Shiraki Tachibana was a journalist on Chinese issues, known as the ideologue for Manchukuo. This paper analyzes the development of his theory on democracy from the 1920s to the Manchurian Incident and illuminates the relevance of Japanese social thought in the 1920s and 1930s.

  Tachibana was conscious of the failure of the classical liberalism and representative politics. He absorbed the discourse of “the right to life” that was popular in interwar Japan, and developed his version of democracy based on it. During the National Revolution Period in China, he highly appreciated Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People, considering it as a gradual “middle course” to realize socialism in China. Moreover, inspired by Sun’s theory of the Kingly Way, Tachibana developed his own version of it, which was in resemblance to the fundamental theory of the “welfare state”, claiming that the legitimacy of governance lies on the guarantee of the people’s “right to life”. Later he used the very same argument that the legitimacy of the governance lies on the guarantee of welfare, to denounce Chiang Kai-shek’s seize of power, and to legitimize the foundation of Manchukuo.