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Eisaku Satō

Eisaku Satō (佐藤 栄作) was a Japanese politician who served as prime minister of Japan from 1964 to 1972. He is the third longest-serving prime minister, and ranks second in longest uninterrupted service as prime minister.

Satō entered the National Diet in 1949 as a member of the Liberal Party. Gradually rising through the ranks of Japanese politics, he held a series of cabinet positions. His brother Nobusuke Kishi served as prime minister from 1957 to 1960. In 1964 he succeeded Hayato Ikeda as prime minister, becoming the first prime minister to have been born in the 20th century. Satō was the second prime minister to come from the Satō–Kishi–Abe family.

As prime minister, Satō presided over a period of rapid economic growth. He arranged for the formal return of Okinawa (Ryukyu Islands; occupied by the United States since the end of the Second World War) to Japanese control. Satō brought Japan into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize as a co-recipient in 1974.

Early life
Satō was born on 27 March 1901, in Tabuse, Yamaguchi Prefecture, the third son of businessman Hidesuke Satō and his wife Moyo. His father had worked in the Yamaguchi Prefectural Office, but quit in 1898, and started a sake brewing business in Kishida, Tabuse. The family had a history in sake brewing and had held the right for sake brewing for generations. Sato's great-grandfather was a samurai of the Chōshū Domain, with their outsized influence in Meiji era Japan, with more Meiji and Taisho prime ministers coming from Yamaguchi than any other prefecture. His two older brothers were Ichirō Satō, who would become a vice admiral, and Nobusuke Kishi, who served as prime minister from 1957-1960.

Satō studied German law at Tokyo Imperial University and in 1923, passed the senior civil service examinations. Upon graduation the following year, he became a civil servant in the Ministry of Railways. He served as Director of the Osaka Railways Bureau from 1944 to 1946 and Vice-Minister for Transport from 1947 to 1948.

Satō entered the Diet in 1949 as a member of the Liberal Party.

He served as Minister of Postal Services and Telecommunications from July 1951 to July 1952. Sato gradually rose through the ranks of Japanese politics, becoming chief cabinet secretary to then prime minister Shigeru Yoshida from January 1953 to July 1954. He later served as minister of construction from October 1952 to February 1953.

After the Liberal Party merged with the Japan Democratic Party to form the Liberal Democratic Party, Satō served as chairman of the party executive council from December 1957 to June 1958, followed by a post as minister of finance in the cabinet of his brother Nobusuke Kishi from 1958-1960. As minister of finance, Sato requested the US to fund conservatives.

Satō also served in the cabinets of Kishi's successor as prime minister, Hayato Ikeda. From July 1961 to July 1962, Satō was Minister of International Trade and Industry. From July 1963 to June 1964 he was concurrently head of the Hokkaidō Development Agency and of the Science and Technology Agency.

Prime minister
Satō succeeded Ikeda after the latter resigned due to ill health. He would go on to serve the longest stint of any prime minister up until that time, and by the late 1960s he appeared to have single-handed control over the entire Japanese government. He was a popular prime minister due to the growing economy; his foreign policy, which was a balancing act between the interests of the United States and China, was more tenuous. Student political radicalization led to numerous protests against Satō's support of the United States–Japan Security Treaty, and Japanese tacit support for American military operations in Vietnam. This opposition peaked with the 1968–1969 Japanese university protests, which eventually forced Satō to close the prestigious University of Tokyo for a year in 1969.

After three terms as prime minister, Satō decided not to run for a fourth. His heir apparent, Takeo Fukuda, won the Sato faction's support in the subsequent Diet elections, but the more popular MITI minister, Kakuei Tanaka, won the vote, ending the Satō faction's dominance.

Relations with China and Taiwan
Satō is the last Prime minister of Japan to visit Taiwan during his term. In 1965, Satō approved a US$150 million loan to Taiwan. He visited Taipei in September 1967. In 1969, Satō insisted that the defense of Taiwan was necessary for the safety of Japan. Satō followed the United States in most major issues, but Satō opposed the Nixon visit to China. Satō also bitterly opposed the entry of the PRC into the United Nations in 1971.

Relations with South Korea
On 22 June 1965, the Satō government and South Korea under Park Chung Hee signed the Treaty on Basic Relations Between Japan and the Republic of Korea, which normalized relations between Japan and South Korea for the first time. Relations with Japan had previously not been officially established since Korea's decolonization and division at the end of World War II.

Nuclear affairs
In the 1960s Sato argued that Japan needed nuclear weapons to match those of China, but the United States opposed such. The Johnson administration pressed Japan to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ending, for then, Japan's nuclear ambitions.

Satō introduced the Three Non-Nuclear Principles on 11 December 1967, which means non-production, non-possession, and non-introduction of nuclear weapons. He later suggested the "Four-Pillars Nuclear Policy". During the prime ministership of Satō, Japan entered the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Diet passed a resolution formally adopting the principles in 1971. For this he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974.

However, recent inquiries show that behind the scenes, Satō was more accommodating towards US plans of stationing nuclear weapons on Japanese soil. In December 2008, the Japanese government declassified a document showing that during a visit to the US in January 1965, he was discussing with US officials the possibility of using nuclear weapons against the People's Republic of China. In December 2009, his son reported that his father agreed in a November 1969 conversation with US President Nixon to allow the stationing of nuclear warheads in Okinawa once it was restored to Japanese sovereignty.

Okinawa issues
Since the end of the Second World War, Okinawa had been occupied by the United States. While visiting the United States in January 1965, Satō openly asked President Lyndon Johnson to return Okinawa to Japan. In August 1965, Satō became the first post-war prime minister of Japan to visit Okinawa.

