Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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sealed off from the influence of the parties and which the oligarchs could control. A

strong state dominated by this bureaucracy was their main legacy to the future, for

‘‘over time, with the bureaucracy installed at the center of government and with the

passing of the oligarchs, it was the bureaucrats – both military and civilian – who

arrogated more and more power to themselves.’’

This, then, is the prevailing image in Western research of the Meiji oligarchy as a

pragmatic, effective, political elite. However, virtually every aspect of this interpret-

ation has been provocatively challenged by Mark Ramseyer and Frances Rosenbluth

in their book The Politics of Oligarchy, which attests to the increasing influence of

rational choice theory in Japanese studies. To summarize their core arguments: first,

the key point about the oligarchs is not their far-sighted cooperation for the national

good but rather their individual pursuit of power at the expense of each other and

their collective unity. Thus, ‘‘Instead of establishing an institution al framework that

ameliorated their disagreements, the oligarchs institutionalized the suspicion with

which they viewed one another.’’

Second, these rivalries best explain the fatal ambiguity of the Meiji constitution

which would seriously undermine the capacity of the state to govern the country

effectively. Lest any one of the oligarchs gain too much power, they agreed to disperse

it among various elite organs which would check and balance each other: the cabinet

and its civilian and military ministries, the Hous e of Representatives, the House of

Peers, the Privy Council, the army and navy chiefs of staff offices, and the bureau-

cracy. Moreover, to prevent the prime minister from becoming too powerful, minis-

ters of state were made responsible not to him but to the emperor. That made it

difficult for the prime minister to ensure cabinet unity and it weakened the cabinet as

a whole.

The chiefs of staff, in charge of military operations, were similarly respon-

sible only to the emperor, who alone had ‘‘the supreme command of the army and

navy’’ (article 11). Originally, this was meant to shiel d the military from possible

interference by the political parties. But as another writer points out, in practice

‘‘there was no clear definition regarding either the scope of the right of supreme

command or the person responsible for exercising it.’’

Consequently the chiefs

were in effect responsible only to themselves, with calamitous results for Japan in later

years.

Article 1 of the constitution stated, ‘‘The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and

governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal.’’ Accordingly, the emperor

was also invested with a host of other prerogatives, for example the power to convoke,

open, close, and prorogue the Diet, to dissolve the lower house, to issue imperial

ordinances in place of law, to declare war, make peace, conclude treaties, and to

declare martial law. In theory the emperor, who was also the locus of sovereignty and

head of state, stood supreme in all civil and military affairs.

In fact, the oligarchs anticipated that the emperor would reign over, but not rule,

Japan. His vast prerogatives were to be exercised by other organs and ministers of

state who bore responsibility for success or failure and all laws, imperial ordinances,

and rescripts had to be countersigned by a minister of state. So, divorced from

government by the terms of the Imperial House Law, the emperor’s function was

to legitimize the government and its policies by formally conferring the ‘‘Imperial

Will’’ and publicly to symbolize the national polity (kokutai) by vir tue of his sacred

authority as the lineal descendant of the Sun Goddess. Japan’s mod ern emperors

OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND FASCISM 159

could, and did, strive informally behind the scenes to referee conflicts and promote

consensus among their ministers. However, they could not unify the government .

This meant that an extra-constitutional mechanism was required to ensure unity. The

oligarchy, straddling the civil and military sides of government, provided that mech-

anism, but it was by no means clear what would happen after the oligarchs had died

out.

Third, the oligarchs could have resisted the encroachment of the parties more

effectively had they mai ntained a united front. But Ito

destroyed that possibility when

he joined the Seiyu

kai, hoping to cultivate popular support for his own political

ambitions. Yamagata resisted the parties through his prote

s but this strategy

backfired when in January 1913 Prime Minister Katsura defied him by forming the

shikai party which, renamed Kenseikai in 1916 and Minseito

in 1927, would

henceforth compete with the Seiyu

kai in an em erging two-party system of the

‘‘established parties’’ (kiseito

). Katsura could not save his administration, however.

