Ichirō Hatoyama

Prime minister of Japan (1954-1955, 1955-1956)

• Born: January 1, 1883
• Birthplace: Tokyo, Japan
• Died: March 7, 1959
• Place of death: Tokyo, Japan

Hatoyama was the architect of the postwar conservative coalition that has ruled Japan almost continuously as the Jiyū Minshutō, or Liberal Democratic Party, since 1955.

Early Life

Ichirō Hatoyama (ee-chee-roh hah-toh-yah-mah) was the son of Kazuo Hatoyama, who was graduated from Kaisei Gakko (now Tokyo University), studied at Columbia and Yale Universities, and returned to Japan to pursue a distinguished career in diplomacy and party politics, being elected to the Diet in 1892 and rising by 1896 to become Speaker of the House. Hatoyama’s mother, Haruko, was a leading educator of women who founded Kyōritsu Joshi Shokugyō Gakkō (now Kyōritsu Joshi Gakuen) and served as the school’s president from 1922 until her death. Hatoyama’s younger brother, Hideo, represented Japan at the League of Nations, served in the Diet like his father and brother, and was a respected legal scholar. The family was wealthy and well positioned to make significant contributions to the development of modern Japan.

Life’s Work

Hatoyama was graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1907 with a specialty in English law. In 1915, he was first elected to the Diet as a member of the Seiyūkai Party. As a protégé of Giichi Tanaka, he served as chief cabinet secretary from 1927 to 1929, when Tanaka was prime minister. Hatoyama became embroiled in controversy when, as Tanaka’s cabinet secretary, he helped draft legislation applying the death penalty to anyone proposing changes in the kokutai, or “national polity,” the term used to denote Japan’s prewar political system, thus foreshadowing the thought control characteristic of the 1930’s. This early display of conservatism was followed in the 1930’s by several additional incidents that came to haunt him for the rest of his life.

In 1930, after the government of Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi agreed to a new round of naval arms reductions at the London Naval Conference, Hatoyama emerged as a vocal member of the Seiyūkai opposition by demanding an end to the government’s bargaining with the West over the security of Japan. By arguing that the Hamaguchi cabinet had violated the principle of autonomous command for the navy the principle that the navy itself should determine its requirements without being subject to cabinet control Hatoyama took a position that was later used by other rightists throughout the 1930’s to defeat civilian control of the military. Hamaguchi himself was wounded in an assassination attempt and had to resign in 1931.

From December, 1931, until March, 1934, as minister of education under Prime Ministers Tsuyoshi Inukai and Makoto Saitō, Hatoyama further established his reputation as an arch-conservative by instituting curbs on freedom of speech and ordering the revision of textbooks to reflect the prevailing nationalist ideology. In May, 1933, he ordered the dismissal of Yukitoki Takigawa, a professor of law at Kyōto Imperial University, for harboring “dangerous thoughts” that Hatoyama believed were detrimental to the kokutai. Takigawa had argued that society bore some responsibility for the acts of criminals and had criticized the relegation of women to inferior social and legal status. Takigawa’s dismissal sent shock waves across Japan. The president and thirty-six members of the Kyōto University faculty resigned in protest. A subsequent search for more “dangerous thoughts” among state employees led to more dismissals and arrests of teachers at all levels. In 1934, Hatoyama himself was forced to resign after being charged with bribery and tax evasion.

Hatoyama’s prewar public positions were not always antidemocratic. He is remembered for having opposed the military’s removal of Takeo Saitō from the Diet in 1940 for giving an antimilitary speech on the floor, his refusal to join the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, the combined party of wartime Japan, and his candidacy in the 1942 election as a supporter of constitutional government.

The more common view of Hatoyama, however, is that he remained committed to the policy first expressed by Tanaka in the late 1920’s, to promote Japan’s special destiny on the mainland of Asia the so-called positive policy toward Manchuria and China. In 1937, he toured the United States and Europe as Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe’s personal representative to explain Japan’s objectives in the war. In 1938, he wrote a book in which he commented favorably on Nazism and compared it with Japanese Bushido. He also recommended Nazi-style labor controls for Japan. These activities associated him with Japanese militarism in the eyes of the occupation authorities after 1945, when they accused him of having “aided the forces of obscurantism, reaction and militarism” and of having paid only lip service to democracy.

With Japan’s defeat in 1945, Hatoyama organized his followers into the Jiyūtō, the Liberal Party, and together they won a 140-seat plurality (out of 466 contested seats) in the Diet election of April, 1946. It was at that point, on the eve of his assuming the prime ministry, that the American occupation authorities stepped in and removed him from the political arena by labeling him a “militarist and ultranationalist.” In his place, Shigeru Yoshida, a wartime peace advocate and foreign minister under the liberal leader Shidehara Kijuro, became prime minister. Hatoyama was allowed to resume public life in 1951, in the waning months of the occupation. His supporters, who had been temporarily in Yoshida’s camp, now returned to him and became the nucleus of the Democratic Party. Their defection cost Yoshida his majority in the Diet, and he was forced to resign in December, 1954.

