Emperor Taisho
The emperor between two enormous ones, too ill to rule and reigning over the most democratic years Japan had yet had. Yoshihito succeeded his father in 1912 and gave his name to the Taisho era, which means great righteousness. He had contracted cerebral meningitis within weeks of birth and was never well: his speech, his walking and his concentration were all affected, and by the last years of the reign he appeared in public rarely and then with difficulty. The most repeated story about him is that at the opening of the Diet in 1913 he rolled his prepared speech into a tube and peered through it at the assembled members. It may not have happened. It is told constantly anyway, which says something about how the court managed his reputation and how little else the public was allowed to know. What the reign is actually remembered for happened around him. Power moved from the surviving oligarchs of the Meiji settlement towards party cabinets and the Diet, a shift historians call Taisho democracy, and universal male suffrage passed in 1925 - alongside a Peace Preservation Law that criminalised the politics the franchise was supposed to enfranchise. Japan entered the First World War on the Allied side in 1914 and took German holdings in Shandong and the Pacific cheaply. In 1915 it presented China with the Twenty-One Demands, which would have made it a protectorate and which China resisted with foreign help. Rice riots spread across the country in 1918 and brought down a government. In 1921 his son Hirohito was made regent, and the emperor effectively stopped functioning as head of state. The Great Kanto earthquake destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923 and killed over a hundred thousand people. He died at the end of 1926, aged forty-seven.
- Lived: 1879 CE – 1926 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: ruler, head_of_state
