Ichirō Hatoyama
Ichirō Hatoyama | |
|---|---|
鳩山 一郎 | |
 Official portrait, 1954 | |
| Prime Minister of Japan | |
| In office 10 December 1954 – 23 December 1956 | |
| Monarch | Shōwa |
| Deputy | Mamoru Shigemitsu |
| Preceded by | Shigeru Yoshida |
| Succeeded by | Tanzan Ishibashi |
| Minister of Education | |
| In office 13 December 1931 – 3 March 1934 | |
| Prime Minister | Tsuyoshi Inukai Makoto Saito |
| Preceded by | Ryūzō Tanaka |
| Succeeded by | Genji Matsuda Makoto Saito (acting) |
| Member of the House of Representatives | |
| In office 25 March 1915 – 7 March 1959 | |
| Preceded by | Masutarō Takagi |
| Succeeded by | Seiichirō Yasui |
| Constituency | Tokyo City |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1 January 1883 Tokyo City, Empire of Japan |
| Died | 7 March 1959 (aged 76) Bunkyō, Japan |
| Political party | Liberal Democratic (1955–1959) |
| Other political affiliations | Rikken Seiyūkai (1915–1940) Japan Liberal Party (1945–1948) Democratic Liberal Party (1948–1950) Liberal Party (1950–1953) Liberal Party–Hatoyama (1953) Liberal Party (1953) Japan Democratic Party (1954–1955) |
| Spouse | Kaoru |
| Children | Iichiro Yuriko Reiko Setsuko Keiko Nobuko |
| Signature |  |
Ichirō Hatoyama (鳩山 一郎, Hatoyama Ichirō, 1 January 1883 – 7 March 1959) was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1954 to 1956.
During his tenure he oversaw the 1955 merger of the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party to create the Liberal Democratic Party, and served as its first president. The party went on to rule Japan for most of the next seven decades. Diplomatically, Hatoyama's signature achievement was restoring official diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which had been in abeyance since World War II.
Early life
Ichirō Hatoyama was born in Tokyo, on New Year's Day of 1883, the eldest son of Kazuo Hatoyama and Haruko Hatoyama. His name indicated his status as the first born son in Japanese. Ichirō had an elder half-sister, Kazuko, and a younger brother Hideo, who became a noted jurist.[1]
Their family been samurai sworn to the Miura clan before the Meiji Restoration. Kazuo Hatoyama was among a group of students selected by the government to study in America in 1875. He graduated from Columbia University and Yale Law School. After returning to Japan, he became a lawyer, educator and politician. Haruko was an educator who helped found Kyoritsu Women's Vocational School in 1886.[2]
Ichirō Hatoyama received much of his early education from his mother. From early on Hatoyama was encouraged to pursue a political career and he readily accepted this ambition. His father was elected to the House of Representatives in 1894 and was its Speaker from 1896 to 1897.[2]
Hatoyama attended First Higher School and afterwards studied law at Tokyo Imperial University. After graduating in 1907 he began working in his father's law office. The following year he married Kaoru, the daughter of Sakae Terada, a judge who later became a politician and an executive of the Gen'yōsha. Her mother was a niece of Haruko Hatoyama.[2]
Pre-war political career
After his father died in 1911, Hatoyama was elected in the 1912 by-election for his father's seat in the Tokyo City Council. In the 1915 House of Representatives election, Hatoyama was elected from Tokyo district and belonged to the Rikken Seiyukai. A rival in the same constituency was Bukichi Miki, who later became a close friend and ally.[2]
When Keigo Kiyoura became Prime Minister in January 1924 the Rikken Seiyukai split over whether or not to support him. Kisaburo Suzuki, the husband of Hatoyama's elder sister Kazuko, served as Minister of Justice in the new cabinet. Hatoyama participated in the Seiyūhontō organised by pro-Kiyoura forces led by Takejirō Tokonami. In June Kiyoura had to resign in favour of Takaaki Kato, who had formed a coalition of his own Kenseikai, the Seiyukai and the Kakushin Club. Seiyūhontō became the main opposition.[3]
The Seiyukai withdrew from the coalition in July 1925. The Seiyūhontō moved towards coalition with the Kenseikai, but Hatoyama opposed this and left the party with about twenty Diet members in December. They returned to the Seiyukai in February the following year. Hatoyama was close to the new party president Giichi Tanaka who made him Secretary-General in March. Hatoyama's brother-in-law Kisaburo Suzuki joined the party around this time.[2][4]
