Prime Minister
After the collapse of the administration of Tanaka Giichi in 1929, Hamaguchi became Prime Minister of Japan and formed a cabinet based largely on Minseitō party members.
With a strong sense of his own rectitude and a tough, stubborn temperament, Hamaguchi inspired trust. Initial public confidence bolstered Hamaguchi's government and allowed him to successfully challenge the ascendant military radicals within Japan. However, his settlement of the London Naval Conference treaty of 1930, in which he tried to set the ratio of battle ships for the United States, Great Britain, and Japan at 10:10:7 but was forced to agree to a 10:10:6 ratio, led many right-wing politicians and conservatives to think that Hamaguchi had sold out on Japanese national security. This released a surge of Japanese nationalism and resulted in the end of Shidehara/Hamaguchi diplomacy (which supported peaceful economic expansion).
In his term of office, Hamaguchi attempted to strengthen the Japanese economy through fiscal austerity measures. Hamaguchi's fiscal policy, however, proved disastrous. The Hamaguchi government put Japanese yen on the gold standard to help stimulate exports, a measure that greatly worsened the impact of the worldwide Great Depression of 1929 on the already feeble economy. This failure of Hamaguchi's economic policies played into the hands of right-wing elements, already enraged by the government's conciliatory foreign policies and efforts to reduce military spending.
In 1931 Hamaguchi's cabinet sponsored a (watered-down) bill on women's suffrage. It would have granted women over the age of 25 the right to vote in local elections and stand for office given their husbands' approval. The bill passed the lower house, but it was defeated in the House of Peers in March 1931 by a vote of 184 to 62.
Hamaguchi fell victim to an assassination attempt on 14 November 1930 when he was shot in Tōkyō Station by Tomeo Sagoya, a member of the Aikoku-sha ultranationalist secret society. (Nine years earlier another Prime Minister, Hara Takashi, had been assassinated near the same place.) The wounds kept Hamaguchi hospitalized for several months, but he struggled through physical weakness to win the February 1931 election. He returned to his post in March 1931 but resigned a month later to be replaced by Wakatsuki Reijirō. He died on 26 August.
Read more about this topic: Osachi Hamaguchi
Famous quotes related to prime minister:
“The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.”
—Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960)
“Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life. What do you do after you are world-famous and nineteen or twenty and you have sat with prime ministers, kings and queens, the Pope? What do you do after that? Do you go back home and take a job? What do you do to keep your sanity? You come back to the real world.”
—Wilma Rudolph (1940–1994)
“One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever but need not be a genius; he should be conscientious but by no means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)