Taisho Democracy After Taisho

Faraday Cage

How could Japan's liberalization phase and good relations with the West not gone out the door after Emperor Taisho's death?


Here is a series of at least semi-possible events that I think might have done the trick, maybe. Perhaps.


1. Not pushing their luck and risking the turning of popular sentiment against them by witholding the most extreme of OTL's 21 Demands and instead focusing on the legitimization of their possession of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia.
2. Less successfull communist infiltration in Japan, hence less of a response from the ultranationalist right during the period of general liberalization and democratization. Additionally, the Peace Laws preventing communist assemblies being broadly worded enough so they can later be interpreted generally and be used to contain military cliques and ultranationalist organizations.
3. The maintaining of their alliance with Britain.
4. Prince Hirohito's accidental death (horseback riding?) and the regency being turned over to the British-friendly Yasuhito. Yasuhito would assume the throne upon his father's death and ostensibly continue the period of relative democracy and good relations with the West that had occurred under his father.
5. A war between the Soviet Union and Japan, allowing Japan to ride on Western anti-communist sentiment and commonly held vested interests in keeping the status quo in China.
6. This would lead to the Soviet Union being a co-belligerent rather than Ally in WWII, and Japan being one of the Allies.
7. With the US staying out of the war longer and the USSR getting less aid (while the British would be kicking more aid than in OTL), once the US does find an excuse to join in the war the Allies will probably push the Germans to the Russian border, or close to it, preventing Soviet expansion.
8. A scrappy surviving, intact USSR however still means that the US and Britain will be interested in keeping Japan as an ally to check Russia in the far east. This will also probably mean a post WWII war between Soviet backed China and a flush from Allied victory Japan, which will help vent the nationalist/expansionist energies of the hard to control Japanese military complex. Japan would get more or less open license to keep East Asia from going red(?).

The main problem is that there aren't many Nazi possessions in Asia for Japan to go after during WWII, but some sort of campaign on East Africa would be interesting. Also, one can hope that continued universal male sufferage and influence of the Diet rather than unelected advisors would help temper the empire over time.

Suggestions?
 

Faraday Cage

This Japanese Empire would be not all that unlike America in terms of a "democratic" (in this case, constitutional monarchic) imperialist power, checking communism in East Asia the same way the US would check it's spread into Latin America.

So they get German Asia after WWI, get even more of China during a war with the USSR, during the temporary co-belligerence with the USSR participate in the African theater of WWII and maybe gain some postcolonial influence there, and in the general decolonization period of the Cold War fight against jungle revolutions in the European colonies of East Asia for the West, gaining defacto regional supremacy and trade dominance. And as a British ally they wouldn't be fighting with Commonwealth India over dominance of the Indian Ocean trade routes.
 
Taisho Democracy and the policy described by some writers (e.g. Akira Iriye) as the "Washington System" were abandoned because many (most?) Japanese believed that they had failed. Here is a list of reasons in random order.

Firstly, there was a wide consensus that Japan needed to import raw materials and that this required access to foreign markets for both imports and exports. The most important markets were considered to be China, the British Empire and the USA. Access was threatened by the rise of Chinese Nationalism, British Empire Preference and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. As the Chinese problem had the most obvious consequences, it might help to give more details. By 1927, it was apparent that a strong Chinese Nationalist movement might take control of China. This discredited the non-interventionist policies of Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijūrō. His replacement was Tanaka Giichi, who was simultaneously Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. However, all Tanaka's plans were blown up by Colonel Komoto's assassination of Zhāng Zuòlín (Chang Tso-lin) and he was forced from office by his Emperor. Shidehara returned as Foreign Minister but had very little control of the IJA. My feeling is that by 1931 only IJA figures such as Ishiwara Kanji were confident that they had a policy that would improve Japan's position.

