Taisho period

The period opened with the Taishō political crisis of 1912–1913, when mass protests in Tokyo in defence of constitutional government brought down the cabinet of the oligarch Katsura Tarō. Rice riots that spread across the country in 1918, triggered by soaring prices, led to the appointment of Hara Takashi, leader of the Seiyūkai party and the first prime minister without noble title to head a cabinet drawn from the majority party. Hara was assassinated in 1921, but from 1924 until 1932 the leaders of the majority parties regularly formed governments.

The political scientist Yoshino Sakuzō argued for minponshugi, government for the benefit of the people within the imperial constitution. In 1925 the Diet granted the vote to all men aged 25 and over, quadrupling the electorate. The same year it passed the Peace Preservation Law, which criminalised organisations aiming to change the national polity (kokutai) or abolish private property, and was later used extensively against communists, socialists and other dissenters.

Japan entered the First World War in August 1914 as an ally of Britain, captured the German leasehold of Qingdao in China and Germany's island colonies in the North Pacific. In 1915 it presented China with the Twenty-One Demands, seeking extensive rights, which fuelled Chinese nationalism. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 Japan was one of the five great powers and gained Germany's rights in Shandong and a League of Nations mandate over the Micronesian islands, but its proposal to write racial equality into the League Covenant was rejected.

In 1919 Japanese colonial rule in Korea faced the March First Movement, a nationwide independence demonstration that was forcibly suppressed; afterwards the colonial government adopted a somewhat more conciliatory 'cultural rule'. Japan joined the Allied intervention in Siberia (1918–1922), keeping troops there longer than any other power. The Washington Conference of 1921–1922 limited naval armaments and restored Shandong to China, inaugurating a decade of cooperative diplomacy.

Industrial growth expanded the urban working and middle classes. Labour unions, tenant farmers' associations and socialist groups organised, and the Suiheisha (Levelers' Association), founded in 1922, campaigned against discrimination of burakumin communities. The women's movement grew from the literary magazine Seitō (Bluestocking), founded by Hiratsuka Raichō in 1911, to the New Women's Association of 1920, which won the right for women to attend political meetings.

The cities were home to a new salaried middle class and to the 'modern girl' and 'modern boy' (moga and mobo) of the 1920s, with Western dress, bobbed hair and a taste for jazz and cinema. At the same time rural poverty persisted, and many young women and men left the countryside for textile mills, factories and domestic service.

The First World War brought an unprecedented boom. With European competitors absent from Asian markets, Japanese exports of textiles, ships and manufactures surged, Japan turned from debtor to creditor nation, and the newly rich war profiteers (narikin) became a byword for conspicuous consumption. Heavy and chemical industries grew, and the zaibatsu extended their reach.

The boom ended with a sharp recession in 1920, followed by the heavy costs of the 1923 earthquake. Inflation during the war had already provoked the rice riots of 1918, and the 1920s were marked by stagnation in agriculture and banking troubles that culminated in the financial crisis of 1927, early in the next reign.

At 11:58 on 1 September 1923 an earthquake of magnitude 7.9 struck the Kantō region. Fires fanned by strong winds swept through the wooden neighbourhoods of Tokyo and Yokohama; more than 100,000 people died or went missing, most of them in the fires. In the chaos that followed, rumours that Koreans were poisoning wells or setting fires led vigilante groups, police and soldiers to kill many Koreans, as well as Chinese and Japanese mistaken for them; the anarchists Ōsugi Sakae and Itō Noe were murdered by military police. The number of victims of these killings is disputed, but their occurrence is well documented.

The reconstruction under the home minister Gotō Shinpei widened streets, created parks and bridges and introduced reinforced concrete buildings, reshaping central Tokyo. 1 September is observed as Disaster Prevention Day in Japan.

The state continued to promote shrine rites as civic duty: Meiji Jingū, dedicated to Emperor Meiji and Empress Shōken, was completed in Tokyo in 1920 with trees donated from all over the empire. New religious movements attracted large followings; the government suppressed Ōmoto, a movement with millenarian teachings, in 1921, an early sign of the state's intolerance of religious groups it considered subversive. Christianity influenced social reform through figures such as Kagawa Toyohiko, who worked among the urban poor.

Taishō culture was cosmopolitan and increasingly commercial. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke wrote short stories such as Rashōmon (1915), Tanizaki Jun'ichirō explored eroticism and modern urban life, and the Shirakaba (White Birch) group promoted humanism and Western art. Illustrators such as Takehisa Yumeji created the romantic, nostalgic style known as Taishō roman. The mingei (folk craft) movement of Yanagi Sōetsu, launched in the mid-1920s, celebrated the beauty of everyday handmade objects.

Mass media transformed leisure: large-circulation newspapers and magazines, cinema, record music and, from 1925, radio broadcasting. The all-female Takarazuka Revue gave its first performance in 1914, the national high school baseball tournament began in 1915 and moved to the new Kōshien Stadium in 1924, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo opened in 1923, famously surviving the earthquake on its opening day.

The Taishō period showed that Japan's constitutional order could accommodate party government, a mass electorate and a lively civil society. It gave modern Japan much of its urban culture, from department stores and suburban railways to baseball and popular magazines.

Its democratic achievements proved fragile. The Peace Preservation Law, the independence of the military under the Meiji constitution and the economic crises of the late 1920s and early 1930s allowed militarists and nationalists to push aside party government in the following Shōwa era. Postwar reformers nevertheless saw Taishō democracy as a native precedent for the democracy they sought to build after 1945.