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Kinmen

Kinmen, alternatively known as Quemoy, is a group of islands governed as a county by the Republic of China (Taiwan), only 10 km east from the city of Xiamen in Fujian, located at the southeastern coast of the People's Republic of China, from which they are separated by Xiamen Bay. Kinmen is also located 187 km west from the closest shoreline of the island of Taiwan across the Taiwan Strait.

The county consists of the major island of Kinmen along with several surrounding islets, as well as Wuqiu Township remotely located 133 km northeast from the rest of the county. Kinmen is one of two counties that constitute Fuchien Province; the other is Lienchiang County (Matsu).

Kinmen's strategic location in the Taiwan Strait has caused numerous confrontations, making it a visible embodiment of political change on Cross-Strait relations. In August 1958, Kinmen was heavily bombarded by the People's Liberation Army during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. Travel restrictions between Kinmen and the main island of Taiwan were lifted in 1994 following the end of decades-long military administration over Kinmen. A direct ferry route to Xiamen was inaugurated in January 2001 following the establishment of the Three Links.

The People's Republic of China (PRC, China) claims Kinmen as part of its own Fujian Province and considers Wuqiu to be a separate territory of Fujian apart from Kinmen itself; conversely, the ROC claims the Dadeng Islands (Tateng) as part of Kinmen, even though the PRC has effectively transferred the jurisdiction of those islands to Xiamen.

Names

Kinmen (金門) means 'golden gate'. The name was first recorded in 1387 when the Hongwu Emperor appointed Zhou Dexing to administer the island and protect it from pirate attacks. The spelling "Kinmen" is a postal romanization. This transcription system is a variation of Nanking Syllabary, a system developed by Herbert Giles in 1892. It was adopted by the Chinese Imperial Post, part of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service led by Irishman Robert Hart. It is based on pronunciation in the Southern Mandarin, or Jianghuai, dialect. This dialect is widely spoken in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, including the city of Nanjing. The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs uses "Kinmen," while the United States Board on Geographic Names gives "Kinmen Island." Jinmen is the island's name both in Tongyong Pinyin and in Hanyu Pinyin. Chin-men / Chinmen is the Wade–Giles romanization of the county and island's name.

Quemoy, pronounced, is a name for the island in English and in other European languages. It may have originated as a Spanish or Portuguese transcription of the Zhangzhou Hokkien pronunciation of the name, Kim-mûi. This is the most common form of the islands' name in English. For example, works that deal with the First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises (the Quemoy Incident ) and the 1960 United States presidential election debates when the islands received prominent worldwide news coverage all use the word Quemoy. In addition, the former National Kinmen Institute of Technology was renamed National Quemoy University in 2010. Kinmen scholar Wei Jian-feng advocates the use of the word Quemoy to better connect the island to "international society or achieve more recognition in the world". Kimoi is a Hokkien-derived spelling also used in the postal romanization system.

History

Humans have lived on Kinmen for 5,800 to 8,000 years. During the reign of Emperor Yuan (317 CE), the Five Barbarians invasion of China led six extended families to flee south and they settled in Kinmen, then called Wuzhou. More people settled there during the Tang dynasty, changing the name from Wuzhou to Kinmen.

During the Ming dynasty, more migrants settled in Kinmen. Koxinga used Kinmen as a base to capture Formosa and Penghu from the Dutch. He cut down trees to build his navy, resulting in massive deforestation that made Kinmen vulnerable to soil erosion.

The Prince of Lu, a member of the Southern Ming dynasty, resisted the invading Manchu Qing dynasty forces. In 1651, he fled to Kinmen, which the Qing dynasty took in 1663. During the Qing Dynasty, the Kinmen area was part of Tungan County.

After the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912, Kinmen became part of Fujian Province. In 1913, the Kinmen area was made part of Siming County. Kinmen County was established in 1914. In 1928, the county came under direct administration of the provincial government.

The Empire of Japan captured Kinmen in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. They blockaded the island on September 3 and landed on October 23. Fighting was light with ROC forces fleeing rather than fighting. The only casualty was sustained by a local self-defense unit. Many of the residents fled to the mainland or to Southeast Asia. The purpose of the Japanese seizure of Kinmen was to use it as a position from which to attack the neighboring city of Xiamen which they would seize in May 1938. Following the seizure of Xiamen many of the locals who had fled there returned to Kinmen.

After the capture of the island the county government went into exile in Dadeng. The Japanese administered Kinmen as a special municipality of Xiamen, the government was composed of locals, people from other parts of occupied China, and Taiwanese.

A poor harvest in 1938 brought challenges for islanders. The Japanese engaged in economic development of the island including through the use of forced labor. KMT forces engaged in two serious attempts to retake the island and kept up a low level campaign against the Japanese. In 1943 insurgents kidnapped two Taiwanese officials who had been overseeing the salt fields and took them to China before executing them. In retaliation the Japanese authorities rounded up 300 young men from the local community eventually executing four.

Towards the end of WWII conditions worsened with Japanese authorities conscripting 500 locals (with their mules) into the military and confiscating household goods. The island came under allied bombing including one attack on Aug. 30, 1944 which killed 19 locals.

WWII ended in Aug. 15, 1945 with the surrender of Japan. Following the end of the war there were attacks by locals against Taiwanese who took shelter with the Japanese garrison. Kinmen was effectively ungoverned until Oct. 3, 1945 when ROC forces landed and installed a new government. A celebration on Oct. 10 marked the end of hostilities. Locals who had survived the war following their conscription by the Japanese were treated as traitors by the KMT occupation authorities.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) by the Chinese Communists in October 1949, Kinmen County was claimed by both the Nationalists and the Communists. Dadeng, Xiaodeng and Jiaoyu were taken by the Communists on 9 October or 15 October, 1949. While those islands are still claimed by the ROC, they are governed as part of Dadeng Subdistrict, Xiang'an District, Xiamen, Fujian, China.

On 25 October 1949, People's Liberation Army (PLA) forces landed on Kinmen Island near Guningtou beginning the Battle of Kuningtou. ROC forces successfully defended the island and prevented an attack on Taiwan.

At the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, retired Admiral Charles M. Cooke Jr., advisor to President Chiang Kai-shek, opposed withdrawing ROC forces from Quemoy (Kinmen). On 26 July 1950, ROC forces on Dadan Island (Tatan), in total 298 soldiers, repulsed an attack (大擔島戰役) from a People's Liberation Army force of 700 soldiers that landed on the island. General Douglas MacArthur and other US officials supported ROC efforts to defend the islands. The PLA extensively shelled the island during the First and Second Taiwan Strait crises in 1954–1955 and 1958 respectively. In 1954, the United States considered responding by using nuclear weapons against the PRC. Again in 1958, General Nathan Farragut Twining and the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that the United States should not permit the loss of the islands to the communists and recommended to President Eisenhower the use of whatever force was necessary, including atomic weapons.

The phrase "Quemoy and Matsu" became part of American political language in the 1960 U.S. presidential election. During the debates, both candidates, Vice-president Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy, pledged to use American forces if necessary to protect Taiwan from invasion by the PRC, which the United States did not recognize as a legitimate government. But in the second debate on 7 October 1960, the two candidates presented different opinions about whether to use American forces to protect Taiwan's forward positions, Quemoy and Matsu, also. Senator Kennedy stated that these islands – as little as 9 kilometres (5.5 mi) off the coast of China and as much as 170 kilometres (106 mi) from Taiwan – were strategically indefensible and were not essential to the defense of Taiwan. Vice-president Nixon maintained that since Quemoy and Matsu were in the "area of freedom," they should not be surrendered to the Communists as a matter of principle.

Earlier in the debate, then-Vice President Nixon mentioned:

"In the Truman Administration 600 million people went behind the Iron Curtain including the satellite countries of Eastern Europe and Communist China. In this Administration we have stopped them at Quemoy and Matsu, we have stopped them in Indo China, we have stopped them in Lebanon, we have stopped them in other parts of the world."

Later in the debate, Edward P. Morgan asked then-Senator Kennedy:

"Senator, Saturday on television, you said that you had always thought that Quemoy and Matsu were unwise places to draw our defense line in the Far East. Would you comment further on that, and also address to this question: couldn't a pull-back from those islands be interpreted as appeasement?"

Then-Senator Kennedy responded to Morgan's question saying:

Well, the United States has on occasion attempted, mostly in the middle '50s to persuade Chiang Kai-shek to pull his troops back to Formosa. I believe strongly in the defense of Formosa. These islands are a few miles, five or six miles off the coast of Red China within a general harbor area, and more than a hundred miles from Formosa. We have never said flatly that we will defend Quemoy and Matsu if it is attacked. We say we will defend it if it's part of a general attack on Formosa, but it is extremely difficult to make that judgment.

Now, Mr. Herter, in 1958, when he was Under Secretary of State, said they were strategically indefensible. Admiral Spruance and Collins in 1955 said that we should not attempt to defend these islands in their conference on the Far East. General Ridgway has said the same thing. I believe that when you get into a war, if you're going to get into a war for the defense of Formosa, it ought to be on a clearly defined line. One of the problems, I think, at the time of South Korea was the question of whether the United States would defend it if it were attacked. I believe that we should defend Formosa, we should come to its defense. It leaves this rather in the air that we will defend it under some conditions but not under others, I think it is a mistake.

