2 Structural foundations of a New Japan

Although the eruption of the world war four years ago felt like a sudden
explosion, viewed in broader terms, this war was, in fact, a referendum
on nineteenth-century civilization ( jūkyū seiki bunmei).
Anesaki Masaharu, Nov. 19181

Japanese religious scholar Anesaki Masaharu had, by the end of 1918,

hinted at the monumental global significance of the Great War. The conflict
was not a mere local quarrel, after which the pieces could be picked up and
human life continue naturally along. On the contrary, Anesaki categorically
declared, “the world can never return to its original social state (moto no
shakai jōtai).” Just as wartime mobilization had brought “enormous
change” (dai henka) to society and public sentiment, “a return to peace
will, without a doubt, be accompanied by revolution (dai henkaku).” People
spoke of a “return to peace”, but as had clearly been the case in all past great
wars, east and west, “we will see the construction of a new world and
transformation of human sentiment.”2

Economic growth
Histories of Meiji typically detail the new national infrastructure that
formed the foundation of the modern Japanese state: a centralized system
of prefectures, national taxation, national education, national conscrip-
tion and a national network of communications and transportation. As
hinted by Anesaki, the Great War brought similar structural change.
Unlike its nineteenth-century predecessor, the war did not introduce an
entirely new national infrastructure to Japan. But it unleashed formidable
subterranean processes that would qualitatively transform Japanese

1
Anesaki, Sekai bunmei no shinkigen, 17; reprinted in Shimazono, ed., Anesaki Masaharu shū,
vol. 7. The first portion of this volume was a compilation of several Anesaki articles
originally published between November 29 and December 9, 1918 under the heading
“Jūkyū seiki bunmei no sōkanjō” in the Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun and the Ōsaka mainichi
shinbun. See Seki, Taishō gaikō, ch. 3 for a discussion of these articles.
2
Ibid., 3.

37

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 38 Structural foundations of a New Japan

national life. Just as the mid nineteenth century witnessed a metamorpho-

sis from feudal realm to modern nation, the First World War marked
Japan’s passage from a predominantly regional nineteenth-century
empire to a major industrial world power. As historians of Europe and
the United States have often observed for their respective countries, and
as Anesaki’s remarks above suggest, the Great War marked the true start
of the twentieth-century Japanese polity.
Above all, conflict in Europe brought to Japan an unprecedented level of
economic prosperity that became the bedrock of a fundamental transfor-
mation of Japanese politics, society and culture. Classic accounts of eco-
nomic development rightly stress the transformation of the Japanese
economy around the turn of the century: the twofold expansion of factory
labor between 1900 and World War I,3 the nearly fourfold increase in
foreign trade between 1895 and 19144 and the rapid urbanization that
doubled the population of Tokyo between 1900 and 1920. Each of these
constitutes a critical step in Japanese economic development. But the First
World War easily stands apart as a watershed between two distinct eco-
nomic eras. Marxist historians have long described the conflict as the period
when monopoly capitalism finally arrived in Japan.5 But we may more
profitably identify the Great War as a pivotal era of transition from a rapidly
growing, regional economy into an industrial power with global reach.6
Japan in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War lagged behind the
great powers in productive capacity7 and was saddled with 2 billion yen in
debt. But between 1913 and 1922, the Japanese economy expanded by
5.21 percent, significantly higher than the international standard.8 And
demographers argue that Japan underwent a demographic transition from
high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates – typically the gauge

3
Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, 20.
4
W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism 1894–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987),
124–5.
5
See, for instance, Toyama Shigeki, Imai Seiichi and Fujiwara Akira, Shōwashi (Tokyo:
Iwanami shoten, 1959), 7.
6
Hayami Akira and Kojima Miyoko describe the Taishō years (1912–26) as the era in which
Japan transformed from a primarily agricultural to an industrial state. Hayami and Kojima,
Taishō demogurafii, 19.
7
According to Angus Maddison, Japan in 1913 ranked seventh overall in its proportion of
world GNP, enjoying less than half the capacity of fifth-ranked France, one-third the
capacity of second-ranked Germany and less than one-seventh the scale of top-ranked
United States. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris:
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2001), 261. I am indebted
to Richard Smethurst for bringing this to my attention.
8
According to the Ōkawa Kazushi project. Ōkawa Kazushi, Takamatsu Nobukiyo and
Yamamoto Yūzō, Kokumin shotoku (Tōkyō keizai shinpo, 1974); cited in Takemura Tamio,
Taishō bunka teikoku no yūtopia (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2004), 13.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Economic growth 39

of movement from a pre-industrial to an industrial economy – around the

time of the Great War.9 By 1925, the population of Japan proper stood at
60.74 million, the fifth largest behind China, the United States, Russia
and Germany.10
Between 1910–14 and 1920–4, Japanese exports tripled and by 1916
had produced the first balance of payments surplus in Japanese history. By
1920, the surplus reached 2.7 billion yen and enabled Japan to compete,
for the first time, in the global competition to distribute international
loans.11 During the 1920–4 interval, manufactured goods comprised
over 90 percent of Japanese exports.12 By 1926, Japan produced double
the value of manufactured goods as in the primary sectors of agriculture,
forestry and fisheries.13 The number of Japanese-owned cotton spindles
in China leapt from 55,296 in 1910 to 801,662 in 1920, far outstripping
the 256,284 spindles owned by Western interests after the war.14 For the
first time, Japanese textiles established a firm foothold in India, the Dutch
East Indies and other countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Japanese shipping was in hot demand, and the net shipping income rose
from 41.2 million to 381.4 million yen between 1914 and 1919.15
Between 1912 and 1926, the number of person-kilometers of rail traffic
within Japan more than tripled and the number of ton-kilometers of
freight traffic on rail more than doubled – a “phenomenal” (kyōiteki)
rate according to Hayami Akira and Kojima Miyoko.16 The number of
power plants in Japan expanded from twenty-eight in 1912 to 1,313 in
1925 and, while only 20 percent of Japanese households in 1912 were
connected to electricity, by 1925 most domiciles were plugged into the
power grid.17 From 1915 to 1919, the number of incorporated firms in
Japan increased almost twofold, from 17,000 to 30,000. Manufacturing
firms increased threefold to fourfold.18 Reflecting upon the astonishing

