Japanese Political History Since the Meiji Restoration, 1868-2000.

474 Pages·1989·4.87 MB·English

by  Richard Sims

Table of Contents
Back cover
About this ebook
First page
Title
Copyright page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
GLOSSARY
A NOTE ON JAPANESE NAMES
THE CHANGING VALUE OF THE YEN
1. THE MEIJI RENOVATION
Japan in the mid-nineteenth century
The causes of the Meiji Ishin
The establishment and consolidation of the Meiji government
Obstacles to centralising reform
The abolition of feudal domains
The acceleration of modernisation
Political division and the 1873 governmental crisis
The ascendancy of Okubo
The disestablishment of the samurai and the Satsuma rebellion
The character of the Meiji government
2. THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE MEIJI STATE AND THE GROWTH OF POLITICAL
OPPOSITION, 1878-90
The consolidation of the Meiji state
The People's Rights movement
The 1881 political crisis
The first national political parties
The People's Rights movement in the 1880s
The Meiji government's response to the People's Rights movement
3. THE CONSTITUTIONAL EXPERIMENT AND THE BEGINNING OF COMPROMISE POLITICS,
1890-1905
The first Diet sessions
The Ito cabinet and the Jiyuto
The 1898 impasse and the Kenseito cabinet
The Yamagata cabinet and the Kenseito
The formation of the Seiyukai
Politics under the first Katsura cabinet
The Hibiya Park riots
The declining role of the elder statesmen
4. POLITICAL PARTY CONSOLIDATION, OLIGARCHIC REACTION AND THE EMERGENCE OF
NEW FORCES, 1905-18
The political strategy of Hara Takashi
The second Katsura cabinet and the Seiyukai
The second Saionji cabinet and the death of the Emperor
The Taisho political crisis
The social and ideological background of the Taisho political crisis
The aftermath of the Taisho political crisis
The Okuma cabinet and the rise of the Doshikai
The Terauchi cabinet and the resurgence of the Seiyukai
The rice riots and the Hara cabinet
5. PARTY CABINETS, RADICAL MOVEMENTS AND THE COLLAPSE OF TAISHO DEMOCRACY,
1918-32
The post-war ferment
The policies of the Hara cabinet
Seiyukai disunity and non-party cabinets
Reform and reaction under the Kato cabinet
The Wakatsuki cabinet and its difficulties
Formation of the Minseito and the 1928 election
The repressive policies and political difficulties of the Tanaka cabinet
Financial retrenchment and the Naval Limitations controversy
The Depression and failures of the Minseito cabinet
Military subversion and the Mukden Incident
The collapse of the second Wakatsuki cabinet
The Inukai cabinet and the May 15th Incident
The weaknesses of political parties
'Taisho Democracy' and the new social movements
Left-wing political parties
6. THE PURSUIT OF GREATER NATIONAL UNITY AND THE WAR STATE, 1932-45
The upsurge of fundamentalist nationalism
The divisions within Japanese ultranationalism
The Saito cabinet
The Okada cabinet and the Minobe affair
Factional struggle in the army
The February 26th Incident
The increase in military influence on government
The partial party revival and the Hayashi cabinet
The first Konoe cabinet and the China Incident
The Hiranuma and Abe cabinets
The Yonai cabinet and the new party movement
Konoe and the new political structure
The emasculation of the new structure
Politics and foreign policy in 1941
Tojo, the 1942 election and war-time politics
The growth of opposition to Tojo
The Koiso and Suzuki cabinets and the peace party
The decision to surrender
7. THE POST-WAR RESHAPING OF JAPANESE POLITICS, 1945-52
Conservative expectations and initial Occupation policy
Constitutional reform
The revival of political parties
The 1946 election and the purge of Hatoyama
The first Yoshida cabinet and the challenge of the Left
Socialist-led coalition government
The change in American policy and the return to conservative control
The end of the Occupation
8. THE '1955 SYSTEM' AND THE ERA OF L.D.P. DOMINANCE, 1952-93
The persistence of American influence
Conservative division and Yoshida's ousting
Socialist merger and the formation of the Liberal Democratic Party
The Hatoyama cabinet and the reaction against the Occupation
Kishi's rise to power
Kishi and Security Treaty revision
Political conciliation and economic growth under Ikeda
The Sato cabinet and political change in the 1960s
The retrocession of Okinawa
Relations with China and the end of the Sato cabinet
The Tanaka cabinet's aims and setbacks
The Miki cabinet and the obstacles to political reform
The Lockheed scandal and the Fukuda cabinet
LDP factional conflict and the Ohira cabinet's loss of a Diet majority
The conservative revival
The Suzuki cabinet and administrative reform
Nakasone's new approach
The Liberal Democratic Party's 1986 election success
Introduction of the consumption tax
The Recruit scandal and the collapse of the Takeshita and Uno cabinets
The collapse of the 'bubble economy' and the impact of the Gulf Crisis
The Sagawa scandal and the Liberal Democratic Party's fall from power
The reasons for the LDP's long dominance
9. THE SHAKE-UP OF JAPANESE POLITICS, 1993-2000
The Hosokawa coalition and its reform measures
The conservative-Social Democratic coalition, 1994-6
The New Frontier Party and the 1996 election
The Hashimoto cabinet and the LDP setback in 1998
The Obuchi cabinet and the LDP-Liberal Party-Komeito coalition
The Japanese political situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Back cover:
Modern Japan's political history has been eventful and turbulent. The country
transformed itself from a decentralised feudal regime into a modernising nation-
state, which then deviated from that path in the 1930s towards militarism,
fascism and pan-Asianism, a course which led to the Pacific War and then to
defeat, occupation and the imposition of a fully democratic constitution.
This book explores the Meiji Renovation (conventionally but misleadingly
termed Restoration); the policies of the samurai modernisers who dominated the