Secondly, I would not suggest a withdrawal at the point of the Communist guns. It is a decision finally that the Nationalists should make and I believe that we should consult with them and attempt to work out a plan by which the line is drawn at the Island of Formosa. It leaves 100 miles between the sea. But with General Ridgway, Mr. Herter, General Collins, Admiral Spruance and many others, I think it is unwise to take the chance of being dragged into a war which may lead to a world war over two islands which are not strategically defensible, which are not according to their testimony, essential to the defense of Formosa.

I think that we should protect our commitments. I believe strongly we should do so in Berlin. I believe strongly we should do so in Formosa and I believe we should meet our commitments to every country whose security we've guaranteed. But I do not believe that that line, in case of a war, should be drawn on those islands, but instead on the island of Formosa. And as long as they are not essential to the defense of Formosa, it has been my judgement ever since 1954, at the time of the Eisenhower Doctrine for the Far East, that our line should be drawn in the sea around the island itself.

Then–Vice President Nixon retorted:

I disagree completely with Senator Kennedy on this point.

I remember in the period immediately before the Korean War, South Korea was supposed to be indefensible as well. Generals testified to that, and Secretary Acheson made a very famous speech at the Press Club early in the year that the Korean War started, indicating in effect that South Korea was beyond the defense zone of the United States. I suppose it was hoped when he made that speech that we wouldn't get into a war, but it didn't mean that. We had to go in when they came in.

Now I think as far as Quemoy and Matsu are concerned, that the question is not these two little pieces of real estate—they are unimportant. It isn't the few people who live on them—they are not too important. It's the principle involved. These two islands are in the area of freedom. The Nationalists have these two islands. We should not force our Nationalist allies to get off of them and give them to the Communists. If we do that, we start a chain reaction, because the Communists aren't after Quemoy and Matsu, they're after Formosa. In my opinion, this is the same kind of woolly thinking that lead to disaster for America in Korea, I'm against it, I would never tolerate it as President of the United States, and I will hope that Senator Kennedy will change his mind if he should be elected.

After the third debate on 13 October 1960, Kennedy's advisers spoke with then Secretary of State Herter and said Kennedy was willing to revise his position on the Quemoy and Matsu issue so as not to give the Communists the impression that the USA would not stand united against aggression. Nixon pointed out the change in Kennedy's position but decided not to press the point due to the importance of the USA's role in what was an extremely tense situation. Nixon's polls among Republicans and Democrats showed overwhelming support for Nixon's position on the issue.

Kinmen was originally a military reserve under the Martial Law curfews, which eventually led to the tragedies of innocent civilian casualties, such as the 1985 Shi Islet Slaughter and 1987 Lieyu massacre. The island was returned to the civilian government in the mid-1990s, after which travel to and from it was allowed. Direct travel between mainland China and Kinmen re-opened in January 2001 under the mini Three Links, and there has been extensive tourism development on the island in anticipation of mainland tourists. Direct travel was suspended in 2003 as a result of the SARS outbreak, but has since resumed.

Many Taiwanese businessmen use the link through Kinmen to enter the Chinese mainland, seeing it as cheaper and easier than entering through Hong Kong. However, this changed following the 2005 Pan–Blue visits to mainland China and the 2008 presidential and legislative victories of the KMT, that allowed easier cross-Strait relations. Kinmen has experienced a considerable economic boom as businessmen relocate to the island for easier access to the vast markets of the PRC.

On 30 June 2014, Dadan Island and Erdan Island were handed over from the military to civilians, represented by Kinmen County Government. Since 1 January 2015, tourists from Mainland China could directly apply for the Exit and Entry Permit upon arrival in Kinmen. This privilege also applies to Penghu and Matsu Islands as means to boost tourism in the outlying islands of Taiwan.

On 23 August 2019, the sixty-first anniversary of the beginning of the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, President Tsai Ing-wen visited the Taiwushan martyrs' shrine (太武山忠烈祠) in Mount Taiwu where she placed flowers and offered incense.

Geography

The county is made up of numerous islands and islets including:
 * Kinmen group
 * Kinmen (Kinmen, Main island; 大金門, 金門本島) (main island; divided into four townships)
 * Dongding Island (Tangtia, Tungting, ) (in Jinhu Township; approximately 35 km to the southwest)
 * Beiding Island (北碇島) (in Jinhu Township; approximately 4 km to the east)
 * Cao Islet (Ts'ao Hsü; ) (in Jinsha Township) 24.52334°N, 118.43702°W
 * Hou Islet (in Jinsha Township) 24.52917°N, 118.41233°W
 * Jiangong Islet (建功嶼) (in Jincheng Township)
 * Lesser Kinmen (Hsiao Kinmen, Lieyu; 小金門, 烈嶼) (second largest island under ROC control; in Lieyu Township)
 * Dadan Island (大膽島) (in Lieyu Township)
 * Erdan Island (二膽島) (in Lieyu Township)
 * Fuxing Islet (Fuhsing Islet; Phaktia) (in Lieyu Township)
 * Menghu Islet (Tiger Island, ) (in Lieyu Township)
 * Shi Islet (Lion Islet) (in Lieyu Township)
 * Binlang Islet (in Lieyu Township)
 * Dadeng (Tateng ) (大嶝  /大嶝島 ) (under PRC control from 9 October or 15 October 1949; part of Dadeng Subdistrict, Xiang'an District, Xiamen, Fujian  )
 * Xiaodeng (Hsiaoteng, Siao Deng ) (小嶝  /小嶝島 ) (under PRC control from 9 October or 15 October 1949; part of Dadeng Subdistrict, Xiang'an District, Xiamen, Fujian  )
 * Jiaoyu /Jiao Yu (Chiao I., 角嶼   ) (under PRC control from 9 October or 15 October 1949; part of Dadeng Subdistrict, Xiang'an District, Xiamen, Fujian  )
 * Wuqiu (Ockseu, Wuchiu; 烏坵) group
 * Daqiu (Tachiu, Taciou; 大坵) (in Wuqiu Township)
 * Xiaoqiu (Hsiaochiu; 小坵) (in Wuqiu Township)

Climate
Kinmen's climate is classified as humid subtropical climate (Köppen Cfa, bordering on Cwa). Among them, the annual average temperature is 21.0 C, the hottest month in August is 28.5 C, and the coldest month is 12.6 C in January. The annual precipitation is 1089.4 mm, of which August is the wettest with 156.3 mm, while November is the driest with only 23.5 mm. The extreme temperature throughout the year ranged from 1.3 C on January 25, 2016 to 39.1 C on August 31, 2020.

Geology
Kinmen, much like the surrounding Chinese mainland, is predominantly composed of Cretaceous aged granite, with lesser amounts of Eocene-Oligocene sandstone, Miocene basalt and Pleistocene-Holocene conglomerate. The thickness of the sediments varies from 150 metres in the west to only a few metres in the east.

Culture

The people of Kinmen see themselves as Kinmenese, Mínnánrén/Mǐnnánrén (people of Southern Fujian), or Chinese. They identify as citizens of the Republic of China but not so much as Taiwanese. Kinmen's strong Chinese identity was forged during the period of the ROC's military confrontation with the People's Republic of China (1949–1992) when Kinmen was under military administration. In the 1980s, as the militarization decreased and martial law was ended on Taiwan, the Taiwan independence movement and efforts in de-Sinicization grew in strength on Taiwan. To Kinmenese, however, these developments were viewed with concern and there was a feeling that "Taiwan didn't identify with Kinmen". Many worried that Taiwanese de jure independence from China would lead to the severing of ties with Kinmen. These concerns play a strong role in Kinmenese politics as well. Legally speaking, Kinmenese people are not Taiwanese either and have a unique identity from that of the Taiwanese. "Taiwanization" is sometimes perceived as a threat to the cultural identity of the Kinmenese people.

Language
Many of the county's inhabitants speak Hokkien; the Quanzhou accent is predominant. Most residents will say they speak Kinmenese, which is mutually intelligible with Taiwanese Hokkien. The residents of Wuchiu Township speak Pu-Xian Min, as opposed to Hokkien for the rest of Kinmen.

Others
Kinmen is notable for a number of cultural products. Due to the extensive shelling by the People's Liberation Army in the 1950s, Kinmen is famous for its artillery shell knives. Local artisans would collect the vast amounts of exploded ordnance and make high-quality knives which are still sought after by chefs and connoisseurs. Kinmen is also home of the regionally famous Kinmen Kaoliang liquor, a spirit ranging between 38 and 63 percent alcohol, which is highly appreciated by the Taiwanese. Other local culinary specialties include Kinmen noodles, kòng-thn̂g and beef jerky (bakkwa).

Like the Ryukyus, Kinmen is known for shisa (wind-lion god) figures (風獅爺).

Military
Kinmen is home to the ROC Army’s 101st Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion also known as the ROC Army Frogman, whose main headquarter is garrisoned on Liaoluo Bay (料羅灣). As of 2024, United States soldiers are stationed in the islands.

Economy
Kinmen's economy is mainly based on tourism and services due to its proximity to mainland China.