9
Britain underwent this transition at the end of the eighteenth century. See Hayami and
Kojima, Taishō demogurafii, 226–33.
10
If Japan’s imperial territories are counted, the population stood at 85.4 million. Ibid.,
238–9.
11
Saraki Yoshihisa, Taishō jidai o tazunete mita: Heisei Nihon no genkei (Tokyo: Fusōsha,
2002), 72.
12
Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 126, table 2.
13
Hayami and Kojima, Taishō demogurafii, 19.
14
James L. McClain, A Modern History of Japan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 396,
table 11.9.
15
William W. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan: Growth and Structural Change,
1868–1938 (Princeton University Press, 1954), 38–9.
16
Ibid., 22.
17
This does not include Okinawa Prefecture. Hayami and Kojima, Taishō demogurafii,
23–4.
18
Saraki, Taishō jidai o tazunete mita, 72.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 40 Structural foundations of a New Japan

economic transformation of the wartime years, Japan Chronicle editor

A. Morgan Young noted that Tokyo, for the first time, lent money to
Russia, France and Britain and that “her manufactures were in the most
eager demand in every country in the world.”19

Empire
Japan’s new economic reach following the First World War was accen-
tuated by a conspicuous expansion of the Japanese empire. Japan special-
ists have increasingly highlighted the importance of empire in modern
Japanese national life.20 But it is useful to clarify the distinct phases of
imperial development. Despite the scholarly focus on the Sino-Japanese
(1894–5) and Russo-Japanese (1904–5) wars, before 1931, it was the First
World War that brought the most dramatic gains to Japanese imperial
power. The Sino-Japanese War produced Japan’s first formal colony in
Taiwan and war with Russia gave Japan a critical political, military and
economic foothold in southern Manchuria. But the First World War
brought an enormous expansion of Japanese presence in China, Russia
and the South Pacific.
By vanquishing German forces at Qingdao in November 1914,
Imperial Japan acquired 200 square miles of territory in Kiaochow Bay,
a first-class naval base, two railroads fanning out from Qingdao and
preponderant economic power throughout Shandong Province. The
notorious “Twenty-one Demands,” agreed to by Chinese President
Yuan Shikai by June 1915, confirmed these new rights in Shandong and
consolidated and expanded earlier Japanese gains in southern Manchuria,
eastern Inner Mongolia, Fujian and the Yangzi Valley. In so doing, the
Sino-Japanese treaties confirmed preponderant Japanese political and
economic power throughout China. In August 1918, Japanese troops
joined an allied “intervention” in Siberia ostensibly aimed at preventing
the spread of Bolshevik and German power east. Although a multinational
effort, the 70,000 Japanese troops dwarfed the next largest allied contin-
gent – 7,900 soldiers from the United States – and remained for two years
after the withdrawal of all other allied troops in 1920.21

19
Young, Japan under Taishō Tennō, 16. The Japan Chronicle was an English-language
newspaper founded by British national Robert Young in Kobe, Japan in 1891.
20
See, in particular, Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen: “Nihonjin” no jigazō no
keifu (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1995).
21
For the latest English-language study of Japan’s expedition experience, see
Paul Dunscomb, Japan’s Siberian Intervention, 1918–1922: “A Great Disobedience against
the People” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Empire 41

Such formidable projections of power in China and Russia accentuate

the enormous new scope of Japan’s political, military and economic
activities in Asia during the Great War. But they did not constitute formal
extensions of the Japanese empire. As we shall see in Chapter 6, following
the new internationalist tenor after the Paris Peace, Japanese troops with-
drew from both Shandong and Siberia in 1922. But the first projection of
Japanese might during the Great War did result in a formal expansion of
imperial territory. Two months before the fall of Qingdao, Japanese war-
ships steamed to the South Pacific to eject German forces from German
Micronesia. Although the total area of the Marshall, Mariana and
Caroline Islands did not exceed 800 square miles (compared to 538
square miles in Japan’s leasehold in Liaodong, southern Manchuria),
their strategic location just south of the Bonin (Ogasawara) island chain,
which had already been incorporated into Japanese territory in 1866,
meant a formidable new Japanese Pacific presence. Indeed, as American
travel writer Willard Price declared somewhat ominously in 1936, “The
old Great Wall of China is obsolete. Not only China but all Asia has a new
Great Wall. It starts with the Kurile Islands (neighbors of Uncle Sam’s
Aleutians), extends through the main islands of Japan, through the
Bonins, then broadens to take in the 2,550 islands and islets of the
Japanese mandate. This brings the Great Wall to the equator. The entire
Asiatic continent lies behind this rampart.”22
As hinted by Price, despite the post-Versailles vogue for “self-
determination,” Japan retained her South Pacific acquisitions after the
Great War. And the islands would, of course, become important stepping
stones to further military conquest in the Pacific during the Second World
War. But most critical was the qualitative change in Japanese visions of
empire spurred by these new territories after 1919. Japanese policy-
makers and opinion leaders clearly envisioned themselves at the helm of
an Asian empire by the latter nineteenth century. And a small cross-
section of voices at that time pictured Japanese power extending beyond
the oceans.23 But it was not until the acquisition of German Micronesia
that Japanese subjects imagined themselves as part of something more
than a regional empire. In addition to the new permanent military pres-
ence, commercial opportunities in the Pacific expanded rapidly during
the war. One of Japan’s two largest shipping companies, Mitsui OSK
Lines, opened a direct service between Taiwan, south China and the

22
Willard Price, Pacific Adventure (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1936), 187.
23
Mark R. Peattie, Nanyō: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 42 Structural foundations of a New Japan

Dutch East Indies in 1916. By 1918, Japan supplied the Indies with
20 percent of its imports and accounted for 11.5 percent of its exports.24
The Great War, in other words, marked a formidable leap from the
aspiration to lead a region through ever expanding continental interests to
visions of a world power with assets reaching into the Pacific. Hawaiian
dance quite naturally pops up in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s best-selling novel
Chijin no ai (A Fool’s Life) of 1924. But that reference to the Pacific could
no more have occurred before the war than the description of the extrav-
agant lifestyle of the “modern girl” and heroine Naomi. Naomi’s friend
Seki’s skill at Hawaiian dance is described as the consequence of multiple
visits to the International Pavilion of the Peace Exposition. The singular
event marking the start of a new age animated Ueno Park in Tokyo
between March and July 1922.25

Urbanization
While Pacific empire increasingly defined Japanese subjects’ vision of the
world, the rapid industrial expansion of the war years brought equally
remarkable growth to Japan’s major cities. Studies of the new urban
culture of interwar Japan tend to highlight the Great Kantō Earthquake
as the principal demarcation point for a variety of new phenomena such as
cinema, cafés, modern art and the “modern girl.”26 But economic histor-
ians recognize the First World War as the principal catalyst for change in
these years. Although Japan conducted its first national census only in
1920, we know from a variety of other indicators that the country went
through another striking demographic transformation between 1914 and
1919. Japan’s farm population dropped by 2 million during these years.
Between 1913 and 1926, the urban population doubled, from 14 to 22
percent of the national total.27 The population of Tokyo grew by 300,000,

