One great reason to think of the Taishō Period as beginning in 1900, rather than with the enthronement of the Taishō Emperor in 1912 is that it is possible to trace the system of government that many identify as “Taishō Democracy” to that year. 1900 was when Meiji power broker and author of the Meiji Constitution, Itō Hirobumi, formed the Rikken Seiyūkai (Friends of Constitutional Government), Japan’s second political party, out of the remains of the first. Itō was Prime Minister at the time, appointed, as was the norm, by the emperor, not elected. He was interested in governing with Japan’s people in mind, and willing to cooperate with those elected to the National Diet. The Seiyūkai provided the roots of “Taishō Democracy.”
The democracy part was not constitutionally mandated, and it developed over time. Though Itō created it, the effective leader of the Seiyūkai from 1904 until his death in 1921 was commoner, former Journalist-turned-politician, and consummate backroom dealmaker Hara Kei. Hara was determined to find a way for elected representatives to make a difference in government. He managed his party carefully and with discipline, and controlled its votes well, giving the Seiyūkai command of a large block of votes. This mean that in 1904, when then-Prime Minister Katsura Tarō needed a budget increase to help pay for the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), Hara was able to martial the only real power the Diet had – to either agree, or not, to budget increases.
So Hara made a deal with Katsura. Katsura agreed, against his own political character, to give Seiyūkai members cabinet positions and government offices, and to spend government money on infrastructure, schools, and railroad lines in Seiyūkai member districts. In exchange, Hara delivered the votes needed to increase the budget. For Katsura, this turned out to be a devil’s bargain. Katsura needed to compromise again and again to get his budgets passed, and when Katsura was not Prime Minister, Prince Saionji Kimmochi was. Saionji was a noble who was a liberal at heart, and he was also nominal leader of the Seiyūkai. So between Katsura’s need to compromise to get money, and Saionji’s desire to compromise due to his political beliefs, Seiyūkai members participated in every cabinet from 1904-1912. This put elected officials with party affiliation in positions of power for the first time. It made the Seiyūkai and its effective leader, Hara Kei, big-time players in Japan’s power game.
Eventually, in the same year that the Taishō Emperor acceded to the throne, the “Taishō Political Crisis” pitted Hara and his transactional politics against Katsura’s direct connection with the emperor and his advisors. The need for two new army divisions, and the funding to go along with them, created a crisis in which Prince Saionji, then Prime Minister trying to reduce government spending, rejected the two new divisions, and his army minister, who by law had to be an active duty army officer, resigned, leading to the collapse of his cabinet. The emperor appointed Katsura, who attempted to force through a budget increase. The Seiyūkai declined to pass it. To counter the Seiyūkai, Katsura started his own political party, but it was unable to achieve enough numbers to outweigh the Seiyūkai. Katsura asked the emperor to command Saionji and Hara to accept his budget in 1913. Following this, Katsura’s cabinet also collapsed due to popular protest and national riots against his appeal to the emperor as anti-democratic. Ultimately, this back and forth resulted in a government appointed by the emperor, but with three cabinet posts guaranteed to go to Seiyūkai members along with changes to the system that favored party politics. It was clear after 1913 that the Japanese People mattered in government.1 Hara’s transactional politics had won, and Japan became, nominally, a democracy.
In my own past, as I have read this story many times in the texts listed below, and many others, I have always had the temerity to judge Hara’s system, and to imagine “Taishō Democracy” as somehow not ‘real’ democracy. This, I thought, helped explain the change to the wartime political system. A transactional democracy not enshrined in a constitution, I thought, was inherently weak. It did not have a solid basis in law that placed the people explicitly in charge of lawmaking, control of the budget, and the judiciary. Its transactional nature made it less a democracy and more of a plutocracy in which market advantage could translate easily into new forms of political advantage that did not necessarily favor parties or democracy. Hara’s politics, while astute, could be turned on him and his party, as Katsura indeed sought to do, by playing the “patriotism” card.2 I used this weakness as a way to explain the willingness of Japan’s political parties to give up their independence and band together in the 1930s and melding into the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusankai).
One of the most valuable parts about training as a historian is the requirement that we be willing to change our minds when new evidence requires a new story. Living in 2025, I am no longer so sure that a constitution, however revered and despite its grounding in the people of a nation, can provide the guardrails to maintain a democracy when the mood of the public shifts sufficiently. Legal documents and systems, including treaties, contracts, and patriotic promises, are just so much paper without a commitment to defending them from the people who created and benefit from them.
Hara was able to turn the vagaries of the Meiji Constitution, which enshrined power in the Emperor and the elite, to democratic advantage when public attitudes provided the opening. His transactional politics may not have been ideal, but given the precarity among constitutional democracies in the world in recent years, it seems to me that “Taishō Democracy” was no less ‘real’ democracy than those of our own time. Democracy needs people to defend it, not just legal paper. The stresses, drastic changes, cultural innovations, and new freedoms present in the Taishō Period mean that, as I noted in my last post, “Taishō” can’t be explained in just a narrow political way.3 It was much, much more. Stay tuned for that more. We’re just getting started!
Beasley, W. G. The Rise of Modern Japan. 2. ed. New York: St. Martin’s Pr, 1995.
Duus, Peter, ed. The Cambridge History of Japan. 6: The Twentieth Century / Ed. by Peter Duus. Repr. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr, 1997.
Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. Third international edition. New York Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Minichiello, Sharon, ed. Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900 - 1930. Repr. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.
———. Retreat from Reform: Patterns of Political Behavior in Interwar Japan. 2. print. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1986.
Najita, Tetsuo. Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, 1905–1915. Harvard East Asian Series 31. s.l: Harvard University Press, 1967. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674429048.
Oda, Yasunori. Nihon kindaishi no tanken (Exploration of Modern Japanese History). 1st ed. 1 vols. Kyoto: Sekaishiso Seminar, 1993.
Ota, Masao. Zōhō Taishō Demokurashii Kenkyū (Supplementary Taishō Democracy Research). Tokyo: Shinsensha Co., Ltd., 1990.
Pyle, Kenneth B. The Making of Modern Japan. 2. ed. Lexington, Mass.: Heath and Comp, 1996.
Gordon, A Modern History of Japan. 127. Minichiello, Retreat from Reform. 11.
Gordon, A Modern History of Japan. 127-129.
Ota, Zōhō Taishō Demokurashii Kenkyū (Supplementary Taishō Democracy Research).
Many thanks for adding a bibliography.