Tourism

Because of its military importance, development on the island was extremely limited. Only by 2003, Kinmen opened up itself to tourists from Fujian in Mainland China. It is now a popular weekend tourist destination for Taiwanese and is known for its quiet villages, old-style architecture and beaches. Chinese and Taiwanese tour groups also spend a short time touring the island whilst transiting between the ferry and the airport, as an intermediate stop between China and Taiwan. Large parts of Kinmen form the Kinmen National Park which highlights military fortifications and structures, historical dwellings and natural scenery.

The year 2014 recorded the highest number of passengers traveling by ferry between Kinmen and Fujian ports for as many as 1.5 million people. Since 1 January 2015, Chinese mainland tourists were no longer required to apply for Exit and Entry Permit in advance for visits to Kinmen, Penghu and Matsu Islands. Instead, they can apply for it upon arrival at a cost of NT$600.

By 2016, two infrastructure projects are expected to boost tourism and meetings, incentives, conferencing, exhibitions visitors to the islands. One includes a yet-to-be-named five-star resort spearheaded by Xiamen property developer, Wu Youhua, president of Xiamen Huatian Group, the first time a Chinese interest has been allowed to invest in the Taiwanese hotel sector.

According to local authorities in Kinmen, they had recorded over 745,000 tourists from mainland China in 2018, who had collectively spent over 360 million dollars during that year.

Tourist attractions
Tourist-related affairs in Kinmen are governed by Transportation and Tourism Bureau of Kinmen County Government. Major tourist attractions in Kinmen are:

Museums
August 23 Artillery Battle Museum, Guningtou Battle Museum, Hujingtou Battle Museum, Kinmen Ceramics Museum, Landmine Museum, Lieyu Township Culture Museum, Yu Da Wei Xian Sheng Memorial Museum.

Nature
Ci Lake, Gugang Lake, Houhu Seashore Park, Jiangong Islet, Jincheng Seaside Park, Kinmen National Park, Lingshui Lake, Tianpu Reservoir, Zhongzheng Park.

Historical buildings
Beishan Old Western-style House, Chenggong Coastal Defense Tunnel, Chen Shi-yin Western Style House, Deyue Gun Tower, Gulongtou Zhenwei Residence, Jindong Movie Theater, Jinshui Elementary School, Juguang Tower, Kinmen Folk Culture Village, Kinmen Military Headquarters of Qing Dynasty, Mashan Broadcasting and Observation Station, Mofan Street, Qingtian Hall, Qionglin Tunnel, Yannan Academy, Wang Chin-cheng's Western House, Wuqiu Lighthouse and Zhaishan Tunnel.

Religious buildings
Longfeng Temple, Maoshan Pagoda, Wentai Pagoda.

Industry
Kinmen is famous for the production of Kaoliang liquor, which takes up about 75% of Taiwan's market share, in which it is a strong economic backbone of the county. Traditional industries are also being kept and improved, ranging from agriculture, fishery and livestock. It has a good fishery industry also due to its nature being surrounded by unpolluted sea.

Kinmen also produces its unique Kinmen knife, in which the raw material used to produce it is taken from the remaining of shells fired by the People's Liberation Army in 1958–1978. The knife was made as gift to the visiting Head of Taiwan Affairs Office Zhang Zhijun to Kinmen on 23–24 May 2015 to symbolize mutual peace between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait and to bury the hatchet left from Chinese Civil War.

Imported goods
Kinmen often import more goods from Mainland China than Taiwan Island because of lower costs due to the proximity of the county to the mainland. During the campaign for the 2014 county magistrate, all of the magistrate candidates spent their money on campaign materials produced in mainland provinces, such as Guangdong, Zhejiang and Fujian instead of from Taiwan Island.

Politics

The island consistently votes for the Kuomintang (KMT). Until the early 1990s, proponents of Taiwan independence argued that they would consider handing Kinmen over to the PRC in any negotiated settlement. Residents of the island have broadly opposed such measures.

The Democratic Progressive Party has a minor presence on the island and typically does not present candidates to stand in local elections, although it does hold a single seat in Kinmen County Council from both of the 2009 and 2014 local elections. However, the party occasionally lends support to liberal or center-left candidates.

On 29 November 2014 however, independent candidate Chen Fu-hai won the county magistrate election and took office as the Magistrate of Kinmen County on 25 December 2014, the first independent candidate to win the office. He replaced Magistrate Lee Wo-shih of the Kuomintang. The 2014 Kinmen County magistrate election consisted of 10 candidates, the highest number of nominated candidates in the electoral history of Taiwan.

Kinmen County Constituency is represented by a single seat in the Legislative Yuan. It is currently represented by Chen Yu-chen of the Kuomintang. The current majority seats of Kinmen County Council is from independent, but headed by speaker Hung Yun-tien of the Kuomintang. The incumbent Magistrate of Kinmen County is independent Chen Fu-hai.

Townships

Kinmen County is divided into three urban townships and three rural townships. Jincheng Township is the county seat which houses Kinmen County Government and Kinmen County Council. The township also houses the headquarter office of Kinmen-Matsu Joint Services Center. Kinmen County has the fewest rural townships among other counties in Taiwan.

All those townships on Greater Kinmen Island start their names with Jin (i.e., Kin, lit. "gold"). Lieyu Township encompasses the entire Lesser Kinmen Island, and is the closest to Xiamen. Wuqiu Township comprises Greater Qiu Islet (大坵) and Lesser Qiu Islet (小坵).

Jincheng and Jinsha are the largest of the six townships. Altogether, there are 37 villages in Kinmen County.

Cross-Strait relations
In the controversy regarding the political status of Taiwan, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has continuously claimed the territory of Kinmen County as part of its own Fujian Province, claiming the Kinmen Islands as a county of Quanzhou prefecture-level city. The PRC claims the Wuqiu (Ockseu) Islands as part of Xiuyu District in Putian prefecture-level city. Taiwan (Republic of China) claims the Dadeng (Tateng) Islands in Dadeng Subdistrict, Xiang'an District, Xiamen, Fujian as part of Kinmen County.

Education
In August 2010, National Quemoy University was established from the predecessor National Kinmen Institute of Technology and Kinmen Division of National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences established in 1997. It is located in Jinning Township. The islands also have a satellite campuses of Ming Chuan University and National University of Kaohsiung. Secondary educational institutions include National Kinmen Senior High School and National Kinmen Agricultural and Industrial Vocational Senior High School. In total, there are 24 junior high schools, elementary schools and kindergartens.

The Kinmen County Government have invested millions in education in Kinmen, with an average of NT$20,000 per student. Schools in the county also accept the growing number of Taiwanese students whose parents are doing business in Fujian, China. The county government has been striving to encourage universities in Taiwan and China to set up branches in the county, as well as to attract Chinese students to study in Kinmen.

Electricity
The Kinmen Power Company was founded in 1967 and gradually built five power plants in the county and is in charge of providing power resources to all residents in Kinmen. It used to rely on light diesel oil which created high cost burden to its management. Since 1992, the ROC central government approved the power company to authorize Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) for five-year management. All of the power development projects were invested by Taipower and helped the region economic development. In July 1997, Kinmen Power Company was officially incorporated to Taipower. In 1999, the diesel-fired Tashan Power Plant was built to supply electricity to Kinmen grid. The other smaller power plants were subsequently discontinued to reduce cost. The county is also powered by its Jinmen Wind wind farm with a capacity of 4 MW and photovoltaic system with a capacity of 9 MW.

Submarine telecommunication cable
In August 2012, Kinmen and Xiamen established the first submarine telecommunication cable between the two sides. On Taiwan side, the infrastructure was constructed by Chunghwa Telecom, while on mainland China's side was done by China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile. The project was initially launched in 1996 and took 16 years to build.

The telecommunication system consists of two cables, one is an 11 km long cable that runs from Kinmen's Lake Tzu and Xiamen's Mount Guanyin, and the other is a 9.7 km long cable that runs from Guningtou on Greater Kinmen Island (ROC) to Dadeng Island (PRC). The system is a non-repeater system with a bilateral transmission capacity of 90 Gbit/s, which might be expanded in the future if demand arises.

Water supply
The current daily water demand for Kinmen is 50,000 tonnes, which are used for households, industries and agriculture sectors. One tonne of water produced for Kinmen costs about NT$50–60 and may surge to NT$70 during summer. In extreme drought condition, water shipment from Taiwan Island may cost as much as NT$200 per tonne. Because Kinmen residents pay only NT$10 for each tonne water they use, the cost of water supply has become a heavy burden for the county government.

For decades, Kinmen has been facing difficulties in water supply to its residents due to its shallow lakes, lack of rainfall and geographical constraints which makes building reservoirs and dams unfeasible. Therefore, Kinmen often overuses its groundwater, causing rising tidal flood and soil salinity. In early September 2013, the People's Republic of China government agreed to supply Kinmen with water from Jinjiang City in Fujian due to the ongoing water shortage problem in Kinmen. Kinmen draws more than 8,000 tonnes of groundwater every day and water from its reservoir is barely enough to support the residents during the dry season. It was judged that a shortage would affect the local economy badly if no mitigation plan was enacted by 2016. The water supply agreement was officially signed on 20 July 2015 in Kinmen between Kinmen County Waterworks Director Weng Wen-kuei (翁文貴) and Fujian Water Supply Co chairman Zhu Jinliang (朱金良) witnessed by Kinmen County Magistrate Chen Fu-hai and Fujian Province Governor Su Shulin.

