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.
Read more about this topic: May 15 Incident
Famous quotes containing the word incident:
““It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.... I would call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.... I would call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)