Failed Democratization in Prewar Japan: Breakdown of a Hybrid Regime by Harukata Takenaka (review)

To use the author’s words, the purpose of political scientist Harukata Ta kenaka’s book is to address this question: “how and why does a semi-democratic regime—a regime that developed as a result of the significant degree of democratization—break down without experiencing further democratization?” (p. 1). Within this context, the evolution, decline, and eventual disappearance of the system of party government in Japan between 1918 and 1932 constitutes a case through which to study the factors that lead to the breakdown of a semidemocratic regime. The book revisits territory previously covered by the author in a 2002 book published by Kisōsha, Senzen Nihon ni okeru minshuka no zasetsu: minshuka tojō taisei hōkai no bunseki (The frustration of democratization in prewar Japan: an analysis of the collapse of a semidemocratic regime). As all of this implies, the work under review is a social scientific study and specifically one in the field of comparative political analysis. It relies heavily on secondary studies to make its case. It is decidedly not a historiographic exercise that adds substantial new information or data to the historical record.

The value of Takenaka’s book lies in encouraging us to be more reflexive in the way we approach the “failure” of democracy in pre–World War II Japan. As he rightly points out, the tendency in the literature has been to treat Japan as having somehow diverged from a teleological trajectory as a consequence of distinctive flaws in either its government institution or political culture. Takenaka usefully reminds us that semidemocratic hybrid regimes composed of both democratic and authoritarian elements like that of 1918–32 Japan are in fact quite common around the world. He thus encourages us to abandon the notion that Japan was an aberrant case and to instead treat party government in prewar Japan as an example of a common regime type. From there, we may systematically analyze the structures and processes associated with that regime type as it played out in the Japanese case in order to flesh out what accounts for its “relapse” into authoritarianism in the 1932–45 period.

Building on the foundation of prior work in the comparative politics field—and in particular on Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan’s work on the breakdown of democratic regimes—Takenaka spends the introduction and chapter 1 developing an analytical framework with which to explain the dynamics of party government in Japan during the period in question. In his general model, the key to explaining the survival, further evolution toward democracy, or fall of a semidemocratic regime is the balance of power between the “democratic” and “nondemocratic forces” that by definition coexist in such a regime. The first of the three factors that determine this is the regime’s political institutions. They “determine the legal rights that democratic and nondemocratic forces can exercise” and consequently “strongly influence their choice of action” in confronting or accommodating the other forces. The second is the legitimacy of the semidemocratic regime among the elites and the general public that helps determine to what extent democratic forces are in a position to resist challenges to the regime from nondemocratic forces. The third is what he calls “semi-loyalty” on the part of groups and individuals within the democratic forces, that is, behavior that undermines the position and viability of democratic processes in a semi-democratic regime (pp. 42–43).

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the evolution of the Japanese political system from the 1868 Meiji Restoration onward that is informed by this analytical framework. In the book’s characterization, the 1889 adoption of the Meiji Constitution set the stage for the emergence of a “competitive oligarchical regime” (p. 47). That regime subsequently underwent a process of “democratization” that unfolded to an extent sufficient to qualify it as a semidemocratic regime when Hara Takashi’s cabinet was...