Kigoshi Yasutsuna

Kigoshi Yasutsuna

Kigoshi Yasutsuna ( Japanese 木 越 安 綱 ; born April 22, 1854 in Kanazawa , Japan ; † March 26, 1932 ) was a Lieutenant General of the Imperial Japanese Army and Minister of the Army .

Life

Kigoshi Yasutsuna was the eldest son of a samurai family from the Kaga-han , now Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture . In 1875, while still a student in the first class of the army officer school , he fought on the side of the troops loyal to the emperor in the suppression of the Satsuma rebellion . In 1883 he was sent to the German Empire as a military attaché in order to receive additional training there. After returning to Japan, he served in the First Sino-Japanese War as Chief of Staff of the 3rd Division . After the war, he was promoted to major general and moved to the post of chief of staff of the Taiwan Army in 1898 . In 1901 and 1902 he served in the Army General Staff and in the later outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War he was given field command when he led the 23rd Infantry Brigade, which distinguished itself in the battle of Sandepu .

After the war, he initially served on the staff of the Kwantung Army , which in the assumed by Russia leasehold Kwantung had been erected, and later successively as commander of the 1st , 5th and 6th Division . In 1907 he was raised to the rank of Danshaku according to the Japanese nobility system of Kazoku . In the same year he was promoted to lieutenant general. On December 21, Prime Minister Katsura Tarō Kigoshi appointed him Minister of Defense in his third cabinet. He also held this post under the first Yamamoto cabinet . During his tenure, the law Gumbu daijin gen'eki bukan sei ( 軍部 大臣 現役 武官 制 ) was passed, stating that the Minister of Defense, who had to be an active or former military officer, could only come from the ranks of the active officer corps. Since the Army General Staff rejected this new regulation, Kigoshi's already safe promotion to general was suspended and he was forced to resign on June 24, 1913, and in 1914 he was transferred to the Führerreserve. From 1920 until his death in 1932 he sat in the upper house of the Japanese parliament . His grave is in Aoyama Cemetery in Tokyo .

literature

• Leo TS Ching: Becoming Japanese. Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. University of California Press, Berkeley 2001, ISBN 0-520-22553-8 .
• Meirion Harries: Soldiers of the Sun. The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army. Random House, 1994, ISBN 0-679-75303-6 .
• Geoffry Jukes: The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905. Osprey Publishing, Oxford 2002, ISBN 978-1-84176-446-7 .

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