Background
Kōichi Kido was born on 18 July 1889 in Tokyo, the grandson of the eminent Meiji period statesman Kido Takayoshi.
木戸 幸
Kōichi Kido was born on 18 July 1889 in Tokyo, the grandson of the eminent Meiji period statesman Kido Takayoshi.
After attending the Peers’ School, he entered the law department of Kyoto Imperial University in 1911, specializing in political science. While in college he developed an interest in economics and was influenced by the Marxist economist Kaivakami Hajime, at that time a professor of Kyoto University. After his graduation in 1915, Kido entered the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce and later became a member of the Upper House of the Diet.
In 1925, when the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce was discontinued, he entered the newly established Ministry of Commerce and Industry. At the recommendation of Konoe Fumimaro and others, he was appointed chief secretary to the home minister. Thereafter he was active in court affairs, being on close terms with the secretaries of Konoe Fumimaro, Harada Kumao, and the elder statesman Saionji Kim- mochi, and was said to have had considerable influence with Saionji.
After heading the Sochitsuryo, one of the divisions of the Department of the Imperial Household, he in 1937 became minister of education in the first Konoe Fumimaro cabinet; the following year he became welfare minister. In 1939 he became minister of education in the Hiranuma Kiichiro cabinet. With the fall of the Hiranuma cabinet in the same year, he was out of public office for a time, but in 1940, at the recommendation of Saionji, replaced Yuasa Kurahei as home minister because of the latter’s resignation due to illness. In the various governmental changes and crises that followed, he headed the conference of senior statesmen and continued to serve as home minister under a succession of prime ministers until the abolition of the post of home minister in 1945.
During this period he worked in close cooperation with the right-wing forces and militarists, supporting the overthrow of the pro-British and American cabinet of Yonai Mitsumasa and playing an important role in the formation of the Tojo Hideki cabinet. After the end of the Pacific War, he was tried as an A-class war criminal by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and was condemned to life imprisonment. In 1953 he was granted provisional release because of illness.
