Tokyo between the wars is not a woodblock print. It is department stores, jazz cafés, a constitution with a sacred emperor, and a press that can be brilliant until it is not allowed to be. A country that beat Russia in 1905 and sat with the victors in 1919 is deciding whether modern means the concert hall or the empire.
The pressure
The Meiji generation built the factories. The 1920s bring party cabinets, votes for all men in 1925, and in the same year a law against 'dangerous thoughts'. The Depression wrecks the silk trade, and young officers murder a prime minister in 1932. Each crisis hands the army more room.
Which future
Liberals hope for a great-power seat without a great-power war. Officers dream of a continent; the big industrial houses look for markets. City people would rather have the cinema than the draft. No cabinet can hold all of that.
What survived
By 1945 the jazz is gone, the cities are ash and the emperor stays, a continuity the American occupation decides to use. The parties, unions and newspapers of the 1920s come back under the occupation: the modern the army had shut down.
Whose story
Andrew Gordon traces a long road from the 1920s; others insist the turn came only in the 1930s. Whether to call the result fascism, as in Germany, or something built around the emperor is still argued.