清浦奎吾
Keigo Kiyoura was born on 14 February 1850 in the district of Kamoto in the province of Higo, present-day Kumamoto Prefecture, the fifth son of Okubo Ryoshi, a Buddhist priest who headed a local temple. His childhood name was Fujaku. Later he was adopted into the Kiyoura family.
As a child he studied Chinese, and in 1865 entered the Kangien, a private school in Hita in the neighboring prov-ince of Bungo (present-day Oita Prefecture) founded by a poet and scholar of Chinese named Iiirose Tanso (1782-1856). He remained there until 1870 and thereafter for a time opened a private school of his own in Kuma-moto.
In 1872 he went to Tokyo and, through the introduction of the governor of Saitama Prefecture, whom he had earlier known when the latter was governor of Hita, he became a member of the prefectural administration and principal of an elementary school.
In 1876 he entered the Ministry of Justice of the central government, being engaged in the formulation of a code of criminal law (promulgated in 1880) and the handling of criminal lawsuits.
In his later years he remarked that the training in law which he received at this time under Gustave Boissonade, a French lawyer who had been appointed to draft a criminal code for the Ministry of Justice, constituted, along with his years at the Kangien, one of the most formative experiences of his life. In 1881 he was transferred to the legal organ called the Sanjiin, where his talents were soon recognized by the chairman, Yamagata Aritomo. In 1884 he became head of the Bureau of Police Protection in the Ministry of Home Affairs, which at this time was headed by Yamagata; he held this post for a total of seven years. During this period, he distinguished himself in formulating the Peace Preservation Regulations and other legal measures and in modernizing the police system and he was also active in prison reform. Through these activities, he won the profound confidence of Yamagata and came to be regarded as one of the group of bureaucrat-statesmen directly allied with Yamagata. In 1891 he was selected to be a member of the Upper House of the Diet and the same year embarked on a trip abroad.
In 1898 he became minister of justice in the second Yamagata cabinet. In the first Katsura cabinet, which lasted from 1901 to 1906, he served as minister of justice, then minister of justice and minister of agriculture and commerce, and finally, in 1905, as minister of agriculture and commerce and minister of home affairs. In 1906 he became an advisor to the Privy Council. In 1914, after the fall of the Yamamoto cabinet, he attempted to form a cabinet of his own, but failed because he could get no one to fill the post of naval minister. In 1917 he became vice-chairman of the Privy Council and in 1922, chairman.
In 1924, after the resignation of the second Yamamoto cabinet, he became prime minister and formed his own cabinet, but because it was made up of a special group of bureaucrats drawn mainly from the Upper House of the Diet, and because the Seiyühontô was recognized as the only progovernment party in the Lower House of the Diet, it aroused much opposition. The Kenseikai, Seiyükai, and Kakushinkai banded together to carry out the so-called Constitution Protection Movement, and the Kiyoura cabinet was forced to resign after only half a year in power. Kiyoura was thereafter granted the privileges of his former posts and in 1941 was one of the high officials who participated in the council that recommended the formation of the Tôjô cabinet.
