This thesis focuses on the nature and extent of interwar Japanese unemployment and public policy responses to it, issues which remain relatively neglected in the historiography. It details the spasmodic attention devoted by government to the unemployed in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and how attitudes towards the out of work evolved in response to the changes in the economic environment, both national and international, down to 1938. Particular attention is paid to contemporary attitudes both inside and outside of government towards the related issues of public works, unemployment insurance and industrial rationalization. In addition, unemployment policy is examined in the context of wider budgetary and fiscal concerns, principally with regard to the restoration and abandonment of the gold standard, and in light of the efforts made from the early 1920s to improve upon the rudimentary estimates available to policy makers of the scale and nature of unemployment problem.