Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (26 page)

Instead of submitting, Prince Kuni dug in his heels and secretly
fought back, enlisting the support of Empress Sadako and Sugiura. It is doubtful if Hirohito, who had been involved in Nagako's selection, was aware of all that happened next. Sugiura tried to rally officials within the Imperial Household Ministry by maintaining that breaking an engagement would set a bad precedent for the imperial house and also scar the crown prince for the rest of his life. When his “ethical” arguments failed, Sugiura proceeded to mobilize the families of the nobility and titled peers on the Shimazu side of the Kuni family, hoping that once they became involved against Yamagata, they would exert their influence on high officials descended from the old retainer band of the Satsuma fiefdom.

Sugiura's attempt to manipulate the genealogically based marriage networks that linked the Satsuma clan failed to yield results. Yamagata and Hara continued to worry about the future of the imperial family, and their rational concerns could not be easily discounted. Makino Nobuaki, the second son of the great Restoration leader Ōkubo Toshimichi, had just returned to Japan from the Paris Peace Conference and was considered a leader of the Satsuma clique. After Sugiura's disciple Shirani Takeshi, an elite bureaucrat and head of Japan Steel, had visited Makino to discuss the problem, he reported to Sugiura that Makino “is having a hard time deciding.”
²⁴
Admiral Yamamoto of the Satsuma clique was also cool to Sugiura's importuning.

Despairing of being able to overcome the most powerful
genr
, Sugiura decided to escalate his conflict with Yamagata by informing another former student, Kojima Kazuo, then a member of the House of Representatives and a leader of the Kokumint
Party, of Yamagata's attempt to break the crown prince's engagement. Kojima thereupon informed Kokumint
president Inukai Tsuyoshi, and soon Ōtake Kanichi of the Kenseikai Party also learned of the trouble. If the Kokumint
and Kenseikai Parties—the two leading enemies of Hara's Seiy
kai—had been willing to break the silence that surrounded the lives of imperial family mem
bers, they could have used this explosive issue against Hara at a time when the suffrage issue was before the forty-fourth session of the Imperial Diet, which had convened on December 27, 1920. Also, the media had learned of Sugiura's resignation of his position at the Ogakumonjo, officially for reasons of ill health, yet with only a few months to go before the crown prince's graduation. Apparently the more isolated, powerless, and desperate Sugiura felt in trying to change the situation, the more he alerted others, and the more politicized the issue became.

Finally Sugiura told his old friend Toyama Mitsuru, the ultranationalist leader of the “old right,” that Yamagata hated Prince Kuni and intended to aggrandize his own power at the court. In 1881 T
yama, with Hiraoka K
tar
, had formed the Dark Ocean Society (Geny
sha), a pressure group with allies in government, business, and the universities, which sought to make Japan the center of an Asian confederation to combat European imperialism.
²⁵
T
yama's comrades in the Amur River Society (Kokury
kai, founded in 1901), as well as members of Uchida Ry
hei's Society of Masterless Samurai (R
ninkai), now began to harass Yamagata physically. Sometime in January 1921 two pan-Asianists of the “new right,” the Orientalist scholar Ōkawa Sh
mei and the China “expert” and Nichiren Buddhist thinker Kita Ikki, learned about Yamagata's attempt to annul the crown prince's engagement. Ōkawa had recently formed, with Professor Mitsukawa Kametar
of Takushoku University, a nationalist, anti-Marxist discussion group, the Y
zonsha (literally, the “pine trees and chrysanthemums”), which Kita later joined. From its ranks rumors spread of a plot to assassinate Yamagata.