BACKGROUND

During the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first four of the twentieth, basic political control in Japan shifted twice. In the 1910s it shifted from a handful of oligarchs to a larger group of professional politicians. In the 1930s it shifted again, this time to a set of independent military leaders.

In this book we explore those shifts. We ask why the oligarchs failed to design institutions that protected their power, why the elected politicians did no better, and what political and economic consequences the various institutions had. More generally, we ask whether the shifts may explain some of the dynamics of oligarchic government and clarify some of the theoretical aspects of the relationship between institutional structure and regime change.

The puzzle

In explaining political control in Imperial Japan, most scholars implicitly posit three hypotheses. In their concern for authenticity and precision, they seldom state them as baldly as we do here. We admit that we strip their accounts of much of the richness and nuance that they give them. Although we do this reluctantly, we do it intentionally – for what we lose in subtlety we capture in clarity. Richness and sophistication can confuse as well as contextualize, and we simplify the discussion here because we think the simplicity clarifies the essential logic at stake.

First, most scholars argue that the oligarchs who controlled the government in the late nineteenth century largely (not exclusively) tried to promote the national interest.