ABSTRACT
The events of the early 1930s played out against a backdrop of social instability produced by severe economic difficulties. In the trajectory of industrialization, Japan during the late 1920s and early 1930s was in the ‘take-off’ period. This was the transition from agriculture and light industry to heavy industry, from a predominantly agricultural labor force to an industrial workforce, a phase that has been called the ‘most difficult and precarious phase in the course of a country’s modernization’ (Kosaka, 1992: 28).