24
Howard Dick, “Japan’s Economic Expansion in the Netherlands Indies between the First
and Second World Wars,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 20, no. 2 (Sept. 1989), 247.
25
Anthony H. Chambers, trans., Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Naomi (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1990), 141–2. The proper reference is, in fact, to the South Seas Pavilion. See
“Yokyō daininki: Nanyōkan de settai no kōcha wa tachimachi ni urikire,” Tōkyō asahi
shinbun, March 3, 1922, evening edition, 2. For more on the Peace Exposition, see
Chapter 7 herein.
26
Miriam Silverberg, for example, stresses a “postearthquake era of economic, social, and
cultural reconstruction.” Silverberg, “The Modern Girl as Militant,” 240. By contrast,
Unno Hiroshi finds important movement in Japan’s avant garde movement before the
earthquake and argues, therefore, that “the Great Earthquake is not necessarily a turning
point.” Unno Hiroshi, Modan toshi Tōkyō: Nihon no 1920 nendai (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha,
1988), 12.
27
Hayami and Kojima, Taishō demogurafii, 19.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Urbanization 43

Figure 2.1 “Population of two million from today.” Celebrating the

spectacular economic growth of Osaka.
Nishida Tōhyaku et al., Meiji Taishō jiji esenryū (Osaka: Kibunkan,
1926), 184.

to 1.01 million between 1908 and 1920.28 And Osaka became the indus-
trial capital of Japan, with a population, by 1925, of 2 million people – the
sixth largest city in the world at the time.29
The 1910–20 years mark the most volatile decade of movement
between agricultural and non-agricultural labor in the history of modern
Japan. During that time, 2.9 million laborers left the agricultural work-
force and 3.566 million entered the ranks of non-agricultural industrial
workers, representing a ratio of 82.7 percent of former agricultural
laborers in the number of new entrants in industrial labor. Significantly,
the next most volatile decade of movement between agricultural and non-
agricultural labor was immediately following the Meiji Renovation,

28
Robert A. Feldman, trans., Nakamura Takafusa, Economic Growth in Prewar Japan (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 125, 147.
29
Imai Seiichi, Taishō demokurashii (Tokyo: Chūō kōron, 1974), 456.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 44 Structural foundations of a New Japan

between 1875 and 1885. But the percentage of former agricultural

laborers among the number of new industrial workers at that time only
came to 71.7.30
This dramatic movement from agricultural to non-agricultural indus-
trial labor during the war marked the emergence of the six great metro-
politan centers of Imperial Japan: Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Kobe
and Yokohama. These centers were officially recognized in 1920, when
the new codes of the Urban Building Law (Shigaichi kenchikubutsu hō) and
the Urban Planning Law (Toshi keikaku hō) were applied to them and the
rapidly urbanizing areas around them. These laws, which had originally
been developed as a Tokyo municipal building code, were, by 1920,
transformed into a national standard of zoning regulations, lot lines for
minimum road width, land readjustment procedures to create uniform
blocks, density and height limits, and restrictions for fire safety.31
In 1920, two out of three Japanese still lived in towns with populations
of 10,000 or less.32 But the comparatively rapid migration to the cities
during the war became the basis for numerous new developments that
would comprise, for the first time in Japanese history, an “urban culture.”
As we have already hinted, a central component of that new culture was an
expanding urban labor force. Historians have long noted the growing
importance of factory labor from the start of the twentieth century.
Typically, this is underscored within a narrative of increasing labor
strife.33 The First World War is particularly important in the rise of this
conflict. The 1914–19 years, after all, mark a pivotal transition from
sporadic labor activism to a genuine national labor movement.
Following the wartime manufacturing boom, the percentage of compa-
nies with over one hundred employees expanded from 46 percent to
53 percent between 1914 and 1922.34 And the number of work stoppages
multiplied, from forty-seven strikes with 5,242 participants in 1913 to 497
walkouts with 63,137 strikers in 1919.35 Japan’s most successful early
labor union, the Friendly Society (Yūaikai), was founded in 1912. But it
was not until August 1919 that the single union Yūaikai became a national
federation of unions, the Greater Japan General Federation of Labor and

30
Numbers from Table 14.6, “Movement of Gainful Workers,” in Ōhkawa and Shinohara,
eds., Patterns of Japanese Economic Development, 246.
31
Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan, 271–2.
32
Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan, 158.
33
See Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, ch. 3.
34
Saraki, Taishō jidai o tazunete mita, 72–3.
35
Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987), 249, appendix I.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Party politics 45

Friendly Society (Dai Nihon rōdō sōdōmei yūaikai). Japan celebrated its
first May Day on May 2, 1920.
The Great War could, in other words, play a greater role in histories of
labor activism in Japan. But the most important story of urban labor does
not necessarily lie in the tale of labor strife. It is, more profoundly, the
story of the transformation of the Japanese body politic. The striking
migration of people to Japan’s six metropolitan centers during the war
became the basis for a true urban culture in postwar Japan. Expansion of
urban labor, in turn, spurred the rise of a Japanese middle class. And a
new culture of consumption materialized to cater to the needs of both.
Domestic consumption did not become the critical driving force of the
Japanese economy until the 1950s and 1960s.36 But the Great War
ushered in a class of consumers and infrastructure of consumption
never before seen in the Japanese empire. Students of Japanese history
regularly learn of the large number of nouveau riche spawned by the
economic boom of the First World War. But although this conspicuous
new entrant in the burgeoning urban landscape captivated the national
press, wealthy individual entrepreneurs were far less significant than the
much larger body of regular white-collar workers who increasingly popu-
lated Japan’s largest cities.
In the early 1920s, Tokyo boasted 40 percent of Japan’s fully funded
firms; Osaka had 18 percent. Through the Meiji era, graduates of the top
two imperial universities, Tokyo and Kyoto, invariably entered the
national bureaucracy. From the First World War, many began staking
their futures in private companies.37 As a result of the immediate postwar
expansion of educational opportunities (see below), women made up an
increasing proportion of the post-Versailles expansion of the middle class.
In the early 1920s, they comprised 10 percent of the workforce in Tokyo’s
central business district, Marunouchi.38

Party politics
Japan’s strikingly new economic and demographic profile following the
war spurred fundamental change in Japanese politics. Historians of mod-
ern Japan rightly note the steady political gains made by champions of
“constitutional government” prior to the First World War. Elder states-
men Itō Hirobumi and Katsura Tarō founded political parties in the first
decade and a half of the twentieth century and laid the foundations for a

