Party Rivalry and Political Change in Taisho Japan

Capitalising on Catastrophe: Reinvigorating the Japanese State with Moral Values through Education following the 1923 Great Kantô Earthquake

“…In addition to the record number of strikes and disputes, the demands of the labour movement began to expand from economic issues involving worker-employer relations, to political issues calling for representation and the right to vote. 48 Urbanisation also created a new middle class in Japan's expanding cities and consequently a new Western-influenced popular culture emerged. As Elise Tipton indicates, the mass consumer culture of shopping, entertainment and eating out in cafés provoked praise and enthusiasm from some, but severe moral condemnation and rejection from others.…”

Marxism and National Socialism in Taishō Japan: The Thought of Takabatake Motoyuki

“…The difficulty was that democratic impulses manifested on the grass-roots level -in the rice riots, the growth of labor unions and tenant farmers' associations, the universal suffrage movement, and the movement for a proletarian political party-remained divorced from the political parties, which were widely viewed as corrupt and closely tied to large landowners and the huge financial interests of the zaibatsu. In the words of Kato Shuichi, "The participation of the mass in politics still rested largely on votes in elections which were not much more than mere formalities" (Kato 1974:229)-The oligarchical politics of the Meiji period had indeed given way to "party rule" (Duus 1970(Duus , 1968; nevertheless, as the parties became more activist, they were increasingly integrated into the political establishment, and the maneuvers of their leaders became barely distinguishable from the machinations of the genro, military men, and bureaucrats who had dominated the Meiji era. As the masses remained disenchanted and disengaged from political parties pursuing separate interests, those seeking political action from below were finally compelled to generate reformist, and then radical, alternatives to the Taisho political framework.…”

“A Thorough Study of the Spanish Influenza”: How Japanese Party Politics and Ministerial Conflicts Reduced the Pandemic

“…He illustrates how the political party members shared official positions in the state bureaucracy, and they were often not in the best interest of the working-class. 8 While scholars had disagreed on the scope and implications of bureaucratization, they concur on the importance of the state in building a modern Japan. Central to the claim is the sense that from early on, the structure of the state bureaucracy was considerably stable.…”