Ryoichi Sasakawa - Prewar Activity

Prewar Activity

In the 1930s, during the Sino-Japanese War, Sasakawa rose to prominence by using wealth gained in rice speculation to build a voluntary flying squad within Japan for the purpose of providing trained pilots in the case of a national emergency. He also built an air defense field, donating it to the army. Once Japan began to coordinate its air power in 1941, Sasakawa dissolved his voluntary flying group and gave all of its facilities and aircraft to the nation. In addition, he used the various mining interests that he had accumulated to support the army by in a more concrete fashion. It has been noted that "... his family records show ... that his mining ventures were not as profitable in wartime as they could have been" because he seems to have been more interested in supporting the war effort than in making a profit.

In addition, the 1930s saw Sasakawa take the helm of the Kokusui Taishu-to, or Patriotic Peoples' Party (PPP). This small organization was one of the many right-wing groups that sprang up in Japan in the lead-up to World War II. It was in this connection that he first met Yoshio Kodama, who was at that time a member. In 1935, Sasakawa and twelve other leading members of the PPP were arrested and held for three years on suspicion of having ordered the blackmail of several leading companies, such as Takashimaya, the Hankyu Railway, and Tokyo Life Insurance. Though he was eventually exonerated, the jail time and the subsequent appeals process took a total of 6 years, leading up the opening year of World War II. In the end, the prosecution itself revealed that the charges against him had been based more on perception of the PPP as "dangerous," than on actual evidence of blackmail.

Sasakawa's trials ended in August 1941. In December that year, World War II broke out, and in April 1942, Sasakawa won a seat in the Japanese parliament, taking one of only 85 out of 466 seats that were captured by non-government-backed candidates. The reason that such candidates were so few was that it was wartime, and those in power were doing all they could to control policy while maintaining a mask of parliamentary democracy. Sasakawa joined the parliament nearly a half year after the war began, as a member of the "opposition."

In parliament, he stood against the government's suppression of the freedom of speech and its pressure for the conformity of all parliamentarians. However, his efforts in this vein were largely unsuccessful, and he spent much of the war outside of parliament, touring Manchuria and China, visiting prisons around the country, and cheering those on the home front. He advocated war extension. During the war he flew a squadron bomber to Rome and met Mussolini.