Japan

POLITICALLY, Japan was an empire ruled by an emperor who claimed direct descent, through an unbroken line of illustrious predecessors, from Amaterasu-Omikami, goddess of the sun. Since 1603, Japan had actually been governed by a delicately balanced system, often described as centralized feudalism, in which prime authority rested with a shogun, the head of the great house of Tokugawa, who ruled from his family's historical capital of Edo (modern Tokyo). In this Japan, politics, like social organization, was carefully stratified along hereditary class lines, and only a small elite was privileged to participate in the making or administering of political decisions. In short, prehistoric Japan was a specie of traditional Asian society, being predominantly rural, agrarian, immobile, stratified, authoritarian, and oligarchic in its primary sociopolitical characteristics.

However, the Meiji Restoration, when Emperor Meiji assumed formal power, marked an end of the long rule of Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1867). Most of the leaders of the “Restoration Movement” were members of the privileged military or samurai class, operating with the approval of their particular feudal lords and a section of the imperial court nobility. Restoration effectively established a new oligarchy, originally military in nature and regional in its political loyalties, with the Satsuma and Chosu clans as primary powers and Tosa and Hizen fiefs as secondary ones. The new oligarchy continued to fear domestic as well as foreign enemies. Thus, for years the Meiji oligarchy was preoccupied with plans to strengthen and modernize the country to prevent political and economic intervention by the imperialist powers of the West. Some argue that the fear of the West spurred the development of Japanese nationalism, which greatly affected the politics of Japan.

Seeing the political change between the enactment of the Meiji constitution in 1890 and the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai, it can reasonably be concluded that the Japanese political system was slowly “evolving” along relatively liberal and democratic lines. During all these years, Japanese politics was largely a product of two major streams of domestic development: one authoritarian and the other parliamentary and at least protoliberal. Nonetheless, under the surface, actually authoritarianism was in the ascendancy.

The social background of the Meiji oligarchy created favorable conditions for the rise of zaibatsu, a collective term for the great cartels that controlled major sectors of the nation's economy. The growing weight of zaibatsu in the national economy greatly increased their role in domestic politics. Their size and wealth made it inevitable that they would maintain close association with the government. Though their political affiliations varied but all had active bureaucratic connections, they [Page 718]usually cooperated with both the civilian and military oligarchy. Nevertheless, it was not until World War I that some of the largest zaibatsu began to ally themselves closely with the major conservative political parties. Political campaigns and elections were very expensive, especially after the introduction of male suffrage in 1925, and zaibatsu contributed large sums to campaign funds, which enabled them to extract a substantial amount of political funds.

The period 1932–45 marked a reversion to authoritarian and militaristic ways that were certainly far more in the mainstream of Japan's political traditions than the brief years of “liberalism.” The resurgent forces of Japanese militarism and ultranationalism felt threatened by the increasing power of political parties and the attendant development of a parliamentary system. The militarists and the ultranationalists also believed that these were years of unique opportunity for Japan. With intelligence and courage, they held, Japan could become a world power and create an empire that would ultimately dominate all Eastern Asia. If this opportunity were to be missed, however, Japan would have to resign itself to a slow process of national attrition, leading inevitably downward to an insecure and second-class status among the powers.

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