A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower (56 page)

These same two parties also brought a motion of no confidence against Katsura, who responded by persuading the new emperor to order the withdrawal of the motion. The emperor’s order was ignored – testimony to the exceptionally low esteem in which he was already held. Presently, in February 1913, thousands of angry demonstrators surrounded the Diet building, obliging Katsura to resign after less than two months in office. This was the first time in Japanese history that the voice of the people had helped bring down a government.

The man who followed Katsura as prime minister, Admiral Yamamoto Gonbei (1852–1933), was a political neutral and was well disposed towards party politics. Parties gradually strengthened their representation in cabinet, but it could not be said that party politics became established. The aged Okuma Shigenobu, who succeeded Yamamoto in 1914, may have been a party man in the past but by this stage he was much under the influence of the oligarchs. He in turn was followed in 1916 by Terauchi Masatake (1852–1919), who was firmly opposed to party politics and was an unpopular prime minister.

The first real party-dominated cabinet was that of the
Seiy
kai
’s Hara Takashi (1856–1921, also Kei), who succeeded Terauchi in 1918. However, he was not necessarily the ideal representative of democracy. Though widely known as the common man’s politician he was in fact of high-ranking samurai descent and very well-connected. He had only become prime minister after close vetting and approval by the oligarchs, was an early exponent of pork-barrel politics, and was not above resorting to undemocratic methods such as the use of professional ‘muscle men’ to physically intimidate his opponents.
²
After his assassination in 1921 he was followed by a number of non-party cabinets.

This was the pattern of politics in the Taish
period. As with the Meiji period, there were advances for democracy and liberalism, but these were invariably counterbalanced and checked by authoritarianism and repression.

On the one hand Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948), an influential professor of law at T
ky
University, was able to advocate democratic constitutionalism. He could also promote his view of the emperor as an organ of the state, as opposed to the absolute nature of the emperor’s
authority promoted by the government in the Meiji period. On the other hand, another professor of law at T
ky
University, Uesugi Shinkichi (1878–1929), contended that the emperor’s authority was absolute.

At least this was debate. However, in 1925 a repressive Peace Preservation Law was passed, in effect making it a crime to advocate basic changes to the national political structure. But yet again, this was the same year that the right to vote was extended to all males of 25 or over. It was like an interplay of light and dark.

One of Taish
Japan’s darkest moments came in September 1923, in the aftermath of the nation’s greatest natural disaster, the Great T
ky
Earthquake. This killed over 100,000 people, with many more injured. More than three million people lost their homes, most of these in the fires that followed rather than the earthquake itself. Rumours spread very quickly that Korean residents had been responsible for some of the fires. They were also said to be exploiting the opportunity to loot and inflict further damage on the Japanese by poisoning wells and so on. Some Japanese even believed the very earthquake itself was caused by Koreans upsetting the gods by their presence on Japanese soil. In the relative state of lawlessness of the days immediately after the earthquake (martial law had in fact been declared), as many as 6,000 Koreans are estimated to have been murdered by vigilantes.
³
Anti-Korean members of the public were not the only ones to avail themselves of the lawlessness: the military police killed a number of radicals and those associated with them, including the well-known anarchist Osugi Sakae (1885–1923) and his wife and 6-year-old nephew.
⁴

In the international arena too, Taish
Japan was to experience light and dark. At times there were budgetary restraints imposed by the government on military expenditure and growth. There were also moments of belief in diplomacy rather than military might. This was particularly so in the last few years of the period, when Shidehara Kij
r
(1872–1951) was Foreign Minister. However, the idea of aggressive expansionism backed by military force was far from dormant. The First World War, in which Japan was nominally involved as a British ally but in practice hardly involved at all, obviously occupied the attention of the European powers. Japan was not slow to capitalise on this. It rapidly seized German territory in the Shantung (Shandong) Peninsula in China, as well as various German-owned Pacific islands.
⁵