36
Mark Metzler, Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism
in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 243.
37
Imai, Taishō demokurashii, 456–7. 38 Ibid., 457.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 46 Structural foundations of a New Japan

two-party system (in 1900 and 1913, respectively). Itō’s party, the
Seiyūkai, made dramatic gains in national support over the same time
through an aggressive program of railway construction.39 And the
Seiyūkai joined Japan’s minor parties in 1913 to bring about another
first in Japanese history: the destruction of an oligarchic cabinet by a
coalition of political parties.
But just as the Great War transformed Japan’s economic profile, it
marks an easily identifiable watershed in Japanese political development.
“Factional politics” (hanbatsu seiji) were well under siege in Japan before
the advent of the First World War. But it was not until after the war that
party politics became viable in Tokyo. For the war offered for the first time
both the language and the political thrust necessary for dramatic political
change. The prewar movement for constitutional politics was a total fail-
ure, declared the editors of the monthly Chūō kōron in January 1916. For
many years, the Japanese state had pursued the German model of milita-
rism (gunkokushugi). As a result, there was a tendency to view citizens as
soldiers. “There are not insignificant obstacles to the natural development
of the individual.” Great nations stood on the foundations of the individ-
ual. For Japan to become such a great nation would require “major
reform” (ichidai kakushin).40
As a first step toward that reform, the most celebrated columnist for the
Chūō kōron offered in the same issue of the journal a convenient new
benchmark for Japanese politics. In his groundbreaking piece titled
“Preaching the Essentials of Constitutional Government and Discussing
the Road to its Fulfillment,” Tokyo University professor Yoshino Sakuzō
clearly defined the most fitting foundation of constitutional government
in Japan as a naturalized version of Western “democracy” (minpon-
shugi).41 According to a later Home Ministry study, following the pub-
lication of Yoshino’s essay, “journalists and intellectuals who did not
engage the subject of minponshugi seemed to lose all legitimacy.”42
Although the language of party politics was established in Japan by
1916, it took a major economic event to ready the political landscape for
a dramatic new advance after the war. Casual observers of Japanese
history are familiar with the most striking consequence of inflationary
pressures during the Great War. Discontent over the skyrocketing price

39
See Mitani, Nihon seitō seiji no keisei and Tetsuo Najita, Hara Kei in the Politics of
Compromise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
40
Editors, “Saishinkai no Taishō ishin,” Chūō kōron, 31, no. 1 (Jan. 1916), 13–14.
41
Yoshino Sakuzō, “Kensei no hongi o toite, sono yūshū no bi o sumasu no michi o ronzu,”
Chūō kōron, 31, no. 1 (Jan. 1916), 17–114.
42
Quoted in Arima, “Kokusaika” no naka no teikoku Nihon, 139.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Party politics 47

of rice brought fishermen’s wives in Toyama Prefecture to the streets at

the end of July 1918 in a protest that would ultimately consume the nation
and require over 100,000 troops to quell. The “Rice Riots” were, on the
one hand, an arresting glimpse of robust economic activity during the war.
From the perspective of Japanese conservatives, on the other hand, they
were a frightening look at the growing power of the people. The most
immediate political consequence of the disturbance was to usher in
Japan’s first true political party cabinet. Seiyūkai Party president Hara
Takashi succeeded General Terauchi Masatake as premier at the end of
September 1918, less than two weeks after the final flames of protest
subsided. Remarkably, Hara’s candidacy was supported by the foremost
kingmaker of the age, elder statesman Yamagata Aritomo.
Yamagata had championed the Ōkuma cabinet in April 1914 as the best
way to deal a deathblow to what he perceived to be the most threatening
political force since its founding in 1900, the Seiyūkai. The Great War
had, however, completely transformed the elder statesman’s priorities. As
Hara himself later noted, Yamagata’s willingness to countenance a
Seiyūkai cabinet in September 1918 stemmed from the realization that a
bureaucratic cabinet like the one Yamagata had promoted under the
leadership of protégé General Terauchi was utterly powerless to deal
with the growing power of the people.43
Historians have, for many years, described the advent of the Hara
cabinet as a major watershed in the history of modern Japan. They have,
just as readily, stressed the shortcomings of the new administration. In
part echoing contemporary observations, interwar specialists have
detailed Hara’s defensive reaction to the increasingly shrill calls for suf-
frage and labor reform and his proclivity to strike compromises with non-
elected elites. But one cannot overstate the significance of the Hara
cabinet departure. Hara was the first prime minister in Japanese history
to hold a seat in the Lower House of the Imperial Diet. And his admin-
istration was the first to be staffed by a majority of party members. As
popular pundit Ōyama Ikuo noted in October 1918, the advent of a
Seiyūkai cabinet should be greeted as a “major political advance” (dai
seijiteki shinpo).44 Most importantly, befitting its status as a cabinet more
closely tied to the people than any of its predecessors, it was the source of
several critical innovations that became indispensable pillars in the foun-
dation of a New Japan.

43
Hara observation from Maeda Renzan, Hara Takashi den; cited in ibid., 154.
44
Ōyama, “Gendai Nihon ni okeru seijiteki shinka to sono shakaiteki haikei,” quoted in
ibid., 157.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 48 Structural foundations of a New Japan

Expanding the public sphere

Hara is known for his aggressive support of railway construction in the
heady days of Seiyūkai growth. But as prime minister, he pursued another
institutional innovation that had implications well beyond the narrow
confines of Seiyūkai power. Students of Meiji are well aware of the pivotal
importance of education in the monumental nation-building enterprise of
the latter nineteenth century.45 The founders of Imperial Japan quickly
introduced compulsory education through the eighth grade and a national
system of imperial universities to build a national community and a cadre
of capable national leaders. Just as these nineteenth-century innovations
were critical in the transformation from a feudal to a modern nation, the
educational initiatives of the Hara administration were pivotal in moving
Japan from nineteenth-century monarchy to a twentieth-century mass
society.
Proclaiming education reform number one among four official policy
priorities, Hara immediately set out to overhaul the educational system.
Between 1912 and 1924, the number of male middle school students
expanded more than twofold, from 128,973 to 272,973.46 By the higher
school and university ordinances of December 1918, the cabinet laid the
foundations for a major expansion of Japanese higher schools, trade
schools and universities. Numbering 104 in 1918, the count of higher
and trade schools in Japan almost doubled to 194 by 1930.47 Among them
were new “technical colleges” (kōgyō gakkō) that offered, among other
things, such practical programs geared toward the new urban culture as
architectural training.48
Between 1912 and 1924, the number of female students in higher
schools expanded more than threefold, from 73,128 to 246,938, bringing
the female population to parity with higher school males.49 The expansion
was facilitated by a dramatic growth in the number of higher schools for
girls between 1918 and 1930, from 420 to 975. Among universities,
private institutions such as Keiō, Waseda, Dōshisha, Chūō and Meiji
received official recognition as universities for the first time. The total
number of officially sanctioned universities leapt from five in 1918 to
forty-six by 1930.50 From 1912 to 1926, the number of university