One month later he was forced to resign by a vociferous popular ‘‘movement to

defend constitutional government’’ and the Seiyu

kai’s refusal to withdraw a motion

of non-confidence. He died soon afterwards.

In 1918 Yamagata ran out of alternatives and finally recommended Hara, whose

Seiyu

kai was the majority party in the lower house, to be prime minister. However,

there were several consolations in this final capitulation to the parties. Yamagata’s

personal faction, extending across the Peers, the Privy Council, the bureaucracy, the

army, and the imperial court, remained intact as a check on the parties. Also still intact

was an electoral system which, through various revisions, was devised by the oligarchs

to make elections as complicated, internally divisive, and expensive as possible for

each of the parties. In addition, although the franchise had been gradually increased

from the tiny minority of 450,000 well-off rural and urban male voters who had

voted in the first national elections in 1890, at eight million voters (5 percent of the

total population) in 1919, it was still far short of popular demands for universal

suffrage, which Yamagata opposed. He must have been relieved to find that Hara,

having ‘‘placed himself firmly on the conservative side of change,’’

was no less

opposed to universal suffrage. Both men had been shaken by the spectacle of spon-

taneous mass protests against the high price of rice in the nationwide rice riots of

1918. Both feared ‘‘the people’’ as an unruly force.

Fourth, Yamagata had counted on the bureaucracy to counterbalance the parties.

But it soon became clear that the oligarchs had not completely insulated the bur eau-

cracy from the parties: the parties found ways to influence the bureaucrats and many

bureaucrats, including some who would form party cabinets in the 1920s and early

1930s, joined the parties to work closely with them in framing and expediting public

policy. Accordingly, Ramseyer and Rosenbluth conclude that Japan ‘‘was not a

‘strong state’ in the usual sense of the term’’ (for example, ‘‘where the bureaucracy

is well-insulated from, if not autonomous of, societal pressures’’).

Instead it was in

many ways a ‘‘dysfunctional’’ state.

With some justification, reviewers have cr iticized The Politics of Oligarchy for

various theoretical, methodological, and empirical weaknesses.

Yet while Ramseyer

and Rosenbluth ignore the fact that every historian who has written about the

oligarchy has acknowledged the conflicts between the oligarchs, their point that

these conflicts are crucial to explaini ng the ambiguity of the Meiji constitution and

160 STEPHEN S. LARGE

the dysfunctional system that arose from that ambiguity is well taken. Similarly,

historians have long recognized the inability of the cabinet and indeed the emperor

to prevent the military from abusing the emperor’s supreme command prerogative.

But this point, too, is worth reinforcing, as Ramseyer and Rosenbluth do in their

book, for later, the Japanese military ran amok in the name of an emperor (Hirohito)

who personally opposed Japan’s aggressive wars in the 1930s.

Finally, as we shall

see, other studies essentially confirm their view concerning the interdependence of

the bureaucracy and the political parties.

Wherever historians stand in these debates about oligarchy, most of them would

probably agree with Richard Samuels who writ es, in his comparative study of leader-

ship in Japan and Italy: ‘‘It is obvious that leaders matter.’’ That is, some leaders can

‘‘stretch’’ constraints which they face in choosing the ends and means of policy and

thereby produce outcomes that other leaders might not have produced if put into the

same historical situation.

Viewed from this perspective, Samuels observes succinctly,

‘‘Cavour engineered a liberal Italy free of foreign domination and, in the bargain won

unification as well. Ito

produced a constitutional order that protected imperial

prerogative and limited popular influence. Yamagata built authoritarianism into the

modern Japanese state.’’

The Question of Democracy in the Era of Party Government,

1918–1932

However, to reiterate, the state was not so authoritarian as to preclude a shift of

power to the political parties. After Hara’s assassination by a right-wing fanatic in

November 1921, there was a brief hiatus of non-party cabinets that lasted until June

1924, but from then to May 1932, cabinets were formed by either the Kenseikai–

Minseito

(June 1924–April 1927 and July 1929–December 1931) or the Seiyu

kai

(April 1927–July 1929 and December 1931–May 1932). What did party government

mean for Japan politically and how far did democracy come to prevail in this period?

