A final problem for Japanese leaders in the post-Meiji era
was the familiar capitalist dilemma of finding sources
of raw materials and foreign markets for the nation’s manufactured
goods. Until World War I, Japan had dealt with
the problem by seizing territories such as Taiwan, Korea,
and southern Manchuria and transforming them into
colonies or protectorates of the growing Japanese Empire.
That policy had succeeded brilliantly, but it had
also begun to arouse the concern and, in some cases, the
hostility of the Western nations. China was also becoming
apprehensive; as we have seen, Japanese demands for
Shandong Province at the Paris Peace Conference in
1919 aroused massive protests in major Chinese cities.
The United States was especially concerned about Japanese
aggressiveness. Although the United States had
been less active than some European states in pursuing
colonies in the Pacific, it had a strong interest in keeping
the area open for U.S. commercial activities. American
anxiety about Tokyo’s twenty-one demands on China in
1915 led to a new agreement in 1917, which essentially
repeated the compromise provisions of the agreement
reached nine years earlier.
In 1922, in Washington, D.C., the United States convened
a major conference of nations with interests in
the Pacific to discuss problems of regional security. The
Washington Conference led to agreements on several issues,
but the major accomplishment was the conclusion
of a nine-power treaty recognizing the territorial integrity
of China and the Open Door. The other participants induced
Japan to accept these provisions by accepting its
special position in Manchuria.
During the remainder of the 1920s, Japanese governments
attempted to play by the rules laid down at the
Washington Conference. Known as Shidehara diplomacy,
after the foreign minister (and later prime minister)
who attempted to carry it out, this policy sought to
use diplomatic and economic means to realize Japanese
interests in Asia. But this approach came under severe
pressure as Japanese industrialists began to move into new
areas of opportunity, such as heavy industry, chemicals,
mining, and the manufacturing of appliances and automobiles.
Because such industries desperately needed resources
not found in abundance locally, the Japanese government
came under increasing pressure to find new
sources abroad.
The fragile flower of democratic institutions was able
to survive growing social turmoil throughout the 1920s,
while Japan sought to operate within a cooperative framework
with other nations. In the early 1930s, however, with
the onset of the Great Depression and growing tensions
in the international arena, nationalist forces rose to dominance
in the government. The changes taking place in
the 1930s were not in the constitution or the institutional
structure, which remained essentially intact, but in
the composition and attitudes of the ruling group. Party
leaders during the 1920s had attempted to realize Japanese
aspirations within the existing global political and
economic framework. The dominant elements in the
government in the 1930s, a mixture of military officers
and ultranationalist politicians, were convinced that the
diplomacy of the 1920s had failed and advocated a more
aggressive approach to protecting national interests in a
brutal and competitive world.
Historians argue over whether Japanese democracy
was merely a fragile period of comparative liberalization
within a framework dominated by the Meiji vision of empire
and kokutai or whether the militant nationalism of
the 1930s was an aberration brought on by the depression,
which caused the emerging Japanese democracy to
wilt. Perhaps both contentions contain a little truth. A
process of democratization was taking place in Japan during
the first decades of the twentieth century, but without
shaking the essential core of the Meiji concept of the
state. When the “liberal” approach of the 1920s failed to
solve the problems of the day, the shift toward a more aggressive
approach was inevitable.
World History
