Demands for Workers Rights
With growth, there was discontent. Though isolated from World War I and from the most dramatic shocks of the Great Depression, Japan was still affected. Between 1914 and 1918, prices had increased by 130%, while wages had increased by only 57%. The Russian Revolution in 1917 was one of the worldwide events that now affected Japan. It occurred as there was a greater recognition of deplorable worker rights, the rise of Marxist intellectuals and artists, and an organized demand for change.
The Russian Revolution and these trends scared the Diet and the military of losing their grip on control. After more citizens exercised their right to vote in 1925, and protests both economic and political in nature grew in scope, the Diet passed the Peace Preservation Law. In 1928, three and a half thousand people were arrested for violations, and this grew to fourteen and a half thousand in 1933. Arrests we aimed not so much as violence but for “organized expressions of revolutionary views”. This applied to artists. There was severe scrutiny of all literature and censorship was in effect. This dissuaded authors from pursuing social or proletarian themes and was a factor why autobiographical fiction remained the most popular genre.
Kobayashi Takiji
Some writers did write about social themes, such as Kobayashi Takiji whose popular work The Crab Canning Boat describes the struggle between the crew and superintendent in ideological terms. He was committed to the illegal Communist cause and was forced underground only to be captured, tortured, and killed at age twenty-nine.
Yoshino: For the emperor to know the popular will
Yoshino Sakuzo was one of the leading proponents of the liberal Taisho Democracy. He wrote for political journals that were popular with the educated middle class. In his influential 1916 article “On Democracy,” Yoshino advocated for expanded voting rights and a greater role for popular representation in the constitutional system.
He proposed a system for the people: such popular representation was a means for informing the emperor on what was the general welfare. But not by the people: he thought there was still a role for unelected leaders, including the emperor, to shepherd the people. Also, it was not a government of the people since the Meiji Constitution held sovereignty in the emperor alone.
So, Yoshino used Anglo-American ideas about widening suffrage, limiting the power of the old establishment, and utilitarianism to help prompt up the ideological place and political efficacy of the emperor. However, this interpretation of the Constitution was banned in 1935 by the Okada Cabinet. Other intellectuals who promoted similar, moderate views were suppressed by the military.
New Kokutai: People just instruments of the emperor
A competing text to Yoshino’s article could be the new articulation of the kokutai (national principles/philosophy) in 1937. Used in grade school instruction and national propaganda, the Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan (kokutai no hongi) shed any democratic pretensions of the Meiji kokutai and flatly stated that citizens were instruments of the emperor’s will and that the national economy was geared toward empire and not the random actions of individuals. Individualism was considered a Western scourge that ultimately led to social crisis (and socialism, communism, and anarchy) and stood in opposition to the selfless, Japanese collective spirit.
Even the late Meiji and Taisho periods attest that this is a false dichotomy. However, it was a politically and militarily expedient one and tapped into the fear of the Black Ships. The kokutai no hongi squared against those thought crimes of individualism, humanism, and other instances of so-called foreign influence. Japanese letters in general also bears responsibility for pitting Japan against perceived foreign influences.
There is an association between the purity of the mind, the purity of Japanese culture, and the expulsion of foreignness. Basho runs into a helpless orphan and praises great warriors uncritically. While he maintains his morality, he doesn’t translate that to political sentiments or anything critical of Japan or positive about or looking towards the outside world other than the requisite Chinese classics. He views the state of being when he composes his poetry as the true expression of relations in the temporal world.
Basho and others use such aesthetic principles to craft a uniqueness that excludes dialogue with the other. These exclusionary norms make exclusionary practices more readily accepted and enacted.