Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 428, The Highest Bitter.

One of the things I like to argue against when we talk about history is the idea of

historical inevitability. I'm always hesitant to agree to the idea that a given outcome was

inevitable or unavoidable, or that things had to turn out a certain way.

And that's particularly true when we come to one of the common narratives of pre-war Japan,

the idea that the slide away from democracy and towards military-dominated governments was unavoidable.

It is definitely true that there were structural weaknesses in the imperial-era government

that gave the military in particular way too much unaccountable power,

and that ultimately those weaknesses in conjunction with a breakdown in popular support

for democracy after the Great Depression, as well as

wings of the government, especially the bureaucracy, who were increasingly hostile to ideas

like popular sovereignty and individual rights, proved fatal for a nascent Japanese democracy.

And yet I am very firmly of the opinion that it was possible for things to shake

out differently, and that had they done so, had a precise sequence of events not taken place

the way they did, it would have been entirely possible for imperial-era institutions to transform

into democratic ones, even without the intervention of American occupation.

And the story I want to tell this week is a great way to illustrate, I think, that point.

It shows the vitality of the public sphere in Japan, even before the period we'd normally call democracy,

and the power of the people to hold their

leaders to account, and like all great democratic stories, it starts with a big, old, messy

scandal. To unpack this scandal, we need to talk a little bit about the history of the powerful

Japanese institution embroiled therein, the Imperial Japanese Navy.

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