The Taisho Era

The Taisho Era, 1912 to 1926, named for Emperor Taisho, is generally remembered as a period of comparatively liberal political and cultural life in Japan, often called Taisho democracy, in which party-based cabinet government strengthened, urban middle-class culture flourished, and calls grew for expanded suffrage, eventually producing universal male suffrage in 1925. Japan entered the First World War on the side of the Allies in 1914, seizing German possessions in China and the Pacific, and emerged from the war as one of the five great powers at the Paris Peace Conference, a mark of the international standing it had built since the Meiji Era. The era's stability was shaken by the catastrophic Great Kanto earthquake of September 1, 1923, which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama and killed well over 100,000 people, and by growing social strain from rapid urbanization and economic volatility. The era ends with Emperor Taisho's death in 1926, opening the Showa Era under his son Hirohito.