Political Violence in Early Shōwa Japan, 1931–1936

During the early 1930s, depression, rural poverty, conflict in Manchuria and distrust of party politics encouraged radical nationalist movements in Japan. Secret societies and groups of young officers denounced financiers, party leaders and bureaucrats as corrupt obstacles to direct imperial rule.

The League of Blood assassinations and the May 15 Incident in 1932, followed by further plots and the February 26 Incident of 1936, weakened parliamentary government and normalised political murder. Participants often combined emperor-centred ideology with idealised samurai ethics, agrarian reform and hostility to the zaibatsu.

Set in 1932–1933, Yukio Mishima’s Runaway Horses invents a student conspiracy inside this recognisable political climate. Isao Iinuma’s plan echoes contemporary assassination movements while linking them to the earlier Shinpūren rebellion and to a cult of self-sacrificial purity.