Stephen S. Large

Nationalist Extremism in Early Showa Japan: Inoue Nissho and the ‘Blood-Pledge Corps Incident’, 1932

Less than fifteen months after Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was fatally wounded by the right-wing fanatic Sagoya Tomeo on 14 November 1930, the ‘mysterious priest’ Inoue Nissho orchestrated the Ketsumeidan jiken , or ‘Blood-Pledge Corps Incident’, in which the former Finance Minister Inoue Junnosuke and the Director-General of Mitsui Dan Takuma, were shot and killed, on 9 February and 5 March 1932, respectively. What made the Ketsumeidan Incident all the more shocking in the troubled context of the Depression and the Manchurian Incident was the fact that at one point the terrorists had planned to kill twenty of Japans political and financial leaders, not just Inoue Junnosuke and Dan Takuma. The grim implications of this bold conspiracy were soon driven home when Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was also gunned down in the 15 May Incident that year.

Imperial Japan at war: On saints, sadists and cultural evangelists

Olive Checkland, Humanitarianism and the Emperors Japan, 1877–1977. Macmillan, Basingstoke/St Martins Press, New York, 1994. xxxi + 258 pp. £45. Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932–45 and the American Cover‐Up. Routledge, London, 1994. xiv + 297 pp. £25. Grant K. Goodman, ed. Japanese Cultural Policies in Southeast Asia During World War 2. Macmillan, Basingstoke/St Martins Press, New York, 1994. xi + 223 pp.

Emperor Hirohito and Showa Japan: A Political Biography.

Emperor Hirohito reigned for more than sixty years, yet we know little about him or the part he really played in the turbulent history of Showa Japan. Stephen Large draws on a wide range of Japanese and Western sources in his study of Emperor Hirohitos political role in Showa Japan (1926-89). This analysis focuses on key events in his career such as the extent to which he bore responsibility for Japanese aggression in the Pacific in 1941, and explains why Hirohito remains such a contested symbol in Japanese post war politics.

Discrimination and protest in modern Japan

Ian Neary, Political Protest and Social Control in Pre‐War Japan: The Origins of Buraku Liberation. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989. pp.250. £29.95. Michael Weiner, The Origins of the Korean Community in Japan, 1910–1923. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989. pp.249. £29.95.