Background
Junnosuke Inoue was born on 6 May 1869 in the region of present-day Oita Prefecture in Kyushu.
Businessman economist politician
Junnosuke Inoue was born on 6 May 1869 in the region of present-day Oita Prefecture in Kyushu.
After graduating from Tokyo Imperial, University in 1896, he took a position with the Bank of Japan. During the period 1897-99, he resided in England, studying banking practices under Alexander Allen Shand, an Englishman who had helped to set up the Japanese banking system at the beginning of the Meiji period.
After returning to Japan, he served as head of the Osaka branch of the Bank of Japan, and in 1906 was promoted to the position of head of the Business Division, an unusually rapid advance for a person of his age. In 1908 he was assigned to duty in America. He returned to Japan in 1911, in 1913 became president of the Yokohama Specie Bank (the forerunner of the Bank of Tokyo), and in 1919 became president of the Bank of Japan. In both of the latter positions, he succeeded Mishima Yataro, a native of the domain of Satsuma and member of the Upper House of the Diet.
In 1923 he left the post of president of the Bank of Japan to become finance minister in the Yamamoto cabinet, the first one-hundred-percent Bank of Japan man to hold that position. In the confusion following the Great Kanto Earthquake, he pulled the country through its financial difficulties by declaring a moratorium. With the fall of the Yamamoto cabinet in 1924, he was selected to be a member of die Upper House of the Diet and continued to act as a mediator in affairs of the financial world. At the time of the financial panic of 1927, he once more became president of the Bank of Japan, but resigned after thirteen months.
In 1929 he became finance minister in the Ilamaguchi cabinet and joined Hamaguchi’s political party, the Minseito. He shouldered the responsibility for economic planning during the period of financial panic, pursuing a deflationary policy and in 1930 lifting the embargo on gold. But when England went off' the gold standard, it struck a blow to Japan's policy of free gold export, and the situation was- made more serious by the sudden outbreak of fighting by Japanese forces in Manchuria. When the Hamaguchi cabinet was replaced by that of Inukai of the Seiyukai late in 1931, the new finance minister, Takahashi Korekiyo, restored the embargo on gold. Inoue, after his retirement from political office, was chosen to be senior manager of the Minseito. As head of the election committee, he was on his way to lend his support to a candidate in February of 1932 when he was assassinated by Onuina Sho, a member of a right-wing organization known as the Kctsumei- dan, as part of its movement to create social confusion.