National Diet Library Newsletter
No. 176, December 2010/February 2011
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Exhibition on parliamentary government: commemorating the 120th anniversary of the establishment of the Diet
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Nishiki-e of the Imperial Diet Building |
The opening ceremony of the Imperial Diet (Japanese parliament) was held on November 29, 1890, and the year 2010 saw the 120th anniversary. To mark the occasion, the Diet held a commemoration ceremony on the anniversary day, November 29, 2010, and an exhibition organized by the National Diet Library (NDL) was held from December 1 to 10 in the Parliamentary Museum.
The exhibition consisted of two parts: “Part 1: Path to parliamentary government” introduced the efforts of people who strove to establish the Imperial Diet, pursuing the ideal of the politics from the end of the Edo Era (1603-1868), a period of great transition, to the beginning of the Meiji Era (1868-1912); “Part 2: Party government in the Showa Era (1926-1989)” outlined the history from the latter half of the Taisho Era (1912-1926) to the establishment of the 1955 system. (On the same occasion, the Parliamentary Museum held another special exhibition which treated the period between the establishment of the Imperial Diet and the realization of universal male suffrage in 1924.) The exhibition contained about 80 documents from the NDL collection such as documents relating to political parties, letters, private journals, and memoranda of persons involved in parliamentary activities including SAKAMOTO Ryoma, KIDO Takayoshi, IWAKURA Tomomi, SAIONJI Kinmochi, HAMAGUCHI Osachi, TAKAHASHI Korekiyo, YOSHIDA Shigeru, and HATOYAMA Ichiro.
Images of some of the exhibited documents are also available on the NDL website: Online gallery “Modern Japan in archives: political history from the opening of the country to post-war.” This electronic exhibition was first launched in July 2006, and a new chapter, “Chapter 6: Establishment of 1955 system” was added in November 2010 on this special occasion.
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