SNA (Tokyo) — From 1901-1906, Taro Katsura served a highly consequential term as prime minister which featured the emergence of a new generation to the top leadership post and a war which established Japan as a Great Power in international affairs.

Transcript

On June 2, 1901, Taro Katsura became prime minister of Japan.

His ascension to the top office marked a clear generational change. The Genro would no longer serve as premiers, but were now handing the reins over to their proteges, while they usually retreated to more behind-the-scenes roles.

This also marked the point when the middle Meiji Era crossed into the late Meiji Period. The Emperor was getting older and the 20th century was bringing with it new technologies and new ideas.

But Katsura—as befitted the leading protege of Aritomo Yamagata—was a staunch conservative and an Imperial Army man, with a strong instinct for maintaining political and social order.

The Katsura era had an early diplomatic success, although it was more due to work of the Genro and Foreign Ministry than anything Katsura had accomplished, and that was the conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in February 1902.

It was another major landmark for Japan. Less than three years after the treaty giving them full legal equality with the European Powers had been effectuated, now they were in a formal military alliance with what was arguably the leading empire of the age.

Domestic politics gave Katsura a tougher time, however, and most of the problem touched in one way or another on his predecessor, Hirobumi Ito.

Ito was by no means an enemy to Katsura, but he was a power that he couldn’t control. Not only was Ito a Genro with the ear of the Emperor, but he also remained head of the Constitutional Association of Political Friends, which reaffirmed its dominance of the House of Representatives in the August 1902 general elections.

When the Katsura Cabinet wanted to raise the Land Tax again, this time to fund an expansion of the Imperial Navy, Ito, in his capacity as head of the political party, opposed the government’s policy. Katsura had no choice but to back down and to accept a compromise proposal that Ito had offered him.

When Katsura dissolved the Diet at the end of the year and called a new general election in March 1903, Ito’s party lost some ground but maintained effective control of the chamber.

Eventually feeling that he’d been backed into a corner by Ito’s power, Taro Katsura resigned as prime minister on July 1, 1903…

But this time it wasn’t the end of the story. Aritomo Yamagata gathered the support of his fellow Genro and approached the Emperor, directly appealing that Ito be forced to give up one of his two roles, as Genro or as political party leader. In the end, the Emperor did ask Ito to head the Privy Council and to leave his position as head of the Constitutional Association of Political Friends.

With Ito promoted into a less powerful role, Katsura resumed his post as prime minister of the nation.

By the latter part of the year, Katsura’s position was strengthening, mainly because a diplomatic confrontation with Tsarist Russia was intensifying, and even the opposition parties started to feel the tug of their patriotic duty to unify behind the government.

The confrontation had been building for years, mainly because railway construction across Siberia made it easier for Russia to bring major military power to the Far East, and Japanese leaders felt threatened by the enhanced Russian presence in the region.

The war began with a sneak attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy on the Russian base at Port Arthur, on China’s Liaodung Peninsula, which took the Russians by complete surprise, and succeeded in bottling up their Far East Fleet in the port.

In the run-up to the Russo-Japanese War, and throughout the conflict, Prime Minister Taro Katsura was not making independent decisions about its conduct. Rather, it was he together with the Genro who were collectively in charge, all of them feeling that the fate of the modern Japan they had built in the past decades hung in the balance.

It was a far more brutal war than Japan’s victory over China a decade earlier. In the Sino-Japanese War, Japan lost about 1,400 soldiers killed in action. In the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese lost over 80,000 men.

It was the world’s introduction to mechanized, industrial warfare, with wider use of machine guns, and entire units disappearing in minutes after charging from their trenches.

The Imperial Japanese Army won most of its battles, capturing the Korean Peninsula, the Liaodung Peninsula including Port Arthur, and much of Manchuria. But even as the Japanese pushed back the Russian forces, in reality more Japanese soldiers died in these offensives than did Russian soldiers.

It was at sea that the decisive action came, particularly the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905 when the Imperial Japanese Navy, under the command of Heihachiro Togo, destroyed Russia’s Baltic Fleet, which had spent eight months crossing the world, only to meet its doom.

The destruction of the Russian Navy and signs of revolution in St. Petersburg convinced Tsar Nicholas II that it was time to sue for peace.

For their part, the Meiji Genro understood that Japan, too, was militarily exhausted, and if a grinding battle of attrition continued in Manchuria, that the henceforth victorious war could turn against Japan, which had already suffered terribly.

Both sides accepted the offer of United States President Theodore Roosevelt to mediate, and the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on September 5, 1905.

By the treaty’s terms, Russia recognized Korea as part of the Japanese sphere of influence and agreed to evacuate Manchuria. It also ceded the southern half of Sakhalin Island to Japan. But the Russian government refused to pay any war indemnity.

Prime Minister Taro Katsura had no opportunity to savor his victory. During the year and a half that the war had lasted, domestic politics had been calm and orderly, but the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth were met with outrage by the general public.

The outrage exploded at the Hibiya Park Riots of September 5-7, at which tens of thousands of people rampaged, calling for Russia to pay an indemnity and to give up all of Sakhalin Island to Japan. Not understanding just how fragile Japan’s military victory had been, they felt that the nation had been betrayed in the peace negotiations.

In the end, about seventeen people died, hundreds injured, and thousands arrested—as well as most of the police boxes in Tokyo burned to the ground.

Condemnations poured in on Taro Katsura from newspaper editorials and regional political associations, but the main opposition political party leaders largely refrained from joining the campaign.

The Genro were firmly united behind the Katsura administration, knowing better the true balance of power in international affairs, and the government weathered the crisis.

Japan had stunned the world by defeating Russia, signaling that the 19th century of European domination of the world would not go unchallenged in the 20th century. Japan had become an idol to Asians, Africans, and other colonized peoples aching to be free of their European masters.

But in Japan itself, matters were different. The Genros’ aim was not to overthrow European colonialism, but to join in its bounties.

Former Prime Minister Hirobumi Ito was sent to Seoul in November 1905 to become the first Resident-General of Korea, entrenching Japan’s complete authority over the peninsula.

And for Taro Katsura, although his government survived the immediate postwar political crisis, his cause was spent. He resigned as prime minister on January 7, 1906, after a term of four years, 220 days, the longest premiership under the Meiji Constitution.

Taro Katsura will return.

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