BY N. D. VARADACHARIAR

I happened to be in Japan during May last, when a first-class political crisis arose there. It was an exceptional opportunity for studying the true nature of the Japanese Constitution and the manner in which it behaved during a period of emergency and high popular excitement. I discovered that in practice, the Constitution was as unlike any known forms of Parliamentarism, as in theory Japan's Constitutional Instrument tended to conform to it. The cynicical disregard with which Parliament there was put aside and decisions taken by authorities outside the Constitution itself, and the unmistakable acquiescence of the people in these measures showed that the written Constitution of Japan is just a piece of propaganda for the aggressive modernism of Japan, while really she cared little to enforce popular sovereignty which she ought to enjoy according to that law.

The facts which led up to this crisis may be briefly stated. Huge amounts of money were raised to finance the military operations in China and Manchuria by the Government of Japan, acting under the authority conferred on the Executive to enact financial measures by Imperial Ordinance in times of urgent need. This Imperial Ordinance had to be placed before the Diet, of which a special session was summoned to meet on 23rd May.

The Seiyukai party led by Mr. Takeshi Inukai held power, while Minseito led by Baron Wakatsuki was the official Opposition in the house of Representatives. As the date of the Diet's meeting neared, outstanding public questions began to be agitated in the Press and in public gatherings. There was a feeling in the country that the foreign policy of the Government was not sufficiently firm and well directed, and the cause was attributed not so much to the inefficiency of the particular administration as to the weakness of party government as such. Baron Hiranumi who held a high position in the Military command, was known to have been of this view, and he enjoyed the support not only of the Army and Navy officers but of a large body of independent publicists who had been attracted by the success of Mussolini and Fascist Italy. The growing popularity of this idea was not a little due to the way that Parliamentary institutions had worked in Japan. Corruption was rampant in elections, and wealthy industrialists had strewn money in purchasing votes. In every constituency, hundreds of petitions had been lodged against the successful candidate impeaching his election. A series of actions in law led to the washing of much dirty linen in public, besides causing loss of prestige to the legislature whose members had such uncertain credentials. Candidates elected as a result of proceedings like these could hardly command public respect; and they made things worse by the grossly indecorous and disorderly way in which they disturbed the proceedings of the House itself. Insults and assaults were common, and grave questions of national concern were considered in an atmosphere of levity, certainly of irresponsibility. The public sentiment had been outraged by exhibitions of this sort, and public confidence in Parliamentary institutions rudely shaken. It was this feeling that the party o Japanese Fascists exploited with disastrous consequences to Parliamentary institutions there.

The party leaders fully realised the danger to Parliamentarism. Inukai made a speech, on May 9th in which he appealed to the public to support Parliamentarism, and promised to initiate measures to rectify its present evils. Proportional representation was one of the remedies he suggested. Baron Wakatsuki, the leader of Opposition, in a statement the next day, promised his whole-hearted co-operation to the Prime Minister, and agreed to join forces

with him in resisting the common danger of Fascism. The Press which wields such enormous influence in Japan, led by the Asahi and the Mainichi, also ranged itself on the side of the two leaders. It looked for a time as though the Fascists would be vanquished, at any rate in the coming session of the Diet.

The Fascists then struck a decisive blow. Twenty-five junior officers of the Army and the Navy rushed up to the official residence of the aged Prime Minister and assassinated him, on the evening of May 15th. Simultaneously, other Cabinet Ministers, banks and public places in Osaka and Tokyo were also attacked. But the terrorists did not succeed in injuring anybody seriously except the Prime Minister who died the same night. The Ministry resigned the next day, but was directed by the Emperor to continue in office until its successor was nominated.

In so far as the assassination was an indication of the strength of public feeling against the Inukai Ministry, the resignation was perhaps inevitable. But it must be remembered that neither Inukai nor any member of his Cabinet had been accused of corruption or of any offence involving moral turpitude, and that the dissatisfaction was against the political views they held in support of Parliamentarism in Japan. In a Parliamentary State, the only way to test the real feeling in the country would have been to dissolve the lower house and to have a general election. The Seiyukai still remained the majority party in the House; all that had happened was that the chief of the Ministry was dead. Reshuffling of portfolios, even reconstitution of the Ministry, provided it was still seiyukai, would be understandable. But, why should the Ministry flee the place, when a handful of assasins with whom no one publicly sympathised, did away in a very cowardly manner with the life of the defenceless old Premier who met his end quite heroical? The question, in a Parliamentry State, would not be whether the Ministry forfeited the confidence of the people; it would rather be: Did it lose the confidence of Parliament? If it was suspected that parliament itself had lost the confidence of the electorate, or if the ministry wanted fresh authority from the electorate, over the heads of Parliament, a general election was the only constitutional imaginable. In spite of the way that the articles of the Japanese Constitution are worded to conform to these well-understood principles of Parliamentarism, when the crisis arose, Parliament was wholly ignored in the reconstitution of the Executive.

For a time Japanese Parliamentarians appear to have expected naturally enough, that the Emperor would act like a constitutional monarch carrying out his duty of appointing a fresh Ministry in conformity with known conventions in this behalf. The Seiyukai party met, and after prolonged and very delicate negotiations among rival candidates for leadership, chose Dr. Kuziburo Suzuki as the chief of the Party in the place of the late Premier. Dr.Suzuki, fully expecting to be summoned to form the Ministry, entered upon the difficult task of choosing his Cabinet, and had almost completed it. But the call never came.

