Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. xii, 241 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-6341-7.
Deeply rooted in the Enlightenment past, the social sciences struggle with the enormous complexity of a twenty-first-century world. As Stanford-trained Harukata Takenaka reveals, political scientists have concocted innumerable labels to capture the political complexity of our times: traditional democracy, semi-democracy, pseudo democracy, illiberal democracy, delegative democracy, near polyarchy, competitive oligarchy, inclusive hegemony, tutelary regime, competitive authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism, classical authoritarianism, autocracy, despotism, etc. Takenaka himself leans toward the increasingly popular study of “hybrid regimes,” polities with democratic and authoritarian attributes.
In probing an overlooked subgenre of hybridity, the “semi-democratic” regime, Takenaka hints to the potential of social science research on Japan. Compared to other models of hybridity (competitive authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism), “semi-democracy” suggests the permeability of invented political categories. Takenaka applies the term, after all, to a nation typically considered democratic, Great Britain. Although blessed with the fundamental conditions of democracy—regular elections, accountability and mass political participation—nineteenth-century Britain, Takenaka explains, suffered from bribery and coercion, the unaccountability of the House of Lords and military, and limited suffrage. By the late 1920s, however, legal reform transformed Britain into a model democracy.
Similarly, Takenaka finds Japan wanting between 1918 and 1932 and, like Britain, suggests this “semi-democratic” polity could have transitioned to democracy. Echoing recent historical analyses, Takenaka appropriately distinguishes 1920s Japan from the “competitive oligarchy” of the latter nineteenth century. Whereas latter nineteenth-century Japan witnessed battles among the oligarchs and one political party (the Seiyūkai), by the 1920s, political competition shifted to two major political parties (the Seiyūkai and Kenseikai, later Minseitō). While electoral control in the nineteenth century extended only to the Lower House, by the interwar era, both the Lower House and government became beholden to the people through the strong place of political parties in both. Finally, although only 4.8 percent of the adult population could vote before 1919, by 1925, universal male suffrage enfranchised 37.3 percent of Japanese adults.
Despite these impressive gains, democratic reform did not, of course, continue in 1930s Japan. Takenaka’s broadest aim is to explain how such “semi-democratic” regimes fail. The experience of Japan reveals, first, the importance of civil-military relations. Interwar Japan saw the gradual rise of military over civilian authority. The shift was facilitated by a failure of electoral control over institutions such as the Privy Council, House of Peers and the military, and by the “semi-loyalty” of some party politicians vis-à-vis the civilian government. The lack of loyalty derived from an erosion of civilian legitimacy in the face of economic crisis, political scandal, even political party betrayal of democratic principles.
Takenaka’s strength lies in locating specific points where alternative actions might have facilitated a smooth Japanese transition to democracy. Had the Hara Takashi cabinet (1918–21) introduced universal male suffrage, he argues, the Katō Takaaki cabinet (1924–26) could have curbed the power of the House of Peers and Privy Council. Had the first Wakatsuki cabinet (1926–27) stood up to the Privy Council, the Seiyūkai might not have objected to the London Naval Treaty and thus politicized the military. Had the Tanaka Giichi cabinet (1927–29) punished the army assassins of Chinese warlord Chang Tso-lin, military politicization again could have been checked. Had the second Wakatsuki cabinet (1931) abandoned Hamaguchi’s economic austerity, it could have retained popular legitimacy. It might also have worked harder to control the military after the Manchurian Incident. Following the May Fifteenth Incident, the Seiyūkai and Minseitō parties could have turned to public support against the military.
Takenaka thus offers an important corrective to the determinist vision of a prewar Japanese political culture adverse to democracy. At the same time, his analysis reveals the limitations of social science research on non-Western societies. Codified with the nineteenth-century rise of the Western world, modern political science continues to privilege Western polities (particularly, Britain and the US) as ideal models against which non-Western societies invariably pale. Although Takenaka effectively counters the cultural determinism of political science research from the 1980s (Lucian Pye), his discussion of “semi-democratic” Japan and early 1920s roots of failure echoes early post-1945 Japanese Marxist and revisionist American (Robert Scalapino, Barrington Moore) emphases on the structural origins of Japanese militarism.
A less Anglo-American-centric reading might recognize that, while legal mechanisms for civilian control did not match those in contemporaneous Britain or the United States, democratic procedures in 1920s Japan were fully, if more informally, established. The Japanese parliament adopted universal male suffrage in 1925, just seven years after Britain. And as Mitani Taichirō, Murai Ryōta and Itō Yukio have argued, the Lower House gained ascendancy over the Upper House; party cabinets neutralized the power of the elder statesmen, the Privy Council, and the military; the selection process for prime minister became regularized; and the civilian cabinet expanded its authority over the imperial house. As Kawada Minoru has observed, in deliberations over the London Naval Treaty, Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi (1929–31) unified the Imperial Army, Navy, parliament and Privy Council under political party command.
Trapped by his own “semi-democratic” label, Takenaka cannot interpret the ultimate rise of militarism as anything but the product of weak Japanese democracy. Yet contemporary sources reveal nothing if not the extraordinary power of party government under Hamaguchi and an inordinate fear of that power among Japan’s non-elected elites. It seems likely that Japan’s political transformation of the 1930s derived from a problem of legitimacy not of Japan’s political parties but of her non-elected elites. Rather than focus on a brewing storm from 1920, one might note that the 1930 ratification of the London Naval Treaty marked the pinnacle of prewar Japanese party government, demonstrating to all the overwhelming power of the Hamaguchi cabinet. Unable to surmount party politics by legal means, members of the Imperial Army resolved to do so by a campaign of violence at home and abroad. Unfortunately, no amount of political accountability in interwar Japan could control armed soldiers determined to recover their waning authority through political assassination and foreign conquest.
Frederick R. Dickinson
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
pp. 934-936