Tanaka was appointed Prime Minister in April 1927 and Hatoyama became his Chief Cabinet Secretary. After the cabinet fell in July 1929 Minseito president Osachi Hamaguchi became Prime Minister and the Seiyukai fell to the opposition. Tanaka died in September. Kisaburo Suzuki, with the support of Hatoyama, had become the most influential factional leader in the party at this time, but Takejirō Tokonami had rejoined the party to contest the presidency. In order to prevent a split the respected elder Tsuyoshi Inukai was selected instead. During his time in the opposition Hatoyama criticised the London Naval Treaty.[4][5]
When Inukai was made Prime Minister in December 1931, Hatoyama became Minister of Education. Inukai was assassinated in the May 15 incident and Suzuki was elected to succeed him as Seiyukai president, but he didn't become prime minister, as the genrō Prince Saionji preferred to nominate Admiral Makoto Saito. Hatoyama continued in his post and became involved in a controversy in March 1933 when he had a professor at Kyoto Imperial University dismissed for leftist views. In March 1934 he was forced to resign due to alleged corruption in the Teijin Incident, which eventually led to the downfall of the Saito cabinet.[4][6]
When Suzuki was once again passed over as prime minister, this time in favour of Admiral Keisuke Okada, the Seiyukai moved into the opposition, even expelling members who accepted positions in the new cabinet. By this time Hatoyama had become one of the most powerful men in the Seiyukai as the right-hand man of his brother-in-law.[6]
The Seiyukai took major losses in the 1936 general election and this led Suzuki to resign the following year. Hatoyama and Chikuhei Nakajima were the leading candidates for the presidency, but to prevent schism a "Presidential Proxy Committee" was formed consisting of Hatoyama, Nakajima, Yonezō Maeda and Toshio Shimada. As the was to much antipathy against himself, Hatoyama decided to support Fusanosuke Kuhara as president. But in March 1939 the opponents of Kuhara and Hatoyama had Nakajima declared president in contravention to party rules. As a result, the party was split between a "reformist faction" led Nakajima and an "orthodox faction" led by Kuhara.[5]
Hatoyama opposed the trend towards military government. He led his faction to absent itself in protest against the expulsion of Takao Saitō for an anti-militarist speech. He resisted the dissolution of political parties and the formation of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA). Hatoyama ran in the 1942 general election as a "non-endorsed" candidate, meaning he was not endorsed by the IRAA, but won his election anyway. Shared opposition to the Tojo cabinet brought him together with his old rival Bukichi Miki, who also ran and won as a non-endorsed candidate.[2][4]
Post-war political career
He was about to become prime minister in 1946, but was barred from politics for five years by Supreme Commander Allied Powers because they thought he had co-operated with the authoritarian government in the 1930s and 1940s.[7] As part of the Occupation's "Reverse Course," Hatoyama was de-purged and allowed to return to politics in 1951.
CIA files that were declassified in 2005 and then publicized in January 2007 by the U.S. National Archives detail a plot by ultranationalists to assassinate prime minister Shigeru Yoshida and install a more hawkish government led by Ichirō Hatoyama in 1952.[8] The plot was never carried out.
As prime minister in 1955, he restored diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union.[9][10][11] A staunch conservative, Hatoyama favored pardons for some of the Class A war criminals who had been sentenced to life imprisonment by the Tokyo Trial.[12] He hoped to revise the Constitution to remove Article 9 and eventually remilitarize Japan.[13] To this end, in 1956 he established a "Constitutional Research Commission" to prepare for the process of constitutional revision.[9]
That same year, Hatoyama attempted to implement his infamous "Hatomander" (ハトマンダー, hatomandā, a portmanteau of Hatoyama and Gerrymander), an attempt to replace Japan's SNTV multi-member constituencies with American-style first-past-the-post single-member districts, which would have made it easier for the LDP to secure the two-thirds of seats in the Lower House of the National Diet needed to revise the Constitution. The plan passed the Lower House of the Diet, but was shelved in the face of intense popular opposition before it could pass the Upper House.