Hatoyama became the next prime minister, but his Democratic Party proved unable to win an absolute majority in the Diet. Consequently, he was forced to engineer a merger of his party, which won 185 seats in the election of February, 1955, with the Liberals, who had 112, forming the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the conservative coalition that had ruled Japan almost continuously since November, 1955. As prime minister, Hatoyama had two major objectives: the pursuit of an independent foreign policy and the revision of the constitution. The first involved a readjustment of Soviet-Japanese relations and the second entailed an effort to have Article IX, the famous “no more war, no more military forces” article, removed from the constitution. He started talks with the Soviet Union, and, though the talks nearly foundered over the issue of ownership of the Kuril Islands, Hatoyama was able to conclude a peace treaty with the Soviets during a trip to Moscow in October, 1956, thereby normalizing relations. Trade and fisheries agreements followed. Ironically, it was the right wing in postwar Japan that attacked Hatoyama at the end of his career for dealing with the Soviet Union, and there were vociferous patriotic demonstrations against the agreements.

There were three Hatoyama cabinets between 1954 and 1956. Being based on the Liberal Democratic coalition, his governments were perhaps more democratic than those of Yoshida, but they were also weaker. For example, he strongly opposed the diffusion of political authority that had taken place under the occupation and fought to reassert central government control over such functions as local administration, civil service appointments, police, and education. Powerful opposition from within the LDP and the bureaucracy forced him to accept many compromises in the area of administration. He was successful, however, in centralizing the police and broadening their powers to include internal security and in getting the ministry of education to appoint local school committees instead of having them elected. He also asserted government control over the content of school textbooks.

In December, 1956, Hatoyama resigned because of ill health and was succeeded by a journalist, Tanzan Ishibashi, who also fell ill, and then by Nobusuke Kishi, who served until 1960. Although Hatoyama and Kishi were arch-conservatives and sought to restore much power to the central government, what they accomplished was more on the order of adjustments to the massive reforms already effected by the occupation. Many of the reforms could not be undone. For example, despite Hatoyama’s sentiments against universal suffrage, including voting rights for women, most Japanese supported it. The old-fashioned values reflected in the conservatism of Hatoyama and Kishi, together with their records of service to militarist governments before the war, made them ideal targets for charges by the socialists that they were trying to take Japan back to the repression of the 1930’s. Prime ministers who followed Kishi’s resignation in 1960 and who had not served in government before 1941 were much less vulnerable to that kind of criticism.

Significance

Hatoyama was one of several Japanese political leaders whose careers survived World War II. His contributions were in the area of party politics, and the postwar history of Japan owes much to the way Hatoyama forged the conservative factions in postwar Japan into an effective political force. However, his actions at key moments during the Japanese government’s rightward drift in the 1930’s associated him with the curse of militarism and handicapped his postwar governments by denying him the full measure of legitimacy necessary for strong leadership. Personal ties, therefore, were his stock-in-trade and have been the key to understanding Japanese politics ever since the end of the American occupation.

Bibliography

Baerwald, Hans. The Purge of Japanese Leaders Under the Occupation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. The basic source on the purge that robbed Hatoyama of the prime ministry in 1946.

Dower, John W. Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. A basic book on Prime Minister Yoshida, especially useful for comparisons of the way Yoshida and Hatoyama were seen by the American occupation authorities.

Fukui, Haruhiro. Party in Power: The Japanese Liberal-Democrats and Policy-Making. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. A detailed study of the inner working of the LDP factions, useful for understanding the political genealogies of modern Japanese leaders before and after the war.

Gayn, Mark. Japan Diary. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1981. Events in occupied Japan from the point of view of an outstanding journalist. Especially useful for the election of 1946 and the events surrounding Hatoyama’s purge.

Hellmann, Donald C. Japanese Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. A basic study useful for understanding Japan’s alignment with the United States and Hatoyama’s attempts to settle the peace treaty negotiations with the Soviet Union.

Itoh, Mayumi. The Hatoyama Dynasty: Japanese Political Leadership Through the Generations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Hatoyama is prominently featured in this biography of four generations of his family and their role in Japanese government since the late nineteenth century.

Masumi, Junnosuke. Postwar Politics in Japan, 1945-1955. Translated by Lonny E. Carlile. Berkeley: Center for Japanese Studies, University of California, 1985. Includes a detailed account of Hatoyama’s political career after the war, from the purge through his election as prime minister.

Morris, Ivan I. Nationalism and the Right Wing in Japan: A Study of Postwar Trends. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. A discussion of the continuities in Japanese politics between the pre- and postwar eras.

Thayer, Nathaniel. How the Conservatives Rule Japan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. The classic work on the coalition of conservatives that formed the LDP in 1955.

Yoshida, Shigeru. The Yoshida Memoirs. Translated by Kenichi Yoshida. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Prime Minister Yoshida’s own version of political events before and after the war, with surprisingly gentle treatment of his rival Hatoyama.