Kiyotaka Kuroda and the Unequal Treaties
SNA (Tokyo) — From 1888-1889, Kiyotaka Kuroda served as the second prime minister of Japan. Although he made an energetic effort to oversee the revision of the unequal treaties with the European Powers, he and his foreign minister became caught in the political crossfire.
Transcript
On April 30, 1888, Kiyotaka Kuroda became Japan’s second Prime Minister, in accordance with an agreement he had reached with his predecessor. Hirobumi Ito.
Kuroda was at this time the most influential member of the Satsuma clan. Although he played a key role in policies to colonize Hokkaido, trying to secure Japan’s northern borders against advancing Tsarist Russia, his reputation was not entirely clean.
Kuroda had been a central figure in the Hokkaido Colonization Office Scandal of 1881, which involved alleged financial misdeeds, and he was known to be quite violent when drunk.
The highlight of his administration was the promulgation of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan—the Meiji Constitution—on February 11, 1889, although it did not come into legal effect for another year and a half.
Kuroda, however, was not personally involved in drafting the constitution, which was the work of Hirobumi Ito and small team under his authority.
Nevertheless, Kuroda gave a speech at the Rokumeikan at this time in which he outlined the Meiji elite’s theory of government—he argued that the Cabinet must be “transcendental,” by which he meant that Cabinet policy must reflect a neutral stance serving the whole nation, not any particular political party.
The thorny issue which dominated Kuroda’s term in office was the ongoing effort to convince the European Powers to revise the unequal treaties.
The energetic Shigenobu Okuma was brought in as Foreign Minister to try to resolve the matter, but when it became known in April 1889 that Okuma’s negotiations included allowing foreigners to buy land anywhere within Japan and that foreign judges would be appointed to the Supreme Court, conservatives were outraged.
Kuroda was unable to coordinate support for Okuma’s negotiation plans even within his own Cabinet.
In October 1889, a rightwing activist attempted to assassinate Okuma with a bomb, failing to kill the allegedly traitorous Foreign Minister, but injuring him badly enough that his leg had to be amputated.
A week later, on October 25, 1889, Kuroda and his Cabinet resigned to take responsibility for the controversy. He had served for 1 year, 179 days.
Kiyotaka Kuroda did not leave politics. He later served in a number of high level positions and became recognized as a Genro—a leading statesman of Meiji Japan—by the middle of the next decade.
Kuroda died in August 1900 of natural causes.
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