45
See especially Brian Platt, Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan,
1750–1890 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004).
46
Hayami and Kojima, Taishō demogurafii, 25.
47
From table titled “Zai gakushasū to gakkōsū no suii,” in ibid., 161.
48
Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan, 271.
49
Hayami and Kojima, Taishō demogurafii, 25.
50
Arima, “Kokusaika” no naka no teikoku Nihon, 160–1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Expanding the public sphere 49

Figure 2.2 “Side by side after thirty years of age.” Celebrating female
auditors at Waseda University.
Nishida Tōhyaku et al., Meiji Taishō jiji esenryū (Osaka: Kibunkan,
1926), 119.

professors and students expanded almost sixfold, from 792 teachers and
8,946 students to 4,567 teachers and 52,186 students.51 One may easily
understand why those who scorned the liberal turn of the new postwar
polity frequently directed their ire at the new status of education and
intellectuals in Japan. In 1929, the conservative bi-weekly Nihon oyobi
Nihonjin described the “countless” new schools and students as a “flood”
and lamented that, in an era “addicted to material culture,” schools had
become little more than “job recruiting stations” (shokugyō shōkaijo).52
The journal of the Greater East Culture Association (Daitō bunka kyōkai)
in March 1925 worried that Japan had become a country that “worships
intellectuals.”53
But intellectuals were not the only ones sitting pretty in interwar Japan.
The remarkable growth of educational institutions spurred a rapid expan-
sion generally in the public sphere. Intellectual historians have long located
the emergence of an unofficial public sphere in the nineteenth century.54

51
Hayami and Kojima, Taishō demogurafii, 29.
52
Miyamoto Kantarō, “Ijin no shijuku o matsu,” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, Aug. 15, 1929, 117.
53
“Jiji tanpyō,” Daitō bunka, 2, no. 3 (March 1925), 44.
54
See Andrew E. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 7. More recently, see Kyu Hyun Kim,
The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early
Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 50 Structural foundations of a New Japan

But the First World War marks a clear divide between an era of public
discussion among officially recognized elites and that of a wide-open
playing field. While the post-World War I era witnessed the rise of political
parties to national power, it concurrently saw the emergence of countless
non-party political associations. Primarily organized around one particular
policy interest, these associations broadened the parameters of the previ-
ously narrow discussion among sanctioned elites into a genuinely national
debate.
Among the best known of these are those that emerged upon college
campuses during the Great War. Mitani Taichirō long ago noted the
pivotal importance of such Tokyo University-based groups as the New
Man Society (Shinjinkai) and the Dawn Society (Reimeikai).55 Waseda
University produced the People of the Dawn Society (Kyōminkai) and the
Waseda Builders’ Alliance (Waseda kensetsusha dōmei). But we know from
Itō Takashi that the associations ran the full range of the political spec-
trum, from radical left (North Wind Society [Kitakazekai], Red Wave
Society [Sekirankai]) to liberal (Reform Alliance [Kaizō dōmei], Japanese
League of Nations Association [Nihon kokusai renmei kyōkai]) to conser-
vative (Fraternity of Robust Nation [Kōkoku dōshikai], Greater East
Culture Association [Daitō bunka kyōkai], National Foundation Society
[Kokuhonsha]) to radical right (Society of Young and Old [Rōsōkai],
Resilience Society [Yūzonsha]).56 One may easily understand why schol-
ars continue to perceive the 1920s as a decade of unprecedented turbu-
lence and “crisis.” Not even in the early Meiji period do we find a
comparable number of disparate voices animating the body politic. The
critical change in interwar Japan, however, was not a new level of national
anxiety but a massive new volume in the national discussion.

Print media
Next to unparalleled expansion in the educational infrastructure and
emergence of countless new special interest groups, transformation of
the print media played a pivotal role in spurring an unprecedented wide-
ranging national debate after the First World War. Most historical anal-
yses of modern Japanese print media highlight the formative years of
Meiji, when the dissemination of information went from periodic news-
sheets and pamphlets to regularized newspapers produced on modern

55
Mitani, Taishō demokurashii ron.
56
See Itō Takashi, Shōwa shoki seijishi kenkyū (Tōkyō daigaku shuppanka, 1969) and Itō,
Taishōki “kakushin” ha no seiritsu.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Print media 51

presses.57 Numerous studies have illustrated the degree to which war

affected the Japanese media the way it did the print news of other indus-
trialized societies – by facilitating rapid expansion and modernization.58
But scholars have yet to accentuate the pivotal importance of the First
World War in the history of Japanese news.59 To the extent that they do
discuss the print media in wartime and interwar Japan, historians focus
not on the remarkable new scale of activity but upon a new level of
government regulation.60 But just as one may interpret the stridency of
debate in interwar Japan as evidence less of “crisis” than of an unprece-
dented level of mass involvement, one may understand greater official
regulation in the 1920s as a natural consequence of the exponential
growth of the print media. It is less a sign of a narrowing, in other
words, than of a real expansion of the national debate.61 Indeed, one
does not have to look far to locate contemporary proclamations about
the exciting possibilities for, and also criticism of the overwhelming power
of, the national media in interwar Japan.62 Following Crown Prince

