Політичний проєкт керівної партії Ріккендоші-кай від виникнення до самоліквідації: ідейна сутність і причини нетривалості

Abstract

The Rikkendōshi-kai party, founded in 1913, became the ruling party after winning the 1915 parliamentary election and Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu joined it. In historiography, the process of Rikkendōshi-kai emergence, as well as this party’s cabinet, is limited to an exclusively positive statement of the fact of existence of such party and government, which in the midst of World War I was replaced by a “technical” non-party cabinet. The problem of deep reasons for emergence of such an unexpected power is not only unstudied but not even posed in available publications. During World War I the party government of the Association of Allies of the Constitution effectively pursued domestic political liberalization policy (property electoral qualification was reduced) and active external imperial expansion (particularly in China). Despite the undeniable achievements, Ōkuma’s single-party Cabinet did not rely on stable majority in the parliament. Thus, in October 1916 the Cabinet was dismissed and the Rikkendōshi-kai party ceased to exist. Problem and chronological analysis method of factual material allows to claim that the main reason for the self-dissolution of “The Association of Allies of the Constitution” was lack of experience in then Japanese political tradition of forming multiparty coalition governments. Japanese party politicians learned their lessons from Rikkendoshi-kai’s bitter experience. The key one was the fact that in conditions of absence of an unambiguously dominant party in the parliament a reliable party support for the government should become inter-party coalitions, formed on the basis of inter-party ideological and personnel compromises. However, that idea was implemented only in 1924, when, for the first time in its history, a true coalition “Cabinet of Three Parties to Defend the Сonstitution” (Goken sampa naikaku) led Japan.