The Jinjiang–Kinmen Pipeline was officially opened on 5 August 2018 when it first started supplying water, and was celebrated by separate ceremonies held in both Kinmen County and Jinjiang City in mainland China.

Air
Kinmen is served by Kinmen Airport, a domestic airport located at Jinhu Township, connecting Kinmen with Penghu Airport, Penghu and Taipei Songshan, Kaohsiung, Taichung, Chiayi and Tainan Airport on Taiwan Island.

Sea
People coming from China can also travel to Kinmen via ferry from Xiamen's Wutong Ferry Terminal or Quanzhou, arriving at Shuitou Pier in Jincheng Township. The Kinmen-Quanzhou Ferry is only available to local travelers. Foreigner passport holders are not permitted to use this service.

A new commercial port has been built on newly reclaimed land adjacent to the Shuitou Pier. The new port will handle the majority of sea freight to and from Kinmen. Previously, most of this traffic was handled by a smaller port in Jinhu Township, on the southeast corner of the island. In the past, due to constant artillery shelling from China, an underground port at the Zhaishan Tunnel was used to supply the island in times of conflict. It has since been decommissioned and converted into a tourist attraction.

Road
A 5.4 km bridge, the Kinmen Bridge, connecting Kinmen Island (Greater Kinmen) and Lieyu was completed in October 2022, estimated to cost NT$7.5 billion (US$250 million). It is expected to increase local tourism.

In October 2019, China announced a plan to build a bridge linking Xiamen to Kinmen. Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said that the plans were made unilaterally by China as part of its schemes to absorb Taiwan and divide Taiwanese society, and that they see no need for bridges linking either Matsu or Kinmen to China.

External links and further reading

 * Complete list of the villages in each township
 * Kinmen Island: China without the Communism?
 * On A Rural Taiwanese Island, Modern China Beckons, NPR (11 September 2016)
 * Pictures : Taiwan on China's shores. Reuters.
 * Satellite image of Greater Kinmen and Lesser Kinmen by Google Maps
 * Michael Szonyi, Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line, Cambridge University Press (11 August 2008), hardcover, 328 pages, ISBN 0521898137 ISBN 978-0521898133; trade paperback, 328 pages, ISBN 0521726409, ISBN 978-0521726405
 * Satellite image of Greater Kinmen and Lesser Kinmen by Google Maps
 * Michael Szonyi, Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line, Cambridge University Press (11 August 2008), hardcover, 328 pages, ISBN 0521898137 ISBN 978-0521898133; trade paperback, 328 pages, ISBN 0521726409, ISBN 978-0521726405

title: Kinmen


text:
Franz Passow

Franz Ludwig Carl Friedrich Passow (20 September 1786 – 11 March 1833) was a German classical scholar and lexicographer.

Biography
He was born at Ludwigslust in the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. In 1807 he was appointed to the professorship of Greek literature at the Weimar gymnasium by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose acquaintance he had made during a holiday tour; his lessons were attended by the young Arthur Schopenhauer. In 1815 he became professor of ancient literature at the University of Breslau, where he continued to live until his death. His endorsement of gymnastic exercises, in which he himself took part, caused a quarrel known as the Breslauer Turnfehde (“Breslau gymnastics feud”).

Works
Passow's great work was his Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache (1819–1824) ("Dictionary of the Greek Language"), originally a revision of Johann Gottlob Schneider's lexicon, which appeared in the fourth edition (1831) as an independent work, without Schneider's name. Other works by Passow are ''Grundzüge der griech. und röm. Literatur und Kunstgeschichte (“Foundations of Greek and Roman Literature and History of Art”; 2nd ed., 1829) and editions of Persius, Longus, Tacitus's Germania'', Dionysius Periegetes, and Musaeus. His miscellaneous writings were collected in Opuscula academica (“Minor academic works”; 1835) and Vermischte Schriften (“Miscellaneous writings”; 1843).

Passow's Greek lexicon was the basis for the Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott.

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title: Franz Passow


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User:Foxkid

Carl Mikkelsen

Information about me

These notes are not in order. There is no implicit timeline. I spend so much time pondering and building self-timed, asynchronous logic, perhaps the order of events matters less than that they don't all happen at once.

I worked for Oasis Semiconductor, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company which produces various mixed signal (analog/digital) chips used in consumer electronics, until Oasis Semiconductor was purchased SigmaTel, Inc. around September 2006. On May 5, 2008, SigmaTel was purchased by Freescale. As of August 1, 2008, my part of FreeScale has been bought by Conexant. Conexant went private with the help of private equity, after which it went bankrupt. Upon emerging, Conexant was private, and owned by a George Soros investment fund. In July 2017, that fund sold Conexant to Synaptics, which is where I am now. Seven (7!) corporate capital structures without changing my chair. All this ended on July 31, 2019, when Synaptics decided I was no longer worthwhile.

I founded Pixel Computer, back in the day, with two product ideas. One was, for the time, super high resolution raster graphics on a CRT, 2304x1728 2-bit greyscale pixels. 288 MHz video, which was hard then, and trivial now. The other was to put 2 Gigabytes of data on a VHS tape. This was before DAT storage, before ExaByte. We tried to find some interest and raise some money, with a working prototype in hand. I missed the point, though, that 2 GB was, at the time, a great deal of data. It was useless as a backup device, because the largest common disk drives to be backed up were 15 Megabytes. Why buy a 2 GB device to back up 15 MB? Right, no one else could see a reason, either. Still, it was a fun idea and got me thinking about data encoding and electromechanical controls.

So Pixel, rather than focus on the data storage device, built and shipped Unix (pre-Linux) systems before Sun Microsystems did. In our waning years, the graphics system gave us something unique that made us special, and provided some life (revenue).

When I landed at MIT having turned 17 and feeling that the world was a scary but comprehendible place, I started hanging out at the MIT AI Lab while building a computer I designed in high school for National Research Corporation. When the first summer came, I started being paid at the AI Lab to develop an interactive editor to work with the new CRT terminals. The lab was moving away from teletypes. A "real-time mode for Teco" was what I called it then. I was not a great programmer, struggled with program structure, devised for myself a concept of "virtual buffers" to add into Teco, suffered the rapid feedback of real users who knew something about software testing and version control, which were lessons I was just starting to learn. The Real-Time Mode did grow some legs, and with the work of others in the Lab a following grew. Richard Stallman replaced all the Teco code, and my attempts at PDP-10 assembly code, with Emacs built on Lisp. My obscure key bindings live on.

So, as for today, I am retired. This is OK.

As a hobby, I hack Stewart Platform machine tools, Barbershop Harmony, Amateur Radio, 3D printing, and hydroponic vegetable indoor gardening. I also make custom Judaica and other projects. Some woodworking projects are shown on Etsy. Like most things, I especially enjoy the challenge of pushing my artistic and process limits to make a new thing someone needs.

My family website is no longer operating.

The name "foxkid" is a variation on my last name, Mikkelsen. When in China in 1982, I wanted to have a chop made with my name. The phonetic spelling of Mikkelsen was too long, but my grandmother had told me that in the native Danish, "mikkel" meant fox, and "sen" means son-of. Should have been "foxkit", though, since foxes have kits, not kids.

Since then, it's been a general DBA name and was the logical choice for my domain name.

I'm back into Amateur Radio, with the call sign K1UZK (which was my father's call before he died). My son is also licensed as KB1NYQ. My mother, K1UZG, can no longer be heard working CW on 80 and 40 from time to time, as she is a SK (Silent Key).

title: User:Foxkid


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Nobusuke Kishi

Nobusuke Kishi (岸 信介) was a Japanese bureaucrat and politician who was prime minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960.

Known for his exploitative rule of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeast China in the 1930s, Kishi was nicknamed the "Monster of the Shōwa era" (昭和の妖怪; Shōwa no yōkai). Kishi later served in the wartime cabinet of Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō as Minister of Commerce and Vice Minister of Munitions, and co-signed the declaration of war against the United States on December 7, 1941.

After World War II, Kishi was imprisoned for three years as a suspected Class A war criminal. However, the U.S. government did not charge, try, or convict him, and eventually released him as they considered Kishi to be the best man to lead a post-war Japan in a pro-American direction. With U.S. support, he went on to consolidate the Japanese conservative camp against perceived threats from the Japan Socialist Party in the 1950s. Kishi was instrumental in the formation of the powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) through a merger of smaller conservative parties in 1955, and thus is credited with being a key player in the initiation of the "1955 System", the extended period during which the LDP was the overwhelmingly dominant political party in Japan.

As prime minister, Kishi's mishandling of the 1960 revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty led to the massive 1960 Anpo protests, which were the largest protests in Japan's modern history and which forced him to resign in disgrace.

Kishi was the first prime minister from the Satō–Kishi–Abe family. His younger brother, Eisaku Satō, was also a prime minister. Kishi was the maternal grandfather of Shinzo Abe, twice prime minister, and defense minister Nobuo Kishi.

