When Democracy Breaks: 1930s Japan with Louise Young

That’s such an interesting question and just before I go to the answer there. I think that one of the reasons that it’s hard to think about Japan as a democracy before 1945 is because of the rebranding that happened after 1945 with the American occupation and the project of demilitarization and democratization as a high point in the success of American social engineering abroad. Japanese political figures after ‘45 also embraced that idea that this is a new Japan. We’re a democratic Japan. That was the old bad Japan. So that idea of a binary distinction between a post-war of democracy and a pre-war of militarism and authoritarianism is part of a self-serving narrative that, for a lot of reasons, has been circulated and endured.

So that being said, before 1945, we want to go back to the 19th century when there was the overthrow of the feudal regime, the Tokugawa regime in 1868. A new government comes in. The people that overthrew the feudal regime were dissidents in that regime. So, it was the samurai who were the old regime and now the samurai are the new regime. They inaugurated a wide-ranging set of reforms and a new state building. As part of that, they created in 1889, a constitutional democracy. They had a constitution. It had a diet, a bicameral parliamentary system. It was a system that was very limited. It was democratic in the sense that it was elected. It created the structure for a party system to emerge.

That is a great question. Like a lot of other non-Western states, these states enter into a global environment. They enter into the interstate system. In Asia in particular, all of the strong states that had a long history, Korea, China, Japan were under threat from Western imperialism and in particular, a kind of informal and economic imperialism where European powers came in and forced unequal treaties on all these powers. All of them underwent a process of self-strengthening to protect themselves against this external threat. There was a slogan that emerged, ‘Rich Country, Strong Military.’ The idea is we have to industrialize really quickly so that we can compete with the West on economic terms and develop a modern economy. We also have to build up our military. So, along with that, we have to start looking like a state that is recognizable in the international system.

This means we have to have a constitution. We have to have the rule of law. We have to have an educational system. We have to look like those guys so that they will recognize themselves in us. This was modernization in self-defense. As part of that, the leaders of the new government that took over in 1868 was a very small group of people, about 20. They were very young. They were all samurai or aristocrats. They looked out at the world and they saw they had to do this really quickly. There were disagreements between them and at one point the government basically split and the dissidents left. They became the beginnings of the party movement and the opposition from outside the government. They were the ones that started what was called the People’s Rights Movement in the 1870s and ‘80s.

They were the ones that pressured the government to create a national assembly and allow democratic input. But what they meant by democratic input was they didn’t think everybody should be part of that democracy. It was voice for them, voice for your responsible elites, voice for literate people, voice for the upper class. This was a vision of upper-class democracy, a limited democracy. That’s what emerges and there’s that pressure for upper class democracy. That is the beginnings of all of that, but that leaves out a lot of other people and as Japan industrializes, because that educational modernization goes forward as there’s huge in migration into the cities and the beginning of factory work, you get a more complicated society. Many more people are literate. There are all kinds of newspapers. The literate population is beginning to read the newspapers.

So, these twenty people can’t keep control of this thing anymore. That just becomes unworkable as a system. There’s these pressures both from within the old restoration generation, but also from outside to open up the system and to find mechanisms for resolving all kinds of social and political and economic problems that go along with industrialization and modernization and urbanization and all of that. Those are some of the things that I think become the pressures to build democratic institutions, norms, processes that actually feel, if you look at them, very familiar. It’s happening in Asia. It’s a very familiar story. If you know anything about French history or American history or British history, this is the story of working-class activism. This is the story of women’s suffrage. This is the story of peasant unions that are organizing for rights.

Oh, that’s a great question. You know, you’re right about France, especially when you think about the 19th century chronology, which is just a very dramatic and volatile sort of political timeline. In Japan, there was volatility there, but it was nothing on the same scale. So, I think you’re right that probably Britain makes a better parallel than France does. I guess one of the differences in Japan or how we can look at the particularity of the Japanese case. If we look at the story of nation state making in the late 19th century, you could be a lumper or a splitter. Everybody they’re all the same or actually, no, let’s focus on the differences.

