was a Japanese politician and labor activist. Born in

Iwami Province was an old province of Japan in the area that is today the western part of Shimane Prefecture. It was sometimes called . Iwami bordered Aki, Bingo, Izumo, Nagato, and Suō provinces. In the Heian period (794–1192) the capital was at modern ...

(present day

Tottori Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Chūgoku region of Honshu. Tottori Prefecture is the least populous prefecture of Japan at 570,569 (2016) and has a geographic area of . Tottori Prefecture borders Shimane Prefecture to the west, Hirosh ...

), Matsuoka was a steelworker at

Japan Steel Works is a steel manufacturer founded in Muroran, Hokkaidō, Japan in 1907. History Japan Steel Works was set up with investment from British firms Vickers, Armstrong Whitworth and Mitsui. During World War II, they manufactured what was then the wor ...

who joined

Suzuki Bunji was a Japanese politician and labor activist. He founded the , an organization for laborers. Early life and education Suzuki was born the oldest child of Suzuki Masuji on September 4, 1885 in what is now Kurihara, Miyagi prefecture. When he ...

as a business agent at the predecessor to the

Japanese Federation of Labour The Japanese Federation of Labour ( ja, 日本労働組合総同盟 ''Nippon Rōdō Kumiai Sōdōmei'') was a national trade union federation in Japan. The federation was established in 1946, principally through the efforts of trade unionists who ...

in 1917. With a growing interest in politics, Matsuoka joined the pro-labour

Social Democratic Party The name Social Democratic Party or Social Democrats has been used by many political parties in various countries around the world. Such parties are most commonly aligned to social democracy as their political ideology. Active parties For ...

in 1926, and ran independently in the

1942 Japanese general election General elections were held in Japan on 30 April 1942 to elect members of the House of Representatives. They were the only elections held in Japan during the Pacific theater of World War II. By this time, the House of Representatives had lost all ...

in a failed bid to join Japan's

House of Representatives House of Representatives is the name of legislative bodies in many countries and sub-national entitles. In many countries, the House of Representatives is the lower house of a bicameral legislature, with the corresponding upper house often c ...

following the

labour movement The labour movement or labor movement consists of two main wings: the trade union movement (British English) or labor union movement (American English) on the one hand, and the political labour movement on the other. * The trade union movement ...

's eventual break up in 1940 due to an inability to organize and need to comply with the demands of Japan's imperialist expansionism in the 1930s. Following the end of the war, the

was reborn in 1946 with Matsuoka as its president, and with the backing of the center-left

Japan Socialist Party The was a socialist and progressive political party in Japan that existed from 1945 to 1996. The party was founded as the Social Democratic Party of Japan by members of several proletarian parties that existed before World War II, including ...

, he was elected to Tokyo's 2nd district on 25 April 1947 in a surprising win for the party with 143 of the 468 seats going to the JSP, with Matsuoka elected as speaker. The predecessor to today's center-right Liberal Democratic Party retook the reins of government in the 1949 election, although Matsuoka held his seat in the lower house for 5 more terms. With Japan's entry in the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...

in December 1956, Matsuoka accompanied Foreign Minister

Mamoru Shigemitsu was a Japanese diplomat and politician in the Empire of Japan, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs three times during and after World War II as well as the Deputy Prime Minister of Japan. As civilian plenipotentiary representing the Ja ...

to attend the United Nations General Assembly, and continued to serve his district until dying in office of liver disease on 14 August 1958 at 70 years of age.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Katayama, Tetsu 1888 births 1958 deaths People from Tottori Prefecture Japanese Christian socialists Japanese trade union leaders Members of the House of Representatives (Japan) Social Democratic Party (Japan) politicians