Early life and career
Kishi was born Nobusuke Satō in Tabuse, Yamaguchi Prefecture, the son of a sake brewer from a once illustrious samurai family that had recently fallen on hard times. His older brother, Ichirō Satō, would go on to become a Vice Admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy, and his younger brother, Eisaku Satō, would also go on to become a prime minister. Nobusuke attended an elementary school and middle school in Okayama, and then transferred to another middle school in Yamaguchi. When he was about to graduate from middle school, Nobusuke was adopted by his father's older brother, Nobumasa Kishi, adopting their family name. The Kishi family lacked a male heir, so they adopted Nobusuke in order to continue the family line.

Kishi passed the extremely difficult entrance examination to enter First High School in Tokyo, the most prestigious high school in the country, and then attended Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), where he graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1920 at the top of his class and with the highest grades in the university's history. While at the university, Kishi became a protégé of the right-wing ultranationalist legal scholar Shinkichi Uesugi. Because he studied German law under Uesugi, Kishi's views tended toward German-style statism, compared to the more progressive approaches favored by some of his classmates who studied English law. Uesugi was so impressed by Kishi that he sought to make Kishi his successor as a professor in the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, but Kishi declined. Instead, upon graduation, Kishi entered the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. This was an unusual choice, because at the time, the most brilliant aspiring bureaucrats typically sought to enter the Home Ministry and eventually gain appointment as a prefectural governor. Several of Kishi's mentors even criticized his choice. However, Kishi was uninterested in administrative work, and aimed to be directly involved in Japan's economic development.

In 1926–27, Kishi traveled around the world to study industry and industrial policy in various industrialised states around the world, such as the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Besides the Soviet Five-Year Plan, which left Kishi with an obsession with economic planning, Kishi was also greatly impressed with the labor management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor in the United States, the German policy of industrial cartels, and the high status of German technological engineers within the German business world. Kishi became known as one of the more prominent members of a group of "reform bureaucrats" within the Japanese government who favored a statist model of economic development with the state guiding and directing the economy.

Economic manager of Manchukuo
In the "Manchurian Incident" of September 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army seized the Chinese region of Manchuria ruled by the warlord Zhang Xueliang (the "Young Marshal") and turned it into a puppet state called "Manchukuo". Although nominally ruled by Puyi, who had been the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, Manchukuo was de facto a Japanese colony. All of the ministers in the Manchukuo government were Chinese or Manchus, but all of the deputy ministers were Japanese, and these were the men who really ruled Manchukuo. From the start, the Japanese Army sought to turn Manchukuo into an industrial powerhouse in support of the Japanese Empire and carried out a policy of forced industrialization. Reflecting the military's ideas about the "national defense state", Manchukuo's industrial development was focused completely upon heavy industry such as steel production for the purposes of arms manufacture.

Kishi has been described as the "mastermind" behind the industrial development of Japan's puppet state in Manchuria. Kishi had first come to the attention of the Kwantung Army officers as a rising star in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry who openly touted the policies of Nazi Germany and called for policies of "industrial rationalization" to eliminate capitalist competition in support of state goalsideas that accorded with the Army's idea of a "national defense state". In 1935, Kishi was appointed Manchukuo's Deputy Minister of Industrial Development. Kishi was given complete control of Manchukuo's economy by the military, with the authority to do whatever he liked just as long as industrial growth was increased.

In 1936, Kishi was one of the drafters of Manchukuo's first Five-Year Plan. Clearly modeled on the Soviet Union's First Five-Year Plan, Manchukuo's Five-Year Plan was intended to dramatically boost heavy industry in order to vastly increase production of coal, steel, electricity, and weapons for military purposes. In order to enact the new plan, Kishi persuaded the military to allow private capital into Manchukuo, successfully arguing that the military's policy of having state-owned corporations leading Manchukuo's industrial development was costing the Japanese state too much money. One of the new public-private corporations founded to assist in carrying out the Five-Year Plan was the Manchuria Industrial Development Company (MIDC), established in 1937, which attracted a staggering 5.2 billion yen in private investment, making it by far the largest capital project in the Japanese empire; by comparison, the total annual budget of Japan's national government was 2.5 billion yen in 1937 and 3.2 billion yen in 1938. The man handpicked by Kishi to lead the MIDC was his distant relative and old First High School classmate, Nissan Group founder Ayukawa Yoshisuke. As part of the deal, the Nissan Group's entire operations were supposed to be transferred over to Manchuria to form the basis of the new MIDC. The system that Kishi pioneered in Manchuria of a state-guided economy where corporations made their investments on government orders later served as the model for Japan's post-1945 development, and subsequently, that of South Korea and China as well.

In order to make it profitable for the zaibatsu to invest in Manchukuo, Kishi had a policy of lowering the wages of the workers to the lowest possible point, even below the "line of necessary social reproduction". The purpose of Manchukuo was to provide the industrial basis for the "national defense state", with American historian Mark Driscoll noting that, "Kishi's planned economy was geared towards production goals and profit taking, not competition with other Japanese firms; profit would come primarily from rationalizing labor costs as much as possible. The ne plus ultra of wage rationalization would be withholding pay altogetherthat is, unremunerated forced labor." Accordingly, the Japanese conscripted hundreds of thousands of Chinese as slave labor to work in Manchukuo's heavy industrial plants. In 1937, Kishi signed a decree calling for the use of slave labor to be conscripted both in Manchukuo and in northern China, stating that in these "times of emergency" (i.e. war with China), industry needed to grow at all costs while guaranteeing healthy profits for state and private investors. From 1938 to 1944, an average of 1.5 million Chinese were taken every year to work as slaves in Manchukuo. The harsh conditions of Manchukuo were well illustrated by the Fushun coal mine, which at any given moment had about 40,000 men working as miners, of whom about 25,000 had to be replaced every year as their predecessors had died due to poor working conditions and low living standards.

Kishi showed little interest in upholding the rule of law in Manchukuo. Kishi expressed views typical of his fellow colonial bureaucrats when he disparagingly referred the Chinese people as "lawless bandits" who were "incapable of governing themselves". According to Kishi's subordinates, he saw little point in following legal or juridical procedures because he felt the Chinese were more akin to dogs than human beings and would only understand brute force. According to Driscoll, Kishi always used the term "Manshū" to refer to Manchukuo, instead of "Manshūkoku", which reflected his viewpoint that Manchukuo was not actually a state, but rather just a region rich in resources to be used for Japan's benefit.

As a self-described "playboy of the Eastern world", Kishi was known during his four years in Manchukuo for his lavish spending amid much drinking, gambling, and womanizing. Kishi spent almost all of his time in Manchukuo's capital, Xinjing (modern Changchun, China) with the exception of monthly trips on the world famous Asia Express railroad line to Dalian, where he indulged in his passion for women in alcohol- and sex-drenched weekends. When he was locked up in Sugamo prison in 1946 awaiting trial, he reminisced about his Manchukuo years: "I came so much, it was hard to clean it all up”. According to Driscoll, "photographs and written descriptions of Kishi during this period never fail to depict a giddy exuberance: laughing and joking while doling out money during the day and looking forward to drinking and fornicating at night." Kishi was able to afford his hedonistic, free-spending lifestyle as he had control over millions of yen with virtually no oversight, thanks to being deeply involved in and profiting from the opium trade. Before returning to Japan in October 1939, Kishi is reported to have advised his colleagues in the Manchukuo government about corruption: "Political funds should be accepted only after they have passed through a 'filter' and been 'cleansed'. If a problem arises, the 'filter' itself will then become the center of the affair, while the politician, who has consumed the 'clean water', will not be implicated. Political funds become the basis of corruption scandals only when they have not been sufficiently 'filtered.'"

Minister in the Konoe and Tōjō governments
In 1939, Kishi became Vice Minister of Commerce in the government of Prince Fumimaro Konoe. Kishi intended to create within Japan the same sort of totalitarian "national defense state" that he had pioneered in Manchuria, but these plans ran into vigorous opposition from the zaibatsu, who accused him of being a communist, and Kishi was fired from his post in December 1940. However, Kishi entered the cabinet as Minister of Commerce under new prime minister Hideki Tōjō less than one year later, in October 1941. Kishi and General Tōjō had worked closely together in Manchuria, and Tōjō regarded Kishi as his protégé. On 1 December 1941, Kishi voted in the Cabinet for war with the United States and Britain, and co-signed the declaration of war issued on 7 December 1941. Kishi was also elected to the Lower House of the Diet of Japan in April 1942 as a member of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. Kishi's many connections with the business world and his organizational skills proved an asset to keeping Japan's war effort going despite growing obstacles. In 1943, the Ministry of Commerce was abolished and replaced with the newly created Ministry of Munitions. Kishi was forced to accept a demotion, becoming Vice Minister of Munitions as Tōjō concentrated power in his own hands by simultaneously serving as Prime Minister, Minister of War, and Minister of Munitions, although Kishi retained his status as a member of the cabinet. This demotion was the beginning of a rift in the relationship between the two men.

Meanwhile, Kishi increasingly became convinced that the war was unwinnable under Tōjō. In July 1944, during the political crisis caused by the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Saipan, Tōjō attempted to save his government from collapse by reorganizing his cabinet. However, Kishi refused a request to resign, telling Tōjō he would only resign if the prime minister also resigned along with the entire cabinet, saying a partial reorganization was unacceptable. Despite Tōjō's tears as he begged Kishi to help him save his government, Kishi was unmoved. Kishi's actions succeeded in bringing down the Tōjō cabinet and led directly to Tōjō's replacement as prime minister with General Kuniaki Koiso.