In 1969, Satō struck a deal with U.S. president Richard Nixon to repatriate Okinawa and remove its nuclear weaponry: this deal was controversial because it allowed the U.S. forces in Japan to maintain bases in Okinawa after repatriation. Okinawa was formally returned to Japan on 15 May 1972, which also included the Senkaku Islands (also known as the Diaoyu Islands in China and the subject, since 1971, of a Sino-Japanese sovereignty dispute; see Senkaku Islands dispute).

Relations with Southeast Asia
During Satō's term, Japan participated in the creation of the Asian Development Bank in 1966 and held a ministerial level conference on Southeast Asian economic development. It was the first international conference sponsored by the Japanese government in the postwar period. In 1967, he was also the first Japanese prime minister to visit Singapore. He was largely supportive of the South Vietnamese government throughout the Vietnam War.

Later life
Upon leaving the premiership in 1972 to an approval rating of 19% (by April) and a fractured party, Satō moved back to his home in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, staying out of the eyes of the media but remaining in the Diet. His reputation, however, quickly began to be rehabilitated, starting in November of that year with his awarding of the Grand Cordon of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum. Satō opened up to the media after the award, with outlets noting his visual image change, with a longer hairstyle reminiscent of the post-presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Satō quickly settled into his life as an elder statesman. In January 1973, Satō and his wife were invited to President Richard Nixon's second inauguration. Satō maintained close relations with Nixon, sending him his personal condolences upon his resignation and attending his funeral.

Upon returning to Japan, his successor, the initially-popular Kakuei Tanaka, who had been handed a rebuke with 17 seat losses in the 1972 Japanese general election, looked to Satō to repair relations within the LDP, especially towards his rival Takeo Fukuda. Both men were Satō's protegés, and Satō advised Tanaka in the forming of his post-election cabinet, notably including Fukuda as director-general of the Administrative Agency. Although privately critical towards Tanaka's government, Satō remained in the public eye a unifier within the LDP.

Satō shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Seán MacBride in 1974. He was awarded for representing the Japanese people's will for peace, and for signing the nuclear arms Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970. He was the first Asian to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. (In 1973, Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho had become the first Asian to win the prize, but Tho had rejected it. ) Satō began working with McBride shortly after, joining Amnesty International.

In April 1975, as part of his last foreign visit before his death, Satō was chosen as the LDP representative to attend the funeral of Chiang Kai-Shek. However, upon protest from the Chinese government of Satō's role as "official envoy of the LDP president", his role was relegated to a "friendship representative".

Death
On 19 May 1975, Satō attended a dinner in Shikiraku, a restaurant in Tokyo's Tsukiji district, attended by Fukuda. During the event, he suffered a massive stroke, resulting in a coma. He was held in an emergency unit in the restaurant for four days before being moved to hospital. He died at 12:55 a.m. on 3 June at the Jikei University Medical Center, aged 74. After a public funeral, his ashes were buried in the family cemetery at Tabuse.

Satō was posthumously honored with the Collar of the Order of the Chrysanthemum, the highest honor in the Japanese honors system.

Personal life
Satō married Hiroko Matsuoka (松岡 寛子) in 1926 and had two sons, Ryūtarō and Shinji. Hiroko's father, Matsusuke Satō, was Eisaku's paternal uncle. After Matsusuke died in 1911, Hiroko was raised by her maternal uncle, diplomat Yōsuke Matsuoka. Their son Shinji followed his father into politics, serving in both houses and as a cabinet minister. Shinji's son-in-law, Masashi Adachi, currently serves in the House of Councillors, and formerly worked as an aide for his cousin-in-law, Eisaku's grandnephew, Shinzo Abe.

In a 1969 Shukan Asahi interview with novelist Shūsaku Endō, Hiroko accused Satō of being a rake and a wife-beater. His hobbies included golf, fishing, and the Japanese tea ceremony. Nobusuke Kishi (his older brother) and Shinzō Abe (his grandnephew) were also both prime ministers.

Honours
Satō received the following awards:
 * Golden Pheasant Award of the Scout Association of Japan (1970)
 * Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (3 November 1972)
 * Nobel Peace Prize (12 May 1974)
 * Collar of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (3 June 1975; posthumous)
 * Junior First Rank (3 June 1975)

Foreign honours

 * 🇪🇸 Spain: Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic (23 February 1965)
 * 🇲🇾 Malaysia: Honorary Grand Commander of the Order of the Defender of the Realm (S.M.N.) (1967)
 * 🇸🇬 Singapore: The Order of Temasek (25 September 1967)
 * 🇲🇽 Mexico: Sash of the Order of the Aztec Eagle (9 March 1972)
 * 🇵🇾 Paraguay: Grand Cross of National Order of Merit (5 April 1972)
 * 🇰🇷 South Korea: Order of Diplomatic Service Merit (1969)
 * Laos: Order of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol (1966)

title: Eisaku Satō


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Kakuei Tanaka

Kakuei Tanaka (田中 角栄) was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1972 to 1974. He served in the House of Representatives from 1947 to 1990. As prime minister, Tanaka advocated large-scale infrastructure development and oversaw the normalization diplomatic relations with China. Afterwards he was arrested in connection to the Lockheed bribery scandals, but nevertheless exercised a dominant influence on Japanese politics until suffering a stroke in 1985.

Born in rural Niigata Prefecture, Tanaka grew up under poor circumstances and received little formal education. As a young man he worked in the construction industry, becoming the president of his own construction company at a young age. He made a fortune from military contracts during the Pacific War. After the war, Tanaka went into politics and became noted for his earthy and tenacious political style. Becoming a member of the Liberal Democratic Party when it was founded in 1955, Tanaka successively served as minister of posts and telecommunications, chairman of the LDP Policy Research Council, minister of finance, secretary general of the LDP and minister of international trade and industry.

