man, attacking him over his heavy-handed foreign policy towards China and Manchuria, as well as showing weakness before the United States. In 1927, Nakano helped found the Minseitō party, the successor to the Kenseikai. Representing his increased fortunes within the party, Nakano became a party director, campaign manager, and was also give responsibility for drafting the party program. After the Tanaka cabinet fell following the fallout of Zhang Zuolin's assassination, a Minseitō cabinet under Hamaguchi Osachi was formed. Nakano was offered the position of Parliamentary Vice Minister of Communications, and while there, he developed a plan to expand the telephone industry through the formation of a company partly government-owned and partly privately-owned, but his plans were blocked by Shidehara Kijūrō, who had become acting Prime Minister after Prime Minister Hamaguchi was severely wounded in an assassination attempt, and Nakano resigned in protest. Nakano would have further disagreements with the Minseitō, particularly over their reimplementation of the gold standard, which he believed was flawed, and when the Manchurian Incident broke out in 1931, Nakano sided with the young officers, praising their spirit and influenced by the Ōyōmei tradition, which stressed action and intuition. Despite sharing a dislike of the elitist bureaucracy with the young officers, however, Nakano would always attempt to work within the system. Drift Towards Fascism Break with the Minseitō By 1932, recent events such as the Great Depression and Manchurian Incident had convinced Nakano that the world and the establishment were drifting towards crisis. In order to form a strong government, he first attempted to create a union of the two largest political parties, the Seiyukai and Minseito. When this attempt failed, however, Nakano formed the Kokumin Dōmei (National Alliance) with Adachi Kenzō and his faction, breaking away from the Minseito, then elaborating and going further on his earlier proposals for national reconstruction. In the pamphlet Tenkan Nihon no Dōkō (Trends of Japan in Transition), he now claimed that the general trend of the times was towards one-party states, and that parliamentary politics and laissez-faire economics, both based on the British model, were outdated. In a later 1933 publication, Kokka Kaizō Keikaku Kōryō (Outline Plan for National Reconstruction), Nakano would advocate for a corporatist system. Upon the formation of the Kokumin Dōmei, the party platform called for the establishment of a "controlled economy", "aiming at the guarantee of the masses' livelihood". In his campaign for a reconstruction of