Kobashigawa Hideaki

HIdeaki Kobashigawa (Hyojin: Kobashigawa HIdeaki) is a Hyojin politician serving as the 28th Chancellor the Republic of Hyokoku. Elected in 1945 at age 43, Kobashigawa is the youngest Chancellor in Hyojin history. A member of the Liberal Party, Kobashigawa was elected to a third term in office by the Kokkai in 1955, securing his position as the longest consecutively serving Hyojin Chancellor.

Childhood and Family Background
Born in an affluent suburb of Tochikyo in 1902, Kobashigawa was the child of a wealthy family with strong ties to Hyokoku's corporate and political sectors. He had two older brothers and a younger sister. He was especially close with his father, Kobashigawa Masaharu, who served as Vice Minister of Finance from 1915—1920. Kobashigawa attended elite private schools throughout his early life, and was noted by his teachers for his good manners and intelligence, though friends and family often described him as reserved, stiff, and cold.

Education and Early Career
Kobashigawa studied economics at the prestigious Yamakyo State University. He completed his graduate program in 1935 and was quickly hired at the National Bank. In 1938, Kobashigawa was made head of the bank's Industrial Investment Office. Coworkers alleged that he was hired to the position due to his father's close relations with the National Banks senior leadership, though the claims were never substantiated. During his time working for the bank, Kobashigawa formed personal relationships with a number of senior zaibatsu executives, including Sumatsu Takayuki and Matsuzaki Kyou.

He helped mediate the Nakai—Sumatsu Steel Dispute in 1939, drafting a set of regulations informally known as the Kobashigawa Papers that established the National Bank's position as a middleman between the Zaibatsu's large and powerful conglomerates. The Kobayashi Papers secured an agreement between Sumatsu and Nakai, wherein the former agreed not to raise the price of crude iron in its sales to the latter for a period of ten years.

Career as Minister of Finance and Leadership in the Liberal Party
In 1940, Kobashigawa became the Minister of Finance. He was a close friend of then Chancellor Tsukamoto Shoji, who admired Kobashigawa's intelligence and competence. He served as a close advisor to the Chancellor, traveling to the Hachidori Palace frequently to brief him on economic affairs. With Tsukamoto's support, Kobashigawa became an influential member of the ruling Liberal Party. Though it was seen as improper for senior ministers in the government to take noticeable political positions, Tsukamoto's patronage (as well as his "mob boss-like" control of the Hyojin government and press, to quote his conservative opponents) insulated Kobashigawa from criticism in the newspapers.

By 1944, letters between members of the Liberal Party noted that Kobashigawa had become Tsukamoto's "right hand," despite the fact that he held no formal position in the party's power structure. It was well known by that time that the Chancellor was grooming him as his successor, while influential and more progressive members of the Liberal Party like Iwamoto Makoa and Tachibana Takumi were sidelined. The Liberals held their grip on power in the Kokkai's 1945 general elections, and Tsukamoto Shoji—who had announced his plan not to pursue a third term as chancellor a year earlier—distributed an internal memo to members of his party instructing them to appoint Kobashigawa as the leadernof the Liberals and support him during the following vote for Chancellor.

Election as Chancellor and First Term (1945—1950)
Kobashigawa's nomination for chancellor was controversial in the Kokkai, as many members of the Liberal Party itself privately or publicly opposed his ascension to the position of president of the party. For a brief time, it seemed as if the party would split as a left-leaning block privately told the chancellor they would refuse to nominate Kobashigawa. He was a political outsider, criticized by his peers for his notoriously robotic and stiff demeanor, traits that earned him the nickname "the metal man" among his colleagues. Nevertheless, Tsukamoto's famous ability to twist arms and call favors from his fellow politicians secured a robust base of support for Kobashigawa, who was successfully nominated to run against the National Party's Konishi Shichiro in the Kokkai vote.

Because Hyojin chancellors were chosen in the Kokkai, and not elected by the public, it was rare for prospective candidates to gain much notoriety outside of the halls of the parliament. Kobashigawa, however, was completely unknown to the general public until the announcement of his nomination, just a week before the Kokkai was scheduled to vote. Newspapers began running stories suggesting that, despite the Liberal Party's strong majority, Kobashigawa would lose the election. His opponent, Konishi, was a veteran parliamentarian who had held his seat in the Kokkai since 1911.

Kobashigawa was narrowly elected on July 2nd, 1945, with a vote of 54-to-46. Political commentators were surprised by the result, and questions of his ability to lead circulated in the weeks after.

