09 │ Taishō Democracy and the Turn to Militarism — A Decade of Hope, and Why It Did Not Last

🗳️Article 9 │ Taishō Democracy and the Turn to Militarism
The 1920s — the decade in which karate was carried to mainland Japan and spread through the universities (see Articles 6 and 7) — coincided with what Japanese historians call “Taishō democracy” (大正デモクラシー, Taishō demokurashī): an age of parliamentary politics, liberal urban culture, and international cooperation. Yet from the end of that decade Japan turned, with remarkable speed, toward militarism, and karate too was absorbed into the wartime mobilization of the body. This article surveys the politics and thought of this sharply oscillating age.

🧭Orientation for readers new to Japanese history

Era names. This article runs from the late Meiji period (1868–1912) through the whole Taishō period (1912–1926) and into the early Shōwa period (1926–1989). Era names are always paired with the Western calendar year.
“Democracy” under an emperor. Japan’s Meiji Constitution (1889) made the emperor sovereign. The liberal currents of the 1910s–20s therefore could not call themselves “democracy” (which implies popular sovereignty) without appearing to attack the throne. This is why thinkers coined careful alternative terms — and why the whole movement rested on an unstable foundation, as we will see.
A movement, not a regime. “Taishō democracy” is a label applied later by historians to a loose set of trends, not the name of any government or party. Its beginning and end are debated.
Why this matters for karate. Karate reached Tokyo precisely during this open, cosmopolitan moment, and was received by university students as part of a modern urban culture. When that culture gave way to militarism, karate was reorganized — like every other martial art — into a tool of national-spiritual training. The arc of this article is the arc that carried karate from the liberal campus to the wartime parade ground.

What Was “Taishō Democracy”?

Taishō democracy is an umbrella term for the political, intellectual, and social currents — favoring parliamentary government, liberalism, and international cooperation — that ran from the end of the Meiji period through the Taishō period and into the early Shōwa years. Scholars dispute its exact span, but in the broad sense it is commonly dated from the popular movements after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) to around the Manchurian Incident (1931) or the May 15 Incident (1932).

Its central ideas were the following.

Yoshino Sakuzō’s (吉野作造) “minponshugi” (民本主義, 1916): the principle that, whoever formally holds sovereignty, government should be conducted in the interest of, and with regard to the will of, the people.
Minobe Tatsukichi’s (美濃部達吉) “emperor-as-organ theory” (天皇機関説, from 1912): the doctrine that the emperor is the highest organ of the state-as-legal-person and is therefore bound by the constitution. This was the mainstream of constitutional scholarship at the time.
Party cabinet government: the first full-fledged party cabinet was formed under Hara Takashi (原敬) in 1918.
Universal manhood suffrage: the 1925 law granted the vote to all men aged 25 and over. Women’s suffrage was not achieved.

📝Why a special word for “democracy”? Under the Meiji Constitution the emperor, not the people, was sovereign. The ordinary word for democracy (minshu-shugi, 民主主義) literally centers on “the people as masters,” which collided head-on with that doctrine. Yoshino therefore chose minponshugi — roughly “people-as-the-base-ism” — which demanded that politics serve the people’s welfare without asserting that the people are sovereign. The verbal tiptoeing is itself the clearest sign of how much liberal reform had to operate within the imperial framework, never against it.

📝The “emperor-as-organ” theory. This sounds abstract but mattered enormously. To call the emperor an “organ” (imagine the state as a body and the emperor as its highest organ) was to say that he acts through and within the constitution — which in practice legitimated rule by the elected Diet and the cabinet. When this theory was violently repudiated in 1935 (see below), it signaled that constitutional government itself was being abandoned.

Society and Culture in the Taishō Period

The Taishō period saw rapid urbanization and the growth of a middle class, and with them the flowering of a modern civic culture.

