Businessmen and Speech in Prewar-era Japan:

Focus on Jitsugyo no Nihon

Abstract

In Japanese society of the prewar era, growing disparity in wealth was frequently taken up by the media as a societal problem. Accordingly, rising criticism of wealthy businessmen (i. e., wealthy investors) is known to have become an opportunity for the historical transition toward a total war system. This paper postulates that one factor that heightened this growing criticism is that the legitimacy of the operations of these men administering enormous wealth and their societal raison d'?tre as the elite wavered in the Taisho period. Accordingly, to approach this process, this paper turns attention to the periodical Jitsugyo no Nihon, which enhanced the societal raison d'être of businessmen in the late Meiji period, then investigates chiefly the editorials of these men in this periodical and discusses the relation between changes in their tenor and the historical and societal background.

As a result, the following was determined: 1) The first International Labor Conference served as the opportunity to put into sharp relief the espousal of paternalistic labor-capital relations by many businessmen of the era, resulting in a rapid rise in mistrust with respect to the words and actions theretofore of these men, who were endorsing self-sacrifice to contribute to transforming Japan into a great power, and 2) amid the shortages and the catastrophic earthquake after the First World War, the speech of businessmen of that time returned to the struggle-emphasizing ideology formerly asserted by older generations of businessmen, and therefore did not turn toward a softening of the growing criticism of businessmen. This change in the state of words and actions surrounding businessmen in the Taisho period is presumed to be a factor that led to skepticism regarding the raison d'être of these men in society.