Background
Tomosaburō Katō was born on 22 February 1861 in Hiroshima. He was a son of a samurai of the fief of Aki.
加藤 友三郎
Tomosaburō Katō was born on 22 February 1861 in Hiroshima. He was a son of a samurai of the fief of Aki.
In 1873 he entered the school that later became the Naval Academy and in time graduated from the Naval Academy and the Naval Staff College.
In 1883 he was commissioned as an ensign. He was sent to England in 1891 as an ordnance supervision officer and the same year became an officer aboard the warship Toshino, which had been built in England at the request of the Japanese. After cruising in foreign waters, he returned aboard the ship to Japan in 1894. The same year he served in the Sino-Japanese War as gunnery lieutenant of the Toshino. In 1895 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant commander and assigned to duty in the Bureau of Naval Affairs in the Naval Ministry. The following year he was also made an instructor in the Naval Staff College, giving instruction in gunnery.
In 1898 he became commander of the warship Tsukushi, and from 1899 on served as the head of various sections in the Bureau of Naval Affairs. In 1904, with the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, he was promoted to the rank of captain and made chief of staff for the Second Fleet. In the course of the war, he advanced to the rank of rear admiral and became chief of staff of the Combined Fleet, participating in the battle of the Japan Sea aboard the flagship Mikasa. In 1906 he became vice-minister of the navy, in 1908 a vice admiral, in 1909 commander of the Kure Naval Yard, and in 1913 commander of the First Fleet. In 1915, after the outbreak of the First World War, he became minister of the navy in the cabinet of Okuma Shigenobu and continued to hold that position in the Terauchi, Hara, and Takahashi cabinets and when he himself became prime minister in 1922. He thus held a cabinet post for a total of ninety-four months, a record surpassed only by Saito Makoto. During this period he worked to implement plans for naval expansion.
In 1921 he attended the Washington Conference as chief plenipotentiary of the Japanese delegation and in 1922 signed the naval reduction treaty on Japan’s behalf. He returned to Japan the same year, and when the Seiyukai cabinet of Takahashi Korekiyo resigned, he was appointed prime minister on the recommendation of the elder statesmen. With the support of the Seiyukai, he formed a new cabinet centering about members of the bureaucracy and the House of Peers.
He died in 1923 while holding the office of prime minister.
He was a man who was capable of taking the long view and of dealing with problems in a cool-headed and thorough manner, but he suffered from poor health.