Japan's Fragile Interwar Democracy and the Rise of Militarism

Japan emerged from the First World War as one of the victorious powers, absorbing Germany's former Pacific possessions and its concession in Shandong, and was admitted as a permanent member of the Council of the League of Nations. The wartime economic boom curdled into a sharp postwar crisis as export demand collapsed between 1918 and 1920. Politically, the following years saw a degree of liberalization known as 'Taishō democracy,' marked by a limited extension of male suffrage in 1925 — the same year in which the government also passed the Peace Preservation Law, a tool for suppressing the left that revealed the fragility beneath the democratic opening. The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 compounded the instability, inflicting severe economic and social damage and providing cover for the repression of Koreans and socialists, while Japan's heavy structural dependence on imported raw materials and export markets, together with widening urban-rural inequality, fed growing ultranationalist and pan-Asian currents among intellectuals.