Aritomo Yamagata as a Founding President
I feel that the collapse of modern Japan (the defeat in World War II) was destined by the death of Aritomo Yamagata.Modern Japan could not have existed without a coordinator like Aritomo Yamagata. With his death, modern Japan self-destructed. The fact that he could not (or did not try to) cultivate his own successor was likely the limit of his capabilities. Modern Japan was truly a revolution that ended with the first generation of the Meiji Restoration.
After Yamagata's death, the military began to run wild, and the Pacific War started one year after the death of Saionji. Modern Japan was barely functioning within a personalistic system known as the Yamagata System. This has similarities to the current Russia under the Putin regime Russia after Putin will likely run even wilder, just as Japan did after Yamagata. There is no guarantee that Japan will not be dragged into it when that happens.
The system built by Aritomo Yamagata collapsed with his death, and the collapse of modern Japan was destined at that point. At the time of the collapse of modern Japan (the end of the war), the situation was pushed to the point where Emperor Showa had to make the sacred decision himself. Originally, this was a role that should have been fulfilled by the Genro, starting with Yamagata. It is ironic, considering that Aritomo Yamagata tried to avoid a situation where the Emperor would have to make direct political decisions through the system he built himself.
Miraculously, just before the end of the war, there was one person left who could barely coordinate the military, the government, and the Imperial Court like Aritomo Yamagata. Kantaro Suzuki was that person. As a second-generation Meiji Restoration naval officer, he learned the philosophy of the Meiji Restoration, cooperation with the West, and realism directly from the first generation, and he also had the deep trust of the Emperor, truly a figure like the former Genro. It is unclear whether Emperor Showa intuitively or with logical backing appointed Suzuki as Prime Minister, but it was truly a divine move. It was a miracle for Japan that Suzuki survived the February 26 Incident and lived a long life. If Suzuki had not existed, Japan would have literally been ruined. The fact that Kantaro Suzuki miraculously survived the February 26 Incident was one of the most significant 'turning points of fate' in modern Japanese history. Emperor Showa's handling of the situation can in a sense be called an act of 'summoning the ghost of the Yamagata System one last time'.
I realized that the relationship between Aritomo Yamagata and Hideki Tojo is very similar to the relationship between a founding president and a salaried president. The required skills, background, and perspective are completely different between a system designer and someone who has risen through the ranks within the system. The organizational collapse of the Japanese military is strongly related to the topic of corporate governance.
In the end, Japan's resentment toward the West for about 100 years from the arrival of the Black Ships to the dropping of the atomic bomb did not change. While realists like Aritomo Yamagata and Hirobumi Ito were alive and held real power, it was controlled. When the Genro left the stage, the deep-seated identity from the end of the Edo period, which could be called a sense of rivalry against the West, was exposed, and the country plunged into an uncontrollable Pacific War. In terms of resentment toward the West, Japan and Russia are similar. Especially in today's Putin's Russia, that is exposed. Japan, too, does not know when it will be exposed again.
Aritomo Yamagata succeeded in founding a nation, but he could not standardize himself, an 'exceptional manager,' into a form that the next generation could reproduce, stop, or correct. That was the greatest structural flaw of modern Japan, and the same tragedy could happen in modern giant startup companies (such as SoftBank or Uniqlo).
