SNA (Tokyo) — In 1931, Reijiro Wakatsuki again took over the post of prime minister from a stronger predecessor, but this time the deck was in any case stacked against any prospect for political success. The nation was sinking into the depths of the Great Depression, and the government lost control of young officers in the Imperial Army, who launched a conquest of Manchuria which had never been authorized by Tokyo.

Transcript

On April 14, 1931, Reijiro Wakatsuki returned to office as prime minister of Japan.

As had been the case five years earlier when he had become prime minister for the first time, Wakatsuki had taken over from a stronger leader who held greater control over the ruling party. While the process leading to his ascension was once again a smooth one, intra-party rivalries lurked not far from the surface.

Wakatsuki was, in any case, walking into major trouble.

By 1931 the impact of the Great Depression was hitting Japan in full force. Exports were slumping and unemployment rates skyrocketing. The financial policies of the Hamaguchi administration—reducing government expenditures and sticking to the gold standard—were precisely the wrong measures to cope with the Depression, and dissatisfaction with the Wakatsuki administration, which stuck to the same line, arose quickly.

The even more dire threat was rising from the Imperial Japanese Army—not only from its senior command, which had long been difficult to control, but increasingly from junior officers who had begun to imbibe various rightwing revolutionary ideologies, even rejecting the legitimacy of national rule by elected politicians.

With the misery of the Depression in the background, Army plots of various descriptions began to proliferate.

It was in Manchuria on September 18, 1931, where the crisis broke. Relatively junior officers arranged for a bomb to go off near the track of the South Manchuria Railway. This was blamed on Chinese saboteurs, and provoked a full-scale Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Much of the public back home was swept up in patriotic fervor to support the troops.

Many in the Imperial Army had long chafed at the nonintervention policies of Foreign Minister Kijuro Shidehara and felt that control of Manchuria was a necessity to secure Japan’s national security and its interests on the continent.

The Manchurian Incident posed a major dilemma for Prime Minister Wakatsuki and his government.

On the one hand, the Army was actively subverting their authority. Their basic diplomatic policy of maintaining cooperative relations with the Western Powers had been put in jeopardy by such a heavy-handed and unilateral move.

On the other hand, if the Wakatsuki regime opted for a full political confrontation with the Army, it was by no means certain which side would come out on top.

At first, the Wakatsuki administration tried to limit the scope of the Army offensive in Manchuria, but when General Senjuro Hayashi and his forces stationed in Korea crossed the border into Manchuria, the government reluctantly provided the necessary funding, avoiding a direct political clash.

As if the defiance of the Army wasn’t a heavy enough blow to the Wakatsuki government’s credibility, also in September the United Kingdom took the British Pound off the gold standard, revealing in stark terms the fundamental wrongheadedness of Japan’s economic policy.

Wakatsuki’s one significant countermove was to explore the idea of inviting Tsuyoshi Inukai’s main opposition party to join in a broad-based national unity cabinet, aiming to bolster the prospects for civilian politicians to remain in charge. But Cabinet opinion was deeply divided. The coalition proposal collapsed even before it had been formally offered.

The Wakatsuki Cabinet resigned on December 13, 1931, after a term of just 244 days.

While he never returned to a Cabinet post, Reijiro Wakatsuki remained influential in Japanese politics, consistently arguing for moderation and criticizing militarism. After the war, he became a witness for the prosecution in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. He died of natural causes in 1949.

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