The approach of some historians to these questions is to focus on the role of the

parties in maintaining the continuity of constitutional government. Not much, if any,

attention is paid to the theme of ‘‘democracy.’’ Gordon Berger, an auth ority on the

parties, exemplifies this approach. He writes, ‘‘By 1918, the parties had already begun

to demonstrate their ability to use their ties with nonparty elites to assume the

collective genro

function of harmonizing political, bureaucratic and economic pres-

sures.’’

They carried out this same function after 1918 with the result that ‘‘As

molders of elite coalitions, they stabilized the fragile cabinet sys tem created by the

Meiji oligarchs.’’

Then there are those who address the issue of Japanese ‘‘democracy,’’ but chiefly

with a view to qualifying its significance. To cite just one example, Bernard Silberman

asserts: ‘‘the period of democratic experimentation, ‘Taisho

democracy,’ was a period

of limited pluralism at best. It was a period in which parties and other organizations

within a very narrow ideological range were allowed to compete for a share of power

and not for control of power.’’

Skeptics on the question of democracy typically

make the following points. First, small in membership and tied to influe ntial local

interests and big business (especially the zaibatsu), upon which they relied heavily for

OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND FASCISM 161

election campaign funds, the partie s in power concentrated on reaching compromises

with other, more conservative, political elites to stay in power. This stance prevented

any serious challenge to the authoritarian framework of the Meiji constitution. The

independence of the supreme command, for example, always remained a bridge too

far for the parties, both in and out of government. Second, ideologically, very few

party politicians were liberals. The true liberals, such as Yo shino Sakuzo

who advo-

cated that government should serve all the people and that policy should always take

popular opinion into account, stood outside of and criticized the ‘‘established par-

ties’’ for their conservatism.

Third, to be sure, the victory of democracy over autocracy in the 1917 Russian

Revolution and in World War I, the 191 8 rice riots, and growing labor unrest amidst

the postwar recessi on, all inspired popular demands for democratic reform in 1920s

Japan. Visions of freedom, equality, and justice were variously expressed in terms of

liberalism, Marxism, and other varieties of socialism, anarchism, and eventually

communism, in the labor and tenant farmer union movements, the student move-

ment, the women’s movement, the movement to liberate the burakumin (Japan’s

pariahs), and the new social democratic parties that arose in the late 1920s.

However, for all this popular ferment in the era of ‘‘Taisho

democracy,’’ Peter

Duus states that ‘‘Aside from the passage of universal [manhood] suffrage in 1925,

the one major landmark of the period, it is difficult to discern any large political or

social changes wrought by the parties, even by the reform-minded Kenseikai.’’

The

significance of this ‘‘one major landmark’’ is typically overshadowed in narratives

which stress that the Peace Preservation Law was also enacted in 1925, primarily to

suppress the revolutionary Japanese Communist Party which was established in 1922.

By contrast other historians, while conceding the force of some of these arguments,

contend that in important respects democracy was stronger in interwar Japan than is

usually thought. The case for this view partly rests on the belief that if democratic

government is basically government by elected representatives of the people whom

the people can hold accountable at the polls, then party government from 1918 to

1932 was democratic government. The case for democracy, as it were, also depends in

some measure on depicting a generally favorable context for party government in the

1920s.

Here, the argument goes like something like this. Admittedly, uneven economic

growth, manifested in a cycle of recessions and spurts and in a lag between a

stagnating agricultural sector and a strengthe ning industrial sector, contributed to

an unstable economic context. Contemporary Japanese criticisms of the zaibatsu for

amassing too much wealth inevitably rebounded against the parties when corruption

scandals involving party politicians and big business frequently made front-page

news. Otherwise, the context in which party government operated was more propi-

tious. The rise of a mass society, the growth of the middle class, the diversity of choice

in an expanding consumer culture, the experimentation with new Western lifestyles,

and the proliferation of the mass media (including radio, from 1925), all represented

and nurtured a greater pluralism in Japanese society, thought, and culture. This

pluralist trend, which was most conspicuous in urban Japan, indirectly supported

the ascendancy of a ‘‘parliamentary ideology’’ that ‘‘situated the practice of parlia-

mentary politics at the center and imperial authority at the legitimating circumfer-

ence, rather than the revers e’’ as in the Meiji period.

