How did voting restrictions limit participation in early Meiji Japan?

In early Meiji Japan, voting restrictions were a deliberate mechanism used by the government to limit political participation and maintain executive control under the Meiji Constitution.

When the first Diet met in 1890, the government imposed a tax qualification of 15 yen. This financial requirement significantly restricted the electorate, limiting the right to vote to approximately 500,000 people, or about 5 percent of the adult male population.123

These restrictions were part of a broader constitutional framework designed by Itō Hirobumi to balance a popularly elected lower house with imperial authority. By tying suffrage to tax payments, the government ensured that the initial voting base was narrow and largely composed of wealthier individuals, thereby tempering the influence of the broader democratic movements that had emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. These qualifications were only gradually loosened over the following decades, with universal manhood suffrage not being implemented until 1925.132