The Japanese statesman Korekiyo Takahashi (1854-1936) was an economically liberal finance minister who resisted military spending. For this he was assassinated in the attempted military coup of 1936.

Korekiyo Takahashi was born on July 27, 1854, in Edo (Tokyo) and temporarily given the name Wakiji by his real father, Shozaemon Kawamura, a master painter attached to the Shogun's court. But because Korekiyo was an illegitimate child, he was adopted by a low-ranking samurai of Sendai Province named Koretaka Kakuji Takahashi. Precociously bright, at 11 Korekiyo studied English with Hepburn; at 13 he was sent to study in the United States. In San Francisco he unwittingly signed a paper indenturing himself to 3 years' labor but soon extricated himself from this plight and hurriedly returned to Japan in December 1868, shortly after the Meiji restoration. Thereafter he taught and translated English and became a Christian.

Takahashi's successful career in the bureaucracy started in 1881 in the newly...