Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 479, The Dynasty, Part 2.

The story of Hatoyama Kazuo, the progenitor of the Hatoyama dynasty, is the story of a very

odd man for his time. He was a committed liberal during an age where liberalism was very

much an outsider ideology. He was a politician liberal during an age where liberalism was very much an outsider ideology.

He was a politician who never fully embraced that vacation, instead splitting his time between

politics and the law.

And he was a liberal who ended up joining the Seyukai, a party that in many ways served to

launder the ambitions of pro-government oligarchs like Ito Hirobumi

through the fig leaf of liberalism, driven by an inexplicable rift between himself and a man

who previously had been one of his foremost boosters.

To be fair, Hatayama Kazuo was not the only Japanese liberal to make that choice, but still, it was an odd one.

All of this is to say that Kazuo doesn't exactly look like the kind of guy to launch his family into the upper rungs of Japan's political elite.

Indeed, arguably, he wasn't even a very good politician because he

was absolutely terrible at the kind of horse trading and backroom deals you really need to

succeed in the field. So it's really his eldest son, Hatoyama Ichiro, who is, in many ways,

the foundational figure of the Hatoyama dynasty and the one we're

going to spend the most time with.

Ichiro, who was, as the name implies the eldest son, was born in 1883 in Tokyo, right at the

start of his father's political career.

In many ways, his upbringing was traditional for a boy from

an elite family during the Meiji years. He attended a series of extremely elite schools

founded by the new government, culminating in a graduation from the Daiichi Koto Gakko in elite

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