Genrō

Both were, to varying degrees, uncomfortable with the labor and socialist movements that the industrial expansion of the previous decades had produced.

Hovering above the party politics were the Genro, the elder statesman, the surviving architects of the Meiji era who had exercised informal but enormous influence over Japanese government for decades.

By the time Hirohito became emperor, this group had dwindled to essentially one man, Prince Saionji Kinmochi, a Francophile liberal in his late seventies who had twice been prime minister and who understood constitutional governance with a sophistication that most of his contemporaries had never matched.

Saionji became, in the early Showa years, the most important advisor Hirohito had the man whose read on political situations the young emperor trusted most and whose counsel he sought on the recurring question of who should form the next government.