“Modern girls” and “modern boys” (moga and mobo): urban youth culture — Western dress, cafés, jazz, cinema.
Mass magazines and newspapers: million-circulation magazines such as King (founded 1925).
The start of radio broadcasting (1925).
Literary movements such as the Shirakaba (“White Birch”) school and the Neo-Sensualists — individualist and modernist.
The women’s movement: led by figures such as Hiratsuka Raichō and Ichikawa Fusae.
The labor movement: the Yūaikai and its successor union federation; a sharp rise in labor disputes.
The inflow of socialism and communism: the Japanese Communist Party was founded (1922); the Peace Preservation Law was enacted (1925).

That karate was transplanted to the mainland during these same years is significant. Funakoshi Gichin’s (船越義珍) 1922 demonstration at the Ministry of Education’s Physical Education Exhibition (運動体育展覧会, undō taiiku tenrankai), the founding of the Keiō University tūdī research society in 1924, and the subsequent spread to major universities such as Tokyo Imperial University all unfolded within the urban and campus culture of the late Taishō and early Shōwa years. Karate had, in part, the character of being received as one fashionable element of modern city life by educated young men in Tokyo (Kadekaru 2009).

World War I and the Wartime Boom

Because World War I (1914–1918) was fought in Europe, Japan — though it entered on the Allied side — was spared fighting on its own soil and enjoyed an export-driven wartime boom (taisen keiki).

Japan seized Germany’s leasehold on the Shandong Peninsula (Jiaozhou Bay, with the port of Qingdao) and Germany’s South Sea Islands (its Pacific possessions north of the equator). It retained the Pacific islands after the war as a League of Nations mandate, while the German rights in Shandong — transferred to Japan at the Treaty of Versailles — were returned to China in 1922.
Industrial output surged; new business magnates and nouveaux riches (narikin) appeared.
The urban middle class — the social base of Taishō democracy — expanded.

But economic blows then followed in succession: the postwar recession (1920), the Great Kantō Earthquake (1923), the financial crisis (1927), and the Great Depression (1929). These laid the ground for the social anxiety and the rise of the military during the Shōwa Depression (from 1930).

The Age of International Cooperation

Through the 1920s Japan followed a course of international cooperation.

Signing of the Treaty of Versailles (1919): Japan took part as one of the five great powers.
Permanent member of the Council of the League of Nations (1920).
The Washington Conference (1921–1922): the Four-Power Treaty, the Nine-Power Treaty, and the naval limitation treaty.
The London Naval Treaty (1930).

The representative figure was Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijūrō (幣原喜重郎) and his cooperative diplomacy (“Shidehara diplomacy,” 1924–1927 and 1929–1931). This was a line of securing Japanese interests through cooperation with the Western powers — and one the military attacked as “weak-kneed diplomacy.”

📝“Cooperative diplomacy” and its enemies. The 1920s arms-control treaties were genuinely popular abroad and saved Japan money, but they also capped the size of its navy below American and British levels and required restraint in China. To naval hard-liners and army officers, accepting foreign-imposed limits looked like national humiliation. The label “weak-kneed diplomacy” (nanjaku gaikō) became a powerful weapon for discrediting party government itself — a reminder that the attack on liberalism often arrived dressed as wounded national pride.

The Turn to Militarism

Entering the 1930s, the situation changed with great speed.

Economic factors

The collapse of exports caused by the Great Depression (1929).
Rural immiseration (crop failures in the northeast; impoverished families selling daughters into service or prostitution).
A sharp rise in unemployment.

Political factors

The Manchurian Incident (September 1931): using the self-staged Liutiaohu (Liutiaogou) Incident as a pretext, the Kwantung Army occupied all of Manchuria.
The founding of Manchukuo (March 1932): the last Qing emperor, Aisin-Gioro Puyi (愛新覚羅溥儀), was installed as chief executive (later emperor).
The May 15 Incident (May 1932): young naval officers assassinated Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (犬養毅). Party cabinet government came to an end.
Withdrawal from the League of Nations (1933): in protest at the Lytton Report.
The February 26 Incident (February 1936): an attempted coup by young army officers; many senior figures of the government were killed.
The Second Sino-Japanese War (from 1937): ignited by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, it widened into all-out war.
The National Mobilization Law (1938).
The Tripartite Pact (1940) among Japan, Germany, and Italy.
The Pacific War (December 1941 – August 1945).