57
See James L. Huffman, Politics of the Meiji Press: The Life of Fukuchi Gen’ichirō (Honolulu:
University Press of Hawai‘i, 1980) and James L. Huffman, Creating a Public: People and
Press in Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai‘i, 1997).
58
For the first Sino-Japanese War, see Stewart Lone, Japan’s First Modern War: Army and
Society in the Conflict with China, 1894–95 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). For the
expansion of media in the context of the Manchurian Incident, see Louise Young, Japan’s
Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998).
59
Gregory Kasza acknowledges “tremendous” growth in Japan’s periodical press from 1918
without mentioning the First World War. Gregory J. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media
in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 28.
60
Gregory Kasza identifies the significance of the First World War as its “total war “char-
acter, which “generated new state control strategies to prepare for defense or aggression.”
Ibid., xiii. Sasaki Takashi titles his chapter on the interwar media “Heimin saishō no
medeya kontorōru.” Sasaki Takashi, Medeya to kenryoku (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha,
1999), ch. 5. Suzuki Kenji completely ignores the impressive growth in scale of newspaper
circulation over time to offer a history of progressive capitulation to state censorship.
Suzuki Kenji, Sensō to shinbun (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 1995).
61
Mitani Taichirō, likewise, accentuates the importance of expansion in the print media
around the First World War. His point, however, is not that this facilitated a much larger
national discussion but that it enhanced the influence of the intellectuals who championed
democracy in Japan. Mitani, Taishō demokurashii ron, 29.
62
As for possibilities inherent in media, Yamawaki Higher School for Women president
Yamawaki Fusako argued in 1919 that, “in addition to reporting simple facts, it is
important for newspaper articles to emphasize firm critical powers (kakko taru hihan-
ryoku).” Yamawaki Fusako, “Takai kenshiki de fujin no mitaru shinbunshi,” Yomiuri
shinbun, Jan. 5, 1919; reprinted in Nakajima, comp., Shinbun shūroku Taishōshi, vol. 7, 6.
In terms of criticism of media power, the Japan Social Problems Research Center’s Ōi
Kazuya in 1929 cited the inability to control the press as a critical liability of political party
cabinets. Ōi Kazuya, “Seitō kokunanron” (Pamphlet by Nihon shakai mondai kenkyūsho,
Dec. 1929) 7–8. Saitō Makoto monjo 172–4. Kensei shiryōshitsu, National Diet Library,
Tokyo.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 52 Structural foundations of a New Japan

Hirohito’s “profound interest in trends in public opinion,” the Imperial

Household Ministry in October 1924 invited Tokyo University professor
Onozuka Kiheiji to conduct a two-hour lecture in palace chambers on
“The Power of Public Opinion.”63
As we have seen with the economy, empire, urbanization, party politics,
education and the public sphere, the First World War marks for the
Japanese print media a critical transition from the nineteenth to the
twentieth century: from an era of experimentation to one of truly mass
circulation. In 1905, Japanese dailies had a circulation of 1.63 million a
day. By 1924, this had grown almost fourfold, to 6.25 million.64 The
expansion was facilitated by dramatic changes in newspaper content
made expressly to appeal to a mass readership. The dailies converted
their editorial pages and economic coverage from formal prose to the
vernacular.65 And they vastly expanded the content of their “society”
sections from simple police reports to attempts to relate any and all
developments in politics, thought, society, finance and economy to peo-
ple’s daily lives. They renamed what had been known as “Third page
articles” (sanmen kiji) – now, “Society articles” (shakai kiji) – and reor-
ganized them to a central place among daily offerings. Whereas all
Japanese correspondents who had covered the Russo-Japanese War
were political reporters, by the First World War the majority hailed from
the dailies’ society sections. Following the war, an unprecedented number
of correspondents covered international conferences and were based in
foreign lands.66 Foreign news in Japan depended upon unreliable means
of transmission before and during the war.67 But observers after 1919
expressed wonder that “yesterday’s problems in Europe and the United
States are reported in our papers today.”68

63
“Onozuka hakase no kōen ‘yoron no chikara’ o gochōkō,” Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun
(evening edition); reprinted in Uchikawa Yoshimi and Matsushima Eiichi, comps.,
Taishō nyūsu jiten, 8 vols. (Tokyo: Mainichi komyunikeshionsu, 1986–9), vol. 6, 343.
64
Sharon H. Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan: Ishibashi Tanzan and His Teachers, 1905–
1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 19.
65
Saraki, Taishō jidai o tazinete mita, 216.
66
Midoro Masuichi, ed., Meiji, Taishō shi, vol. 1, Genronhen (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha,
1930), 320–3. Compare the emphasis here on the First World War with Imai Seiichi’s
preference for the Great Kantō Earthquake as the principal catalyst of expansion in
Japan’s major dailies. Imai, Taishō demokurashii, 464–5.
67
Note, for example, the disclaimer published by the monthly Gaikō jihō at the outbreak of
the war stating that news of events in Europe would, henceforth, experience a month-and-
a-half to two-month delay, due to the unreliability of the telegraph and to the increased
time for European papers to travel across the Atlantic, the USA and the Pacific to Japan
(rather than through the usual Siberian route, which was now closed to all but Russian
papers). “Kinkyū shakoku,” Gaikō jihō, 237 (Aug. 1, 1914), 105.
68
“Henshū kōki,” Sekai to Warera, vol. 4, no. 9 (Sept. 1929), 437.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Print media 53

As if to confirm the new power and presence of Japan’s dailies, Yoshino

Sakuzō noted in 1919 that “there is nothing more powerful in fashioning
public opinion than newspaper coverage.”69 Japan’s first school of jour-
nalism, Japan Newspaper Academy (Nihon shinbun gakuin) opened its
doors in the 1920s.70 And the expense of servicing a burgeoning press
presence skyrocketed. The city of Osaka struggled to pay 15,000 yen to
accommodate reporters covering army grand maneuvers in 1919.71
Yoshino’s rivals on the political right viewed this growing power with
fear. “Japanese society today,” declared the journal of the Greater East
Culture Association in 1925, “is an age of newspaper absolutism, news-
paper oppression and newspaper domination (shinbun sensei, shinbun ōbō,
shinbun bakko).”72
Most of Japan’s popular general monthlies had their start before the
First World War. But, like their daily counterparts, these journals profited
immensely from the European conflict. The most widely circulating
monthly, the Central Review (Chūō kōron), grew from only 5,000 copies
during the Russo-Japanese War to 120,000 in 1919.73 And the standard
rate for novellas in these publications quintupled from one to five yen per
essay between 1917 and 1923.74 The wartime economic boom brought an
explosion of economic journals after 1914. And, according to the editor of
the premier economic publication, the Oriental Economist (Tōyō keizai
shinpō), these focused for the first time on private economic concerns,
offering stock quotations and liberal investment advice.75
Several new general publications sprouted after the war with the express
aim of engaging the new debate over reform: publications with such
arresting titles as Transformation (Kaizō), Us (Warera) and Liberation
(Kaihō). And these and others mirrored Japan’s dailies in transforming