Furthermore, the fact that a

162 STEPHEN S. LARGE

relative peace prevailed in East Asia during the 1920s allowed party cabinets to pursue

an internationalist policy of ‘‘cooperative diplomacy’’ and free trade while cutting

military approp riations, as required of Japan by the Washington Naval Limitation

Treaty (1922). Politically, as well, the dropping in 1913 of the provision, introduced

by Yamagata in 1900, that army and navy ministers had to be officers on active duty,

somewhat strengthened the hand of party government vis-a

-vis the military, for that

provision had threatened to make it easier for a service minister to bring down a

cabinet by resigning. After the provision was restored in 1936, army ministers often

did just that.

No historian writing recently has done more to put the theme of Japanese dem-

ocracy back on the front burner than Andrew Gordon, in his book Labor and

Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan. Whereas the ter m ‘‘Taisho

democracy’’ pre-

dominates in both Western and Japanese accounts, Gordon proposes the term

‘‘imperial democracy,’’ signifying democracy centered on emperor and empire. ‘‘Im-

perial democracy’’ indeed makes more sense than ‘‘Taisho

democracy,’’ a term which

has always obliged historians to explain that they are referring to democratic ideas and

practices that originated before, and continued after, the reign of Emperor Taisho

(1912–26). Drawing a distinction between ‘‘imperial democracy as a movement’’

prior to 1918 and ‘‘imperial democracy as a structure of rule’’ from 1918 to 1932,

Gordon traces the evolution of a lively ‘‘dispute culture’’ of protest, as found among

the workers in the Nankatsu district of Tokyo. He concludes, ‘‘the 1920s saw more

than a short, superficial fling with a democratic fad. The idioms and ideas of empire,

emperor, and democracy reached deep into Japanese society.’’

That it ultimately

took the combined crises of the Great Depression, right-wing terrorism, and the

Manchurian Incident to destroy ‘‘imperial democracy as a structure of rule’’ in the

early 1930s attests to the tenacity of ‘‘imperial democracy.’’

It is useful to consider Sheldon Garon’s book The State and Labor in Modern Japan

alongside Gordon’s work, for although Garon is less explicitly concerned with the

theme of democracy, his discussion of what the parties in power actually did, or tried

to do, in the area of public policy bears indirectly on the general issue of Japanese

democracy. Here, it matters that at the time, and in retrospect, the Kenseikai and

Seiyu

kai were quite different in outlook. Before he took office in 1918 Hara had built

up the Seiyu

kai, for example through patronage to cultivate the local support of

prominent rural elites (meibo

ka). But its reliance on these local elites, and the need to

compromise with the oligarchs on the road to power, had made the Seiyu

kai polit-

ically conservative. Hara and his party were instinctively fearful of labor unions and

other organizations that championed democratic reform on behalf of ‘‘the people.’’

Not so the Kense ikai which, under the leadership of Hara’s rival Kato

Takaaki, had

followed a more progressive political trajectory: ‘‘the Kenseikai and its successor, the

Minseito

, took on the trappings of a liberal party intent on attracting the new votes of

workers, tenant farmers, and middle-class urbanites.’’