The National Defense Brotherhood
After the fall of the Tōjō cabinet, Kishi temporarily withdrew from frontline politics, reinventing himself as a key figure in the civilian "continue the war" (kōsenha) faction while working in the background to foment a new political movement dedicated to prolonging the war. Between January and March 1945 Kishi held meetings with several close associates such as Ryōichi Sasakawa, a preeminent fascist political fixer; Yoshio Kodama, a prominent rightist deeply involved in Japan's criminal underworld; Mamoru Shigemitsu, the then-Foreign Minister; and party politician and future prime minister Ichirō Hatoyama. Out of these meetings came a plan to form a new renovationist political movement aimed at further mobilizing the Japanese population for a final, decisive confrontation with the Allies. Kishi's plans coincided with the dissolution of the Imperial Rule Assistance Political Association (IRAPA) in March 1945. Out of the IRAPA's disbandment emerged two political associations: the mainstream Greater Japan Political Association (Dai Nippon Seijikai), led by General Jirō Minami, and Kishi's anti-mainstream National Defense Brotherhood (Gokoku Dōshikai). Some 32 Diet members jumped ship to join Kishi's new association by the end of March.

Under Kishi's guidance, the Dōshikai advocated the mass evacuation and dispersion of the urban population and industrial base to the countryside to avoid the increasingly devastating effects of US aerial bombardment, the further rationalization of the economy in line with Kishi's technocratic worldview, and systematic preparation for a "decisive battle" (kessen) with the Americans on Japanese soil that would reverse the tide of the war and reignite popular support for his Total War ideology.

The Dōshikai soon came into conflict with the new government of Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki, who had grave doubts about how much longer the war could be sustained without bringing about a revolution, and sought to suppress Kishi's nascent political movement. Excluded from the cabinet, members of the Dōshikai were limited to occasionally haranguing against Suzuki's policies during Diet debates.

In any case, events rapidly overtook Kishi's new movement, and the war came to an end just a few months after the Dōshikai's formation. With Emperor Hirohito's announcement of Japan's surrender on 15 August, the "continue the war" movement came to an end. That same day, Kishi and his followers met in an undisclosed office and agreed to formally disband the Dōshikai.

Prisoner in Sugamo
After the Japanese surrender to the Allies in August 1945, Kishi, with other members of the former Japanese government, was held at Sugamo Prison as a suspected "Class A" war criminal by the order of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. Kishi, Kodama, Sasakawa, and Matsutarō Shōriki, the former president of the Yomiuri Shimbun, lived in the same prison cell and were never judged. Their fraternity formed in prison continued for the rest of their lives.

During this time, a group of influential Americans who had formed themselves into an "American Council on Japan" came to Kishi's aid, and lobbied the American government to release him as they considered Kishi to be the best man to lead a post-war Japan in a pro-American direction. The American Council on Japan included former ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew, Newsweek journalists Harry Kern and Compton Packenham, and corporate lawyer James L. Kauffman. Unlike Hideki Tōjō (and several other Cabinet members) who were put on trial, Kishi was released in 1948 and was never indicted or tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. However, he remained legally prohibited from entering public affairs because of the Allied occupation's purge of members of the old regime.

During his time as a prisoner, Kishi had already begun plotting his political comeback. He conceived of the idea of building on his earlier National Defense Brotherhood to establish a mass party uniting the more moderate socialists and conservatives into a "popular movement of national salvation", a populist party that would use statist methods to encourage economic growth and would mobilize all Japanese citizens to rally in support of its nationalist policies.

Return to politics
When the prohibition on former government members was fully rescinded in 1952 with the end of the Allied occupation of Japan, Kishi returned to politics and was central in creating the "Japan Reconstruction Federation" (Nippon Saiken Renmei), drawing upon his earlier efforts with the National Defense Brotherhood. Besides becoming Prime Minister, Kishi's main aim in politics was revise the American-imposed constitution, especially Article 9. Kishi wrote that in order for Japan to regain its status as a "respectable member (of) the community of nations it would first have to revise its constitution and rearm: If Japan is alone in renouncing war ...she will not be able to prevent others from invading her land. If, on the other hand, Japan could defend herself, there would be no further need of keeping United States garrison forces in Japan....Japan should be strong enough to defend herself."

Kishi's Japan Reconstruction Federation fared disastrously in the 1952 elections, and Kishi failed in his bid to be elected to the Diet. After that defeat, Kishi disbanded his party, and tried to join the Socialists; after being rebuffed, he reluctantly joined the Liberal Party instead. After being elected to the Diet as a Liberal in 1953, Kishi's main activities revolved around undermining the leader of the Liberal Party, Shigeru Yoshida, so he could become the Liberal leader in his place. Kishi's main avenues of attack were that Yoshida was far too deferential to the Americans and the need to do away with Article 9. In April 1954 Yoshida expelled Kishi from the party in retaliation for his attempts to depose him as Liberal leader.

Kishi had foreseen this eventuality, and by this time, had already identified over 200 members of the Diet who would be willing to join him in forming a new political party to challenge Yoshida. Kishi wooed these politicians by flashing "show money" (misegane) that he had been supplied by his powerful big business backers. In November 1954, Kishi co-founded the new Democratic Party along with Ichirō Hatoyama. Hatoyama was the party leader, but Kishi was the party secretary, and crucially, controlled the party's finances, which thus made him the dominant force within the Democrats. Elections in Japan were very expensive, so few candidates to the Diet could afford the costs of an election campaign out of their own pockets or could fund-raise enough money for a successful bid for the Diet. As a result, candidates to the Diet needed a steady infusion of money from the party-secretariat to run a winning campaign, which made Kishi a powerful force within the Democratic Party as he determined which candidates received money from the party-secretariat and how much. As a result, Democratic candidates for the Diet either seeking election for the first time or reelection were constantly seeing Kishi to seek his favor. Reflecting Kishi's power as party secretary, Hatoyama was described as an omikoshi, a type of portable Shinto shrine carried around to be worshipped. Everyone bows downs and worships an omikoshi, but to move an omikoshi, it must be picked up and carried by somebody. In February 1955, the Democrats won the general elections. On the day after Hatoyama was sworn in as prime minister, Kishi began talks with the Liberals about merging the two parties now that his arch-enemy Yoshida had stepped down as Liberal leader after losing the elections. In November 1955, the Democratic Party and Liberal Party merged to elect Ichirō Hatoyama as the head of the new Liberal Democratic Party. Within the new party, Kishi once again became the party secretary with control of the party finances. Kishi had reassured the American ambassador John Allison that "for the next twenty five years it would be in Japan's best interests to cooperate closely with the United States." The Americans wanted Kishi to become Prime Minister and were disappointed when Tanzan Ishibashi, the most anti-American of the LDP politicians, won the party's leadership, leading an American diplomat to write the U.S. had bet its "money on Kishi, but the wrong horse won". Just 65 days later, however, in February 1957, Ishibashi was forced to resign due to illness and Kishi was elected to lead his party and the nation as prime minister.

Policy goals
In February 1957, Kishi became Prime Minister following the resignation of the ailing Tanzan Ishibashi. His main concerns were with foreign policy, especially with revising the 1952 U.S-Japan Security Treaty, which he felt had turned Japan into a virtual American protectorate. Revising the security treaty was understood to be the first step towards his ultimate goal of abolishing Article 9. Besides his desire for a more independent foreign policy, Kishi wanted to establish close economic relations with the various states of South-East Asia. Finally, Kishi wanted the Allies to commute the remaining sentences of the Class B and Class C war criminals still in serving their prison sentences, arguing that for Japan to play its role in the Cold War as a Western ally required forgetting about Japan's war crimes in the past.

Pursuit of an Asian Development Fund
In the first year of Kishi's term, Japan joined the United Nations Security Council, paid war reparations to Indonesia, signed a new commercial treaty with Australia, and signed peace treaties with Czechoslovakia and Poland. In 1957, Kishi presented a plan for a Japanese-dominated Asian Development Fund (ADF), which was to operate under the slogan "Economic Development for Asia by Asia", calling for Japan to invest millions of yen in Southeast Asia. With access to markets in China and North Korea cut off due to Cold War polarization, Japanese and American leaders alike looked to Southeast Asia as a market for Japanese goods and source of raw materials. Moreover, the Americans wanted more aid to Asia to spur economic growth that would stem the appeal of Communism, but were disinclined to spend the money themselves. The prospect of Japan spending some $500 million US in low interest loans and aid projects in Southeast Asia had the benefit from Kishi's viewpoint of improving his standing in Washington, and giving him more leverage in his talks to revise the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.