69
Yoshino Sakuzō, “Shōdai, shōgen, rokusoku,” Chūō kōron, 34, no. 10 (Oct. 1919), 146.
This point is made by a number of observers throughout the decade. According to the
editors of Sekai to warera, “the influence that newspapers today exercise over public
opinion is frighteningly large (osoroshiku dai).” “Shinbunshi to seishinteki busō kaijō,”
Sekai to warera, 1, no. 3 (March 1926), 7.
70
Ōkubo Ken establishes a ten-year life span for the Japan Newspaper Academy, from 1932
to 1942. Ōkubo Ken, “Senzen Nihon no janarisumu sukūru, Shinbun Gakuin, ni kansuru
kenkyū – Gakuhō no shiry bunseki o chūshin ni,” Masters thesis, Chūō University, 2010;
according to the monthly Shinbun oyobi shinbun kisha, however, the Academy’s first class
graduated in March 1928. Editors, “Ugoku koto yoshi, Ōi ni yoshi,” Shinbun oyobi shinbun
kisha, 9, no. 4 (April 1928), 1.
71
Tsunoda Jun, comp., Ugaki Kazushige nikki, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1968),
vol. 1, 273.
72
“Jiji tanpyō,” 46. 73 Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan, 19.
74
From an observation by writer Hirotsu Kazuo. Cited in Mitani, Taishō demokurashii
ron, 43n3.
75
Ishibashi Tanzan, Tanzan kaisō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1985), 247.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 54 Structural foundations of a New Japan

their content to appeal to an increasingly mass, consumer audience. In

January 1923, novelist Kikuchi Kan launched a new journal to cater to the
new leisure culture of urban Japan – Literary Age (Bungei shunjū). With its
short, lively pieces, innovative roundtables and low cost (10 sen, com-
pared to the Chūō kōron’s 1 yen 80 sen), Bungei shunjū’s circulation sky-
rocketed from 3,000 to 100,000 in only two years.
But even this paled by comparison with the most celebrated new mass
journal after the First World War. In 1925, Kodansha founder Noma Seiji
launched what he hoped to be the “most interesting, most useful and
highest circulating journal of Japan.” With columns geared to the pleasures
and pains of daily life (“The Lesson of My Success,” “The Failures of Lord
Kōmon,” etc.) and substituting a story-telling format for the moralizing
tone of standard journals, Kingu surpassed all expectations with an extra-
ordinary circulation of 740,000.76 As former Railway Ministry bureaucrat
Tsurumi Yūsuke noted in 1927, the new journal’s significance was not
simply that it sold well. “It is the major social phenomenon that an institu-
tion of public opinion that reaches all corners of Japan has emerged.”77
Adding to the exponential growth of both Japanese dailies and general
monthlies was a remarkable volume of new special interest journals and
pamphlets during the era. Every new special interest group either pub-
lished their own house journal or issued pamphlets outlining their posi-
tions on particular issues throughout the decade. Between 1918 and 1932,
the number of journals registered under the Newspaper Law almost
quadrupled, from 3,123 to 11,118.78 And special events triggered a
torrent of new pamphlets promoting every angle of a particular cause. In
the run-up to the first universal male suffrage election in February 1928,
the Minseitō Party produced twenty pamphlets critiquing various aspects
of the Tanaka cabinet’s policies, reaching an astounding circulation of
4 million. The ruling Seiyūkai Party distributed 500,000 copies of six
different brochures. And the Rōdo nōmintō (Labor and Agricultural
Party) produced two pamphlets, with a circulation of 200,000.79

The new media

The First World War thus had a transformative effect upon an old news
format, the print media. But it was instrumental, as well, in advancing an

76
Imai, Taishō demokurashii, 462–4.
77
Tsurumi, “Kingu no jichō o nozomu,” Kingu, 3, no. 7 (July 1927), 220.
78
Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945, 28.
79
“Zenkoku ni hirogaru fusen no bunsho gassen,” Ōsaka mainichi shinbun, Feb. 12, 1928;
reprinted in Uchikawa Yoshimi and Matsuo Takayoshi, comps., Shōwa nyūsu jiten, 8 vols.
(Tokyo: Mainichi Communications, 1990–4), vol. 1, 255.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 The new media 55

entirely new form of communication: the radio. Although research into

radio waves began in the 1890s, it was not until the Great War that wide
use was made of the wireless telegraph. The first wireless telegraph
between Japan and the USA went into operation in November 1916 and
was hailed by the Japanese press as “a new epoch in the opening of Japan to
the outside world.”80 Following the successful use of Morse Code over
the wires during the war, research into voice transmission began in earnest
after the conflict. The first radio broadcasts began in the United States in
1920 and were quickly followed by transmissions in Britain, Germany, the
Soviet Union and France.
Although national radio broadcasts began in Japan only in 1925, the
new medium quickly became a critical facilitator of the new national
dialogue of the interwar years. Japan specialists are already familiar with
radio as an important instrument of mobilization during the “Fifteen
Years’ War.”81 And Gregory Kasza has detailed the largely bureaucratic
initiative that created the basic institutional framework for Japanese radio
in the interwar years.82 But, despite the impressive arrangements made for
bureaucratic guidance of radio and ready support given by broadcasters
for the new trajectory of war in the 1930s, the new medium was not merely
a mechanism of state control. While recognizing the military application
of the telegraph, most historians of Meiji today stress not its war-making
potential but its critical role in spurring national integration.83 Likewise,
when placed within its proper historical context, radio may be seen as an
integral component of the dramatic interwar transformation of Imperial
Japan. Together with the growth of the Japanese economy and expansion
of education and the print media, radio constituted a pivotal pillar of the
new mass urban culture of the post-World War I years.
Between 1926 and 1932, the principal government-sponsored broad-
caster, NHK, increased its branch stations from three to nineteen. Over
the same period, the number of radio receivers rose from 361,066 to over

80
According to “Jap Wireless Sent Wilson,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 16, 1916, 14.
81
See Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945, chs. 4, 10 and Young,
Japan’s Total Empire, ch. 3. Herbert Bix describes radio fundamentally as a technology
“harnessed to the glorification of the monarchy.” Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making
of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 187. For the development of radio in
one of Japan’s principal colonies, see Michael E. Robinson, “Broadcasting in Korea,
1924–1937: Colonial Modernity and Cultural Hegemony,” in Sharon A. Minichiello,
ed., Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930 (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 358–78.
82
Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945, ch. 4.
83
See, for example, Sydney Crawcour, “Economic Change in the Nineteenth Century,” in
Marius B. Jansen, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5, The Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge University Press, 1989), 609.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 56 Structural foundations of a New Japan

Figure 2.3 “Radio.” One of early twentieth-century Japan’s most

accomplished architects offers a whimsical look at one of interwar
Japan’s greatest new pastimes.
Itō Chūta, Saikin jūnenkan mangareki (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1928), 1.