This more pluralist vision

informed the Kenseikai’s social policies during Kato

’s tenure as prime minister from

June 1924 to January 1926, and those of his Minseito

successors. The result was

cooperation with the moderately socialist Japan General Fed eration of Labor (Nihon

mei) and its political ally, the Social Democratic Party (Shakai Minshu

to legislate ref orms benefiting the workers. Significantly, progressive ‘‘social bureau-

crats’’ in the Social Bureau of the Home Ministry embraced much the same vision

OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND FASCISM 163

and the same strategy. They were neither ‘‘liberals’’ nor ‘‘democrats,’’ but rather men

who regarded social policies adapted from enlightened Western precedents as the

most effective means of containing class conflict and ensuring public order through

improved public welfare. Therefore, it was natural that they would work closely with

the Kenseikai–Minseito

. Such cooperation was also politically necessary: ‘‘meaningful

labor legislation would not have emerged from the Home Ministry, much less

introduced to the Diet, had it not been for the crucial support by the Kenseikai

and Minseito

cabinets.’’

This was true for instance of the Labor Disputes Concili-

ation Law (enacted in 1926) and even more so of the long campaign to legalize labor

unions in the 1920s. This campaign ultimately failed when the House of Peers

rejected the union bill put forward in 1931. Nevertheless, that it had been sustained

for years against the entrenched resistance of employers and their supporters in the

upper house suggests the buoyancy of progressive reform in the era of party govern-

ment.

Garon’s bureaucrats, who contributed much to this drive for reform, reappear

in Sall y Hastings’ more recent study of the working-class ward of Honjo, in Tokyo.

She calls them ‘‘participation bureaucrats’’ to highlight their inclusive vision in which

‘‘all subjects of the Japanese emperor, without regard for religion, ethnicity, or

wealth, would share in both the benefits and the responsibilities of empire.’’

Hastings shows that these bureaucrats indeed encouraged ordinary folk in places

like Honjo to participate in all manner of local neighborhood organizations and

activities. Of course, this kind of popular participation did not necessarily denote

‘‘democracy,’’ and ‘‘dem ocracy’’ was scarcely the dream of the ‘‘participation bur-

eaucrats.’’ But by the 1930s voting in elections had become very important to

people in Honjo: ‘‘For the three-quarters of the electorate in this district who

were not enfranchised until 1925, the election politics of the early Sho

wa years

were more democratic than the Taisho

era had been.’’

Hastings concludes that

Japan was a ‘‘se mi-democracy,’’ at least until the eruption of the ‘‘China Incident’’ in

July 1937.

The overall picture emerging from these debates on the question of democracy is

one of a two-party system in which the conservative Seiyu

kai and the reform-minded

Kenseikai–Minseito

offered voters a genuine choice at the polls. Another distinctive

feature of the era of party government is rising levels of popular participation in

Japanese political life. In the 1928 national election, the first since universal manhood

suffrage gave the vote to men aged 25 or older, the electorate came to 12.5 million

voters or 21 percent of the population. That election was also the first to be contested

by social democratic parties appealing to the workers, tenant farmers, and the urban

and rural lower middle class. Greater popular participation was likewise apparent both

in the growth of organized protest movements demanding a larger share of wealth

and power for their members and in the vitality of other organized community

activities in places like Honjo.

All of this surely amounts to something more than ‘‘limited pluralism.’’ If it also

adds up to something less than a well-developed democracy, that is to be expected

considering the conservative nature of the Meiji constitutional order and the fact that

Japan’s experiment in party government had begun so recently, in 1918. Nor is it

surprising that loyalty to the imperial house and fidelity to maintaining the empire

were the necessary preconditions of democrat ic discourse and activity in 1920s Japan.

164 STEPHEN S. LARGE

When the radical left pursued the goal of proletarian democracy by aggressively

attacking emperor and empire, this course only led to its own destruction.

The Question of Fascism, 1932–1941

Did Japan take a ‘‘fascist’’ turn in the decade prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, which

triggered World War II in Asia and the Pacific? Although historians debat e this

question they do not fundamentally disagree when it comes to narrating what

happened politically in 1930s Japan. First, there is a broad consensus that what

drove the ‘‘established’’ parties from power in 1932 was a lethal confluence of

factors, including the devastating economic and social impact of the Depression on

rural and urban Japan, the uproar over the disadvantageous terms for Japan in the

1930 London Naval Treaty, and the crisis of the Manchurian Incident. From these

explosive conditions there arose a violent right-wing reaction against party govern-

ment, the ‘‘selfish’’ zaibatsu and the capitalist system itself.