After a power struggle with Takeo Fukuda, he became prime minister in 1972. Diplomatically, he pursued negotiations leading to the Japan–China Joint Communiqué. Domestically he pursued his "Plan to Remodel the Japanese Archipelago," an infrastructure development program, but his standing was hurt by the 1973 oil crisis. He resigned amidst allegations of corruption in 1974. Two year later Tanaka was implicated in the Lockheed bribery scandals, which led to his arrest and trial; he was found guilty by two lower courts, but his case remained open before the Supreme Court until his death. Throughout his legal problems, he maintained influence through his faction, the largest faction in the LDP, and was able to serve as kingmaker for subsequent prime ministers, which led to him being called "Shadow Shōgun" (闇将軍). A debilitating stroke he suffered in 1985 led to the collapse of his political faction, with most members regrouping under the leadership of Noboru Takeshita in 1987.

He was nicknamed Kaku-san (角さん) and was known as the "ima taiko" (今太閤, modern taiko) and "Shadow Shōgun" (闇将軍). His politico-economic direction is called the construction state (土建国家). He was strongly identified with the construction industry but never served as construction minister. His daughter Makiko Tanaka and son-in-law Naoki Tanaka were also prominent politicians.

Early life and education
Kakuei Tanaka was born on 4 May 1918, in the village of Futada in the Kariwa District of Niigata Prefecture, now part of Kashiwazaki. He was born to a farming family, the second son of Kakuji Tanaka and his wife Fume. His older brother had died young so Tanaka was treated as the eldest son. He otherwise had six sisters, two elder and four younger. Niigata Prefecture was part of what was called ura Nippon: the ”back of Japan” facing the Sea of Japan, which was impoverished and neglected in comparison to omote Nippon, ”the front of Japan” facing the Pacific Ocean. Furthermore, Niigata was in the snow country of Japan, where heavy snows made conditions difficult.

Although they were a farming family, Tanaka’s grandfather Sutekichi had also been a respected shrine carpenter and Tanaka’s father Kakuji worked as a horse and cattle trader. At the time of Tanaka’s birth they were considered relatively well-off in Futada, but when business ventures undertaken by Kakuji: importing Holstein cattle and koi farming; ended up failing the family fell into poverty. This was exacerbated by Kakuji’s gambling and drinking. To support the family, Tanaka’s mother worked in the fields even after everyone else went to sleep, so Tanaka was often taken care of by his grandmother.

Tanaka contracted diphtheria at the age of two and the aftereffects caused him to stutter, but he lost it by practicing his speech by himself for long periods as a child. Tanaka excelled in school, but his family’s poverty meant he could not pursue higher education after graduating from higher elementary school at the age of fourteen. Instead, Tanaka found work as a manual laborer, but he later quit this job and went to Tokyo in 1934, hoping to work under the Viscount Masatoshi Ōkōchi, head of the Riken Concern, who had championed the development of rural prefectures like Niigata.

In Tokyo, Tanaka was unable to meet with Ōkōchi. Instead he found work as an apprentice at a construction company while he began attending engineering school part-time in the evenings. He ended up quitting his job after a dispute with his foreman, later working briefly for an insurance industry magazine and a trading company. In 1935 the fortunes of Tanaka's father turned, so Tanaka was able to spend more time on his education. He took courses at a number of schools with the goal of entering Naval Academy, but he later decided to go into the construction industry instead. After finishing engineering school in 1936 he found employment as an engineer at a architectural firm.

In 1937, while running errands for the firm, Tanaka had a chance meeting with the Viscount Masatoshi Ōkōchi in an elevator. Ōkōchi, apparently impressed with Tanaka's energy and ambition, helped the young man start his own architectural firm in Tokyo. The fledgling firm was successful as it received contracts from the Riken Concern, but after only two years Tanaka was drafted into the army and sent to Manchuria, where he served as an enlisted clerk in the 24th Cavalry Regiment, reaching the rank of superior private (jōtōhei) in March 1940. He contracted pneumonia and pleurisy and was sent to military hospital in Japan in February 1941; he was discharged in October 1941.

After recovering, Tanaka ended up at the Sakamoto Construction Company, looking for office space to restart his business. There, he met the late company president's widow, who not only gave him the real estate he needed, but also asked him to marry her daughter, Hana Sakamoto. Tanaka accepted, and married his way into the upper class.

Rise into politics
In 1942, Tanaka took over the Sakamoto company and renamed it Tanaka Construction Company. He soon had two children: a son named Masanori Tanaka in 1942 (died 1948), and a daughter named Makiko Tanaka in 1944.

Luck favored Tanaka during the endgame of World War II. None of his major buildings were damaged in the firebombing of Tokyo, and just weeks before the Japanese surrender, he travelled to Seoul and cashed in ¥15b (about US$78m) in Japanese war bonds. In December 1945, as the first postwar Diet was being planned by the American occupation authorities, Tanaka was able to give generous donations to an associate affiliated with the Japan Progressive Party (Nihon Shinpoto).

In 1946, he moved from Tokyo to Niigata to prepare his first bid for a Diet seat: he worked around the election laws of the time by buying buildings throughout the district and placing large "TANAKA" signs on them. However, his bid unraveled at the last minute when three other JMPP candidates entered the race. Tanaka only captured 4% of the vote in the general election.

