2010-8-13
The day before yesterday, on my way back from Tokyo after attending to some business, I read on the train “The Collapse of Two-Party Politics in Early Shōwa Japan,” by Kyoto University Graduate School professor Keishi Saeki, in the August issue of Wedge.
The following is from that article.
… Earlier passage omitted…
In 1936, another general election was held, centered once again on the Minseitō and Seiyūkai parties. Seiyūkai lost and Minseitō won. Minseitō, however, could not secure a majority, while the Social Masses Party, an emerging force dissatisfied with the established parties, made substantial gains. The advance of this new proletarian party certainly indicated the growing strength of social democratic forces. Yet the Social Masses Party came to advocate a “broad conception of national defense” that ranged from an emphasis on everyday life to national defense and sought to restructure the economy in cooperation with the military (the Army Control Faction) and a new group of bureaucrats. Minseitō moved closer to the Social Masses Party’s policies. … Passage omitted…
What this tells us is that, in seeking to expand their own strength through elections and competing excessively for political advantage over one another, the two major parties ultimately drew the military, a powerful force, into politics and opened the way to their own destruction. Of course, there is no military today, and there is no need to fear a military coup.
Does that mean the two major parties are secure? It does not.
The central issue is not the “military,” but the way politics goes astray when the two major parties fail to confront a genuine national crisis and make their struggle for power an end in itself.
The problems at the time were a severe depression, foreign affairs (the Manchurian question), and military coups.
These were national crises that demanded a response transcending party lines.
Nevertheless, the two major parties devoted themselves to competing for power.
Of course, circumstances today differ greatly from those of that time.
Yet we today face national crises involving economic and fiscal instability, foreign affairs (the United States and China), and the collapse of the foundations of everyday life. We must acknowledge that there is much to learn from this lesson.
Taking the liberty of adding something to Professor Saeki’s fine article, I would say that in Japan today, the media and others have joined in, making these past twenty years a period in which solutions to the national crises we should have confronted have been nullified.