This extremist movement of militant young officers and civilian terrorists called for

a new ‘‘Restoration’’ to redeem Japan from sectarian conflict, social injustice, ‘‘deca-

dent’’ Western influences, and above all a weak, deadlocked government that could

be displaced only through a coup d e

tat leading to military rule in the name of the

emperor. No coup took place, but the movement claimed the lives of the Minseito

prime minister Hamaguchi Osachi, former finance minister Inoue Junnosuke, the

head of the Mitsui zaibatsu Dan Takuma, and in the May 15, 1932 ‘‘Incident,’’ the

Seiyu

kai prime minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, whose assassination brought an end to party

government in prewar Japan.

It was not clear, however, that the parties would remain out of power for long. To

be sure, the army opposed the continuation of party cabinets and for several years,

ironically, the Minseito

and the leading social democratic party in the 1930s, the

Shakai Taishu

, preferred ‘‘national unity’’ cabinets to the alternative of seeing

the Seiyu

kai back in power. But as late as April 1937, just three mon ths prior to the

eruption of war with China, the liberal commentator Baba Tsunego wrote, ‘‘I think

that in the fairly near future a united parties’ [Seiyu

kai–Minseito

] cabinet will emerge

and the period of party cabinets return again.’’

Unfortunately for the parties,

however, Baba was mistaken. They still played an active role in the Diet and ‘‘retained

considerable power even under extremely adverse conditions in the late 1930s and

wartime years.’’

But the parties had to wait until after Japan’s defeat in 1945 before

they could resume power.

Second, historical narratives commonly emphasize that the eleven prewa r cab inets

following Inukai’s, including five led by a civilian prime minister and six others

headed by an admiral or a general, all reflected the gradual political ascendancy of

the military.

Mounting concerns about national security in the face of perceived

foreign threats spurred Japan’s other political elites, including the major parties, to

defer to the military as their own interests were sa feguarded. The polit ical and labor

groups comprising the social democratic movement deferred, too, for the same

reason.

The turning point in the milit ary’s rising political fortunes was the swift

suppression of the young officers and units under their command in the February

1936 army rebellion, after which the army’s Control Faction attained a hegemonic

OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND FASCISM 165

position of power.

But the military still had to operate within the framework of the

Meiji cons titutional system; it still had to cope with the paradox of a highly central-

ized state in which power was fragmented among competing elites without an

effective unifyi ng mechanism. Even during World War II, ‘‘Beneath the veneer of

national unity, political competition remained intense among and within political

elites and the Meiji political order strained to confine conflicts within boundaries

permitting stable government .’’

Third, there is little disagreement among historians that Japan in the 1930s was

more authoritaria n than it had been in the Meiji period. The communist movement

was crus hed. Professor Minobe Tatsukichi’s longs tanding ‘‘emperor-organ’’ theory

was denounced in the Diet and disowned by the government in 1935 because it

qualified the emperor’s prerogatives. Prominent public figures, including members of

the Diet, who dared to criticize Japanese aggression overseas were accused of being

unpatriotic. The emperor cult, which dated from the Meiji period, now became the

focus of a virulent nationalism based on assertions of Japanese racial purity and

superiority, affirmations of an authentically Japanese national identity, and visions of

Japan as the armed liberator of Asia from Western imperialism and international

communism.

Finally, histo rians agree that the emergency of all-out war with China b eginning in

1937 dramatically quickened the process of building an impregnable ‘‘national

defense state’’ (kokubo

kokka). By 1937 this project, which began in the early

1930s, had already led to Japan’s recovery from the Depression through industrial

rationalization and increased military spending. By the mid 1930s as well, army

reformers like General Ishiwara Kanji, ‘‘revisionist bureaucrats,’’ and influential in-

tellectuals in the Sho

wa Kenkyu

kai (Sho

wa Research Society) who looked to eco-

nomic mod els in Germany and Italy, advocated the urgent need for central economic

planning, the rapid development of military-related heavy industries in Japan and

elsewhere in the empire, and the further empowerment of the state to mobilize Japan

economically for the possibility of total war, as in the 1938 National Mobilization

Law.