Secondly, Japan saw its navy as a critical protection for its trade rather than a threat to other powers and interpreted Anglo-American attempts to limit the IJN during the Taisho period as revealing plans for American aggression (surely the IJN and USN should have been best friends since they depended on each other's existence for funding but Hilary P. Jones and Kato Kanji were seldom found drinking together:)). The refusal of other powers to include a statement that all races were equal in the Versailles Treaty, the end of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the 1924 ban on immigration to the USA did not help. This came to a head in 1930 when Japan accepted the London Naval Treaty despite strong opposition within the IJN. London, unlike Washington, did not simply fix a status quo as Japan had to stop building cruisers while the USA could continue. The revelation in 1931 that the Americans had been reading Japanese codes during the Washington negotiations also cannot have helped.

Thirdly, the IJA, which had been reduced in size during the Twenties, was working hard on raising its popularity to resist and reverse such cuts. It was not above making alliances with rural groups who had not gained from economic development or those who believed that Japanese politicians were corrupt and in the pay of big business. In parallel with official IJA actions, some IJA and IJN officers began to become "politically active" by setting up and joining societies such as the Sakurakai, some of which were not fervently supportive of the Taisho Democracy.

Finally, economic problems at the end of the Twenties damaged the democratic model's reputation for economic competence in Japan as elsewhere. Interestingly, the "quantitative easing" policies followed from 1931 by Takahashi Korekiyo caused the Japanese economy to return to rapid growth, which may have further convinced Japan that the 1931-2 changes had been beneficial.

Thus PODs changing the above may be helpful.
 
One of the TL options I'd put up in my New TL poll a while back (the posters' choice was Viva Balbo) was a little thing I called Coprosperity where a surviving Taisho and a continued Progressive Republican domination of the US government would lead to a situation similar to what you're proposing. I had yet to choose a specific POD [1], but Ito was to be a key figure in Japan and the continued dominance of TR and his acolytes would be a big factor on the US side. The basic idea (details to be worked out as I researched) was to have increases in business [2] and diplomatic ties over the interbellum that in concert with the political changes led to a continuation of the British-Japanese Alliance with the US leaning very heavily in that direction (practically de facto allied, but officially neutral to appease isolationists).

TR's presence at Versailles alone was going to have huge consequences, as was a greater entente involvement in the Russian Civil War.

Of course that's all on the shelf as I concentrate my (little) time on Viva Balbo...

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1 - I'd nominally kicked around everything from a "McKinley survives, but is partially paralyzed" POD to a "TR makes Taft SCOTUS and supports Root for POTUS" POD, but that was all still under consideration.

2 - OTL Harriman had plans for railroad service across Manchuria in concert with Japanese rail companies, for example. This fell through at the last minute.
 
No Great Kantō Earthquake

At the start of 1923, the Japanese economy appeared to be in fairly good shape and no one doubted that the large loans taken out to pay for the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 could be repaid on time and in full. Prospects had recently been improved by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, allowing a reduction in both taxation and government spending. In retrospect, there were some dangers as unlimited demand and lack of competition during WW1 had created a bubble as well as very rapid growth.

However, on 1st September 1923 there occurred the Great Kantō Earthquake which devastated the region around Tokyo. Suddenly, the economic outlook was transformed. New loans had to be negotiated at short notice from America at high cost. The earthquake became linked to the bursting of the WW1 bubble because the Bank of Japan extended special emergency loans to banks in the affected Kantō Region. Naturally banks brought all their pre-existing bad debts to the BoJ! To pay for all of this and due to reduced tax revenue, government spending had to be reduced, notably by reducing the size of the Army. As the BoJ eventually stopped supporting every bank with bad debts, the banking crisis had been only been postponed and occurred in 1927.

Now, Taisho democracy could be considered fully established from June 1924 when the government led by Kiyoura Keigo fell after defeat in an election and the new government extended the vote to all male citizens over the age of 25 in 1925. Kiyoura had had the support of the Genro and the bureaucrats but was defeated by the political parties of the Diet. This timing meant that Taisho democracy had to start by coping with the consequences of the earthquake. The less obvious consequences included attacks by the Seiyukai party on the governing Minseito for paying too much for the American loans, attacks on all politicians for having the BoJ pay out to their friends and the IJA beginning to organize a political movement to defend itself against further cuts.

Thus Taisho democracy would certainly have had a better chance of survival without the Great Kantō Earthquake.
 
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