"The Right to Prosper"
The newly-elected Chancellor moved quickly, keeping a number of Tsukamoto's cabinet ministers in their positions to reassure the party's senior members of his loyalty. He began his career by focusing on legislation to expand Hyokoku's middle class and build up heavy infrastructure in the countryside. His famous "Right to Prosper" initiative, announced during a speech on July 3rd, 1945, focused on the expanding Hyokoku's welfare system, increasing the national education budget, building a network of highways across the country, and expanding railroads in the underdeveloped north and east. To fund his program, Kobashigawa asked the Kokkai to raise the country's corporate tax by 2%. Remarkably, his close relations with major Zaibatsu executives—forged during his time working for the National Bank and Ministry of Finance—enabled him to call for their support to pass the tax. Sumatsu and Matsuzaki lobbied for the tax reform bill to pass, citing the patriotic duty of the zaibatsus. The measure was approved, as were smaller reform bills that raised income taxes on the top 10% of Hyokoku's income bracket and shrunk the military budget.Through this flurry of small, well-planned tax reforms, Kobashigawa was able to wield his abilities as a capable economist to inject significant funding into the Right to Prosper. The program is estimated to have raised approximately 30,000 people above the poverty line in the first two years after its passage, while large subsidies reinvigorated impoverished small towns and led to the construction of new post offices, libraries, and schools in long forgotten areas.

Social Issues and Morality Laws
Racial ensions during Kobashigawa's first term were enflamed after the killing of Mahahuatl Kuatzpaal, a 15 year-old Huascan indigenous boy at the hands of Hyojin police. Indigenous activists criticized Kobashigawa for his silence on the matter. A month after the incident, the Hachidori Palace released a vaguely worded statement expressing "sympathy for the child's family," but took no further actions. None of the officers accused of killing Kuatzpaal were charged.

Kobashigawa's first term was marked by his efforts to rid the Liberal Party's powerful leadership of extravagance, corruption, and vice. Under Tsukamoto Shoji, the party's elite had embraced a culture that ignored the values of the Theodarity, and acts of bribery were common. Party leaders regularly met at high-end gentlemen's clubs where they kept the company of female escorts throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. An ardent supporter of the Tokko, Kobashigawa backed the agency's investigation and subsequent arrest of Handa Toshiaki, the powerful head of the Kokkai's Oversight and Judicial Affairs Committee, after he was exposed as a homosexual. Privately, Kobashigawa ordered his party members to stop going to gentlemen's clubs, and threatened to arrest any person found soliciting escort services.

Second Term (1950—1955)
In April of 1955, the Tokko reported that the Asa Shimbun, a prominent and well-respected newspaper, had obtained evidence of more than 30 incidents of bribery within the Liberal Party during the chancellorship of Tsukamoto Shoji, and was planning to publish a cover story exposing the scandal. If the story was published, Kobashigawa feared it would ruin the Liberal Party's chance of maintaining a Kokkai majority in the general elections, which could have resulted in his expulsion from office in the subsequent July 2nd vote.

In order to prevent the story from being published, the Liberal Party submitted the Information Security Act to the Kokkai for a vote on May 5th. The law, framed as an effort to prevent radical influences from infiltrating Hyokoku's free presss, passed by a margin of 58—42, and allowed the Tokko to censor news publications deemed a "threat to public decency and national stability." Shortly after, Kobashigawa ordered the Tokko to investigate leading members of the National Party. After discovering the president of the National Party, Hayashida Kalei, had been having an extra-marital affair, Tokko agents fed the story the Asa Shimbun through an anonymous leak. The story made national headlines, quickly shifting the public's focus from the Information Security Act (which had roused feelings of suspicion and criticism) to the Nationals, who were quickly labeled as "rotten to the core" by pro-Liberal political pundits.

Shift to the "Moderate Mainstream"
Throughout his second term, Kobashigawa sought to continue efforts beginning under the Tsukamoto government to shift the Liberal Party to what he called the "moderate mainstream." Under this shift, the Liberal Party moved further away from social issues like gender equality and indigenous rights that had defined it up to the 1910s and focused on less controversial and polarizing financial issues, all while ingratiating itself to the once pro-National suburban population by cracking down on perceived "immoral" activities that violated Theodorian values. Simultaneously, many of the Liberal Party's most outspoken progressive members were removed from power. Hatanaka Masaharu, a 25-year veteran of the Liberal Party was removed as Premier of Hyokoku in 1955 and replaced with the more moderate Shimamura Ahi, while Kobashigawa supported the campaigns of mainstream candidates in the electoral districts of Iwamoto Makoa and Tachibana Takumi—both of whom lost their elections in 1955.

"The Liberal Juggernaught"
The term "Liberal Juggernaught" was coined by the Hyojin press to refer to the Liberal Party's majority in the Kokkai throughout Kobashigawa's second term. Their control of the parliament allowed Kobashigawa to ram a number of infrastructure spending bills and tax breaks for major corporations into law, while cutting the defense budget and downsizing the military to fund increased social spending. Kobashigawa's spending programs throughout his second term expanded Hyokoku's automotive and tech sectors, granting a wide array of patents to the country's Zaibatsus. Three progressive housing loans for Hyokoku's rural poor were passed from 1950—1955, cutting the size of the country's homeless population and expanding the workforce.