May 15 Incident - Incident

Incident

On May 15, 1932, the naval officers, aided by Army cadets, and right-wing civilian elements (including Shūmei Ōkawa, Mitsuru Tōyama, and Kosaburo Tachibana) staged their own attempt to complete what had been started in the League of Blood Incident.

Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was shot by eleven young Naval officers (most were just turning twenty years of age) in the Prime Minister's residence. Inukai's last words were roughly If I could speak, you would understand (話せば分かる, hanaseba wakaru?) to which his killers replied Dialogue is useless (問答無用, mondō muyō?). The original assassination plan had included killing the English film star Charlie Chaplin- who had arrived in Japan on May 14, 1932 - at a reception for Chaplin, planned by Prime Minister Tsuyoshi. "These activists, eager to ingest a nativist Yamato spirit into politics, recognised the charged political nature of mass culture"; Chaplin's murder would facilitate war with the U.S., and anxiety in Japan, and lead on to "restoration"-in the name of the emperor. When the prime minister was killed, his son Inukai Takeru was watching a sumo wrestling match with Charlie Chaplin, which probably saved both their lives.

The insurgents also attacked the residence of Makino Nobuaki, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the residence and office of Kimmochi Saionji, head of the Rikken Seiyukai political party, and tossed hand-grenades into Mitsubishi Bank headquarters in Tokyo, and several electrical transformer substations.

Aside from the murder of the Prime Minister, the attempted coup d'état came to nothing, and the rebellion as a whole proved a failure. The participants took a taxi to the police headquarters and surrendered themselves to the Kempeitai without a struggle.