In pursuit of the ADF, Kishi visited India, Pakistan, Burma, Thailand, Ceylon, and Taiwan in May 1957, asking the leaders of those states to join the ADF, but with the exception of Taiwan, which agreed to join, the other nations gave equivocal answers. In November, Kishi once again toured Southeast Asia to promote the idea of an ADF, this time visiting South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. These countries, all of which Japan had attacked and/or occupied during World War II, also expressed ambivalence or disdain toward joining the proposed framework, with the sole exception of Laos, which was in desperate need of foreign aid at that time. Even in countries that were not occupied by Japan like India, Ceylon, and Pakistan, Kishi encountered obstacles. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru told Kishi during his visit to New Delhi that he wanted his nation to be neutral in the Cold War, and given that Japan was allied to the United States, joining the ADF would be in effect aligning India with the Americans. During his visit to Karachi, the Pakistani Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy told Kishi that he thought of himself as a "human being rather than an Asian first", and preferred bilateral over multilateral aid because a multilateral aid framework would put participating countries into competition with each other over aid distribution. In sum, bad memories of Japan's wartime depredations in the region, a suspicion of Japanese motives, an unwillingness to enter into neo-colonial relationship with Japan as suppliers of raw materials, Cold War neutralism, and a fear that America was secretly pulling the strings all contributed to the failure of Kishi's ambitious plans to create an Asian economic block reminiscent of "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" that Japan had claimed to be pursuing in World War II. Ultimately, even the United States was lukewarm about Kishi's project, so it was shelved for the time being, although it was later partially revived in the form of the Asian Development Bank.

Pursuit of treaty revision
Kishi's next foreign policy initiative was potentially even more difficult: reworking Japan's security relationship with the United States. Kishi always saw the system created by the Americans as temporary and intended that one day Japan would resume its role as a great power; in the interim, he was prepared to work within the American-created system both domestically and internationally to safeguard what he regarded as Japan's interests. In June 1957, Kishi visited the United States, where he was received with honor, being allowed to address a joint session of Congress, throwing the opening pitch for the New York Yankees in a baseball game in New York and being allowed to play golf at an otherwise all-white golf club in Virginia, which the American historian Michael Schaller called "remarkable" honors for a man who as a Cabinet minister had signed the declaration of war against the United States in 1941 and who had presided over the conscription of thousands of Koreans and Chinese as slave labor during World War II. Vice President of the United States Richard Nixon introduced Kishi to Congress as an "honored guest who was not only a great leader of the free world, but also a loyal and great friend of the people of the United States", apparently unaware or indifferent to the fact that Kishi had been one of the closest associates of General Tojo, hanged by the United States for war crimes in 1948.

In November 1957, Kishi laid down his proposals for a revamped extension of the US–Japan Mutual Security Treaty, and the Eisenhower administration finally agreed to negotiations on a revised version. The American ambassador Douglas MacArthur II (the nephew of the famous general) reported to Washington that Kishi was the most pro-American of the Japanese politicians, and if the U.S. refused to revise the security treaty in Japan's favor, he would be replaced as Prime Minister by a more anti-American figure. The U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, wrote in a memo to President Eisenhower that the United States was "at the point of having to make a Big Bet" in Japan and Kishi was the "only bet we had left in Japan". Meanwhile, Kishi was able to take advantage of a growing anti-US military base movement in Japan, as exemplified by the ongoing Sunagawa Struggle over proposed expansion of the US air base at Tachikawa and the explosion of anger in Japan over the Girard Incident, to insinuate to U.S. leaders that if the treaty were not revised the continued existence of U.S. bases in Japan might become untenable.

Anticipating public opposition to his plans for revising the security treaty, Kishi brought before the Diet a harsh "Police Duties Bill", which would give the police vastly expanded powers to crush demonstrations and to conduct searches of homes without warrants. In response to the police bill, a nationwide coalition of left-leaning civic organizations led by the Japan Socialist Party and the Sōhyō labor federation launched a variety of protest activities in the fall of 1958 with the aim of killing the bill. These protests succeeded in arousing public anger at the bill and Kishi was forced to withdraw it.

The 1960 Anpo Protests
In late 1959, it became clear that Kishi intended to break with longstanding precedent that prime ministers serve no more than two consecutive terms. Kishi hoped that by successfully revising the Security Treaty, he would have attained the political capital necessary to pull off this feat. In response to Kishi's break with tradition, Kishi's opponents within his own Liberal Democratic Party, who felt they had waited long enough for their chance at power, vowed to do whatever was necessary to bring about the end of his premiership. Meanwhile, final negotiations on the new treaty wrapped up in 1959, and in January 1960, Kishi traveled to Washington, D.C., where he signed the new treaty with President Eisenhower on January 19. During his visit to the United States, Kishi appeared on the January 25, 1960 cover of Time magazine, which declared that the Prime Minister's "134 pound body packed pride, power and passion—a perfect embodiment of his country's amazing resurgence" while Newsweek called him the "Friendly, Savvy Salesman from Japan" who had created the "economic powerhouse of Asia".

However, even though the revised treaty addressed almost all of Japan's complaints with the original treaty, and put the U.S.-Japan alliance on a much more equal footing, the notion of having any sort of security treaty at all with the United States was unpopular with broad sections of the Japanese public, who saw the treaty as allowing for Japan to once again become involved in a war. In 1959, the nationwide coalition that had successfully defeated Kishi's Police Duties Bill in 1958 had rebranded itself as the "People's Council for Preventing Revision of the Security Treaty" (Anpo Jōyaku Kaitei Soshi Kokumin Kaigi) and began recruiting additional member organizations and organizing protest activities against the revised Security Treaty. In a sign of things to come, radical student activists from the Zengakuren student federation and leftist labor unionists invaded the compound of the National Diet in November 1959 to express their anger at the Treaty, and in January, Zengakuren activists organized a sit-in in Tokyo's Haneda Airport to attempt to prevent Kishi from flying to Washington to sign the treaty, but were cleared away by police.

Because the new treaty was better than the old one, Kishi expected it to be ratified in relatively short order. Accordingly, he invited Eisenhower to visit Japan beginning on June 19, 1960, in part to celebrate the newly ratified treaty. If Eisenhower's visit had proceeded as planned, he would have become the first sitting US president to visit Japan. However, when debate on the treaty began in the Diet, the opposition Japan Socialist Party, abetted by Kishi's rivals in his own party, employed a variety of parliamentary tactics to drag out debate as long as possible, in hopes of preventing ratification before Eisenhower's planned arrival on June 19, and giving the extra-parliamentary protests more time to grow.

As the date of Eisenhower's planned visit drew near, Kishi grew increasingly desperate to ratify the treaty in time for his arrival. On May 19, 1960, Kishi suddenly called for a snap vote on the Treaty. When Socialist Diet members attempted a sit-in to block the vote, Kishi introduced 500 policemen into the Diet and had his political opponents physically dragged out by the police. Kishi then passed the revised Treaty with only members of his own party present. Kishi's anti-democratic actions during this "May 19 Incident" outraged much of the nation, with even conservative newspapers calling for Kishi's resignation. Thereafter, the anti-Treaty protest movement dramatically increased in size, with the Sōhyō labor federation carrying out a series of nationwide strikes and large crowds gathering around the National Diet on nearly a daily basis.

On June 10, White House Press Secretary James Hagerty arrived at Tokyo's Haneda Airport to make advance preparations for Eisenhower's impending arrival. Hagerty was picked up in a black car by US Ambassador to Japan Douglas MacArthur II, who deliberately provoked an international incident by ordering that the car be driven into a large crowd of protesters. MacArthur felt that if the demonstrators were going to resort to violence it would be better for both the US and Japanese governments to know rather than waiting to test their resolve at the arrival of the President. In the so-called "Hagerty Incident", the protesters surrounded the car, rocking it back and forth for more than an hour while standing on its roof, chanting anti-American slogans, and singing protest songs. Ultimately, MacArthur and Hagerty had to be rescued by a US Marines military helicopter.

On 15 June 1960, the radical student activists from Zengakuren attempted to storm the Diet compound once again, precipitating a fierce battle with police in which a female Tokyo University student named Michiko Kanba was killed. Kanba's death led to the largest demonstrations ever in Japanese history, against both police brutality and the treaty. By this point, Kishi had become so unpopular that all the LDP factions united to demand that he resign. In April 1960, across the Korea straits, South Korean president Syngman Rhee had been overthrown in the April Revolution, led by protesting university students, and at the time, there were serious fears in Japan that protests led by university students against the Kishi government might likewise lead to a revolution, making it imperative to ditch the very unpopular Kishi.

Desperate to stay in office long enough to host Eisenhower's visit, Kishi hoped to secure the streets in time for Eisenhower's arrival by calling out the Japan Self Defense Forces and tens of thousands of right-wing thugs that would be provided by his friend, the yakuza-affiliated right-wing "fixer" Yoshio Kodama. However, he was talked out of these extreme measures by his cabinet, and thereafter had no choice but to cancel Eisenhower's visit and take responsibility for the chaos by announcing on June 16 that he would resign within one month's time.

Despite Kishi's announcement, the anti-Treaty protests grew larger than ever, with the largest protest of the entire movement taking place on June 18. However, on June 19, the revised Security Treaty automatically took effect in accordance with Japanese law, 30 days after having passed the lower house of the Diet. On July 15, 1960, Kishi officially resigned and Hayato Ikeda became prime minister. Ikeda soon made clear that there would be no further attempts by the LDP to revise Article 9 of the Constitution for the foreseeable future, which from Kishi's perspective, meant that all of his efforts had been for naught.

Stabbing incident
On July 14, 1960, Kishi was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant as he was leaving the prime minister's residence to host a garden party celebrating Hayato Ikeda's impending ascension to the premiership. The assailant was Taisuke Aramaki, an unemployed 65-year-old man affiliated with various right wing groups. Aramaki stabbed Kishi six times in the thigh, causing Kishi to bleed profusely, although Kishi survived because the blade had missed major arteries. Kishi was rushed to nearby hospital, where he received a total of 30 stitches to close his wounds. Reporters raced after him and climbed on stepladders to peer into his hospital room, with nurses angrily closing the curtains on them.