So, if we’re going to be splitters, the differences are in the particularities of the way that the people that created the constitution attached it to the imperial institution. There’s this term, invented traditions, that historians use often to talk about nation building and the creation of nationalist mythologies in the late 19th century. If we think about the imperial institution and how the emperor becomes the centerpiece of the constitutional monarchy, that is a process that’s inventing and mythologizing anew the idea of the emperor, claiming it goes back to the sixth century or even before. The whole idea that the emperor is descended from the gods and it’s the descendant of the sun god. This kind of religious mythology that is embedded in the constitution and in the idea that the Japanese nation is vested in the figure of the emperor.

So, if you’re going to say something unique about Japan, it’s what Japanese historians call the emperor system ideology, which is invented along with this constitution making process in the late 19th century. It becomes important because the overthrow of the feudal government was called a restoration. It was called the restoration of the emperor. We’re going to get rid of this federation of local lords and we’re going to restore power to the emperor because he had power way back in time memorial.

Then this idea of restoration, of imperial restoration, becomes a resonant ideology that gets picked up, particularly on the right. People that are unhappy with the system, sort of democratic opposition, in the twenties then latches onto this idea that the system is all corrupt. We need to restore power in the figure of the emperor. That happens again in the Shōwa period in the 1930s. So, the relationship of the constitution to the emperor and imperial sovereignty, the identification of Japanese nationalism with the figure of the emperor, all of these things are something that’s particular to the Japanese story of democracy and it’s weaknesses perhaps.

It’s interesting because as you’re describing the emphasis on the emperor, I’m now seeing more parallels to Germany before World War One where they very much venerated the role of the Kaiser, the role of their monarch. But at the same time, were giving increasing power to its own parliament and politicians like Otto von Bismarck, who was not part of the monarchical line of succession. He didn’t have a formal role within the aristocracy per se, but had significant political power as more of just a traditional politician.

So, Japan’s got this interesting arc where it does have some similarities to Germany, which obviously had an incredibly difficult time transitioning to democracy. So, I can see how some of those early foundations that exist within its democracy end up leading to an eventual breakdown that allows it to ally with Germany and Italy that are fascist countries. Am I crazy in seeing that parallel?

Not at all. I mean, there’s reasons for them. When the Japanese, when this small group of, we call them oligarchs that ran the early new government in the 1870s and 80s took trips around the world, they studied the British system. They studied the German system. They studied the American constitution. They were like, which one works best for us? There were, of course, differences of opinion. Oh, we should get the British one. No, we should have the German constitution. So, there was a lot of real principled disagreement. It’s fascinating when you go back and read that stuff. But what ended up happening, the man who was the father of the Japanese constitution, this man, Ito Hirobumi, really was drawn to the German constitutional structure because he liked the idea of a strong executive.

Indeed, what is created in the constitution is the vesting of sovereign power in the emperor. He’s a proxy for the whole executive. The executive branch, the structure that Ito helped set up is called the transcendental cabinet system. That basically made the cabinet independent of the parliament and a true parliamentary system. The party that wins in the lower house, then elects the prime minister and then that prime minister selects his cabinet. But there was no mechanism for that. It was just the inner circle of advisors to the emperor who then elected the prime minister and then chose everybody around him. So, it was just a narrow group of people that just, ‘Oh, which one do you want this time? Well, I’ll be the economics minister.’ They just traded it all off and they would appoint each other. This is how it worked.

It was very much modeled on what they saw the German system to be. You know, one other point about the interesting comparisons to the German system, and I don’t know the history of German politics that well, but the problem with using the emperor in this way is they said the emperor is the sovereign and all power is vested in him. He’s the symbol of the nation and its purity and its goodness and value, pure value. But politics is sort of dirty. So, we can’t have the emperor get involved in the dirtiness of politics. His advisors do that stuff. But then the advisors are tempted to use the emperor when they can’t control people. They’re like, okay, well then the emperor should do a directive. Then they would get the emperor to do a directive. But people would go I’m not listening to that directive.

Then you have a crisis because the emperor’s voice is not being listened to. So, what the advisors that were acting in the name of the emperor quickly discovered, or not so quickly, it took them a while, is that they had to be very, very cautious about when they would bring the emperor out from behind his throne and deploy him for political purposes, to use that authority. It wasn’t all powerful sovereignty in reality, even though in theory, that’s the system that was set up.

