1920년대 내무관료의 정당정치관

A Bureaucrat s View on Party Politics in 1920s Japan －Case of Tazawa Yoshiharu, a bureaucrat of the Ministry of Internal Affairs -

Politics in the 1920s Japan is defined as party politics in which modern parties struggled to gain power, organizing participants and reproducing already acquired political power. This article aims at clarifying bureaucrat s view on the contemporary parties and thus giving lights to the backgrounds of bureaucrats s advent in 1930s Japanese politics. Tazawa Yoshiharu(田澤義鋪) fits into this purpose because, being ex-bureaucrat of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, he was a rare person publicly stated his own view on party politics under circumstances in which such statements were not welcomed, and materialized his view by proceeding movements of political education. A particular aspect of bureaucrats s views against political parties in the 1920s Japan was its emphasis on ethical superiority. Bureaucrats tried to get superior political positions by insisting their own ethical superiority over political parties. Sharing and maintaining such view, Tazawa claimed to establishing policy-driven parties rather than power-pursuiting parties, by educating people to think politics in ethical terms. Local organizations became battlefield between parties and bureaucrats. While parties tried to organize local organizations into parties s sub-groups and thus to strengthen their influence, bureaucrats of the Ministry of Internal Affairs denied political latency of local organizations and tried to grasp them as administrative branch at local society. This meant dividing political sphere into national politics in which parties could claim their territories on the one hand, and local administrations from which parties were excluded and only bureaucrats could claim right on the other. Economic difficulties of agricultural area and corruptions of parties in the 1920s resulted in strengthening bureaucrats s influence at local society. Such exclusion of partied from local politics made a basis for bureaucratic politics in the 1930s Japan and it means that the ethical and apolitical views of the 1920s Japanese bureaucrats were realized in the succeeding era.