Taisho is modern Japan’s forgotten era. Postscript to modernizing Meiji (1868-1912), prologue to militarist and postwar Showa (1926-89), Taisho never came into its own as significant in its own right — which is unfair, because across its stage in 14 short years (1912-26) passed World War I (1914-18), nationwide rice riots (1918), “Taisho Democracy,” the assassination (1921) of the prime minister who (however ambiguously) symbolized it, the birth of the Japan Communist Party (1922), the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923), the Universal Manhood Suffrage Law (March 1925) and, as though in alarmed recoil against that liberal measure, the decidedly anti-liberal Peace Preservation Law (April 1925).
These are all definable, datable events. World War I speaks for itself. Japan, on the side of the Allies but fighting little, rode a war boom to prosperity and snatched German territory in China. Soaring postwar rice prices sparked rioting and coordinated strike action on a scale never before seen or even approached here. Was Japan, following Russia, going Bolshevik? Revolution simmered, authority braced. The Japan Communist Party, an incitement of the one, was anathema to the other.
The earthquake was devastating. More than 105,000 perished in destruction that foreshadowed that of World War II. Yet the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) could write of it, “I felt a surge of happiness which I could not keep down. ‘Tokyo will be the better for this!’ I said to myself.” That’s Taisho — gay, exuberant, crazy.
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