Ideological factors

The “movement to clarify the national essence” (国体明徴運動, 1935): the emperor-as-organ theory was denounced as “contrary to the national essence.” Minobe Tatsukichi’s books were banned and he was driven to resign his seat in the House of Peers.
The rise of “imperial-way” philosophy and kokutai theory: the Ministry of Education published Kokutai no hongi (国体の本義, “Cardinal Principles of the National Essence,” 1937).
The Imperial Rule Assistance Association (大政翼賛会, 1940): a state-sponsored body of national unity formed after the existing parties dissolved themselves — the symbolic end of party politics.
The tightening of thought control: revisions of the Peace Preservation Law (1928, 1941); the suppression of intellectuals, as in the Yokohama Incident.

📝What is kokutai? Kokutai (国体), often translated “national essence” or “national polity,” was the idea that Japan possessed a unique and sacred character centered on an unbroken imperial line, binding ruler and ruled into one family-state. Vague by design, it functioned as an unanswerable trump card: once an idea — or a person — could be branded “contrary to the kokutai,” debate was over. The 1935 assault on the emperor-as-organ theory, the 1937 Kokutai no hongi, and wartime mobilization all drew on this concept.

📝A structural flaw: the “independence of the supreme command.” Under the Meiji Constitution, command of the armed forces (統帥権, tōsuiken) belonged directly to the emperor and lay outside the control of the civilian cabinet and the Diet. In practice this meant the army and navy could act — as the Kwantung Army did in Manchuria in 1931 — without, and even against, the elected government’s wishes. Many historians regard this absence of civilian control as one of the deepest reasons Taishō democracy could be overturned so quickly.

Budō and Militarism Joined

Amid the turn to militarism, the martial arts were rebuilt as instruments for cultivating the national spirit.

The Dai Nippon Butoku Kai (大日本武徳会, Greater Japan Martial Virtue Society) was brought under state control, becoming an official government-linked body through its 1942 reorganization.
School martial arts were made compulsory: from 1931, kendō and jūdō became required subjects for boys in middle schools and normal schools; under the National School (kokumin gakkō) system from 1941, martial arts were placed within the “physical-training” subject (tairen-ka), given concrete form by the 1942 teaching guidelines.
The vogue of “bushidō” (武士道) discourse: Nitobe Inazō’s (新渡戸稲造) Bushido: The Soul of Japan (in English, 1900; Japanese translation, 1908) was widely read, and the martial arts came to be identified with the way of the samurai.
Martial artists were sent to comfort troops at the front and to give instruction in military settings.

Karate was no exception. In 1933 the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai began to treat tūdī-jutsu and karate-jutsu as recognized martial arts (budō), and in the latter half of the 1930s karate was connected to the Butoku Kai system through the granting of titles and the establishment of an Okinawa branch. This was also its incorporation into the wartime regime of total martial-arts mobilization. By the 1940s, with students conscripted and sent to the front, the activities of the university tūdī clubs were severely curtailed as well.

📝A bitter irony for karate. Karate had only just arrived in Tokyo as a fashionable, modern campus pursuit (see above). Within little more than a decade it was being folded into the same wartime apparatus that mobilized kendō and jūdō — recognized as budō, attached to the state-run Butoku Kai, and ultimately interrupted altogether as its young practitioners were sent to war. The liberal moment that opened the door for karate, and the militarist moment that constrained it, were barely a generation apart.

How Should We View the “Defeat” of Taishō Democracy?

Why did the parliamentary politics and international cooperation of the 1920s collapse in the 1930s? Historians offer several interpretations.