Aramaki was arrested at the scene, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to three years in prison in May 1962. Despite being unemployed, he had somehow been able to post a substantial bail during the intervening two years.

Aramaki never clearly stated the motivations for his attack. Despite the violent nature of the attack, Aramaki denied that he had intended to kill Kishi, later telling a reporter in an interview, "Yeah, I stabbed him six times, but if I wanted him dead, I would have just killed him." Aramaki told the same reporter that he had visited with the family of Michiko Kanba prior to his attack, perhaps suggesting that he sympathized with Kanba and blamed Kishi for her death. According to court records, Aramaki told police that he was angry at Kishi's mishandling of the Security Treaty crisis and wanted to "encourage Kishi to feel remorse".

However, some figures close to Kishi considered Aramaki's supposed anger in relation to the Anpo protests to be a cover story. In her 1992 memoir, Kishi's daughter Yōko wrote that Aramaki was "a paid assassin, who knew how to use a knife, who was hired by someone who hated my father and wanted to hurt him". In the prewar period, Aramaki had been secretary general of the right-wing ultranationalist Taikakai ("Great Reform Society"), and in the post-war period, he became a member of LDP factional leader Banboku Ōno's private extraparliamentary pressure group (ingaidan). Many LDP politicians felt that the stabbing had been carried out at Ōno's behest, as Ōno had openly hoped to succeed Kishi as prime minister and was known to be angry that Kishi had thrown his support behind Ikeda.

Curiously, Kishi was largely silent on the attack in his memoirs, devoting only two lines to it and saying only that he did not know the reason, and Kishi's brother Eisaku Satō did not even mention the attack in his diary entry for that day.

Later years
After taking power in a coup d'état in May 1961, the South Korean dictator General Park Chung Hee visited Japan in November 1961 to discuss establishing diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea, which were finally achieved in 1965. Park had been a Japanese military officer serving in the Manchukuo Army and had fought with the Kwantung Army against guerrillas in Manchuria. During his visit to Japan, Park met with Kishi, and speaking in his fluent, albeit heavily Korean-accented Japanese, praised Japan for the "efficiency of the Japanese spirit", and said that he wanted to learn "good plans" from Japan for South Korea. Besides fond reminiscences about the Japanese officers in Manchukuo who taught him about how to give a "good thrashing" to one's opponents, Park was very interested in Kishi's economic policies in Manchuria as a model for South Korea. Kishi told the Japanese press after his meeting with Park that he was a "little embarrassed" by Park's rhetoric, which was virtually unchanged from the sort of talk used by Japanese officers in World War II, with none of the concessions to the world of 1961 that Kishi himself employed. During his time as president of South Korea, Park launched the Five-Year Plans for the economic development of South Korea featuring statist economic policies that very closely resembled Five-Year Plan Kishi had administered in Manchukuo.

For the rest of his life, Kishi remained devoted to the cause of revising the Japanese Constitution to get rid of Article 9 and remilitarizing Japan. In 1965, Kishi gave a speech where he called for Japanese rearmament as "a means of eradicating completely the consequences of Japan's defeat and the American occupation. It is necessary to enable Japan finally to move out of the post-war era and for the Japanese people to regain their self-confidence and pride as Japanese." In his final years, Kishi grew increasingly bitter that constitutional revision had not yet come to pass. In his memoirs, he somewhat angrily recalled, "the idea of constitutional revision had always remained at the forefront of [my] mind... The two main culprits in destroying the momentum toward constitutional revision were Hayato Ikeda and my brother, Eisaku Satō, who, while they held power, made sure the constitution would remain unchanged. That is why the call for constitutional revision died with my administration."

Kishi remained in the Diet until retiring from politics in 1979. Even after he retired, he remained a strong influence behind the scenes in LDP politics. After several months of illness, Kishi died on August 7, 1987, at the age of 90.

Accusations of corruption
Political scientist Richard Samuels has found extensive corruption during Kishi's time as prime minister. In February 1958, when the Indonesian president Sukarno visited Japan, the Tokyo police refused to provide security under the grounds that this was a private visit, not a state one. At that point, Kishi asked one of his close friends, the yakuza gangster Yoshio Kodama, to provide thugs from the underworld for Sukarno's protection. During Sukarno's visit, Kishi negotiated a reparations agreement with Indonesia, where Japan agreed to provide compensation for war-time suffering. Kishi's reasons for paying reparations to Indonesia had less to do with guilt over the Japanese occupation and more to do with the chances to engage in questionable contracts to reward his friends as Kishi insisted that Japan would only pay reparations in the form of goods, not money. In April 1958, Kishi told the Indonesian Foreign Minister Soebandrio that he wanted Indonesia to ask to receive reparations in the form of ships built exclusively by the Kinoshita Trading Company-which happened to be run by Kinoshita Shigeru, a metal merchant and an old friend of Kishi's from their Manchurian days in the 1930s-even though the Kinoshita company had never built ships before, and there were many other well-established Japanese shipbuilders who could have provided ships at a lower price. All of the reparations contracts to the various states of South-East Asia during Kishi's time as Prime Minister went to firms run by businessmen who were closely associated with him during his time in Manchuria in the 1930s. Additionally, there were frequent claims that when it came time to award reparations contracts, high-ranking Indonesian politicians had to receive kickbacks, and that ordinary Indonesians never received any benefits from the reparations.

During the same period, there were questions about the M-fund, a secret American fund intended to stabilize Japan economically. The American Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei alleged, "Beginning with Prime Minister Kishi, the Fund has been treated as a private preserve of the individuals into whose control it has fallen. Those individuals have felt able to appropriate huge sums from the Fund for their own personal and political purposes... The litany of abuses begins with Kishi who, after obtaining control of the fund from (then Vice President Richard) Nixon, helped himself to a fortune of one trillion yen."

Release of war criminals
Like many of his fellow conservatives in Japan, Kishi believed that Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific had been a war not of aggression but of self-defense, and thus that the treatment of himself and his colleagues as "war criminals" was unjustified and merely an example of victor's justice. As Prime Minister, he pressured the Eisenhower administration into expediting the release of convicted Class B and Class C war criminals. He also sought to commemorate executed Class A war criminals. In 1960, Kishi was involved in dedicating, on Mount Sangane in Aichi prefecture, a headstone to General Tojo and six other military leaders executed after the Tokyo war crimes trial, marking their grave as that of "the seven patriots who died for their country".

Connections to Unification Church
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Kishi developed connections to the Unification Church (UC, sometimes known as the "Moonies") in Japan. The sect shared Kishi's commitment to anti-communism and enjoyed protection from prosecution by the LDP. Kishi was publicly known as a friend of the sect's leader Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012). Their headquarters in Japan was built “on land in Tokyo once owned by Kishi." When Moon was convicted and jailed for tax evasion in the United States, Kishi wrote a letter asking President Ronald Reagan correct the "injustice" and release Moon. At this point, the UC's forcible recruitment of young people in Japan had already garnered attention as a societal problem, but Kishi evaluated the leader of the cult as "sincere and valuable." The relationship between the Kishi and Abe families and the UC was maintained even after that. The LDP/UC cooperation has carried on until the present day.

Tetsuya Yamagami, the suspect in the assassination of Kishi's grandson Shinzo Abe, blamed the UC for his family's financial problems and his older brother's death from neglected leukemia, holding a grudge against the group. Researching the church's connections to Abe in the months before the attack, he blamed Abe and Kishi for spreading the church's influence in Japan.

Personal life and descendants
In 1919, Kishi married his cousin Yoshiko Kishi, and was adopted by her parents. Their son Nobukazu was born in 1921, and their daughter Yōko was born in 1928.

Kishi's daughter Yōko Kishi married politician and future foreign minister Shintarō Abe. Their second son, Shinzō Abe, served as prime minister of Japan from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 2020. Their third son, Nobuo Kishi, was adopted by Kishi's son Nobukazu shortly after birth, lived with Kishi during the later years of his life, won Kishi's historical Diet seat in 2012, and became Minister of Defense in 2020.

Honors
From the corresponding article in the Japanese Wikipedia

 * Coronation Medal (10 November 1928)
 * Order of the Sacred Treasure, 5th Class (April 1934)
 * Military Medal of Honor (April 1934)
 * Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun with Paulownia Flowers (29 April 1967)
 * Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (7 August 1987; posthumous)

Order of precedence

 * Senior second rank (August 1987; posthumous)
 * Senior third rank (July 1960)
 * Fourth rank (October 1940)
 * Senior fifth rank (September 1934)
 * Fifth rank (September 1929)
 * Senior sixth rank (September 1927)
 * Sixth rank (August 1925)
 * Senior seventh rank (October 1923)
 * Seventh rank (May 1921)

Foreign Honors

 * : Sash of the Order of the Aztec Eagle (5 August 1959)
 * : Grand Cross 1st Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1960)
 * : Grand Cordon of the Order of Propitious Clouds (19 November 1969)
 * 🇺🇳 United Nations: Peace Medal (28 August 1979)

title: Nobusuke Kishi