Tatsukichi Minobe

He graduated from the law school of Tokyo Imperial University in 1897, where one of his mentors was future Privy Councilor Ichiki Kitokurō.

He went to work for the Home Ministry, and was sent for further studies to Germany, France and the United Kingdom, returning to Japan in 1902 to take up a position as a professor at Tokyo Imperial University.

Minobe’s interpretation of the constitution was generally accepted by bureaucrats and even imperial household until the 1930s, although it had been challenged from the beginning by imperial absolutists such as Yatsuka Hozumi and Shinkichi Uesugi, who held that the emperor was, by definition, the personification of the State itself, and therefore politically unaccountable for his actions, however arbitrary, as defined in Article 3 the Meiji Constitution.

On February 18, 1935, Baron Takeo Kikuchi, a retired general and member of the House of Peers, launched a public campaign to demand that Prime Minister Keisuke Okada ban Minobe’s works, which he termed to be “traitorous thoughts”.

[3] Minobe addressed the Diet of Japan a week later in his own defense, while right-wing groups and Kōdōha officers held a demonstration in downtown Tokyo denouncing him.