A structural reading: the decisive forces were economic — depression, rural distress, population pressure.
An institutional reading: the flaw lay in the Meiji constitutional order — the independence of the supreme command and the absence of civilian control.
An intellectual-history reading: liberalism’s intellectual foundations were thin and were easily displaced by kokutai theory.
An international-relations reading: the Anglo-American-centered world order was perceived as disadvantageous to Japan as a latecomer.
A media reading: after the Manchurian Incident, newspapers and radio swung over to support for the military.

Each interpretation is partly correct, and it is best to see them as acting in combination. The judgment that Taishō democracy did not “fail to mature” but rather “was given no time to mature” is one important view (Mitani 2017; Katō 2009).

A Note for Western Readers

In Western history books, prewar Japan is often depicted, in a single stroke, as “Militarist Japan.” This is especially pronounced in the Anglo-American-centered postwar historiography. In reality, however, prewar Japan was not a uniform militarist state.

The Japan of the 1920s was a complex society in which parliamentary politics, labor movements, women’s movements, and international cooperation all unfolded.
The militarization of the 1930s was the compound result of the Great Depression, the destabilization of the international order, and the breakdown of domestic politics — it did not happen because “the Japanese were inherently aggressive.”
In the same years Nazism strengthened in Germany, Fascism in Italy, and the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union, while in the United States the Ku Klux Klan revived and, during the Pacific War, Japanese-Americans were forced into internment camps. The 1930s and early 1940s were a time when much of the world turned toward extremity and violence.

Seeing Japan’s militarization in this context is the only way to understand “why it happened.” At the same time, the harm Japan inflicted in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia in these years can be explained by context but cannot be justified by it. To hold to the principle that contextualization and justification are two different things is the ethic of historical writing.

Notes on Terminology

Taishō democracy (大正デモクラシー). The liberal, parliamentary, internationalist trends of c. 1905–1932; a historians’ label, not a regime.
Minponshugi (民本主義). Yoshino Sakuzō’s “people-as-the-base” principle: government for the people’s welfare, without claiming popular sovereignty.
Emperor-as-organ theory (天皇機関説). Minobe Tatsukichi’s doctrine that the emperor is the highest organ of the state and is bound by the constitution.
Kokutai (国体). “National essence/polity”; the idea of a unique, sacred Japanese order centered on the imperial line, used to silence dissent.
Independence of the supreme command (統帥権の独立). The constitutional principle placing military command outside cabinet and Diet control.
Shidehara diplomacy (幣原外交). Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijūrō’s 1920s policy of cooperation with the Western powers.
Manchurian Incident (満洲事変, 1931). The Kwantung Army’s seizure of Manchuria, staged using the Liutiaohu Incident.
Imperial Rule Assistance Association (大政翼賛会, 1940). The single state-sponsored organization that replaced the political parties.
Dai Nippon Butoku Kai (大日本武徳会). The Greater Japan Martial Virtue Society (founded 1895), the central organ for promoting and regulating the martial arts (see Article 6).
Bushidō (武士道). “The way of the warrior”; popularized in its modern form by Nitobe Inazō and increasingly fused with martial-arts ideology in the 1930s–40s.

Coming Next

Article 10 takes up the expansion of Japan’s colonies and occupied territories. It treats a vast span — Taiwan, Korea, South Sakhalin (Karafuto), the Kwantung Leased Territory, the South Sea Islands, Manchuria, occupied China, and Southeast Asia — setting the Western understanding and the Japanese understanding side by side.

Bibliography

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Mitani Taichirō, Nihon no kindai to wa nani de atta ka [What Was Japan’s “Modernity”?]. Iwanami Shinsho, 2017.
Katō Yōko, Manshū jihen kara Nitchū sensō e [From the Manchurian Incident to the Sino-Japanese War]. Iwanami Shinsho, 2007.
Katō Yōko, Soredemo, Nihonjin wa “sensō” o eranda [And Yet the Japanese Chose “War”]. Asahi Shuppansha, 2009.
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