SNA (Tokyo) — From 1931-1932, veteran politician Tsuyoshi Inukai served as prime minister, attempting to manage the multifaceted international crisis. While he made significant progress in coping with the Great Depression, the military slipped entirely out of control. A group of young officers effectively ended this period in Japanese democracy with direct political violence.

Transcript

On December 13, 1931, Tsuyoshi Inukai became prime minister of Japan.

Like his immediate predecessor he had a mountain of challenges to face, and his own party—the Constitutional Association of Political Friends—was even more factionalized.

But Inukai had labored for about fifty years in party politics, winning his seat in the first Diet election in 1890, and he had finally reached the top office. He would give it his full effort.

One of his first choices was an inspired one. He brought in Korekiyo Takahashi as Finance Minister. While Takahashi had been a failure as prime minister a decade earlier, he turned out to have all the right answers to deal with the Great Depression. The Yen was removed from the gold standard, public money was pumped into the economy. In short, Japan was placed on the path to recovery.

Inukai had another key success in February 1932. Taking advantage of the former ruling party’s unpopularity, he led his own party to robust victory at the polls, gaining a majority in the House of Representatives.

But there were no easy answers for Inukai’s other problems, which were how to get control over radicalized military and how to prevent them from intensifying the diplomatic collision with the Western Great Powers.

His initial move was to appoint the radical General Sadao Araki as Army Minister, judging that it was better to bring this dangerous man into the Cabinet rather than to leave him as a critic on the outside.

But within two months of Inukai coming to power, not only was the Imperial Army moving to detach Manchuria from Chinese sovereignty, but it had sparked a major armed conflict with the Chinese nationalist army in the Shanghai International Settlement. These battles around Shanghai led to the deaths of about 20,000 people.

At the League of Nations, the Western Powers became increasingly exasperated with Japan’s military aggression in China, and Tokyo’s relationships with most of Europe and the United States were souring.

Inukai did not want to antagonize Western opinion, but under the circumstances he had little choice but to go along with the Army’s actions on the continent. Even senior members of his own political party were cultivating close relations with the military, threatening to outflank him on the political right.

The prime minister also went along with the Imperial Army’s initiative to establish the puppet state of Manchukuo, created out of the territories it had conquered in Manchuria. Inukai did, however, refrain from having his government formally recognize Manchukuo as an independent state.

If Inukai had a strategy for regaining control of the military, he never had the chance to implement it. On May 15, 1932, eleven young naval officers broke into the prime minister’s official residence and shot him dead. It was another rightwing military plot to reshape the government.

Tsuyoshi Inukai had spent half a century as a party politician, but his time in office as prime minister lasted only 155 days, and it cost him his life.

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