In 1947, however, he placed third in his district after a strategy targeting rural voters. He took his Diet seat that year as a member of the new Democratic Party (Minshuto). In the Diet, he became friends with former prime minister Kijūrō Shidehara and joined Shidehara's Dōshi Club. Then in 1948, the Doshi Club defected to the new Democratic Liberal Party, and Tanaka instantly won favor with the DLP's leader, Shigeru Yoshida. Yoshida appointed Tanaka as a Vice Minister of Justice, the youngest in the nation's history.

Then, on 13 December, Tanaka was arrested and imprisoned on charges of accepting ¥1m (US$13,000) in bribes from coal mining interests in Kyūshū. Yoshida and the DLP dropped most of their ties with Tanaka, removed him from his official party posts, and refused to fund his next re-election bid. Despite this, Tanaka announced his candidacy for the 1949 general election, and was released from prison in January after securing bail. He was re-elected, and made a deal with Chief Cabinet Secretary Eisaku Satō to resign his vice-ministerial post in exchange for continued membership in the DLP.

The Tokyo District Court found Tanaka guilty in 1950, and Tanaka responded by filing an appeal. In the meantime, he took over the failing Nagaoka Railway that linked Niigata to Tokyo, and through a combination of good management and good luck, brought it back into operation in 1951. In that year's election, he was re-elected to the Diet in a landslide victory, and many of the railroad's employees came out to campaign for him. That year's election was also the first in which he was supported by billionaire capitalist Kenji Osano, who would remain one of Tanaka's most loyal supporters to the end.

Etsuzankai
Tanaka's most important support base, however, was a group called Etsuzankai (越山会, literally "Niigata Mountain Association"). Etsuzankai's function was to screen various petitions from villagers in rural parts of Niigata. Tanaka would answer these petitions with government-funded pork barrel projects. In turn, the local villagers all financially supported Etsuzankai, which, in its turn, funded the re-election campaigns of local Diet members, including Tanaka. At its peak, Etsuzankai had 100,000 members.

The projects funded by Etsuzankai included the Tadami River hydroelectric power project, the New Shimizu Tunnel, and, perhaps most infamously, the Jōetsu Shinkansen high-speed rail line.

During the 1950s, Tanaka brought Etsuzankai members to his residence in Tokyo by bus, met with each of them individually, and then provided them with tours of the Diet and Imperial Palace. This practice made Etsuzankai the most tightly knit political organization in Japanese history, and it also furthered Tanaka's increasingly gangster-like image.

Consolidation of power
Tanaka became a member of the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955, when it absorbed the Liberal Party.

When Nobusuke Kishi became prime minister in 1957, Tanaka was given his first cabinet post, Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. In this role, he granted the first television broadcasting licenses in Japan.

He already carried great influence in the LDP, despite his lack of seniority: this was partly because of his friendship with future prime minister Eisaku Satō, and partly because his stepdaughter had married future prime minister Hayato Ikeda's nephew, giving him a personal relationship with both key heads of the party.

Under Ikeda's cabinet, Tanaka became chairman of the Policy Affairs Research Council, and eventually Minister of Finance. Tanaka's term as minister of finance saw some of the highest economic growth in Japanese history.

Satō succeeded Ikeda in 1964. When Satō reshuffled the cabinet and party leadership in June 1965 Tanaka was appointed Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party. His tenure saw the emergence of a number of corruption scandals involving LDP Diet members, collectively known as the Black Mist Scandal. Although Tanaka himself was not implicated, Satō replaced him with Takeo Fukuda in December 1966. Tanaka was given a low-profile position as chairman of the LDP Urban Policy Research Commission.

Fukuda and Tanaka soon became the two battling heirs of the Satō administration, and their rivalry was dubbed by the Japanese press as the "Kaku-Fuku War." Tanaka made a record showing in the 1967 general election, and Satō re-appointed him as secretary general in November 1968, moving Fukuda to the post of finance minister. In 1971, Satō gave Tanaka another important stepping stone to taking over the government: minister of international trade and industry.

As head of MITI, Tanaka gained public support again by standing up to U.S. negotiators who wanted Japan to impose export caps on several products. He had so many contacts within the American diplomatic corps that he was said to have played a larger role in the repatriation of Okinawa than Satō himself.

In June 1971, he published his book, "A Plan for Remodeling the Japanese Archipelago." He made a de facto government pledge with the purpose of "promoting regional decentralization". This book initially sold 910,000 copies, partly because Tanaka later took the position of prime minister, and was ranked fourth in the year. It became a best seller.

Prime minister
Although Satō wanted Fukuda to become the next prime minister, Tanaka's popularity, along with support from the factions of Yasuhiro Nakasone and Masayoshi Ōhira, gave him a 282–190 victory over Fukuda in the LDP's 1971 party president election. He entered the office with the highest popularity rating of any new premier in Japanese history.

Foreign policy
One of Tanaka's most remembered achievements is normalizing Japanese relations with the People's Republic of China, which occurred around the same time as Richard Nixon's efforts to do the same for Chinese relations with the United States. In 1972, Tanaka met with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to discuss the normalization of relations between the two countries. Among other matters, they discussed the Senkaku Islands, which would later become a major point of contention between the two countries. Tanaka reportedly asked Zhou "What is your view on the Senkaku Islands? Some people say things about them to me," to which Zhou replied "I do not want to talk about it this time. If there wasn't oil, neither Taiwan nor the United States would make this an issue." Just two months after taking office, Tanaka met Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong.

During 1973 and 1974, Tanaka visited the United States, France, Britain, West Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. He appeared on the US television program Meet the Press to have a direct dialogue with Americans during his visit to the US in July/August 1973. His visit to Europe was the first visit by a Japanese prime minister since 1962, and his visit to the USSR was the first since 1956.

