Main Body
Tanaka Kōtarō, Guiding Spirit of the Hiraga Purge, Beset on All Sides
In which the author focuses on Tanaka Kōtarō, whom he credits as the mastermind behind the Hiraga Purge. He traces Tanaka’s stellar career—Tōdai professor of law, Minister of Education, Supreme Court justice, judge on the International Court of Justice. Tanaka, a Catholic, specialized in international law, a fact that set him on collision course with the right-wingers around Minoda Muneki. The national-essence people equated Japan’s war in Asia with their domestic agenda to “clarify the kokutai,” and Tanaka opposed both. The chapter concludes with an account of Tanaka’s battering during the purge at the hands of his colleagues.
Tanaka’s Glittering Career
Tanaka Kōtarō, Dean of the Faculty of Law, enticed Hiraga into being university president and generated the grand design of the Hiraga Purge. Moreover, at the time of the Purge, Tanaka was sitting at Hiraga’s right hand, supporting him all the way. In this sense, Tanaka may have been the true protagonist of the Hiraga Purge. So let’s say something more about Tanaka.
Today what ordinary people remember about Tanaka is solely his postwar career. It was so glittering that merely writing a bit about it shocks people. First, in the immediate postwar period Minister of Education Maeda Tamon asked Tanaka to become Chief of the Bureau of Education while he was still a Tōdai professor (at the time it was possible for a professor to be simultaneously a Ministry official). Chief of the Bureau of Education was a post newly established in a Ministry of Education that sought a fundamental rethinking of education, and it oversaw the whole range of educational administration: from primary and elementary schools to universities and specialist and technical schools. For a while after graduating, Tanaka had worked in the Home Ministry, and in those years Maeda had been Tanaka’s superior; they had a relationship of deep trust. Tanaka burned with zeal for educational reform and thought that with Maeda as his boss he could accomplish whatever he wanted, and there were conditions within the university that made the university inhospitable, so he transferred from the university to the Ministry of Education. It’s a bit of an aside, but the conditions that made it inhospitable contribute to an understanding of Tanaka’s character, so let me touch on them.
At the end of 1945, the last year of the war, an issue arose regarding the promotion of Assistant Professor Yasui Kaoru, who taught international law at the Faculty of Law. This was the same Yasui Kaoru who after the war became secretary-general of Gensuikyō and was spectacularly active. Tanaka opposed his promotion fiercely. Not only Tanaka but also Yokota Kisaburō, the chief professor of international law (and later a third-generation justice on the Supreme Court). The reason for their opposition was the same: they didn’t trust Yasui. In Nambara Shigeru Remembered,[1] there’s this passage:
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