The Japanese Emperor is a difficult institution to understand. According to the terms of the written Constitution, he is a constitutional monarch functioning under forms of Parliamentary government. Law must be sanctioned by him, acting by and with the advice and consent of his Diet. He can, of course, promulgate Ordinances in emergencies as every Executive under all systems of government can, but his Ordinances have to be placed before the next session of Parliament, and if not approved by it, become null. His Ordinances have to be countersigned by a Minister, which shows that the Ordinances are really measures of the Cabinet rather than of the Emperor acting independently of it. It is difficult to see that a system so closely modelled upon principles of Parliamentary government could, in its real intent, have invested the Emperor with powers wholly unknown to those principles. In practice the two chief appointments of that warlike State, the Army Minister and the Navy Minister, do not form part of the responsible Cabinet, and are not political appointments. These are directly responsible to the Emperor. This breach into the theory of Cabinet government has been productive of factors which have very nearly killed the system in Japan. There was an additional cause of no less importance.

At the time when the present Ruling House came into its own in Japan, during the middle of the last century, terminating the Tokugawa Shogunate, a certain number of loyal and patriotic men helped the young Meiji Tenno to acquire and to sustain his authority. These were the Genro, wise and ardent friends of the Royal family, devoted to its service. The Emperor never did a thing of importance without taking their councel, and has never been known to have rejected it. This body which had no sort of recognition in the Constitution, remained in fact the most effective power in the State. One by one have these aged Genros passed away, and not a place was filled, till at the present moment there is just one surviving Genro, the venerable Prince Saionji. Thrice within the last two years the Emperor has turned this Nestor of Japanese politics for advice. When Inusaki was killed and a constitutional crisis arose, the Emperor summoned Prince Saionji to counsel him.

No one bothered about what the House of Representatives thought or would like to do. The leadership of the majority party in the house was not a conclusive nor even a sufficient circumstance to entitle Dr. Suzuki to assume the Premiership. He had to convince Prince Saionji that his choice would be in national interests. The Prince did not tender the advice which we should expect in any Parliamentary State, that the majority party's leader should be automatically summoned, or that there should be a dissolution to ascertain the wish of the people. He received rival claimants to Prime Ministership, and interviewed a number of leading publicists. The electorate, the political sovereign, was nowhere in the picture; no attempt was made to ascertain its mind. At the end of ten days or more, Prince Saionji advised the Emperor to summon Admiral Seito, Governor of Manchuria, to be the Prime minister. And Admiral Seito announced his Cabinet a few days later. He did not lead any party in the House of Representatives where the Seiyukai and the Minseito were still the leading parties.

Commentators of the Japanese Constitution and of its public law freely admit the incongruity of this situation, that a man wholly unknown to the Constitution such as the Genro, should yet possess the decisive voice in Japanese politics, reducing even the Emperor to a mere figurehead. Dr. Inazo Nitobe, a very learned writer on Japanese problems and Honorary Editor of the Osaka Mainichi newspaper, consoles himself that, as the body of Genros is about to become extinct with the death of the old and feeble Prince Saionji this anomaly would soon be removed. No aspersion is meant to be cast against the soundness of his advice or against his motives in tendering it from time to time. By all accounts the Prince is a very estimable man. The point which interested me rather was that the entire Japanese democracy should be willing to let this old man decide its destinies, wholly without taking it into his confidence by any of the well-known methods of democratic consultation, at a time when, everybody admitted, there was a serious financial crisis and a crisis in Japan's tangled foreign policy. It makes no difference from the point of view of Democracy and Parliamentarism whether it is the Emperor who made this decision, or whether he allowed it to be made for him by his trusted adviser, so long as the democracy or its chosen representatives in the Diet had no voice whatever in the matter.

Again, as regards the advice itself, it struck me that it was a total negation of Parliamentarism, whatever may be its justification from other considerations. The assasins have been vindicated by the supersession of Dr. Suzuki, and in a much more positive way, by the appointment of one of the chief men of the discontented Army and Navy services from which they were drawn. They achieved their purpose of destroying party and parliamentary government and of enthroning a military dictatorship by their well-aimed shots at poor old Inukai. And all this without a reference to the electorate. The Seito Ministry has been able to carry on without a party and without a programme; and no effort was made in Parliament, as far as I know, to express want of confidence in it. It seems that in Japan any Ministry can carry on if it is once placed in power, a condition not wholly unknown in India. In both the countries, this absurd thing becomes possible only because there is a power superior to Parliament. In India, this power acts under colour of law; in Japan, it is a power exercised in spite of the Constitution and tolerated by those whose rights are affected by such exercise.

The conclusion which forced itself upon my mind was that the Japanese people care little for forms of government, so long as they have an efficient, patriotic and progressive administration. The tremendous prestige enjoyed by the Naval and Military services and by the bureaucracy is proof of the indifference of the people to forms of popular liberty. The patient submission of the people to frequent and violent inroads upon the guaranteed liberties of the people, including their right to Parliamentary government in accordance with the terms of the Constitution of 1889, prove what many Japanese writers assert, that the Constitution is a spontaneous grant of the Emperor out of his generosity, and unconnected with any popular clamour or even demand for the recognition of their rights. It looks as though the people will want these rights. The Labour Party, whose influence is beginning to be felt, is trying to better this condition of apathy. Communists are rigidly suppressed and the docile public is assured by a solicitious administration that Communism is all wrong. The economic distress which is affecting Japan as much as any other country, is rousing the mind of the average citizen to an appreciation of the fundamental problems of State and Government, but the awakening is slow and imperceptible. So long as the Government is able to ensure economic prosperity, domestic peace, foreign prestige and international recognition as a first class power, this awakening is bound to be tardy. To those idealists to whom liberty means more than security, Japan must remain an object of sympathy for many, many years.

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