Local Political Conditions and the Early Assembly, 1890-1893

Abstract

In the political developments after the opening of the 1890 Imperial Assembly a compromise was reached unexpectedly by the government, controlled by the feudal clan groups, and the opposition parties. Previous research has provided various interpretations of these developments, but only with incomplete success. And so, in order to attain a better understanding of these events the author focuses this article on those local interests which determined the political direction of those prominent local families, from which strata were chosen most of the Imperial Assembly's representatives. This study investigates the following three questions as they appeared in the case of Yamanashi prefecture. First, in the 1890 to 1893 period how strong was the desire for the various local interests (e.g., railway construction, land revaluation, etc.) that attracted the prominent local families? Secondly, what was the relationship between the local interests and thc government's basic policy? Thirdly, how did the concrete local interests determine the political direction of the prominent local families and the political factions' formation and strife? In this article the author furthers the analysis of his earlier article, "The Condition of Local Politics from 1884 to 1890, After the Collapse of the People's Rights Movement" (cf., Shigaku Zasshi, 84-4). For, in this study of an earlier period he showed, through an analysis of the Yamanashi Prefectural Assembly's budget debate, how effectively the Ministry of Home Affairs controlled the prefectural assemblies with the granting of state treasury funds to help finance local construction enterprises in the period up to the opening of the Imperial Assembly.