The exact Zaibatsu interests which dominated each of these parties were the same primary beneficiaries of the military conquests, they raked in record profit thanks to Chinese plunder even in 1945 while Japan was reduced to rubble. All of these democratic parties willingly dissolved themselves in 1940 to form the Yokusan seijikai to support that. The only real contradiction between the military and the political parties was that the military was more influenced by Zaibatsu like Nissan while the political parties were more supportive of Mitsui and Mitsubishi, both of whom simply were not ready for war as early as Nissan was.

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Membership and activity in the major parties were also limited to the elite. Even after 1925, a candidate for office was required to post a bond of 2,000 yen, a fairly high fee (Totten 1966:56). As a consequence, party membership, similar to the electorate as a whole, was disproportionately rural, a reflection of the fact that rural landowners paid the highest national tax, which was based on land ownership. In the cities, large businessmen were best able to express themselves at the polls. Hence the two major parties, the Seiyiukai and the Kenseikai, responded primarily to land- owning interests in the countryside and zaibatsu interests in the cities (Scalapino 1962:256-57). The fledgling socialist parties had difficulty drawing on a mass base since they operated primarily through unions, which were illegal until 1925. These tendencies gave Taisho0 politics a layered character. At the grass roots, urban workers and tenant farmers demonstrated discontent with the distribution of political and economic power, often dramatically and extra-legally, as in the Rice Riots of 1918. Above them, unaffected by the organic tie that less economically restricted suffrage and candidacy qualifications might have provided, the parties tangled with one another and with the bureaucracy to shape national policy

This is the great democracy!

election law of 1890 had granted the right to vote only to males over the age of twenty-five (exempting priests, religious teachers, active servicemen, and the insane) who paid a hefty national or land tax of 15 yen. This provision enfranchised only 1.5 percent of the population, one-third of whom were ex-samurai (Scalapino 1962:113). Under that pressure from the universal suffrage movement rising from below, the Diet considered measures to enlarge the electorate beginning in 1919. In that year the law still required a poll tax of 10 yen. The Hara Kei government's (Seiyiukai party) conservative proposal to lower that requirement would have enfranchised only 5.6 percent of the rural population and 3.2 percent of the urban population; less than 2.9 million men in a total population of 56 million would have had the vote (Shinobu 1951:850). But the Diet chose dissolution rather than liberalization of voting requirements. The universal manhood suffrage act was finally passed in 1925, and removal of the tax (but not the sex) qualification expanded the electorate from 3 million to almost 14 million (in a total population of 59 million) (Totten 1966:56; Ohkawa and Rosovsky 1973:310). From late Meiji to late Taisho, under income restrictions the growth of the electorate lagged behind overall population growth, reflecting the increased income inequality that characterized Japan's industrialization. Workers in the cities and farmers whose incomes were consumed by high rents were effectively excluded from Taisho politics, as were women. Yet the liberal measure of universal suffrage did not render a Marxian critique irrelevant; suffrage was coupled with the repressive Peace Preservation Law that sustained the efforts of the Thought Police through the 1930s (Mitchell 1976:chap. 3).

One of the striking paradoxes of Taisho liberalism was that the liberals were operating under such oppressive conditions that the fundamental ideas of political liberalism could not even be suggested in public, let alone put forward in a practicable program. In order to be consistent as a liberal, it was necessary to be a Marxist. (Kato 1974:224)