His state visit to Indonesia as invited by President Soeharto to discuss Indo-Japanese trade relations was protested by a number of local anti-Japanese sentiments denying international investment, which occurred on 15 January 1974. Japanese-manufactured material and buildings were destroyed by Indonesian protesters. 11 people were dead, a further 300 were injured, and 775 protesters were arrested. As a result, the Soeharto regime dissolved the president's private counselor constitution and took control of the national security leadership. The incident henceforth became well known as the Malari Incident (Peristiwa Malari).

Economic policy
Upon taking office in 1972, Tanaka published an ambitious infrastructure plan for Japan which called for a new network of expressways and high-speed rail lines throughout the country. It was a plan that Tanaka once wrote in his book "Theory of Remodeling the Japanese Islands". He envisioned moving more economic functions to secondary cities with populations in the 300,000–400,000 range, and linking these cities to Tokyo, Osaka and other cores by high-speed rail, a revolutionary view at a time when only one Shinkansen line existed.

Tanaka's government expanded the welfare state through measures such as the doubling of national pension benefits, the introduction of free medical care for the elderly, the provision of child allowances in 1972, and the indexation of pensions to the rate of inflation in 1973. In 1973, the Pollution Health Damage Compensation Law was passed with the purpose of paying victims of specific diseases in certain Government-designated localities compensation benefits and medical expenses, together with providing health and welfare services required by these families.

The Japanese economy, and thus Tanaka's popularity, was severely hurt by the inflationary effects of the 1973 oil crisis.

Resignation
In October 1974, the popular Bungeishunjū magazine published an article detailing how businesspeople close to Tanaka had profited by setting up paper companies to purchase land in remote areas immediately prior to the announcement of public works projects nearby. Although this implied a degree of corruption, none of the activity detailed was actually illegal.

The article inspired Tanaka's LDP rivals to open a public inquiry in the Diet (among other things, Tanaka had purchased a geisha and used her name for a number of shady land deals in Tokyo during the mid-sixties). The Diet commission called Etsuzankai's treasurer, Aki Sato, as its first witness. Unknown to the committee members, Sato and Tanaka had been involved in a romantic relationship for several years, and Tanaka took pity on Sato's troubled upbringing. Rather than let her take the stand, he announced his resignation on 26 November 1974. The announcement was read by Chief Cabinet Secretary Noboru Takeshita.

The Tanaka faction supported Takeo Miki's "clean government" bid to become prime minister, and Tanaka once again became a rank-and-file Diet member.

Lockheed scandal and aftermath
On 6 February 1976, the vice chairman of the Lockheed Corporation told a United States Senate subcommittee that Tanaka had accepted $1.8 million in bribes through the trading company Marubeni during his term as prime minister, in return for having All Nippon Airways purchase 21 Lockheed L-1011 aircraft in 1972. Although Henry Kissinger tried to stop the details from making their way to the Japanese government, fearing that it would harm the two countries' security relationship, Miki pushed a bill through the Diet that requested information from the Senate. Tanaka was arrested on 27 July 1976, initially on charges of violating Japanese foreign exchange restrictions by not reporting the payment. He was released in August on a ¥200m (US$690,000) bond. Tanaka was located in the Tokyo Detention House. Many Tanaka supporters viewed the scandal as an effort by American multinational corporations to "get" Tanaka in response to his hard-line stance in trade talks with the United States, based on the fact that the scandal originated with congressional testimony in the US.

Tanaka's trial did not end his political influence. His faction had 70 to 80 members prior to his arrest in 1976, but grew to over 150 members by 1981, more than one-third of the total LDP representation in the Diet. In retaliation for Miki's actions, Tanaka persuaded his faction to vote for Fukuda in the 1976 "Lockheed Election". The two old rivals did not cooperate for long, however: in 1978, Tanaka threw his faction behind Ohira's. After Ohira died in 1980, the Tanaka faction elected Zenkō Suzuki. In 1982, Yasuhiro Nakasone was elected president of the LDP (and therefore as prime minister) amid allegations from opponents that he would be under Tanaka's control.

The Lockheed trial ended on 12 October 1983. Tanaka was found guilty and sentenced to 4 years in jail and a 500 million yen fine. Rather than cave in, he filed an appeal and announced that he would not leave the Diet as long as his constituents supported him. This sparked a month-long war in the Diet over whether or not to censure Tanaka; eventually, Prime Minister Nakasone, himself elected by Tanaka's faction, dissolved the Diet and called for a new election, stating that "in view of the current unusual parliamentary situation, there is a need for refreshing the people's minds as quickly as possible."

In the "Second Lockheed Election" of December 1983, Tanaka retained his Diet seat by an unprecedented margin, winning more votes than any other candidate in the country. The LDP performed poorly, and Prime Minister Nakasone publicly vowed to distance the party from Tanaka's politics, stating that the party should be "cleansed" with a new code of ethics. Nakasone placed six members of the Tanaka faction on his 1984 cabinet, including future prime minister Noboru Takeshita.