Mobilization on this scale was also seen to require selected changes of the existing

government structure, to concentrate power more efficiently, and to provide greater

coordination and unity between ministries. The first steps in this endeavor were the

creation of new ‘‘superagencies’’ such as the Manchurian Affairs Bureau in 1934 and

the Cabinet Research Bureau in 1935. The next steps, taken in 1940 when Prime

Minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro inaugurated the ‘‘New Order,’’ were more ambi-

tious: the dissolution of all the political parties into the new Imperial Rule Assistance

Association (IRRA ), the dissolution of labor organizations into a patriotic labor front,

and the organization of other such fronts under government control.

The definition of ‘‘fascism’’ is vigorously contested among historians of both

modern Europe and modern Japan.

But if one accepts the following definition

recently advanced by Robert Paxton, then some aspects of political life in 1930s Japan

as I have summarized it would indeed appear to be ‘‘fascist’’:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupa-

tion with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of

unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants,

166 STEPHEN S. LARGE

working in uneasy collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liber ties

and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of

internal cleansing and external expansion.

Certainly, Japanese historians down through the years have typically portrayed 1930s

Japan as ‘‘fascist,’’ using such descriptive terms as ‘‘military fascism,’’ ‘‘bureaucratic

fascism,’’ ‘‘emperor-system fascism,’’ ‘‘cool fascism,’’ and so forth. In Maruyama

Masao’s well-known formula, the suppression of the army rebellion in 1936 signified

the defeat of terrorist ‘‘fascism from below’’ and the victory of ‘‘fascism from above,’’

culminating in the ‘‘New Order’’ of 1940.

The argument that Japan became a ‘‘fascist’’ country in the 1930s crops up now

and then in Western historiography too. For instance, in the last chapter of Labor and

Imperial Democracy, Gordon sees sufficient parallels between Japan, Germany, and

Italy to argue that ‘‘imperial democracy’’ yielded to ‘‘imperial fascism’’ in 1930s

Japan. In particular, he highlights the priority in Japan of ‘‘mobilizing the populace in

organized fashion to serve self-proclaimed ‘national’ goals under the aegis of the

state.’’

Since the same priority prevailed in Germany and Italy, he thinks that fascism

as a construct has the merit of facilitating comparisons of mobilization in Japan,

Germany, and Italy. Yet other studies have demonstrated that useful compari sons can

be drawn of mobilization in Japan, Germany, and Italy without insisting that Japan

was ‘‘fascist,’’

and in any case it is unlikely that the notion of ‘‘imperial fascism’’ will

persuade Western historians who do not accept that Japan took a ‘‘fascist’’ turn.

Peter Duus and Daniel Okimoto argued forcefully some time ago, the concept of

‘‘fascism’’ is widely thought to be too Eurocentric to apply to imperial Japan. It is not

clear, though, that their proposed alternative, ‘‘corporatism,’’ which theoreticall y

encompasses a wider range of countries (the Soviet Union, the United States, and

Great Britain, as well as Japan, Germany, and Italy), is really more useful than the

concept of ‘‘fascism’’ for the purposes of historical comparison.

Kato Shu

ichi’s interpretation cuts straight to the heart of the matter: ‘‘The history

of Japan between the two wars must be understood not as a shift from a democracy

(of the British type) to a fascism (of the Nazi type), but as a shift from a phase of

liberalization to another phase of bureaucratization and militarization within a pol-

itical structure which had not basically changed.’’

‘‘Bureaucratization’’ captures the

essence of the ‘‘New Order.’’ The IRAA ended up as an amorphous ‘‘public body’’

because the bureaucracy, the ‘‘established parties’’ (which continued to function in

the Diet after their formal dissolution), and big business all vehemently opposed the

attempt by the army and ‘‘revisionist bureaucrats’’ to make the IRAA a totalitarian

mass-based political party such as existed in European fascism.

