SNA (Tokyo) — From 1927-1929, Imperial Army-officer-turned-politician Giichi Tanaka attempted to guide Japan with a firm hand, aiming to crush radicalism at home and to use the iron fist in China. This hardline turn was resisted on many fronts, but the biggest problem emerged from the Army itself, which was slipping away from political control.

Transcript

On April 20, 1927, Giichi Tanaka became prime minister of Japan.

Tanaka was the fourth and final direct protege of the late Genro Aritomo Yamagata to rise to the highest office, and while he shared the conservative outlook of his predecessors, he was both an Imperial Army man as well as the head of a political party, making him a unique figure.

As his first order of business, Tanaka dealt swiftly with the Showa Financial Crisis which had sunk the Wakatsuki administration. A special Diet session was called and relief legislation was passed without difficulty.

Tanaka came to power with a clear-cut rightwing agenda of crushing radical political thought at home.

In foreign affairs, he believed in demonstrating Japanese military might, especially within China, where conservatives had chafed for years at the noninterventionist approach of Shidehara diplomacy under the previous two prime ministers. This new policy direction was proclaimed at an event called the Eastern Conference held in Tokyo in the summer of 1927.

However, Tanaka’s premiership was sure to be a short one unless his party could gain a functioning majority in the House of Representatives.

His challenge deepened when the two major opposition parties merged to form the Constitutional People’s Government Party in June 1927, less than two months after Tanaka’s administration had been inaugurated. This new party took a distinctly more liberal and populist policy line, and it was led by former Finance Minister Osachi Hamaguchi.

The February 1928 general election was the first held under universal manhood suffrage, and it resulted in a hung parliament in which Tanaka’s party narrowly lost the popular vote, but gained 217 seats to the 216 seats won by Hamaguchi’s party.

Much to the outrage of Tanaka and other rightwing conservatives, some proletarian parties advocating socialist and anti-establishment programs—such as the Social Democratic Party and the Labour-Farmer Party—also gained a handful of seats in the Diet.

One political casualty of the general election, however, was Home Minister Kisaburo Suzuki, who had used heavy-handed measures, including the widespread replacement of prefectural governors, in order to interfere in the election to boost the results for Tanaka’s party. After the poll, the opposition parties were able to pass a censure motion and force Suzuki to resign in May 1928.

The main energy of the Tanaka administration was aimed at harsh repression of political radicals.

With much difficulty and under much criticism, a revision of 1925 Peace Preservation Law was enacted which allowed the death penalty to be imposed on anyone deemed threatening to the “national essence.”

Citizens advocating communism or related proletarian ideologies were imprisoned and sometimes tortured.

Offices of the notorious Special Higher Police, Japan’s often violent thought police, were expanded to all prefectures across the nation.

In global affairs, however, the Tanaka government maintained cooperative relations with the European Great Powers, even signing the August 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact which banned the use of war as an instrument for settling disputes between nations.

However, this did not prevent the administration from implementing an iron-fisted military policy toward China, including a clash in which the Imperial Japanese Army killed thousands of soldiers of Chiang Kai-Shek’s National Revolutionary Army in the city of Jinan.

Despite such tough policy postures, Prime Minister Tanaka repeatedly found himself embattled on various political fronts. The official opposition within the House of Representatives sniped at him at every occasion, and even many conservatives in the House of Peers disapproved of some of his maneuvers.

The fatal problem, however, was that Tanaka gradually lost control of Imperial Japanese Army, the very institution through which he had originally risen to prominence.

This became dramatically apparent on June 4, 1928, when the Chinese warlord of Manchuria, Zhang Zuolin, was assassinated by a bomb placed under his personal train. It was a plot conceived and carried out by officers of the Imperial Japanese Army in Manchuria, and Tanaka had been kept in the dark.

The killing of the prominent warlord was widely condemned both within Japan and internationally.

Tanaka pledged that he would figure out who had been responsible for carrying out the assassination of Zhang, and if the culprits were Imperial Army officers, they would be court-martialed. Tanaka even made this pledge directly to the Emperor—he would get to the bottom of the matter and it would be handled severely.

But Tanaka subsequently ran into a wall of intransigence from the Army General Staff, which point blank refused to court-martial any officer over the matter, or even to publicly admit its involvement in the assassination and the coverup.

After months of back-and-forth, Tanaka came to accept the Imperial Army’s argument that admitting to the world what had occurred would be damaging to the nation’s foreign policy position in international affairs.

After delaying it as long as he could, Tanaka had an audience with the young Emperor Hirohito and reported his supposed findings that the Army had not been involved in Zhang’s assassination in any way. When Hirohito made clear that he didn’t believe what Tanaka was reporting to him, the prime minister was horrified.

In the following days, Tanaka was overcome with shame over having lied to his sovereign. He thus resigned on July 2, 1929. His term had lasted 2 years and 74 days.

Giichi Tanaka never recovered. He withdrew from most public appearances, and within three months he died of a heart ailment.

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