Meiji government; the rapid appearance of liberal political parties; the
introduction of a German-style constitution and the evolution of a 'politics of
compromise' out of the early parliamentary conflict; the broadening of political
activity and consciousness with the coming of 'Taisho democracy'; the renewed
and sometimes fanatical emphasis on national unity in the 1930s; the wartime
changes in the political system; the radical postwar reforms and the 'reverse
course'; the four decades of Liberal Democratic Party dominance after the
Occupation; and the shake-up of Japanese politics during the 1990s.
No other work has covered Japanese political history since 1868 in such
detail, and the present volume fills the gap between general histories of modern
Japan and the monographic literature.
RICHARD SIMS has taught modern Japanese history at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London, since 1966. His previous
books include Modern Japan (1973) and French Policy towards the Bakufu and
Meiji Japan, 1854-1895 (1998).
Cover: One of the key events in Japanese history – the abolition of feudal
domains in August 1871. The painting by Kobori Tomoto shows Minister of the
Right Sanjo Sanetomi reading the imperial edict to assembled daimyo. The
young Meiji Emperor is half hidden behind the screen; in front of it, left, are
Iwakura Tomomi, Kido Takayoshi and another official. (Meiji Jingu Seitoku
Kaigakan Shozo)
About this ebook
This ebook is not official. It's been scanned, OCRed, coded, and proofread by
a single person to make this epub. To allow exact citation, page numbers have
been preserved and appear as subscript throughout the book. So for example
123
is where page 123 starts in the original print edition. You can verify yourself by
looking at the print edition, or at the pdf version of this ebook which is a page by
page scan of the original. This epub version has been extensively proofread,
checked for OCR mistakes (finding even a few typos that were in the print
edition) and uniformity of punctuation, and little if any errors are left. The print
edition and the pdf version of this ebook, however, should be trusted over this
epub version.
The print edition is faithfully reproduced here except for the following
modifications to adapt to epub format: omission of original TOC and index
(useless here); all footnotes moved to the end of respective chapters, making
them end notes; unnumbered illustration pages pushed at the end of chapters in
which they occurred to avoid split chapters (edited their positions in pp. xi-xii
but kept the original in square brackets); minor edits to illustration captions due
to different layout than the print edition; if a word was hyphenated at page-break
(effectively spanning two pages), the page-break mark was moved AFTER the
word.
JAPANESE POLITICAL HISTORY SINCE THE
i
MEIJI RENOVATION
ii
RICHARD SIMS
iii
Japanese Political History since the Meiji
Renovation
1868-2000
iv
JAPANESE POLITICAL HISTORY SINCE THE
MEIJI RENOVATION 1868-2000
Copyright © Richard Sims 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For
information address PALGRAVE, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10010
First published by PALGRAVE, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE is the new global imprint of St.
Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd. (formerly
Macmillan Press Ltd.) Printed in Malaysia ISBNs: 0-312-23914-9 (cloth) 0-312-23915-7 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sims, R.L. (Richard L.)
Japanese political history since the Meiji renovation, 1868-2000 / Richard Sims.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-23914-9 – ISBN 0-312-23915-7 (pbk.)
1. Japan--Politics and government·-- 1868-I.Title.
DS881.91. S5665 2001
952.03'3--dc21
00-051474
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
v
I must first acknowledge my gratitude to my publishers in London for inviting
me to update and extend the earlier version of this book, which appeared in 1991
under the imprint of the Vikas Publishing House in New Delhi. Because that
version was part of a series which was intended to include a separate volume on
recent Japanese politics, it was not appropriate for me to cover the post-1952
period in detail. I am therefore pleased to have had the chance to make the work
more complete (although I am all too well aware that it is impossible to cover
every aspect of modern Japanese political history in one volume).
In addition to the historians whose works are listed in the bibliography, this
book owes a great deal, directly or indirectly, to a considerable number of
scholars who have personally helped to shape my understanding of Japanese
history over the past four decades. First among these is Bill Beasley, who guided
me initially as a research supervisor and later as a colleague and fellow teacher
and to whom I owe an incalculable debt. Among the various Japanese historians
who have aided and encouraged me, particular mention must be made of Oka
Yoshitake and Mitani Taichiro, both of whom went out of their way, despite their
many other commitments, to make my periods of research at Tokyo University
rewarding, and of Sakai Yukichi, who provided me with an invaluable
introduction to local political history, notably during a trip to collect politicians'
records in Akita in 1972. It is a pleasure to express gratitude also to Uchikawa
Yoshimi, Miyachi Masato, Miyake Masaki, Banno Junji, Emura Eiichi, Matsuo
Takayoshi and Taguchi Shoichiro, with all of whom I have had informative
discussions. Needless to say, they bear no responsibility for the ways in which I
have incorporated their ideas in this book. In some places, indeed, several of
them would almost certainly strike a different balance or emphasise other
factors. It is natural, however, that some aspects of Japanese history should be
vi
seen through a different perspective from outside Japan.