A Study Of Civilian Bureaucracy Under The System Of Before The War Japanese Party Politics

The period of pre-war Japanese party politics was a transitional period of modernJapanese political society——Japan entered into the party politics period from thefeudatory dictatorship period. During this period, Japan underwent tremendous changesboth in domestic politics, economy and culture and political force structure. Taking thebureaucracy as the object of study, the thesis focused on the forces changes of feudatorysenior statesmen, political parties, the military and bureaucratic forces that rivaled witheach other in the times of party politics.During this period, feudatory senior statesmen forces declined, while political partyforces became much stronger than what it was, and it launched large-scale activities toget posts in the government so that a large number of party members gained access to thegovernment agencies. The civil officials who would like to get further promotion in thepolitical arena must choose to join a certain political party. As a result, there was atendency that political parties became bureaucratic and officials belonged to a certainpolitical party. In this way, the civil officials who originally kept neutral in politics beganto prefer to a certain political party. Along with the change of the regime of parties, thecivil official elites in quantity lived among the ordinary so as to the decline of civilofficial forces.In order to win the right to organize a cabinet, political parties in the period of partypolitics carried out money politics, so that political parties were full of corruption. TheJapanese were extremely disappointed at the political parties, declaring that the period ofparty politics was the darkest era of Japanese constitutional government. Feudatorysenior statesmen, political parties and bureaucratic forces had all declined while themilitary became stronger. In this way, the original political balance was broken and anew political pattern was going to come into being.In summary, the thesis consists of five parts: the first part is the Introduction of thethesis. It summarizes the previous research achievements and the existing problems andstates the objective of the thesis. The second part depicts the formation of the pre-warJapanese party politics system. It focuses on the social background of the formation of Japanese party politics. The third part is the changes of the civil official bureaucracy inparty politics period. It discusses the changes and relationships of all forces in the period.The fourth part states the collapse of party politics and bureaucratic reform. Moreover, itmakes a comparison on the pre-war and post-war bureaucracy. The fifth part is theConclusion of the thesis. In this part, the author makes a conclusion of the whole thesisand makes an analysis of the reasons for the collapse of party politics.The academic circle has attained great achievement on the research into Japaneseparty politics and bureaucracy. However, there is little comparative study combining bothof the research fields so far. Out of this, the author makes a research on it with theexpectation to contribute a little to the academic circle through her own efforts.