We see similar issues right now in Thailand over the past few decades where they have a very strong monarch who is extremely popular. At least the former monarch was extremely popular, but the institution itself is still extremely popular as well. Different political actors lean on the monarchy to get their way. And one of the things that we’ve seen within Thailand is that its road to democracy is incredibly bumpy with multiple military coups and all kinds of things that are happening, partly because there’s so much emphasis on the institution of the monarchy. It’s a real stumbling block to them making a complete transition to democracy.

So, I can see how Japan’s having similar issues that it’s making steps towards democracy and it’s becoming increasingly more democratic. But it’s got some problems with the foundation. It’s political foundations that are there that start to create democratic breakdown when it starts to face different crises. So why don’t we kind of go there? I mean, the title of the article is the breakdown of democracy. Why does democracy begin to break down as we enter into the 1930s?

This is such a great question and it’s actually one of the big meta questions for Japanese historians. It is a topic that has attracted so much attention. My interpretation is that it wasn’t fated that Japan was going to take this turn. There were many doors open. I think that there was the triggering event which was what happened in the late 1920s and early 1930s. There was a global crisis. When you have a crisis, this was a systemic crisis, it was the economy, it was international security stuff, it was politics, it was what was happening in the empire, there was a famine, crop failures, just everything went wrong.

So, when you have a crisis like that, it’s a stress test. It’s a stress test for your democratic system. Universal manhood suffrage had just passed in 1925 and the first election under the new expanded electorate was 1928. This is a very new system. So, there was this stress test and what ended up happening is that the democratic system didn’t react very well to it. It became sort of paralyzed. All of those insiders, the insider politicians, which included the big businessmen, it included the landlords, it included the public intellectuals and the big journalists, it included the professoriate and the universities. These were all the sort of power elite and the upper class. They didn’t respond very well to it. They didn’t have good ideas.

So, the crisis just froze. The word that circulated everywhere in 1931 was Japan was in a deadlock. The thing that broke through that was what was happening in Japan’s sphere of influence in Manchuria, in China, Northern China. Some elements of the military staged this conspiracy. Basically, they said, we’re having problems here. We’ve got a local warlord that we can’t control anymore. We’re losing money all the time. Everything’s frozen. We can’t do what we want. We just want to get rid of them. So, they staged this conspiracy to get rid of them. They did. They basically got him assassinated and then they blamed other local Chinese forces on it. You use this as a pretext for an invasion. This is really the beginning of the Asia Pacific war in 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria.

This thing triggers a war fever at home and it turns out it was just enormously popular. So, under the cover of this war fever, elements in the political parties, elements in the business community, elements in the bureaucratic state within the cabinet and so on, they see an opportunity to just go along with and support this move as a way of getting out of the deadlock. In the process, elements of the military start asserting more and more power and everybody’s willing to basically go along with that because it seems fine for now. There’s a just incremental going along with what becomes a power grab by the military.

One of the things that I’ve found in talking to a lot of people about democratization is that it requires a significant amount of institutionalization. We have to really focus on building it and consolidating those institutions. The problem with that is that it’s incredibly boring. Democracy to a large degree is about building popular majorities and it’s difficult to build popular majorities around institutions, even when they’re meant to reflect the will of popular majorities. It’s just difficult to build those institutions. So, it feels like we oftentimes look for off ramps. We’re looking for off ramps that allow us to build popular majorities through shortcuts.

That sounds like what happened is that they were looking for a shortcut where they could both do something that was widely popular, had a large degree of popular support, but avoid the more difficult process of actually consolidating those institutions that they had really only recently built. You said that just in 1928, they had allowed for universal manhood suffrage. Well, democracy is still incredibly fragile, so they’re using elements of democracy in terms of pursuing popular majorities, but they’re pursuing it in ways that don’t necessarily enhance institutions that would further democracy in the future.

That’s such a good point. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but I think you really put your finger on it. I mean, they were really using a shortcut through demagogic sorts of mechanisms. The military had been quite unhappy across the teens and the twenties, because with the expansion of democracy, part of that had involved a turn against the army and a reduction of their budgets, reduction of divisions. They put some naval building on hold. They signed disarmament treaties. The Navy and the Army were very, very upset about all of this. So, this crisis became an opportunity for them to reclaim some of what they perceived as their lost power.

