 to warn of the futility of cooperating with Western nations.
But, as the parties grew in power, they tended to look to bureaucrats for leadership. The businessmen who supported the parties and the bureaucrats who led them shared a fear of the social movements that followed industrialization and the importation of foreign ideas. A growing labour movement already had been checked by a special police law introduced in 1900. This was strengthened under Kato in 1925 as conservatives generally began to fear subversion in labour and tenant movements. Their anxieties mounted after the Japan Communist Party (JCP) was organized in 1922, and interest in Marxism expanded in intellectual circles. Under the Meiji constitution, party cabinets had to make peace with the military, the House of Peers, and the conservatives close to the throne.
Therefore, they needed to work out their ideas for reform with utmost caution. The Diet often found itself virtually powerless, which led to disorder and corruption that did little to win popular support for representative government. The Meiji constitution was so ambiguous in assigning executive power that without institutional reform the party prime ministers could do little but compromise with forces antagonistic to democratic government.
Social and intellectual changes taking place in Japan were as important as those in politics. Many were closely related to the growth and development of industry. After the Treaty of Shimonoseki the government used the Chinese indemnity to subsidize the Yawata Iron and Steel Works in northern Kyushu, which came into production in 1901 and greatly expanded Japan's heavy industrial sector.
At the same time, textile and other consumer-goods industries expanded to meet Japanese needs and to earn credits required for the import of raw materials. Heavy industry was encouraged by government-controlled banks, which provided needed capital. Strategic industries, notably steel and the principal rail lines, were in state hands, but most new growth was in the private sector.
By 1900 Japan's population had expanded to nearly 45 million from a late Tokugawa base of about 30 million. Increasing numbers of Japanese were attracted to urban industrial centres. At the same time, domestic food production was hard-pressed to stay abreast of population increases. Agricultural productivity, after early improvements, slowed and stagnated, and it became necessary to import food.
The enlarged urban population produced movements of social inquiry and protest. In 1895 the industrial labour force numbered about 400,000, the majority of which were women employed in the textile mills. Several efforts to organize socialist movements met with police repression. Peace-preservation laws were passed in 1900 and 1925 to inhibit labour organization, and in 1928 it became a capital crime to agitate against private property or the Japanese "national polity" (kokutai). In 1903 a small group organized the Heimin shimbun ("Commoner's Newspaper"); it published The Communist Manifesto and opposed the Russo-Japanese War before being forced to cease publication. The socialist movement gained strength after World War I, but its program was often theoretical and doctrinaire, and its leaders found it difficult to make contact with workers. Police repression and the difficulties of organizing a labour movement among large numbers of women workers (who worked under three-year contracts before leaving to get married) and diverse industrial empires such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi also hampered union organizers. Meanwhile, the increasing confidence and power of management came to influence, and at times control, the political parties.
In the countryside the principal reflection of Japan's growing involvement in the world economy was the increased production of silkworms, which augmented farm income. At the same time, rural Japan provided the bulk of the labourers for the new industries, and daughters from farming families were found in many textile plants. But the early 20th century was not a time of agricultural prosperity. Colonial competition tended to depress domestic agricultural prices. Farmers also were handicapped by growing fragmentation of holdings and increasing tenancy.
The rising number of tenants resulted in an expansion of tenant organizations, especially during and after World War I. Government efforts to address the situation resulted in little more than a law in 1924 that called for mediation of landlord-tenant disputes. A financial panic in 1927 aggravated rural conditions and indebtedness, even before the collapse of the American silk market in 1929 spelled disaster for farmers and workers alike. In social terms, the countryside remained poor, traditional, and largely undeveloped.
The most lasting social changes were found in the great metropolitan centres, where a growing labour force and new middle class were concentrated. The Tokyo-Yokohama area was devastated by the great Kanto earthquake of September 1923, and the region's reconstruction as a modern metropolis symbolized the growth of the urban society. Cultural interests during and after World War I were uniformly international and largely American in inspiration. Western music, dancing, and sports became popular, and rising urban living standards and expectations produced the need for more and better higher education. The participation of women in office work and other new occupations, and the rise of a feminist movement, however unsuccessful, marked the beginning of changes in the family system.
