Teiichi Suzuki

The eldest son of a landowner in Chiba Prefecture, Suzuki had aspired to participate in the forestry development of Manchuria based on stories told by his uncle, who was a colonel in the Imperial Japanese Army during the Russo-Japanese War. He applied for Tokyo Imperial University's Faculty of Agriculture, but passed the examinations for the Imperial Japanese Army Academy and upon the recommendations of his uncle, began a military career instead. He graduated from the 22nd class in 1910, and from the 29th class of the Army War College in 1917. After commissioning, he studied economics for a year and was briefly assigned to the Ministry of Finance.[1]

Following the Nikolayevsk incident, he was dispatched from April to October 1920 to Siberia. he served as a military attache to Shanghai from November 1920 to February 1922. As he was fluent in both English and Chinese, he was assigned to the China Bureau within the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff and was sent to Beijing from August 1925 to December 1925, and to various locations in China from December 1926 to May 1927. he accompanied General Yamanashi Hanzo on a meeting with Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin in Beijing in June 1927.

From 1927, Suzuki became increasingly involved in internal political factions within the Army, and joined the Isseki-kai in 1929. This clique included Tetsuzan Nagata, Hideki Tojo, Kanji Ishihara and Seishirō Itagaki.[1] He was sent as a military attache to the United Kingdom from February to October 1929. After his return, he was a participant in the 1931 March Incident, an abortive coup d'état intended to make General Kazushige Ugaki prime minister.[2] Following the Mukden Incident later that year, he began advocation of a more aggressive policy in Manchuria, and was one of the most vocal advocates of Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations. He was promoted to colonel in December 1933. From 1934 to 1935, Suzuki served as an instructor at the Army Staff College and was assigned to the Cabinet Research Bureau from 1935 to 1936. During this time, he co-authored a pamphlet outlining his theory for a "national defense state" to prepare for total war, based on utopian and Marxist theories on state control of industries and agrarian reform.[1]

During the February 26 incident in 1936, Suzuki was initially regarded as a member of the Kōdōha faction which supported the attempted coup; however, he switched sides to the Tōseiha as it became apparent that the coup would not succeed. Although this earned him a spot close to Hideki Tojo, it also gained him the reputation as an "opportunist" which many in the Army, including former classmate Tomoyuki Yamashita resented. Suzuki was assigned command of the IJA 14th Infantry regiment in December 1936. Although he had been a bureaucrat and administrator his entire career, with little experience as a field commander and no combat experience, command of a field unit was necessary for his further promotion. He became a major general in November 1937 and was assigned nominally to the staff of the IJA 16th Division from November 1937 to April 1938, although he remained in Tokyo with the Cabinet Research Bureau. From April 1936, he was nominal Chielf-of-Staff of the IJA 3rd Army, At the time, the IJA 3rd Army was a garrison force in Manchukuo, far from the combat zones in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Suzuki returned to Tokyo in December as Head of the Political Affairs Bureau of the East Asia Development Board. He was promoted to lieutenant general in August 1940. He retired from military service in April 1941 and entered the reserves.

Although retired from the military, Suzuki continued to serve as a Minister of State as Chair of the Cabinet Planning Board under the second and third Fumimaro Konoe administrations. In the October 1941 Gozen Kaigi immediately prior to the start of then Pacific War, Suzuki asserted that the outcome of a war would depend a quantitative analysis of Japan's economic and military power, and that at the present time, due to the American economic embargo, Japan had less that three year's supply of oil and other critical resources. Unless new resources could be secured, Japanese industry would collapse and the military would lose its capability of taking action, resulting in the loss of the Empire.[3] Continuing to serve in the Hideki Tojo administration, he pushed strongly for the creation of the Ministry of Greater East Asia, of which he expected to become the cabinet minister. However, Tojo selected career bureaucrat Kazuo Aoki instead, and Suzuki resigned as Minister of State, and became a member of the Upper House of the Diet of Japan in October 1943.