Decades of propaganda have made students in the Western world so familiar with the Japanese interpretation of the population problem of Japan that even international commissions considered population pressure as an extenuating factor in the successive acts of military aggression by which Japan acquired hegemony over Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria. Few realized that the population pressure within Japan was minimal in comparison with that which already existed in the conquered areas; that, furthermore, Japanese imperial policy tended toward an increasing imbalance between population increase and employment opportunities. The deepening poverty of the Korean masses was often reported, only to be challenged by the citation of production statistics, but the provincialism of the West was such that discussion remained in the realm of charge and countercharge. Few students dared the linguistic hurdles barring factual analysis of the impact of Japanese political, economic, and educational domination on the traditional Korean patterns of fertility, mortality and migration. Whatever the explanation for this myopia of the social scientists of the interwar decades, its conquences were serious. No backlog of technically competent and conceptually mature research on the demography of Korea exists to guide either the analysis of the present or the assessment of the future.

In describing the failures of the old society, Chinese communist writers have frequently condemned the evils of bureaucratic capitalism. It is not easy to extract a clear definition of this term from their polemic literature, but I shall attempt to construct a preliminary working proposition.

Universal suffrage was enacted into law in Japan in 1925 under a coalition government formed the previous year by the two major parties, Kenseikai and Seiyūkai. The law abolished an existing tax qualification for voting, expanding the electorate from three million to twelve and one-half million adult males. The Kenseikai had endorsed universal suffrage in late 1919, after an internal debate which began about a year earlier. The Seiyūkai by contrast accepted universal suffrage only in 1924, after several years of expressly rejecting it. This article traces the stages whereby these parties became committed to the legislation, and also examines the reaction to the issue on the part of other elements which had at least a potential voice in this legislation: the nonparty cabinets which governed from 1922 to 1924, the privy council, the House of Peers, and the genro, or elder statesmen.