They used, quite effectively, part of the democratic toolkit. They start using the mass media to create these democratic spectacles, to reach out to constituencies, to create voluntary organizations and they were very effective. Then the military buildup helped Japan recover from the depression. Japan was the first of the industrialized countries to recover full employment from that devastating global depression in 1934. It was all because of this militarism, military buildup, and the invasion. So, all of that got smooshed together. Then ‘Wow, these guys know what they’re doing. They broke the deadlock.’

Then at the same time, everybody else, a lot of these sort of opportunistic politicians, as you say short circuiting, they just thought, ‘We’re not really in support of this, but let’s just ride this train for a little while and then when we want to get off, we can get off. We don’t need to be trying to expand our constituencies and get more votes that way. We’ll just increase our budget and our power within the government by harnessing ourselves or attaching ourselves to the success or the fate of the military.’

Your chapter really emphasizes that democracy’s decline happened over a period of time. It was much more similar to what we see happen in countries around the world today, where democracy is just eroding as we remove checks and balances from people who are in power particularly executives. But in your chapter, it’s the military who’s gaining increasing power and it’s removing from civilian leadership over time. Is there a moment when democracy completely breaks?

Because we see similar things happen in Italy where Mussolini comes to power, but there is a moment when we think of democracy breaking where we have the March on Rome. We see things in Germany, where Hitler is in power during the end of the Weimar Republic, but there’s a moment when we think of him as becoming the Fuhrer, as really breaking democracy within Germany. Is there a similar moment within Japan that democracy clearly breaks, or is it something that’s more difficult to really pinpoint?

Japan is always compared to Germany and Italy. It’s a bit of an outlier from those two cases exactly for the point that you make. There isn’t this moment. If there was going to be a moment, it would have been 1936 when there was a coup attempt when the young officers staged an uprising in Tokyo. They had Tokyo under martial law for several days. They expected the emperor to acknowledge it and there was going to be a restoration of the Shōwa emperor. That didn’t happen. The senior officers turned on them. The emperor was disgusted. They were court martialed and the leaders were executed. That was the end of this coup. But what did happen was there were different moments when things that had been norms of democratic rule….

In 1918, a new sort of expansion of Japanese democracy was the prime minister is going to be the head of a political party. That was established not as a constitutional change. It was a political norm. So, from 1918 through 1932, the prime minister was always the head of the ruling majority party and he got to decide and assemble his cabinet. That ended in 1932 because it was a national crisis and under the national crisis, everybody agreed we have to have full nation cabinets. This means that it has to be decided the old style before 1918. So, they went backwards. Then in 1936 there were more changes that enhanced the power of the military to dominate policymaking and the cabinet, which was where policy happened.

Then in 1937 and ‘38, the government started creating mechanisms to run the economy, to manage society, which was called the National Defense State. Borrowing Nazi style state policies, borrowing the five-year plans of the Soviets, they borrowed all of these different mechanisms and strategies, the toolkit of the authoritarian state, to manage different components of polity, society, and so on. But these things were put in place gradually. Then we get in 1940, the dissolution of the political party system itself. But even this, they created as part of this national defense state. The government created something called the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. This is a fascist single party that supports the imperial rule, the emperor.

But basically, it just absorbed all the old political parties, which kept their vestigial shape and operated with much less power. But they were still there. So, in this sense, there was never really a sharp break. There was just erosion, hollowing out that circle of people that were decision makers, the advisors of the emperor, which in 1870 was about 20 people. Then it got bigger and bigger and bigger. Now it’s shrinking again. You get back to around 20 people. We sort of think democracy always gets better, the arc of progress. But it can go different ways and that’s sort of the Japan story.

It did play a major part in terms of Japan’s political trajectory. But there is this story out there. It’s a very powerful historical narrative that Japan was backed into war. That here was little valiant Japan trying to succeed in a national environment that was very hostile to a nonwhite country and working really hard. It had assembled this empire and was successful and they were one of the great powers that were in World War I. Then the tides turned against them in the 1930s and they were being surrounded by this hostile international environment. In order to defend themselves for national survival, Japan had no choice but to engage in imperialism and self-defense. That is one interpretation. It also happens to be the interpretation that you get out of the documents produced by the imperial state.

