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Japan's Enigmatic Election of 1928

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Thomas R. H. Havens
Thomas R. H. Havens
Affiliation:
Connecticut College
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Extract

When universal manhood suffrage was promulgated, with much eclat, on 5 May 1925, its friends and its enemies both agreed that this act was a new high-water mark in the thirty-five year history of Japanese parliamentarianism. Of a national population of nearly 40 million in 1890, the first electorate had been carefully confined to 400,000 adult males who met a stiff property test. By the early 1920s inflation, population growth, and eased voting requirements had gradually spread the franchise to some 3 million persons, still a mere fraction of the populace. Then, at a stroke, the universal suffrage law of 1925 gave the vote to males aged twenty-five and older, swelling the pool of electors four-fold to more than 13 million.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 1977 , pp. 543 - 555
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

Research for this article was supported by grants from the United States Educational Commission/Japan (Fuibright Commission) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. For helpful comments on the topic, I am grateful to members of the University Seminar on Modern Japan, Columbia University, and the Fascism Seminar, Institute of Social Sciences, Waseda University.

1 For discussions of the franchise, see Beasley, W. G., The Modern History of Japan, 2nd edn (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), pp. 132, 182, 223;Google ScholarScalapino, Robert A., ‘Elections and Political Modernization in Prewar Japan,’ in Ward, Robert E. (ed.), Political Development in Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 255Google Scholar. Women, those under 25, Taiwanese, Koreans, seasonally migrant laborers, and ‘persons who receive public or private assistance or relief for their livelihood on account of poverty’ were ineligible to vote under the new act. See Duus, Peter, Party Rivalry and Political Change in Taishō Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 202–3;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKyōto Daigaku Bungakubu Kokushi Kenkyūshitsu, (ed.), Nihonshijiten (Dictionary of Japanese History), revised edn (Tokyo: Sōgen Shinsha, 1960), p. 452.Google Scholar

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