SNA (Tokyo) — From 1921-1922, finance specialist Korekiyo Takahashi served as prime minister of Japan. His brief tenure, however, was mainly notable as a period in which the nation was adrift at its senior levels; those in authority or who had commanded policy in earlier years had disappeared through death and illness.

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On November 13, 1921, Korekiyo Takahashi became prime minister of Japan.

He had been Minister of Finance in both the Yamamoto and Hara Cabinets, and as a senior member of the Constitutional Association of Political Friends, which had a firm majority of seats in the House of Representatives, the succession proceeded smoothly.

But Takahashi was no Takashi Hara. A masterful political party politician had been replaced a figure of much poorer skills and dramatically weaker personal authority. Hara’s removal had punched a gaping hole into the center of ruling party.

At the national level, the authority crisis deepened when Genro Aritomo Yamagata fell ill and died at the beginning of February 1922, removing the only man who could still control the independent-minded Imperial Japanese Army as a whole.

As for the Emperor Taisho, due to his mental illness, he had withdrawn entirely from public life, and young Crown Prince Hirohito was named Regent. But command ability was lacking within the Imperial institution as well.

In short, Japan was recognized internationally as one of the world’s Great Powers, but with the Emperor, Yamagata, and Hara gone, it was now a power without effective central authority.

The crucial Washington Naval Conference was beginning just as Takahashi came to office. Fortunately, the delegation led by Admiral Tomosaburo Kato was quite competent—although they worried about how they would deal with the military hardliners back home.

The three most important agreements reached at the Washington Naval Conference were that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was ended at the insistence of the United States; that limits on warship construction were agreed, preventing a naval arms race in the near term but also locking the Imperial Japanese Navy into a size 60% of the US and UK navies; and that Japan would return to China the Shandong Peninsula which it had seized from Germany in the early stages of the Great War.

Back home in Tokyo, concerns about the command capabilities of Prime Minister Takahashi quickly proved to be well founded. Political infighting broke out within the ruling party, and almost every observer soon came to the conclusion that Takahashi was not equal to the task of governing the nation.

When, as part of a political maneuver, Takahashi announced his resignation on June 12, 1922, no one begged him to stay. His term of office lasted 212 days.

Although Takahashi had proved to everyone that he was not national leader material, he would return multiple times in the future as Minister of Finance. His most significant historical role was yet to come.

This article was originally published on February 5, 2023, in the “Japan and the World” newsletter. Become a Shingetsu News supporter on Patreon and receive the newsletter by email each Monday morning.