Prince Takamatsu bitterly opposed the
Kwantung Army's incursions in
Manchuria in September 1931, the expansion of the July 1937
Marco Polo Bridge Incident into a full-scale war of aggression against
China and in November 1941 warned his brother,
Hirohito that the
Imperial Japanese Navy could not sustain hostilities for longer than two years against the United States. He urged Emperor Shōwa to seek peace after the Japanese naval defeat at the
Battle of Midway in 1942; an intervention which apparently caused a severe rift between the brothers. After the
Battle of Saipan in July 1944, Prince Takamatsu joined his mother
Empress Teimei, his uncles
Prince Higashikuni,
Prince Asaka, former prime minister
Konoe Fumimaro, and other aristocrats, in seeking the ouster of the
prime minister,
Tojo Hideki[...]In 1975, the
Bungei Sunjū literary magazine published a long interview with Takamatsu in which he told of the warning he made to his brother Hirohito on November 30, 1941, the warning he made to him after Midway and that, before the surrender, he and Prince Konoe had considered asking for the emperor's abdication.