JAPANESE POLITICS

A Brief Account of Political Conflicts

BY

UICHI IWASAKI, LL. B., M. A.

Member of the Japanese Bar

Professor of Sociology in Kwansai University, Osaka

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SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN THE

FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK

1921

UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA.

PREFACE

THIS is an attempt to study Japanese political forces from the viewpoint of modern sociology; that is, to consider them as dynamic forces, not as static conditions. The writer has recognized from the outset that these forces are extremely complex, and that any attempt to separate them must be arbitrary. No systematic consideration of the Japanese state, whether the method be that of sociology or metaphysics or what not, can be free from the danger of artificiality.

The writer is fully aware of this natural shortcoming of his book. He feels, however, that a sociological study of the Japanese polity should be made on these lines. In attempting it he departs from the methods of other students of Japanese political institutions, who have been content merely to recite the facts of history or to discuss dialectically the Japanese constitution and its theory.

As a student of Japanese law in one of the Japanese universities the writer was taught to consider the institutions of his country only as they are described in the constitution and the statutes. He was not encouraged to examine the actual workings of those institutions. The scholars of that university never went beyond an abstract interpretation of the written codes. After the writer came to Columbia University and studied The Responsible State,' by Franklin H. Giddings, his con

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'Houghton, Mifflin Company, Boston, 1918, pp. 107.

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