Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The importance of this group can be seen from the fact that the Genro had only eight members, yet the office of prime minister was held by a Genro from 1885 to 1916, and the important post of president of the Privy Council was held by a Genro from its creation in 1889 to 1922 (except for the years 1890-1892 when Count Oki of the Hizen clan held it for Okuma). If we list the eight Genro with three of their close associates, we shall be setting down the chief personnel of Japanese history in the period covered by this chapter. To such a list we might add certain other significant facts, such as the social origins of these men, the dates of their deaths, and their dominant connections with the two branches of the defense forces and with the two greatest Japanese industrial monopolies. The significance of these connections will appear in a moment.

The Meij Oligarchy

SOCIAL ORIGIN

NAME

(GENRO

MARKED *)

DATE

OF DEATH

DOMINATED

LINKED WITH

Choshu

*Ito

*Yamagata *Inoue *Katsura

1909 1922 1915 1913

Army

Mitsui

Satsuma

*Oyama *Matsukata

Kuroda

Yamamoto

1916 1924

Navy

Hizen

#Okuma

1922

Progressive Party from 1882

Mitsubishi

Tosa

Itagaki

1920

Liberal Party from 1881

Noble Court

*Saionji

194O

“Last of the Genro” (1924-1940)

Sumitomo

Japanese history from 1890 to 1940 is largely a commentary on this table. We have said that the Meiji Restoration of 1868 resulted from an alliance of four western clans and some court nobles against the shogunate and that this alliance was financed by commercial groups led by Mitsui. The leaders of this movement who were still alive after 1890 came to form the Genro, the real but unofficial rulers of Japan. As the years passed and the Genro became older and died, their power became weaker, and there arose two claimants to succeed them: the militarists and the political parties. In this struggle the social groups behind the political parties were so diverse and so corrupt that their success was never in the realm of practical politics. In spite of this fact, the struggle between the militarists and the political parties looked fairly even until 1935, not because of any strength or natural ability in the ranks of the latter but simply because Saionji, the “Last of the Genro” and the only non-clan member in that select group, did all he could to delay or to avoid the almost inevitable triumph of the militarists.

All the factors in this struggle and the political events of Japanese history arising from the interplay of these factors go back to their roots in the Genro as it existed before 1900. The political parties and Mitsubishi were built up as Hizen-Tosa weapons to combat the Choshu-Satsuma domination of the power nexus organized on the civilian-military bureaucracy allied with Mitsui; the army-navy rivalry (which appeared in 1912 and became acute after 1931) had its roots in an old competition between Choshu and Satsuma within the Genro; while the civilian-militarist struggle went back to the personal rivalry between Ito and Yamagata before 1900. Yet, in spite of these fissures and rivalries, the oligarchy as a whole generally presented a united front against outside groups (such as peasants, workers, intellectuals, or Christians) in Japan itself or against non-Japanese.

From 1882 to 1898 Ito was the dominant figure in the Meiji oligarchy, and the most powerful figure in Japan. As minister of the Imperial Household, he was charged with the task of drawing up the constitution of 1889; as president of the Privy Council, he guided the deliberations of the assembly which ratified this constitution; and as first prime minister of the new Japan, he established the foundations on which it would operate. In the process he entrenched the Sat-Cho oligarchy so firmly in power that the supporters of Tosa and Hizen began to agitate against the government, seeking to obtain what they regarded as their proper share of the plums of office.

In order to build up opposition to the government, they organized the first real political parties, the Liberal Party of Itagaki (1881) and the Progressive Party of Okuma (1882). These parties adopted liberal and popular ideologies from bourgeois Europe, but, generally, these were not sincerely held or clearly understood. The real aim of these two groups was to make themselves so much of a nuisance to the prevailing oligarchy that they could obtain, as a price for relaxing their attacks, a share of the patronage of public office and of government contracts. Accordingly, the leaders of these parties, again and again, sold out their party followers in return for these concessions, generally dissolving their parties, to re-create them at some later date when their discontent with the prevailing oligarchy had risen once again. As a result, the opposition parties vanished and reappeared, and their leaders moved into and out of public office in accordance with the whims of satisfied or discontented personal ambitions.

Just as Mitsui became the greatest industrial monopoly of Japan on the basis of its political connections with the prevalent Sat-Cho oligarchy, so Mitsubishi became Japan’s second greatest monopoly on the basis of its political connections with the opposition groups of Tosa-Hizen. Indeed, Mitsubishi began its career as the commercial firm of the Tosa clan, and Y. Iwasaki, who had managed it in the latter role, continued to manage it when it blossomed into Mitsubishi. Both of these firms, and a handful of other monopolistic organizations which grew up later, were completely dependent for their profits and growth on political connections.

The task of building Japan into a modern industrial power in a single lifetime required enormous capital and stable markets. In a poor country like Japan, coming late into the industrial era, both of these requirements could be obtained from the government, and in no other way. As a result business enterprise became organized in a few very large monopolistic structures, and these (in spite of their size) never acted as independent powers, even in economic matters, but cooperated in a docile fashion with those who controlled government expenditures and government contracts. Thus they cooperated with the Meiji oligarchy before 1922, with the political party leaders in 1922-1932, and with the militarists after 1932. Taken together, these monopolistic industrial and financial organizations were known as zaibatsu. There were eight important organizations of this kind in the period after World War I, but three were so powerful that they dominated the other five, as well as the whole economic system. These three were Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo (controlled by Saionji’s relatives). These competed with one another in a halfhearted fashion, but such competition was political rather than economic, and always remained within the rules of a system which they all accepted.

In the period 1885-1901, during which Ito was premier four times, Matsukata twice, and Yamagata twice, it became evident that the oligarchy could not be controlled by the Diet or by the Tosa-Hizen political parties but could always rule Japan through its control of the emperor, the armed forces, and the civil bureaucracy. This victory was hardly established before a rivalry appeared between Ito, supported by the civil bureaucracy, and Yamagata, supported by the armed services. By 1900 Yamagata won a decisive victory over Ito and formed his second Cabinet (1898-1900), from which the Ito group was, for the first time, completely excluded. During this administration Yamagata extended the franchise from half a million to a million voters in order to obtain city support for imposing taxes on rural lands to pay for military expansion. Far more important than this, he established a law that the ministries of the army and the navy must be headed by Cabinet posts held by active generals and admirals of the highest rank. This law made civilian rule of Japan impossible thereafter because no prime minister or member of the Cabinet could fill the two defense posts unless they made concessions to the armed services.