The educated class grew in size and vigour. Currents of thought included Western-style democracy and the new radicalism of the Soviet Union; the Marxist influence went far beyond the ranks of the struggling Communist Party--which, in any event, was soon crushed by the police. Political liberalism was championed by the educator and politician Yoshino Sakuzo, who formed a group of students and intellectuals into the New Peoples Association (Shinjinkai), which represented a self-conscious break with tradition. Minobe Tatsukichi, a distinguished constitutional theorist, introduced the idea that the emperor was an organ of the state and not the sole source of sovereignty. Such men faced sharp criticism and, in time, were forced to resign their positions, but they had great influence, both symbolizing and stimulating the world of advanced ideas.
The base for these new currents, however, was precarious. Politically and institutionally, no advances--beyond the suffrage act of 1925--were made, while the peace-preservation laws of 1928 established a special police corps to ferret out "dangerous thoughts." The economic well-being of the urban classes depended on the continued expansion of international trade. When the worldwide financial collapse at the end of the decade wrecked Japan's foreign markets and removed the possibility of villagers augmenting their meagre incomes from rice farming with silk production, and when the venality, irresponsibility, and occasional corruption of Diet representatives was contrasted to the poverty found in many parts of Japan, numerous Japanese were prepared to listen to charges that the political-party government, dominated by selfish zaibatsu interests, had neglected Japan's markets in China, imperiled morality and decency at home, and allowed subversive trends to flourish, while politicians reaped personal fortunes.
The rise of the militarists
The notion that expansion through military conquest would solve Japan's economic problems gained currency during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was argued that the rapid growth of Japan's population--which stood at close to 65 million in 1930--necessitated large food imports. To sustain such imports, Japan had to be able to export. Western tariffs limited exports, while discriminatory legislation in many countries and anti-Japanese racism served as barriers to emigration. Chinese and Japanese efforts to secure racial equality in the League of Nations covenant had been rejected by Western statesmen. Thus, it was argued, Japan had no recourse but to use force.
The weakening of party government
To these economic and racial arguments was added the military's distrust of party government. The Washington Conference had allowed a smaller ratio of naval strength than the navy desired, while the government of Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi in 1930 had accepted the London Naval Conference's limits on heavy cruisers over military objections. In 1925 Kato Takaaki had cut the army by four divisions. Many military men objected to the restraint shown by Japan toward the Chinese Nationalists' northern expedition of 1926 and 1927 and wanted Japan to take a harder line in China. Under Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi the Seiyukai cabinet reversed earlier policy by intervening in Shantung in 1927 and 1928. But Tanaka was replaced by Hamaguchi in 1929, and under his cabinet the policy of moderation was restored. The army and its supporters felt that such vacillation earned Japan ill will and boycotts in China without gaining any advantages.
While many military leaders chafed under the restrictions that civilian governments placed upon them, they still retained considerable power. It would be wrong to attribute such resentment to all, or even most, of the high command, but enough army officers held such views to become a locus for dissatisfaction among other groups in Japanese society. The idea of the frugal and selfless samurai served as a useful contrast to the stock portrait of the selfish party politician.
Economic pressures and political misgivings were further exploited by civilian ultranationalists who portrayed parliamentary government as being "un-Japanese." A number of rightist organizations existed that were dedicated to the theme of internal purity and external expansion. These sought to preserve what they thought was unique in the Japanese spirit and fought against excessive Western influence. Some originated in the Meiji period, when nationalists had felt obliged to work for a "fundamental settlement" of differences with Russia.
Most, like the Black Dragon Society (Kokuryukai), combined continental adventurism and a strong nationalist stance with opposition to party government, big business, acculturation, and Westernization. By allying with other rightists, they alternately terrorized and intimidated their presumed opponents. A number of business leaders and political figures were killed, and the assassins' success in publicizing and dramatizing the virtues they claimed to embody had a considerable impact on the troubled 1930s. It is clear, however, that the terrorists never had as much influence as they claimed or as the West believed.
