Maeda Toshisada

Viscount was a Japanese politician who was Minister of Communications and Minister of Agriculture and Commerce in the pre-war Empire of Japan.

Biography Toshisada Maeda was born in Tokyo, as the eldest son of Maeda Toshiaki, the final daimyō of Nanokaichi Domain in Kōzuke Province, and inherited his father’s kazoku peerage title of shishaku (viscount). His brother, Toshinari, was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army.

Toshisada Maeda was a graduate of Tokyo Imperial University. He served briefly in the infantry during the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894, and afterwards assumed his family’s seat in the House of Peers of the Diet of Japan in 1904. In 1922, he was appointed Minister of Communications in the cabinet of Katō Tomosaburō. He subsequently served in the cabinet of Prime Minister Kiyoura Keigo as Minister of Agriculture and Commerce. He retired from public life in January 1944, and died in October of the same year. He was posthumously awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasures, 1st class.

Maeda studied poetry under Sasaki Nobutsuna. His daughter married post-war Foreign Minister Katsuo Okazaki.

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