It’s a self-serving narrative and it suggests that there was a binary choice. You either retreat or die. If Japan did not engage in the invasion of Manchuria or the China War or all of this expansionism that that was necessary for self-defense, ultimately, and it was a matter of national economic survival and so on. Well, I just think that that’s just drinking the Kool Aid that you’re given by the government leaders at the time. You have to look critically at it. They saw it that way. I think they absolutely saw the world that way. But that doesn’t mean that the world was that way. I think that Japan wanted to play in the big state game. They wanted to be up there. They want to be one of the big five. If you wanted to do that, yes, that was the choice, but I don’t know.

It’s counterfactual history. Was that where it had to go? I’m not sure that I agree with that. I guess to get back to your question, how much did the international environment shape the breakdown or trigger the breakdown in democracy? I think it was incredibly important, but that was because of the way critical leaders, opinion leaders, people that were in charge of managing information, not just propaganda, but the media, intellectuals, people that shaped perceptions saw it. So, they had an outsized influence in whipping up popular support, which let’s face it, the invasion of Manchuria was popular. The China incident in ‘37 was popular. There was a war fever. The war was popular before it was unpopular.

You know, I really struggle with this, actually, because one example of the Faustian bargain was there was a huge group of very well intentioned, progressive sinologists and intellectuals. They were very progressively inclined. They had a lot of sympathy for China. They were xenophiles. But they went over and they worked with the Guangdong army, the Japanese garrison army in Manchuria, to build the puppet state of Manchukuo. They worked for a big think tank over there that was attached to the South Manchurian Railway, which was the big moneymaker for Japan in Manchuria. They helped the project of imperialism and militarism in Manchuria. They had all kinds of reasons for it.

A lot of them said, ‘We’re doing the revolution from within.’ They said, ‘If we don’t collaborate with these militarists, they’ll be much worse. We can control them.’ In fact, the army people were also playing a dangerous game because they brought all these leftists that didn’t really believe in their project into the inner circles and gave them tons of power, because they needed their knowledge. They needed their research. They needed to have good numbers in order to carry this project out. So, they were each trying to use each other. In the end, I think that the officers got the benefit of this or they had the edge.

But you can also say that in a sense, some of the stuff that happened and the institutions that were built, the things that were created in Japanese occupied Manchuria, were intended to help to provide welfare for some of their subject people and so on. You can’t say that this is a black and white sort of thing. You can’t reduce it to evil and good. Progressivism had some mitigating impact. It did have a positive face. So how do you think about this? I think it’s a really complicated question.

I think to a certain extent, that is true. There was a sense that fascism was taking over Japan, so there was a sense we need to protect against fascism. The Communist Party was stalwart in their opposition to Japanese imperialism. They held that position and they didn’t cave to it. But the other people, you know, some of them, I think you can say they should have spoken out more clearly. But you don’t hear much that we have this choice of defending democracy or not defending democracy. The stakes weren’t so clear until after the fact. This is one of the things, I guess I didn’t put in the article. But in a way, maybe part of the whole issue is in a fog.

There’s a fog of democratic breakdown where really you cannot see the actual impact of your choices or your actions until after the fact. There’s these decisions in real time and then the decisions afterwards really can look different and we can see what was a fateful decision and what wasn’t, but that might not be clear in real time.

Yeah, I think that’s true. On one the hand, you want to keep open lines of communication. You want to keep open the possibility of compromise and if we were looking at the Japanese case, one of the things that expanded democracy was the politics of compromise, bringing in new people that have to be compromised with. This expanded the ecosystem, the field and so it is important to keep the possibility of compromise open. But when it goes wrong is if one group just keeps giving in just to stay in that narrowing sphere of decision making or where the compromise happens.

I think that that was one of the things that happened in Japan, is that these Faustian bargains were not made, you know, I’ll give you this horse, you give me that horse. That’s a trade. This was an asymmetrical compromise. Whereas earlier, I do think they saw that they were building an institution rather than just keeping what they had.