This research examines the emergence of political institutions in Japan in the 1910s and 1920s and the impact of political development in the country as a consequence of the way in which the institutions developed. One view of the dynamics is that through the 1920s Japan was developing democratic institutions at home and emerging as a status-quo-oriented country in geopolitical terms, and that the economic downturn in the 1920s affected internal politics in ways that enabled the rise of a policy of militarist imperialism and ultimately to the geopolitical aggressions of the 1930s. Other interpretations are also possible, as this research will show.
The forces driving Japanese national development in the first decades of the 20th century can be distinguished from the aggressive position of Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. Rule by oligarchs in the Meiji period progressed to a form of parliamentary government in the 1920s, but then shifted to totalitarianism and total war in the 1930s and 1940s. The transformation of Japanese political culture from Meiji rule toward parliamentary rule can be seen as being based on appeals to the special qualities of Japanese society, people, and historical traditions. Pyle (p. 161f) refers to the mobilization of the nation along these lines, also noting the shift in Japanese political institutions that had been originally conceived in terms of Tokugawa feudalism but that increasingly became subject to partisan politics (with the emperor a definite presence in both models).
In part, the shift toward party politics was a function of the shifting power base of the oligarchs, but there were certain constants of national experience present. The abstract goal of Japanese leadership in Asia, manifest in Japan's well-known takeover of Korea in 1910, was never abandoned. In the aftermath of Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1906, "the majority strongly favored improvement of Japan's continental posit...