Personal life
Ichirō was a Master Mason and a Protestant Christian (Baptist). He was Japan's third postwar Christian Prime Minister.[14]
Iichirō Hatoyama, Ichirō's only son, made a career for himself as a civil servant in the Budget Bureau of the Finance Ministry. Iichirō retired after having achieved the rank of administrative Vice Minister. In his second career in politics, he rose to become Foreign Minister of Japan in 1976–1977.[15]
One of Ichirō's grandsons, Yukio Hatoyama, became prime minister in 2009 as a member of the Democratic Party of Japan.
Ichirō Hatoyama died in his Hatoyama Hall house, in Tokyo's Bunkyō ward, on 7 March 1959. He was buried in the Yanaka Cemetery, in nearby Taitō ward.
Hatoyama family and freemasonry
Ichirō and some members of Hatoyama family are known as advocates of fraternity. During the purge against Ichirō (1946–1951), he received an English book The Totalitarian State against Man originally written in German by an Austrian freemason Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi from a professor of Waseda University Kesazō Ichimura (1898–1950) who wanted Ichirō to translate the English book into Japanese.[16] The English book struck a sympathetic chord in Ichirō, and he began to advocate fraternity, also known as yūai (友愛) in Japanese.[17][18]
On 29 March 1951, he was initiated as 1st degree of freemason,[19] and on 26 March 1955, passed as 2nd degree mason, and raised as 3rd degree mason.[20][21]
His grandsons are advocates of fraternity. However, when a Japanese press asked Yukio Hatoyama's office and the masonic grand lodge of Japan whether Yukio Hatoyama was a freemason, his office denied it and the grand lodge of Japan didn't answer it.[22] At least, on his grandson Kunio Hatoyama, the brother of Yukio, on a Japanese TV program Takajin no Money on 25 August 2012,[23] his partner Emily's Australian father was a member of freemasonry. He said so, and said he had swum in a masonic pool with her at Tokyo when he had started to going steady with her. Although he didn't say he himself was a mason or not, he insisted that he had not been invited to freemasonry, and he guessed his brother Yukio as a freemason.
Yukio and Kunio became the officers of a fraternal organization named Yūai Kyōkai (or Yūai Association[24]) with their sister Kazuko,[25] founded by their grandfather Ichirō who became the first president of the former organization in 1953. And also Ichirō's son Iichirō became the third president of the same former organization.[26]
The granddaughter and two grandsons of Ichiro's founded a fraternal school Hatoyama Yuai-Jyuku at Hatoyama Hall (Hatoyama kaikan) in April 2008.[27]
Honours
From the corresponding article in the Japanese Wikipedia
- Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (1959; posthumous)
See also
References
- ^ "Hatoyama Ichiro (prime minister of Japan)". Britannica. 7 March 1959. Retrieved 29 August 2009.
- ^ a b c d e f Itoh, Mayumi (7 November 2003). The Hatoyama Dynasty: Japanese Political Leadership Through the Generations. Springer. p. 49-75. ISBN 978-1403981523.
- ^ Magill, Frank N. (5 March 2014). The State and Labor in Modern Japan. University of California Press. p. 120-122. ISBN 978-1317740605.
- ^ a b c d Magill, Frank N. (5 March 2014). The 20th Century Go-N: Dictionary of World Biography, Volume 8. Routledge. p. 1574-1576. ISBN 978-1317740605.
- ^ a b Fukui, Haruhiro (28 May 2021). Party in Power: The Japanese Liberal-Democrats and Policy-making. University of California Press. p. 23-24. ISBN 978-0520369016.
- ^ a b Mitchell, Richard H. (31 March 2002). Justice in Japan: The Notorious Teijin Scandal. University of Hawaii Press. p. 77. ISBN 978-0824825232.
- ^ Crane, Burton. "Hatoyama Barred by MacArthur Order; Directive Forbidding Him to Take Diet Seat Rules Him Out as Japan's Premier", The New York Times. 4 May 1946; Crane, Burton. "Hatoyama Voices Surprise at Order; Challenges Ground Upon Which He Is Barred From Holding Office in Japan", The New York Times. 5 May 1946.
- ^ "CIA Papers Reveal Japan Coup Plot". Military. Retrieved 29 August 2009.
- ^ a b Kapur, Nick (2018). Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 80. ISBN 9780674988484.
- ^ Jorden, William J. "Hatoyama Takes Plea to Bulganin; Return of Some Isles Urged at Moscow Peace Parley --Treaty Reported Near Goodwill Aspect Stressed", The New York Times. 18 October 1956.