Defections to Takeshita faction
Amid Tanaka's objections, Noboru Takeshita formed a "study group" called Soseikai on 7 February 1985, which counted among its ranks 43 of the 121 Tanaka faction members. Weeks after this defection, Tanaka suffered a stroke on 27 February and became hospitalized, sparking uncertainty over the future of his faction. His daughter Makiko spirited him from the hospital after authorities refused to give the former prime minister an entire floor, and the Diet session halted entirely while details of Tanaka's condition leaked out to the press. Susumu Nikaido, the titular chairman of Tanaka's faction, mounted a campaign against Takeshita to attempt to win over members of Tanaka's faction amid uncertainty as to his condition, which was only known to Tanaka's family and doctors. The division in the Tanaka faction was a boon for smaller LDP faction leaders, particularly Prime Minister Nakasone who no longer had to worry about a single dominant force within the LDP. Public chiding of Tanaka continued during 1985, including Sega's publication of an arcade game titled Gombe's I'm Sorry (ごんべえのあいむそ〜り〜) featuring a caricature of Tanaka dodging various celebrities in a quest to collect gold bars and grow wealthy, with the title punning on the Japanese term for "prime minister", Sōri (総理).

Tanaka remained in convalescence through the election of 1986, where he retained his Diet seat. On New Year's Day of 1987, he made his first public appearance since the stroke, and was clearly in poor condition: half of his face was paralyzed, and he was grossly overweight. The Tokyo High Court dismissed Tanaka's appeal on 29 July 1987, and the original sentence passed down in 1983 was reinstated. Tanaka immediately posted bail and appealed to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, despite Nikaido's efforts, by July 1987 the Takeshita faction counted 113 of the 143 Tanaka faction members, while only thirteen supported Nikaido. The Tanaka faction members who moved to Takeshita's faction included Ichirō Ozawa, Tsutomu Hata, Ryutaro Hashimoto, Keizō Obuchi and Kozo Watanabe. Takeshita won the LDP leadership election in November 1987 and served as prime minister until resigning amid the Recruit scandal in June 1989.

Retirement and death
While his appeal lingered in the Court's docket, Tanaka's medical condition deteriorated. He announced his retirement from politics in October 1989, at the age of 71, in an announcement made by his son-in-law Naoki Tanaka. The announcement ended his 42-year career in politics; the remnants of his faction, now led by former Prime Minister Takeshita, remained the most powerful bloc within the LDP at the time of his retirement. In 1993, a number of members of his faction broke away from the LDP to form part of an Eight-party Alliance government under Morihiro Hosokawa.

Tanaka was later diagnosed with diabetes, and died of pneumonia at Keio University Hospital at 2:04 p.m. on 16 December 1993. Following his death, his home in northern Tokyo was "besieged" by supporters and journalists.

Foreign honours

 * 🇵🇭 Philippines:
 * PHI Order of Sikatuna 2003 Grand Collar BAR.svg Grand Collar of the Order of Sikatuna

Legacy
Tanaka's faction remained within the Liberal Democratic Party even after his death. It split in 1992, after Noboru Takeshita was sidelined by the Recruit scandal, with Tsutomu Hata and Ichiro Ozawa leaving the LDP and forming the Japan Renewal Party. Keizo Obuchi inherited what was left of the Tanaka faction, supported the election of Ryutaro Hashimoto as prime minister, and himself became prime minister from 1999 to 2000. After Obuchi's death, Hashimoto led the faction until refusing to stand in the 2005 general election due to a fundraising scandal, and died shortly thereafter. The remnants of the faction, formally known by this time as Heisei Kenkyūkai (Heisei Research Council), remained active under the leadership of Yūji Tsushima, who resigned prior to the 2009 general election, passing control to Fukushiro Nukaga. The faction raised much less in donations during the 1990s and 2000s than it did under Tanaka and Takeshita in the 1980s, as electoral reforms enacted in 1994, coupled with new campaign finance regulations and the ongoing economic slump that followed the Japanese asset price bubble, weakened the power of factions in Japanese politics.

Tanaka built his faction largely by recruiting and supporting new candidates. This technique was used to some success by two prominent politicians decades later: Junichiro Koizumi, who recruited a large number of new LDP representatives dubbed "Koizumi Children" in the 2005 election, and Ichiro Ozawa, who did the same for the Democratic Party of Japan in the 2009 election. However, neither the "Koizumi Children" nor the "Ozawa Children" showed the same degree of loyalty as the Tanaka faction, with many "Koizumi Children" voting against Koizumi's reform agenda, and many "Ozawa Children" voting against Ozawa in his 2010 bid for the DPJ presidency.

Makiko Tanaka, who was not associated with Etsuzankai, was elected to her father's old seat in Niigata in the 1993 election and became foreign minister in the Koizumi cabinet in 2001. Due in part to her father's historical role in Sino-Japanese relations, she became popular in the People's Republic of China and publicly opposed several anti-PRC actions by Japan and the United States, including Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine. She lost her seat in the December 2012 general election, by which point Etsuzankai had disbanded with only a few elderly surviving members.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Kakuei Tanaka


text:
Takeo Miki

Takeo Miki (三木 武夫) was a Japanese politician who served as prime minister of Japan from 1974 until 1976.

Early life and family
Takeo Miki was born on 17 March 1907, in Gosho, Tokushima Prefecture (present-day Awa, Tokushima), the only child of farmer-merchant Hisayoshi Miki and his wife Takano. Aside from farming, his father traded fertilizers, sake, rice and general goods, though he was not a wealthy farmer (gōnō) or from a family of pedigree (kyūke). Hisayoshi was born in Kakihara, near Gosho, to farmer Rokusaburō Ino'o, and after briefly working in Osaka, he returned and began working for the Shibata family, the largest landowner in Gosho. He met Takano Miki, the daughter of farmer Tokitarō Miki, when the two were working for the Shibata family. Hisayoshi took Takano's surname after marriage, and the newlywed were given a house by the Shibata family.

When Miki was born, Hisayoshi was 33 and Takano was 38 years old, and Miki was raised with much love as he was the only child. His mother was particularly careful about his healthcare.

