Hara cabinet

On 29 September 1918 Emperor Yoshihito appointed a new Japanese government. At its head was the 62-year-old Takashi Hara, since 1914 president of the Rikken Seiyūkai, the strongest party in the lower house of parliament. He replaced Field Marshal Masatake Terauchi, who since October 1916 had headed a non-party cabinet of soldiers and bureaucrats. The Japanese called Hara the “commoner prime minister” (heimin saishō). He was the first head of a Japanese government without an aristocratic title, and is regarded as the first prime minister to have sat in the elected lower house of parliament.

The fall of Terauchi

Terauchi’s government was brought down by the rice riots. In the summer of 1918 the price of rice rose week by week, and when the government announced the expedition to Siberia, merchants began to hold back sales in expectation of army orders. Protests by women from fishing villages in Toyama Prefecture turned in August into riots in dozens of cities, towns and villages, and in September into strikes in the coalfields. The government used more than 100,000 troops to restore order. Several dozen civilians were killed and more than 25,000 people were arrested. The prime minister, who had been ill since the spring, submitted the resignation of the whole cabinet on 21 September (some Japanese works give 20 September).

The choice of a successor lay with the genrō, the elder statesmen, and among them Field Marshal Aritomo Yamagata, who for years had kept the Seiyūkai from power, had the most say. He looked for a candidate among his own men, but none of them could have governed against the party that held the majority in parliament. When Prince Kinmochi Saionji, Hara’s predecessor at the head of the Seiyūkai, declined to become prime minister again, Yamagata accepted that Hara had to take over the government. On 27 September the emperor entrusted him with forming a cabinet, and two days later the new ministers took office.

A party cabinet

Hara was born in 1856 in Morioka in northern Japan, into a samurai family of the Nanbu domain, which in the Meiji Restoration had fought on the losing side. As a young man he gave up his status as a descendant of samurai and registered as a commoner, and later he declined offers of a peerage so as not to lose his seat in the lower house. He was a diplomat, vice-minister for foreign affairs, a journalist and head of the Osaka daily Mainichi, and between 1906 and 1913 three times Home Minister. In 1917 he accepted Terauchi’s invitation to join the Advisory Council on Foreign Relations and became a partner the government had to reckon with. It was he, together with Yamagata, who in the spring of 1918 restrained the advocates of a unilateral intervention in Siberia.

In the new government all ministers except those of war, the navy and foreign affairs were members of the Seiyūkai. For this reason Japanese historians regard it as the first full party cabinet in the country’s history. The prime minister himself also took the justice ministry. Finance was headed for the second time by Korekiyo Takahashi, and home affairs by Takejirō Tokonami. Admiral Katō Tomosaburō remained Navy Minister. Lieutenant-General Giichi Tanaka, until then vice-chief of the General Staff and one of the main architects of the Siberian expedition, became War Minister in place of General Ken’ichi Ōshima. A British chronology of the war dates his appointment to 30 September, but according to Japanese lists all the ministers were appointed on 29 September. The foreign ministry, headed since April by Shinpei Gotō, was taken over by Viscount Kōsai Uchida. The British chronology and Japanese biographies of Gotō state that he had already stepped down on 28 September. Uchida (in Western sources of the period Yasuya Uchida) was a career diplomat, had already been foreign minister in 1911–1912, and at the time of the revolution was ambassador to Russia.

The change of government did not mean a break with the intervention, but it changed its direction. Hara wanted cooperation with the United States, not independent action by the army. As early as 5 October his cabinet decided that Japanese troops would not go west of Lake Baikal, and in December it began to reduce the contingent. Hara governed until 4 November 1921, when he was killed by an assassin at Tokyo station.