Similarly, militariza-

tion produced a leader, General To

Hideki (appointed prime minister in October

1941), who was hardly a fu¨hrer or a duce. Nothing comparable to the Fu¨hrerprinzip,

or ‘‘leadership principle,’’ in European fascism existed in Japan, for that would have

compromised the supreme authority of the imperial house.

Doubtless the question of Japanese fascism, like the questions of oligarchy and

democracy, will be debated for years to come. But in my opinion the last words, for

now at least, on the issue of Japanese ‘‘fascism’’ come from two historians who

comment on 1930s Japan after years of studying and writing about fascism in Europe.

The first is Stanley Payne:

OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND FASCISM 167

Japan had evolved a somewhat pluralistic authoritarian system which exhibited some of

the characteristics of fascism, but it did not develop fascism’s most distinctive and

revolutionary aspects. Japan was never subjected to the same degree of radicalization,

for imperial Japan on the eve of World War II in many ways approximated the develop-

ment of Germany’s Second Reich more than it did Hitler’s nation.

The second is Paxton. He acknowledges some Japanese ‘‘structural analogies to

Germany and Italy,’’ but stresses that, unlike Germany and Italy, Japan ‘‘faced no

imminent revolutionary threat.’’ Paxton then concludes, ‘‘Though the imperial

regime used techniques of mass mobilization, no official party or autonomous grass-

roots movement competed with the leaders. The Japanese empire of the period

1932–45 is better understood as an expansionist military dictatorshi p [sic] with a

high degree of state-sponsored mobilization than as a fascist regime.’’

NOTES

1 Silberman, ‘‘The Bureaucratic State,’’ p. 226.

2 Hackett, Yamagata Aritomo.

3 Hackett, ‘‘Political Modernization and the Meiji Genro

,’’ pp. 95–6.

4 Akita, Foundations of Constitutional Government, p. 66.

5 Duus, Party Rivalry and Political Change, p. 86.

6 Silberman, Cages of Reason, p. 221.

7 Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, p. 37.

8 Ramseyer and Rosenbluth, The Politics of Oligarchy, p. 39.

9 Mitani, ‘‘The Establishment of Party Cabinets,’’ pp. 59–64.

10 Masuda, ‘‘The Emperor’s Right of Supreme Command,’’ p. 79.

11 Dickinson, War and National Reinvention, p. 220.

12 Ramseyer and Rosenbluth, The Politics of Oligarchy, pp. 161, 198 n. 2.

13 Gownder and Pekkanen, ‘‘The End of Political Science?’’

14 This theme is documented in Large, Emperor Hirohito, chs. 2, 4, and 5.

15 Samuels, Machiavelli’s Children, pp. 1, 5–6.

16 Ibid., p. 41.

17 Berger, Parties Out of Power, pp. 8–9.

18 Berger, ‘‘Politics and Mobilization,’’ p. 98.

19 Silberman, ‘‘The Bureaucratic State,’’ p. 254 (italics original).

20 Duus, Party Rivalry, p. 248.

21 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, p. 237.

22 Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy, p. 233 (italics original).

23 Garon, The State and Labor, p. 136.

24 Ibid., p. 122.

25 Hastings, Neighborhood and Nation, p. 12.

26 Ibid., p. 192.

27 Quoted from Banno, Democracy in Prewar Japan, pp. 168–9.

28 Berger, Parties Out of Power, p. 358.

29 Note that of the five cabinets headed by a civilian prime minister, three were formed by

Prince Konoe Fumimaro (June 1937–Jan. 1939, July 1940–July 1941, and July–Oct.

1941).

30 Large, Organized Workers, chs. 6–8.

31 Shillony, Revolt in Japan.

32 Berger, ‘‘Politics and Mobilization,’’ p. 152.

168 STEPHEN S. LARGE