Kaya Okinori

Kaya Okinori (1962)

Kaya Okinori ( Japanese : 賀屋興宣 * 30th January 1889 in Hiroshima , Hiroshima Prefecture , Empire of Japan , † 28 April 1977 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese politician , among others from 1937 to 1938 and again from 1941 to 1944 Finance was . He was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Tokyo Trials on November 12, 1948 for numerous war crimes , from which he was released in 1955. Then he got involved in theLiberal Democratic Party (LDP), on whose executive committee he was chairman of the Political Research Council between 1962 and 1963. He then served as Minister of Justice between 1963 and 1964 .

Life

Finance Minister and Member of the House of Lords

After attending school, Kaya Okinori began studying politics and law at the Imperial University of Tokyo and, after graduating in 1917, joined the Ministry of Finance as a civil servant . In 1927 he was part of the Japanese delegation to the Commission for the Preparation of the Geneva Disarmament Conference , which met without result from 1932 to 1934. In 1932 he became head of the Treasury Department and in 1934 head of the General Administration Department of the Ministry of Finance, before he became General Director of the Ministry of Finance in 1936. As the successor to Kawagoe Takeo, he was first finance secretary of the Ministry of Finance on February 2, 1937 and thus deputy to Finance Minister Yūki Toyotarō . He held this office until June 5, 1937 and was then replaced by Ishiwata Sōtarō .

Kaya himself had previously assumed the office of finance minister in the Konoe I cabinet on June 4, 1937 and held this office until May 26, 1938, when Ikeda Shigeaki succeeded him. In 1938 he became a member of the Kizokuin , the Upper House of the Reichstag (Teikoku-gikai), and on August 14, 1939, Akira Otani's successor as President of the North China Development Corporation (Kita shina kaihatsu) . He remained in this position until October 18, 1941, before Koichi Tsushima succeeded him there on November 7, 1941. He in turn took over on October 18, 1941 in the Tōjō cabinet again the office of finance minister, which he now held until his renewed replacement by Ishiwata Sōtarō on February 19, 1944. In this position he participated in the formulation of the war policy of Japan and in the financial, economic and industrial preparation of Japan for the implementation of this policy of aggression.

Convicted as a war criminal and minister of justice

The defendants in the Tokyo trial for war crimes in World War II

After Japan surrendered , Kaya Okinori was arrested on September 19, 1945 and, as a class A war criminal, was one of the main accused of numerous war crimes in the Tokyo trials . He was charged for involvement as a leader, organizer, instigator or accomplice in planning or executing a joint plan or conspiracy to wage wars of aggression and war or wars in violation of international law, for waging an unprovoked war against China , for waging of a war of aggression against the United States , of waging a war of aggression against the British Commonwealth , of waging a war of aggression against the Netherlands , and thus found guilty on five of the ten counts. He was acquitted of the charges of ordering, authorizing, and allowing inhuman treatment of prisoners of war and others, as well as the willful and reckless neglect of the duty to take appropriate steps to prevent atrocities. On November 12, 1948, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for this. He was released early on September 17, 1955.

Subsequently, Kaya began his political involvement in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and in 1956 became a member of the Industrial Planning Conference (Sankyo Keikai) , an influential think tank that, under the chairmanship of Matsunaga Yasuemon, planned the Japanese economic miracle (Kōdo keizai seichō) of the 1950s. In the 1958 election he was elected for the first time for the LDP as a member of the House of Representatives ( Shūgiin ) , the lower house of the new parliament ( Kokkai ) , and belonged to it after his re-elections in 1960 , 1963 , 1967 and 1969 until he renounced a new candidacy the election of December 10, 1972 . As the successor to Tanaka Kakuei , he became chairman of the influential Political Research Council on the party executive committee in July 1962 . He held this position for a year until July 1963, after which Miki Takeo was his successor. From 1962 until his death in 1977 he was also the chairman of the Japanese Survivors' Association (Nippon Izokukai) , a charity for the family members of soldiers who died in World War II.

On July 18, 1963, Kaya Okinori took over the post of Justice Minister after the third reshuffle of the second Ikeda cabinet from Nakagaki Kunio . He also took over this office after the formation of the Ikeda III cabinet on December 9, 1963 until the cabinet was reorganized on July 18, 1963, whereupon Takahashi Hitoshi became his successor.

Web links

• Entry in rulers.org
• Entry in Trial Watch

Individual evidence

1. ^ Cabinet Konoe I
2. ^ Cabinet Tōjō
3. ^ Cabinet Ikeda II
4. ^ Cabinet Ikeda III
5. ↑ Japan: Key Ministries (rulers.org)

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus, Kaya is the family name, Okinori the first name.