Ichirō Hatoyama

Ichirō Hatoyama
鳩山 一郎
Prime Minister of Japan
In office 10 December 1954 – 23 December 1956
Monarch	Shōwa
Preceded by	Shigeru Yoshida
Succeeded by	Tanzan Ishibashi
Personal details
Born	(1883-01-01)1 January 1883 Tokyo City, Japan
Died	7 March 1959(1959-03-07) (aged 76) Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan
Political party	Liberal Democratic Party (1955–1959)
Other political affiliations	Constitutional Association of Political Friendship (1915–1940) Japan Liberal Party (1945–1953,1953–1954) Japan Liberal Party (1953) Japan Democratic Party (1954–1955)
Spouse(s)	Kaoru
Children	Iichiro Yuriko Reiko Setsuko Keiko Nobuko
Religion	Baptist
Signature

Ichirō Hatoyama (鳩山 一郎, Hatoyama Ichirō, 1 January 1883 – 7 March 1959) was a Japanese politician and the 52nd,^[1] 53rd and 54th Prime Minister of Japan, serving terms from 10 December 1954 through 19 March 1955,^[2] from then to 22 November 1955,^[3] and from then through 23 December 1956.^[4]

Personal life

Ichirō Hatoyama was, as his name indicates, the first born boy. He was born into a wealthy cosmopolitan family in Tokyo. His father Kazuo Hatoyama (1856–1911) was a Yale graduate (and Speaker of the House of Representatives) and his mother Haruko Hatoyama (1863–1938) was a famous author and the founder of Kyoritsu Women's University.^[5] His brother Hideo Hatoyama was a noted jurist.

Ichirō was a Master Mason and a Protestant Christian (Baptist). He was Japan's third postwar Christian Prime Minister.^[6]

Iichirō Hatoyama, Ichirō's only son, made a career for himself as a civil servant in the Budget Bureau of the Finance Ministry. Iichirō retired after having achieved the rank of administrative Vice Minister. In his second career in politics, he rose to become Foreign Minister of Japan in 1976–1977.^[7]

One of Ichirō's grandsons, Yukio Hatoyama, became prime minister in 2009 as a member of the Democratic Party of Japan.

Political career

Ichirō was elected to the House of Representatives as a Rikken Seiyūkai member in 1915. He was about to become prime minister in 1946, but was barred from politics for five years by Supreme Commander Allied Powers because they thought he had co-operated with the authoritarian government in the 1930s and 1940s.^[8] He was allowed to return in 1951. As prime minister in 1955, he rebuilt diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union,^[9][10] and favored parole for some of the Class A war criminals who had been sentenced to life imprisonment by the Tokyo Trial.^[11]

CIA files that were declassified in 2005 and then publicized in January 2007 by the U.S. National Archives detail a plot by ultranationalists to assassinate then prime minister Shigeru Yoshida and install a more hawkish government led by Ichirō Hatoyama in 1952.^[12] The plot was never carried out.

Hatoyama family and freemasonry

Kaoru, Iichirō, Ichirō, and Yukio.

Ichirō and some members of Hatoyama family are known as advocates of fraternity. During the purge against Ichirō (1946–1951), he received an English book The Totalitarian State against Man originally written in German by an Austrian freemason Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi from a professor of Waseda University Kesazō Ichimura (1898–1950) who wanted Ichirō to translate the English book into Japanese.^[13] The English book struck a sympathetic chord in Ichirō, and he began to advocate fraternity, also known as yūai (友愛) in Japanese.^[14][15]

On March 29, 1951, he was initiated as 1st degree of freemason,^[16] and on March 26, 1955, passed as 2nd degree mason, and raised as 3rd degree mason.^[17][18]

Ichirō Hatoyama, Yukio Hatoyama, and Kunio Hatoyama.

His grandsons are advocates of fraternity. However, when a Japanese press asked Yukio Hatoyama's office and the masonic grand lodge of Japan whether Yukio Hatoyama was a freemason, his office denied it and the grand lodge of Japan didn't answer it.^[19] At least, on his grandson Kunio Hatoyama, the brother of Yukio, on a Japanese TV program TAKAJIN NO MONEY on August 25, 2012,^[20] his partner Emily's Australian father was a member of freemasonry. He said so, and said he had swum in a masonic pool with her at Tokyo when he had started to going steady with her. Although he didn't say he himself was a mason or not, he insisted that he had not been invited to freemasonry, and he guessed his brother Yukio as a freemason.

Yukio and Kunio became the officers of a fraternal organization named Yuai Kyokai (or Yuai Association^[21]) with their sister Kazuko,^[22] founded by their grandfather Ichirō who became the first president of the former organization in 1953. And also Ichirō's son Iichirō became the third president of the same former organization.^[23]

The granddaughter and two grandsons of Ichiro's founded a fraternal school Hatoyama Yuai-Jyuku at Hatoyama Hall (Hatoyama kaikan) on April 2008.^[24]

Honours

From the corresponding article in the Japanese Wikipedia

• Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (1959; posthumous)

See also

• Hatomander

References

Further reading

• Itoh, Mayumi (2003). The Hatoyama Dynasty: Japanese Political Leadership through the Generations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-403-96331-2, ISBN 978-1-403-96331-4. OCLC 248918078.
• Saunavaara, Juha (28 September 2009). "Occupation Authorities, the Hatoyama Purge and the Making of Japan’s Postwar Political Order". The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 39-2-09.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ichirō Hatoyama.

• Ichirō Hatoyama at Find a Grave
• Time cover portrait of Ichirō Hatoyama, 14 March 1955

Prime Ministers of Japan (List) H. Itō Kuroda Sanjō Yamagata Matsukata H. Itō Kuroda Matsukata H. Itō Ōkuma Yamagata H. Itō Saionji Katsura Saionji Katsura Saionji Katsura Yamamoto Ōkuma Terauchi Hara Uchida Takahashi To. Katō Uchida Yamamoto Kiyoura Ta. Katō Wakatsuki G. Tanaka Hamaguchi Shidehara Hamaguchi Wakatsuki Inukai Takahashi Saitō Okada Gotō Okada Hirota Hayashi Konoe Hiranuma N. Abe Yonai Konoe Tōjō Koiso K. Suzuki Higashikuni Shidehara Yoshida Katayama Ashida Yoshida I. Hatoyama Ishibashi Kishi Ikeda Satō K. Tanaka Miki T. Fukuda Ōhira M. Itō Z. Suzuki Nakasone Takeshita Uno Kaifu Miyazawa Hosokawa Hata Murayama Hashimoto Obuchi Aoki Mori Koizumi S. Abe Y. Fukuda Asō Y. Hatoyama Kan Noda S. Abe Italics denote acting Prime Ministers