This study aims to examine the high school students’ perceptions about “democracy” to clarify the characteristics of their perceptions. As a premise of the study, the perceptions of “democracy” can be changed due to the situation where the students’ interpretation made visible and their background. This study focuses in particular on the view of democracy in history learning. Therefore, our team developed and implemented a lesson plan, `Taisho Democracy’ to investigate high school students’ perceptions. The findings revealed the following two points. (1) High school students’ interpretation of the progress and decline of “democracy” in Japan can be classified with six patterns. (2) High school students tended to associate democracy with social movements. These findings shows a different trend from previous studies. The results can potentially improve the teaching of history and democracy in the future.