While enrolled at Meiji University's Faculty of Law, Miki was able to spend four years from 1932 to 1936 traveling around the United States, where he saw firsthand both Anglo-American liberal society as well as that society's aversion towards totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union. He attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and was later awarded an honorary doctorate in law from the institution in 1966.

Pre-LDP political career
During 1937, Miki was elected to the Diet; he remained there for the rest of his life, winning re-election no fewer than 19 times over 51 years. In the 1942 general election he openly voiced opposition to the military government under Hideki Tojo and still managed to win a seat; his efforts at this time were assisted by Kan Abe, the grandfather of Prime Minister Shinzō Abe.

In the earlier post-war period, Miki led the centrist National Cooperative Party in the 1947 and 1949 general elections, to limited success. In the early 1950s, Miki joined Ichirō Hatoyama's Democratic Party, which was one of the two main conservative factions of the time and took a stance that was critical of Shigeru Yoshida and his Liberal Party. These two factions eventually merged in 1955 to form the modern-day Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which Miki joined as well.

Later political career (in the LDP)
As the head of an LDP faction, Miki held cabinet posts in the administrations of Ichirō Hatoyama, Nobusuke Kishi, Hayato Ikeda, and Eisaku Satō. However, he was especially critical of the Kishi administration, and was strongly opposed to Kishi's handling of the massive 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. When Kishi railroaded the treaty through the Diet on May 19, 1960, Miki's faction absented itself from the vote in protest of Kishi's heavy-handed approach. On May 28, Miki and fellow faction leader Kenzō Matsumura issued a public call for Kishi's resignation, and Kishi was ultimately forced to resign in July. However, when Ichirō Kōno floated a plan later that summer to split up the LDP, Miki and Matsumura ultimately declined to support him. As punishment for taking part in the anti-Kishi rebellion, Miki was initially excluded from the cabinet of Kishi's successor Hayato Ikeda. However by the following year, Ikeda had cemented his power enough to overcome the objections of the Kishi faction and bring Miki back into the cabinet as Head of the Science and Technology Agency.

Although Ikeda was re-elected as party president in 1964, he retired soon afterwards due to illness. In the debate over who would succeed Ikeda as prime minister, Miki supported Kishi's brother Eisaku Satō while Matsumura supported Ichirō Kōno. This led to a falling out between Miki and his erstwhile ally Matsumura, and thereafter the two men went their separate ways. Miki's support for Satō also healed the rift that had been created when he had opposed Kishi during the Anpo crisis, and Miki was rewarded for his support with powerful posts in the Satō cabinet, first as Minister of International Trade and Industry (1965–66) and then as Minister of Foreign Affairs (1966–68).

As the foreign minister under Satō, Miki secretly met in 1967 with American ambassador to Japan U. Alexis Johnson to discuss "how to reconcile Japanese desire for reversion [of Okinawa] with [American] military requirements." This was part of a series of resolute attempts by several Japanese officials within the same time period aimed at convincing the United States to reconsider its continued hold on Okinawa, which the U.S. had formerly insisted should remain under American protection so long as there was any remaining instability in East Asia. In matters of regional foreign policy, Miki was an early advocate of Asia-Pacific economic cooperation and, in 1968, he said that "'it would be an act of suicide on our part to create an exclusive and closed trading bloc in the Pacific area." Despite this, ASEAN would later decline to invite now-Prime Minister Miki to the organisation's very first summit at Bali in 1976, as economic perceptions towards Japan in the region were negative because of resentment towards both wartime abuse by Imperial Japan as well as Japan's current status as a powerful economic giant with a heavy trade surplus.

Miki took over from Kakuei Tanaka as Prime Minister on 9 December 1974, following the latter's implication in the corruption concerning real-estate and construction companies. The attractiveness of Miki to the LDP bosses was chiefly due to his personal integrity, and his weak power base from his small faction. In fact, Miki had neither expected nor wanted to be prime minister at all, as was reflected when upon his election he murmured "a bolt from the blue".

While Miki was at the funeral of ex-PM Eisaku Sato in 1975, he was assaulted by a right-wing extremist named Hiroyoshi Fudeyasu, the secretary-general of the Greater Japan Patriotic Party with foreign dignitaries nearby. This caused criticism of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police over not doing enough to ensure his safety.

In a 1976 Diet session, Miki reaffirmed a past order of Prime Minister Satō's cabinet dating back to 1967 in which the percent of the national GDP allocated towards defense spending was frozen so as to not exceed 1%. This policy taboo was broken by future Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone in the 1980s, but was revived in 1990 by another future Prime Minister, Toshiki Kaifu, who was a member of the faction that descended from Miki's faction. This policy has again come under renewed attention within modern Japan in light of contemporary discussions about constitutional revision and, by extension, the possible expansion of Japan's defense capabilities. In any event, Miki also pushed the Diet to fully ratify the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and he also worked to further strengthen previous policies set in motion by Prime Minister Satō which virtually committed Japan to not engage in the export of arms to any country.

After being elected, Miki attempted to reform the LDP, relentlessly investigating the Lockheed bribery scandals and refusing to halt the criminal prosecutions being made against his predecessor. Miki also pursued political finance reforms. These activities made him a large number of enemies within the party, and a campaign literally called "Down with Miki" ("Miki oroshi") was started by influential faction leaders. Despite Miki's personal popularity with the public, the Lockheed scandal reflected poorly on the party, which lost its overall majority in the 1976 election to the Diet and had to make deals with minor parties to remain in power. As is customary for Japanese political officials following heavy party setbacks, Miki then resigned. He was succeeded on 24 December 1976, by Takeo Fukuda.