- ^ Odaka, Konosuke (2002). "The Evolution of Social Policy in Japan" (PDF). World Bank. Retrieved 13 January 2013.
- ^ Trumbull, Robert. "Japan Urges U.S. Free War Guilty; Continued Appeals Are Based Largely on Dire Straits of Prisoners' Families", The New York Times. 21 June 1955.
- ^ Kapur, Nick (2018). Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 81. ISBN 9780674988484.
- ^ "Land of the Reluctant Sparrows". TIME. 14 March 1955. Archived from the original on 1 September 2009. Retrieved 29 August 2009.; "Tokyo Storm Center; Ichiro Hatoyama Likes Hymn-Singing", The New York Times. 18 October 1956.
- ^ "Iichiro Hatoyama; Ex-Foreign Minister, 75" (obituary), The New York Times. 20 December 1993.
- ^ "第471号" (PDF). Newsletter "友愛". Yuai Association. 10 September 2004. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 October 2013. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
今朝蔵は、「この本の翻訳は鳩山一郎さんにして貰おう。 (中略) 鳩山さんは往年の優等生だから、この位の翻訳軽く出来るよ。歴代の総理大臣でこれだけの本を出版した人なんて誰もいない。その日の為にもこの翻訳をしておいて貰いたいんだ」などと一寸おしゃべりして雲場ヶ池の鳩山家の別荘に自転車で出かけて行ったそうである。
- ^ Hatoyama, Ichirō (1957). 鳩山一郎回顧録. Tokyo: Bungeishunjū.
- ^ "2006年8月 鳩山一郎・薫ご夫妻銅遷座式". Yuai Association. Archived from the original on 26 August 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
クーデンホフカレルギーの著書に共鳴自ら「自由と人生」と題して訳出した
- ^ Akama, Gō (1983). フリーメーソンの秘密 世界最大の結社の真実. Tokyo: San-ichi Publishing. p. 79.
- ^ Tim Wangelin. "Freemasonry and Modern Japanese History". Freemasonry in Japan. Far East Lodge No. 1. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
On March 26, 1955, Ichiro Hatoyama and Yahachi Kawai, both Entered Apprentices (First Degree Masons), were made Fellowcrafts (Second Degeree Masons), and raised to Master Masons.
- ^ "New Master Mason". Toledo Blade. 26 March 1955. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
TOKYO, March 26 (AP)—Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama became a master mason today.
- ^ Weeklypost (14 February 2012). "鳩山氏改名とフリーメイソンの関係噂は「事実無根」と事務所". ライブドアニュース. Livedoor news. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
- ^ "たかじんNOマネー". 関西版TVトピック検索. tvtopic.goo.ne.jp. 25 August 2012. Archived from the original on 2 July 2013. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
- ^ "Yuai Association". Yuai Association. Archived from the original on 26 August 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
- ^ "役員". Yuai Association. Archived from the original on 26 August 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
- ^ "3代目会長 鳩山 威一郎". Yuai Association. Archived from the original on 30 October 2013. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
- ^ "hatoyama-yuai-jyuku.com". Archived from the original on 23 November 2020. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
Further reading
- Itoh, Mayumi (2003). The Hatoyama Dynasty: Japanese Political Leadership through the Generations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-403-96331-2, ISBN 978-1-403-96331-4. OCLC 248918078.
- Saunavaara, Juha (28 September 2009). "Occupation Authorities, the Hatoyama Purge and the Making of Japan’s Postwar Political Order". The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 39-2-09.
External links
- Ichirō Hatoyama at Find a Grave
- Time cover portrait of Ichirō Hatoyama, 14 March 1955
| Empire of Japan (1868–1947) |
| ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| State of Japan (1947–present) |
| ||||||
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
- 1883 births
- 1959 deaths
- 20th-century prime ministers of Japan
- Government ministers of Japan
- Education ministers of Japan
- Hatoyama family
- Democratic Party (Japan, 1954) politicians
- Japanese Baptists
- Liberal Democratic Party (Japan) politicians
- Democratic Liberal Party (Japan) politicians
- Liberal Party (Japan, 1945) politicians
- Prime Ministers of Japan
- Rikken Seiyūkai politicians
- 20th-century Japanese politicians
- Japanese Freemasons
- 20th-century Baptists
- Politicians from Tokyo