The principal force against parliamentary government was provided by junior military officers, who were largely from rural backgrounds. Distrustful of their senior leaders, ignorant of political economy, and contemptuous of the urban luxuries of politicians, such officers were ready marks for rightist theorists. Many of them had goals that were national-socialist in character. Kita Ikki, a former socialist and one-time member of the Black Dragon Society, contended that the Meiji constitution should be suspended in favour of a revolutionary regime advised by "national patriots" and headed by a military government, which should nationalize large properties, limit wealth, end party government and the peerage, and prepare to take the leadership of a revolutionary Asia. Kita helped persuade a number of young officers to take part in the violence of the 1930s with the hope of achieving these ends.
The Kwantung Army, which occupied the Kwantung (Liaotung) Peninsula and patrolled the South Manchurian Railway zone, included officers who were keenly aware of Japan's continental interests and were prepared to take steps to further them. They hoped to place the civilian government in an untenable position and to force its hand.
The Tokyo terrorists similarly sought to change foreign as well as domestic policies. The pattern of direct action in Manchuria began with the murder in 1928 of Chang Tso-lin, the warlord ruler of Manchuria. The action, though not authorized by the Tanaka government, helped bring about its fall. Neither the cabinet nor the Diet dared to investigate and punish those responsible. This convinced extremist officers that their lofty motives would make retribution impossible. The succeeding government of Prime Minister Hamaguchi sought to curtail military activists and their powers. The next plots, therefore, were aimed at replacing civilian rule, and Hamaguchi was mortally wounded by an assassin in 1930. In March 1931 a coup involving highly placed army generals was planned but abandoned.
On Sept. 18, 1931, came the Mukden (or Manchurian) Incident, which launched Japanese aggression in East Asia. A Kwantung Army charge that Chinese soldiers had tried to bomb a South Manchurian Railway train (which arrived at its destination safely) resulted in a speedy and unauthorized capture of Mukden (now Shen-yang), followed by the occupation of all Manchuria. The civilian government in Tokyo could not stop the army, and even army headquarters was not always in full control of the field commanders. Prime Minister Wakatsuki Reijiro gave way in December 1931 to Inukai Tsuyoshi. Inukai's plans to stop the army by imperial intervention were frustrated.
On May 15, 1932, naval officers took the lead in a terrorist attack in Tokyo that cost Inukai his life but failed to secure a proclamation of martial law. The army now announced that it would accept no party cabinet. To forestall its desire for power, the last genro, Saionji, suggested retired Admiral Saito Makoto as prime minister. Plotting continued, culminating in a revolt of a regiment about to leave for Manchuria. On Feb. 26, 1936, several outstanding statesmen (including Saito) were murdered; Prime Minister Okada Keisuke escaped when the assassins mistakenly shot his brother-in-law. For more than three days the rebel units held much of downtown Tokyo. When the revolt was put down on February 29, the ringleaders were quickly arrested and executed. Within the army, the influence of the young extremists now gave way to more conservative officers and generals who were less concerned with domestic reform, while sharing many of the foreign-policy goals of the young fanatics.
The only possible source of prestige sufficient to thwart the military lay with the throne. But the senior statesmen were cautious lest they imperil the imperial institution itself. The young emperor Hirohito had been enthroned in 1926, taking as his reign name Showa ("Enlightened Peace"). His outlook was more progressive than that of his predecessors; he had traveled in the West, and his interests lay in marine biology. Those close to the throne feared that a strong stand by the emperor would only widen the search for victims and could lead to his dethronement. As international criticism of Japan's aggression grew, many Japanese rallied to support the army.
The road to World War II
Each advance by the military extremists gained them new concessions from the moderate elements in the government and brought greater foreign hostility and distrust. Rather than oppose the military, the government agreed to reconstitute Manchuria as an "independent" state, Manchukuo. The last Manchu emperor of China, P'u-i, was declared regent and later enthroned as emperor in 1934. Actual control lay with the Kwantung Army, however; all key positions were held by Japanese, with surface authority vested in cooperative Chinese and Manchu.
A League of Nations committee recommended in October 1932 that Japanese troops be withdrawn, Chinese sovereignty restored, and a large measure of autonomy granted to Manchuria. The League called upon member states to withhold recognition from the new puppet state. Japan's response was to formally withdraw from the world body in 1933. Thereafter, Japan poured technicians and capital into Manchukuo, exploiting its rich resources to establish the base for the heavy-industry complex that was to undergird its "new order" in East Asia.
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