The Emperor’s powers are exercised on the advice of his ministers,
in accordance with constitutional practice. He is not supposed to
act on his own authority. Real power, therefore, resides not in the
Emperor but in his advisers, acting through the agencies set up by
the Constitution. On the surface, these agencies _seem_ to establish
a system of representative government. There is a Cabinet, and a Diet
with two houses--the House of Peers and the House of Representatives.
And political parties like those of the Western democracies soon formed
to contest elections in Japan.
But there the resemblance ends. There is not only the supposedly
divine power of the Emperor. The democratic forms themselves are a
shell, empty of the real meat of popular government. In all effective
representative systems, as we well know, the legislature--particularly
its lower house--has real authority. Not so under Ito’s Constitution.
Ito ranged an overwhelming battery of aristocratic, bureaucratic and
militarist influence in five powerful agencies of government. You can
see from our chart on page 49 what these agencies were. They completely
eclipsed the House of Representatives. Moreover, they often dominated
the Cabinet, or disputed its authority. And through them, as much as
through the Cabinet, the clansmen ruled Japan with a tight rein. Let us
see how each worked out in practice.