Unpopular War?

People familiar with Japan generally suspect that in spite of numerous victories Japan's war is widely unpopular among Japan's meagerly living masses and once-thriving international tradesmen. Such suspicions were strengthened last week by news of the final election returns for the lower house of the Japanese Diet.*

The Japanese Diet theoretically has full legislative power and control over finance. Actually it is little more than a grand-scale sounding board for public opinion. The Emperor can dissolve the lower house at any time, and has often done so at the behest of the Premier and Cabinet. The Cabinet is not responsible to the Diet, but to the Emperor. And the Cabinet is virtually at the mercy of the Army & Navy.

But a great public sounding board has great influence, and the military extremists who planned Japan's war would have liked to eliminate the Diet. While they were coming to power they had got rid of political parties. They made a start toward a totalitarian Fascist party, the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, but so many politicians got on its rolls that it never had much unity. The militarists could not get rid of the Diet because it had been set up by the sacrosanct Imperial Constitution.

They tried, instead, to reform the election laws so that Japan's universal manhood suffrage would be supplanted by votes for no one except family heads and military reservists. This "reform" would have disfranchised some 2,000,000 voters, including many unwarlike Japanese, both liberals & conservatives. A howl rose in Diet circles. Finally, in January 1941, a political bargain was struck. The Government dropped its electoral-reform scheme, extended the term of the current lower house for a year, promised not to press legislation which would have increased Japan's economic totalitarianism. In return, the Diet agreed to pass huge military appropriation bills with maximum speed and without adverse comment.

There was nothing in this bargain to prevent the Diet from again acting as a sounding board when this year's elections came around. The Japanese radio announced that 378 out of 466 seats had been won by Government-supported, war-favoring candidates. If 20% of the elected candidates were unsupported by the Government, probably much more than 20% of the total vote was cast for candidates unsupported by the Government. This did not mean that Japan was on the verge of collapse: it did seem to mean that at least one Japanese voter in every five is seriously downhearted.

* The upper House of Peers is partly hereditary, partly specially elected.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.