1.4 million. By 1932, 25.7 percent of all metropolitan households owned a

radio.84 As early as June 1925, the print media warned that too many
hours in front of a radio receiver could have the same deleterious effects
upon a listener’s hearing as the long hours spent on the phone by switch-
board operators.85 Although such reports reflected, in part, a competitive
relationship between newspapers and the new media,86 from the start, voice
and print developed a largely synergistic relationship. Newspapers and
journals freely advertised new programming, and special radio addresses
regularly commented upon the most popular debates circulating in print.
Radio offered a wide variety of musical entertainment and coverage of
sports and, from its start, highlighted most of the principal political and
diplomatic events of the day. When the government commandeered radio
broadcasting after 1939,87 it was not a logical extension of the pattern of
radio development from 1925. Rather, it represented a significant change

84
Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945, 88.
85
“Rajio kikisugiru to mimi ga tōku naru,” Yonezawa shinbun, June 12, 1925, reprinted in
Watanabe, comp., Shinbun shūroku Taishōshi, vol. 13, 252.
86
The print media, for example, attempted to halt special radio reports following the
Manchurian Incident.
87
With the establishment of the Situation Broadcast Planning Conference in July 1939. See
Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945, 253–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 The new media 57

in the character of the medium. Japanese man of letters Kiyosawa Kiyoshi

hinted at the dramatic contrast when, in 1942, he lamented that “the radio
is so dull, I can no longer bear to listen.”88
Like radio, film is typically associated with the new culture of consump-
tion in interwar Japan. Initially introduced into Japan in 1896, film did not
become a mass medium until after the First World War. The principal
technical innovations and viewing infrastructure for film were already in
place by the early 1900s.89 But, as was the case in the United States,
general diffusion of film culture depended upon rapid urbanization,
which, as we have seen, came to Japan between 1910 and 1920, partic-
ularly during the war years. As in the USA, Japan’s first journals devoted
to matters cinematic appeared in the early 1910s.90 And, like their
American and British counterparts, Japanese moviegoers began flocking
to the theaters in record numbers during the First World War.
Capitalizing upon the new disposable income generated by the war,
movie producers and theater managers in Japan increasingly catered to
working-class tastes, work schedules and budgets.91 By 1926, the paying
public for films came to 153.7 million.92
Like other benchmarks of Taishō culture, film is often associated with
post-earthquake Tokyo. But as Edward Seidensticker points out, Chaplin
caramels were a gold mine for their maker, the Meiji Confectionary
Company, long before the natural disaster. And Harold Lloyd glasses
made it into popular song on the eve of the earthquake.93 More appropri-
ately, most purveyors of Taishō culture recognize film as one of the
principal media for introducing a new level of American culture in inter-
war Japan.
Given the events of the 1930s, historians are apt to characterize the new
post-Versailles intrusion of American culture as a captivating but fleeting
fad, nothing more. Indeed, contemporary critics invariably condemned

88
Yamamoto Yoshihiko, ed., Ankoku nikki, 1942–1945 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990), 11
(diary entry of Dec. 12, 1942).
89
The first permanent structure in Japan built exclusively for viewing films appeared in
1903 – the Electric Theater (denkikan) in Asakusa. Significantly, this came several years
before the USA and Britain moved away from makeshift storefront nickelodeons. Joseph
L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and History (Princeton University
Press, 1982), 26.
90
In the USA, Motion Picture Story Magazine debuted in 1911. Japan’s first motion picture
magazine, Film Record, appeared in 1913. Ibid., 36.
91
Jeffrey E. Hanes, “Media Culture in Taishō Osaka,” in Minichiello, ed., Japan’s
Competing Modernities, 272.
92
Official figures from the Japanese Home Ministry. Cited in Kasza, The State and the Mass
Media in Japan, 1918–1945, 54.
93
Seidensticker, Low City, High City, 274.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 58 Structural foundations of a New Japan

the shallowness of the new trends.94 But we cannot divorce this cultural
development from the enormous geopolitical shifts of the Great War. The
ubiquity of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Harold Lloyd in interwar
Japan marked less a passing craze than another potent symbol of the
wartime shift of power from Europe to the United States. Indeed, while
European states focused upon war, Hollywood, for the first time, came to
set the international standard for film. Japanese statesmen after 1919, as
we shall see, enthusiastically subscribed to a new multi-national world
order as the vanguard of civilization. Likewise, fans in Tokyo fawned over
Harold Lloyd because he represented the cutting edge of cultural
development.

Synopsis
Just as the First World War transformed international politics, it had a
direct effect upon the Japanese nation. While the conflict marked a per-
ceptible decline of Europe, rise of the United States and a new conceptu-
alization of international relations, it spurred in Japan a qualitative change
in the structure of the Japanese economy, empire, urban landscape,
politics, public sphere and the media. Wartime and immediate post-
Versailles Japan, in other words, mirrored the mid nineteenth-century
enterprise of nation-building not simply in censure of the old and exal-
tation of the new. It was accompanied by tangible developments in the
national infrastructure. Although less dramatic, perhaps, than the
nineteenth-century leap from feudal realm to modern state, the Great
War transformed a small, regional agrarian polity into a world-class
empire and mass consumer society.
Because of the imminent transition to war in the 1930s, historians have
not underscored the pivotal consequences of the Great War in Japan. Few
have equated the war and its immediate aftermath with the extraordinary
mid nineteenth-century enterprise in national construction. But just as a
variety of interests, public and private, rallied following the fall of the
Tokugawa dynasty to construct the basic infrastructure of a modern
state, a broad cross-section of society after 1919 leapt at the opportunities
afforded by the First World War.
The basic foundations for a New Japan in the 1920s were, in other
words, strong. And it was this strength that struck fear in the heart of some

94
One of the most conspicuous of these, of course, is Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s serial novel from
1924, Chijn no ai, where the Americanized heroine, Naomi is identified as a “Yankee girl,”
in sharp contrast with the “subtle beauty from Italy or France.” Chambers, trans.,
Jun’ichirō, Naomi 92.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Synopsis 59

members of the established elite. There was no shortage of anxiety in

interwar Japan over the direction of the nation. But, contrary to prevailing
orthodoxy, that anxiety had less to do with the limitations of the new
trajectory than with its seemingly limitless horizons. President of the Army
War College Major General Ugaki Kazushige worried in 1919 not about
the incompetence of the new breed of opinion makers, but about their
strength. “There is,” he groaned, “a precarious future for the Empire,
which is swayed by opinion leaders who make a living through news-
papers, journals and speeches.”95 As we shall see, the strength of these
foundations ensured that interwar Japan went a very long way toward
adapting to the standards of the new world order, just as the founders of
modern Japan very capably constructed a “European-style empire” in
Asia in the nineteenth century.96

95
Tsunoda, comp., Ugaki Kazushige nikki, vol. 1, 195.
96
To quote, again, Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru in 1887. See Jansen, “Modernization and
Foreign Policy in Meiji Japan,” 175.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794794.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press