The Noise of Suffrage: Modern Japan in the Global Rise of Mass Politics

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the history of suffrage and mass elections in Japan from the aftermath of World War I through World War II in conjunction with global history. Suffrage and elections have been understudied subjects in the English-language historiography of modern Japan, while Japanese scholars have examined them within the domestic context mostly from institutional perspectives. At the same time, scholars of mass politics have only rarely included Japan in their analyses, due to a lack of archival access. By examining the rise of mass politics in Japan within the global context, this study argues that Japan fully participated in transnational socio-political trends that characterized post-World War I democracies, and that the authoritarian turn that led to war may be explained with specific contingencies of the late 1930s rather than structural issues. Nonetheless, as explained in the conclusion, such authoritarian turn was not a radical departure from the mass political practices of the democratic era but was instead based on them, as the wartime state, not unlike other fascist regimes, used suffrage for mass mobilization. Therefore, suffrage, rather than being equated with democracy, represented a significant transwar trend.This study examines politics as it intersects with institutions, society, ideas, and culture. Suffrage is interpreted as a complex socio-political experience whose meanings changed depending on the broader domestic and transnational circumstances. Several key topics are surveyed through the chapters, such as men’s and women’s suffrage movements, the state debate on suffrage expansion, suffrage movements across the Japanese empire, electoral campaigns and parties’ strategies, voting trends and mass ideologies, political visual culture, popular participation in state campaigns, institutional crisis and democratic breakdown, and war mobilization. Japan is placed within three global moments – the post-World War I democratic internationalism, the Depression crisis and its consequences, and war. If existing English-language scholarship has paid little attention to the roles that suffrage and elections had in interwar and wartime Japan, this dissertation reinterprets them as foundational moments for political competition, popular political consciousness, state legitimacy, and the integration of the masses into the praxis and discourse of national politics.