The Forming of the "Yokusan Seiji" System and the Political Party Statesmen : The Case of Yamazaki Tatsunosuke

Abstract

To date, the research on the history of the political parties around the time when the "Yokusan Seiji翼賛政治" System was established regards them as a group removed from mainstream of politics. However, we must not neglect the political party statesmen who positively participated in the forming of the "Yokusan Seiji" System. By focusing on the ideas of Yamazaki Tatsunosuke 山崎達之輔 about the political system, the author analyses the relation between the forming of the "Yokusan Seiji" System and those statesmen, and concludes the following. After the "Kensei Jodo憲政常道" collapsed, Yamazaki proposed "Totalitarianism" which denied competition among political parties as a factor that confused party government. Based on this understanding, in the Konoe Shinto近衛新党 movement and the Shintaisei 新体制 movement, he planned the formation of a new party, that aimed to participate in policy-making in advance and to unite the political powers which had become divided under the Meiji Constitution. This plan was instituted by crossing administration and legislation in the Yokusan Seijikai翼賛政治会's policy research council. In order that the new party would have this function, Yamazaki utilized the logic that public opinion was reflected in the platform of political party. Because party statesmen had been criticized for political competition and scandal, they needed a reliable way to justify that logic. In this context, the Yokusan election held in the form that the whole nation recommend their candidates created the fiction that the party statesmen and parliament had regained the confidence of the nation. That is to say, behind the fact that party statesmen positively participated in the forming of the "Yokusan Seiji" System, that system had the possibility of stabilizing the political order under the Meiji Consti-tution. It is important that an analogy between pre- and postwar politics can be recognized in the policy-making of the Yokusan Seijikai and that of the Liberal Democratic Party. This means that Japanese politics retained its base of the decision-making from the prewar to the postwar period. The author is of the opinion that the opportunity for political parties to make contact with administration was expanded in the situation of administration expansion or modernization in the pre- and postwar periods.