Empire and Constitution in Modern Japan by Junji Banno;

Author:Junji Banno;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350136236
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

8

The twenty-one demands to China

‘Constitution’ domestically, ‘Empire’ externally

The rise of Yoshino Sakuzō

The point of reference throughout this book is the idea that when ‘Constitution’ was strong, ‘Empire’ was restrained, and when ‘Empire’ was strong, ‘Constitution’ ran out of breath. The idea of ‘Constitution domestically, Empire externally’, meaning that both of them coexisted simultaneously, is however mistaken as a way of understanding Japanese modern history. But during the second cabinet of Ōkuma Shigenobu (April 1914–October 1916), which came to office following the ending of the Taishō Political Crisis, the contrast between the domestic and the external situation did fit this model exceptionally.

This cabinet, which absorbed the results of the Taishō Political Crisis, institutionalized ‘Constitution’. In so far as the controlling regime after the Russo-Japanese War was a cooperative enterprise between the military clique, the bureaucratic clique and the Seiyūkai as the eternal ruling party, the Siemens Affair, in which the masses targeted the Seiyūkai, may be regarded as the culmination of the Taishō Political Crisis.

The second Ōkuma Cabinet was a kind of ‘non-Seiyūkai’ Cabinet consisting of what may be called a ‘government party’, or a ‘quasi-government party’, including the Rikken Dōshikai of Katō Takaaki, the Rikken Kokumintō of Inukai Tsuyoshi, and the Chūseikai of Ozaki Yukio. The Seiyūkai, for the first time since its foundation, was forced into the position of a party in the political wilderness. Ever since the Imperial Edict establishing a Constitutional Regime, issued in 1875, which had meant combining confrontation with cooperation between the domain-clique and the parties, what seems now to have arrived was a system of two major parties competing for power between them.

In the election law at the time, however, a large majority of the 1,500,000 electors were rural landlords, and since the ‘three anti-Seiyūkai factions’ forming the government party behind the Ōkuma Cabinet engaged in continual combat with the Seiyūkai, there was no alternative but to expand the electoral roll and pick up votes from the city commercial and industrial classes, as well as the votes of ordinary people. The man who presented this idea most clearly was Professor Yoshino Sakuzō of Tokyo Imperial University, who had recently returned from Europe and America. Just after the formation of the second Ōkuma Cabinet, the journal Taiyō (Sun) published an article by Yoshino, titled ‘The collapse of the Yamamoto Cabinet and the establishment of the Ōkuma Cabinet’. This was a rare example of an analysis of the unfolding drama of a change of government from the viewpoint of a political scientist with a long-term perspective.

Yoshino presented the differences between the party politics he himself had witnessed in Western Europe between 1910 and 1913, and party politics in Japan.

For a long time Japanese political parties have only been able to expand their party base once they have obtained power, but this is just the opposite of parties in the advanced countries of Western Europe. In their case, they can only come to power once they have developed their party strength among the people. . . .

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