of circumstances propelled the cost of rice in a dangerous upward spiral. The sudden growth of the urban population had led to a rise in demand for rice as a staple of the daily diet and as an ingredient in the manufacture of sake and other rice-based products. At the same time, migration to the cities produced a labor shortage in the countryside, causing a fall in the supply of rice. The situation was exacerbated by rumors of an imminent military expedition to Siberia, which was then officially announced on August 2. Anticipating a redirection of a large segment of the rice supply to feed the troops, the news spurred grain speculators into action. It also encouraged widespread stock-piling, competition between regional markets for a dwindling supply, and rice prices that varied wildly from place to place—all driving the vicious cycle of inflation ever faster. As rice prices rose, the economy continued to boom, and some were clearly enjoying the benefits of prosperity. But while narikin engaged in orgies of conspicuous consumption, others found themselves unable to afford even a family meal. In some areas no rice was to be had for any price. Rumors abounded that merchants were hoarding supplies or shipping rice out of the district in search of greater profits. In desperation and rage, urban crowds blamed rice merchants for their greed and the government for its failure to rectify the situation.
The rice riots began in July as a “housewives revolt” (nyobō ikki) in a small Toyama fishing village, when fisherwomen refused to allow local rice to be loaded on ships for transport to urban markets in the Kansai region. Protests spread quickly along the Toyama coast and into urban centers throughout Japan. By mid-August the entire country was engulfed with rioting, which affected 38 cities, 153 towns, and 177 villages and involved an estimated six hundred thousand to a million participants.24 Though the riots were touched off in a village, when transferred to an urban setting they took on a more frightening aspect, becoming associated with a dangerous new form of crowd violence. Michael Lewis points out that the urban riots went beyond the rural protests in their sweeping indictment of the political status quo, representing a “massive rejection of the new Japan by great numbers of its citizens.”25 The distinction made between the rural and urban riots was reflected in the words used to describe them. While the media spoke of village ikki, employing language derived from the feudal lexicon of peasant uprisings, they referred to urban riots as sōjō—a term drawn from the Meiji criminal code, which categorized sōjō as a crime of sedition.26
The riots drew on a history of urban militancy that had gathered strength since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, and which had schooled the urban crowd in political tactics empowering the disenfranchised. Since the shocking Hibiya Riots of 1905, where unruly crowds overran Hibiya Park to protest the terms of the peace treaty with Russia, urban rioting had become an increasingly familiar feature of urban politics. Over the years, urban residents learned to use shimin taikai—“citizens rallies”—as a means of protesting streetcar-rate hikes, new taxes, and other offensive aspects of municipal policy. If the authorities refused to give way, the crowd frequently demonstrated its displeasure through violence, attacking symbols of the political order such as police boxes and government offices. At the same time, the formation of labor unions created another vehicle for collective action that provided a source of social power for the disenfranchised. The labor shortage of the war boom gave workers a new advantage over their employers, an edge that labor activists were quick to seize in their quest to improve working conditions. The war spurred union organizing and emboldened labor activists to use strikes and other forms of militancy to press their demands.27
Though both these forms of crowd militancy had created a new source of social power to express political demands, nothing prepared political elites for the extent and force of the rice riots. The nationwide riots pushed the government to extreme measures, forcing it to impose a media blackout and to dispatch troops to 144 locations to put down the disturbances. The aftermath was equally dramatic: for failing to prevent the riots, the Terauchi Masatake cabinet fell in disgrace, signaling the ability of the disenfranchised crowd to determine the fate of the prime minister. The crowd forced a host of new policies concerning rice prices and rice supply, as well as new measures to address poverty and provide social services for the urban poor. Most of all, the riots burned into popular memory the image of a chain of cities engulfed in rioting: the specter of urban revolution.
The media were a key factor in the outbreak and spread of the rioting. Indeed, their role in the rice riots served as an important demonstration of the social power of the press among an increasingly literate, newspaper-reading public. Coverage in the press of the daily rises in rice prices helped inflame public anger in the first place; sensational reports of riots in one locale inspired crowds elsewhere to act. Moreover, the press served as a kind of advertisement for local rallies and other crowd actions, as in Niigata, where the Niigata shinbun published the contents of leaflets that called on local residents to gather and discuss the situation.28 Extensive coverage of an August 12 rally in Kanazawa that erupted into a riot merely brought greater numbers out the following night, when the crowd regrouped at the same public park to renew its demands.29 Recognizing the inflammatory role of the media, in mid-August the Home Ministry began to censor reports of the riots.
Coverage in the press helped shape public perceptions of the angry crowds and constructed narratives of their actions. Even in cities like Sapporo, where despite the circulation of advertisements for a “citizen’s rally to discuss the problem of rice” neither rallies nor riots occurred, articles on rioting elsewhere impressed local residents with the power of the urban crowd.30 The story told in the newspapers concluded, significantly, with the suppression of the riots and the arrest of the perpetrators, but not before treating the public to hair-raising accounts of crowds of thousands surging down the streets, overwhelming the local police forces, and venting their rage on the political and economic elite they blamed for their troubles by throwing rocks, lighting fires, and smashing houses.
Newspaper accounts of the Kanazawa riots detailed crowds of several thousand gathering on the evenings of August 12 and 13, the first night on the grounds of a local temple, the second at the city’s major park. As the paper told the story, on the first evening of rioting, after the crowds had gathered at the temple grounds, they broke into four groups and spread out over the city, stopping in front of residences of rice merchants, wealthy landlords, and political authorities. At each stop they issued a summons to the master of the house to come out and negotiate with the crowd; they demanded provision of cheap rice to the residents of the city. If their call was answered and demands were met, the crowd moved on. But if the gate remained tightly shut, they vented their rage by breaking down the door and smashing up the entry hall.31
The local press in Niigata and Okayama told similar stories of escalating violence. In mid-August the Niigata shinbun reported that crowds that had gathered in Hakusan Park for Obon festival dancing were roused to action by a series of impromptu speakers denouncing local merchants for their refusal to lower prices. A pack of angry people surged out of the park and headed for the home of Kagitomi Sansaku, where sentiments toward the powerful rice dealer were expressed with a hail of rocks.32 Likewise, the San’yō shinpō reported the outbreak of violence at the Okayama rice exchange, where two brokers were assaulted by an irate mob. Though city authorities tried to avert rioting by dispensing reduced-price rice, an angry crowd gathered at the storefront of a leading rice merchant and, judging the company efforts wanting, broke into the warehouse and distributed rice to those waiting in the street. From there they headed for the residences of the company president and other local merchants, smashing houses of businessmen rumored to have profited from the rice inflation. Though the police were present for most of this, they were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the rioters and could only stand by ineffectually. In Okayama, crowd violence was quelled only with the arrival of the local army regiment.33
Such tales of urban rioting conveyed in lurid detail modern society’s frightening capacity for violence. In the way the press framed their stories, they drove home several points about the significance of the rice riots. The first concerned the appropriation of city space by the crowd. Gatherings at parks, temple grounds, and other public spaces inscribed these as sites of popular political revolt, memorializing and monumentalizing the social power of the crowd and creating an alternative to the town hall as the symbol of grassroots democracy. Second, newspapers told the story of the righteous anger of the crowd that arose from its