Personal life
In 1940, Miki married Mutsuko Mori, daughter of the prominent Japanese businessman and politician, Nobuteru Mori, who had founded Showa Denko, a major chemical engineering firm. His brother-in-law, Kiyoshi Mori, was the head of the now defunct Management and Coordination Agency, which would later become the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. His other brother-in-law, Yoshihide Mori, served as the chief of the Environment Agency, the forerunner of the present-day Ministry of the Environment.

Legacy
In Mao Zedong's final days, he took a great interest in Miki's political condition, as Miki was suffering a coup d'état from amongst his own party. Mao had never shown any interest in Miki before, or even mentioned him.

NFL player Takeo Spikes was named after Miki.

Connection to Seattle
During his time in Seattle, Miki spent a period as a dishwasher at noted Japanese restaurant Maneki.

To commemorate the ties of Japan to America, and Seattle in particular, Miki gave 1,000 cherry trees to Seattle to commemorate the United States Bicentennial in 1976. This gift gave birth to the Seattle Cherry Blossom Festival, still running annually.

Slang term
In Hong Kong, the name "Takeo Miki" (三木武夫) is sometimes used to describe actors or actresses with wooden or no emotional expressions during movies or TV dramas. Some have said that the origin for the slang term stems from Miki's wooden expression during his appearance in news reports.

Honours

 * Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (14 November 1988; posthumous)

Foreign honour

 * : Sash of the Order of the Aztec Eagle (18 September 1967)

title: Takeo Miki


text:
Takeo Fukuda

Takeo Fukuda (福田 赳夫) was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1976 to 1978. A member of the House of Representatives from 1952 to 1990, he was part of the Liberal Democratic Party from its foundation.

Born in Gunma Prefecture and educated at Tokyo Imperial University, Fukuda served as an official in the Ministry of Finance for two decades before entering politics. His political life was marked by his rivalry with Kakuei Tanaka, which was dubbed the "Kaku-Fuku War." As prime minister he formulated the Fukuda Doctrine and saw the conclusion of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and China.

His son, Yasuo Fukuda, followed him as a politician and served as prime minister from 2007 to 2008.

Early life and bureaucratic career
Fukuda was born in the village of Kaneko in Gunma prefecture (present day Takasaki City) on January 14, 1905, the second son to an old samurai family who had been village headmen in the Edo period. His father was the mayor of Kaneko, his grandfather had also been mayor and his older brother eventually filled the same role. Fukuda was a gifted student who went on to First Higher School in Tokyo, followed by studying law at Tokyo Imperial University. He received the top score on the civil service examination and entered the Ministry of Finance upon graduating in 1929.

Fukuda was assigned as financial attaché to the embassy of Japan in London the following year. After three years he was called back to Japan to serve as the head of a local Tax Office.

At this time he married Mie Arai, the granddaughter of a Supreme Court justice. The couple came to have three sons and two daughters. Yasuo Fukuda was their eldest son. Fukuda steadily rose in the ranks of the Ministry. During the Pacific War he served as an adviser on fiscal policy for the Wang Jingwei regime.

At the time of the Japanese surrender, Fukuda was chief secretary and head of the Minister's Secretariat. Masayoshi Ohira and Kiichi Miyazawa were his subordinates at that time. He became chief of the Banking Bureau in 1946 and by 1947 he had risen to chief of the Budget Bureau. Fukuda was in line to become administrative vice minister, however in 1948 he was arrested in connection to the Showa Denko scandal, a corruption scandal involving several bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians which precipitated the fall of the Ashida administration. Fukuda was later acquitted, but the incident led him to resign from the Ministry in 1950.

Political career
In the 1952 election, Fukuda was elected as an independent to the House of Representatives, representing the third district of Gunma.

Fukuda grew close to Nobusuke Kishi, who was making a political comeback. He joined the Liberal Party along with Kishi in 1953 and when Kishi was expelled the following year Fukuda left with him and took part in forming the Democratic Party. Fukada became a prized lieutenant to Kishi.

The two parties merged to form the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955. After Kishi became prime minister, Fukuda became chairman of the Policy Research Council in 1958 and secretary-general in January 1959. Fukuda joined the cabinet in June as Minister of Agriculture, remaining until the Kishi was forced to resign as prime minister due to the massive 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security treaty.

After that, Hayato Ikeda was elected as LDP president and prime minister with the support of Kishi and his brother Eisaku Satō. Fukuda again became chairman of the Policy Research Council in December 1960. Before long, the alliance between Ikeda, Kishi and Satō began to fray. Satō wanted to succeed Ikeda and Kishi was inclined to support him, but Ikeda intended to have a long-term administration. In the reshuffle of July 1961, Ikeda treated his former opponents Banboku Ōno and Ichirō Kōno generously to balance the influence of Kishi and Satō. Fukuda for his part lost his position as policy chairman.

In January 1962, Fukuda formed the "Party Spirit Renovation League" (Tōfū Sasshin Renmei), which became a forum for Diet members to air anti-Ikeda grievances. The Kishi faction began to split between those who opposed or supported Ikeda, led by Fukuda and Shojiro Kawashima respectively. Kishi disbanded the faction in July 1962 and all but the group close to Kawashima joined Fukuda, who became Kishi's de facto successor as factional leader.

Satō decided not to stand in the 1962 LDP leadership election and Ikeda successfully ran unopposed, but the 70 or so members of the Party Spirit Renovation League cast blank ballots in protest. In the 1964 leadership election Fukuda strongly supported Satō against Ikeda. Satō was defeated, but soon afterwards Ikeda fell ill and had to resign as prime minister, naming Satō as his successor.

Although Fukuda remained locked out of the cabinet during the Ikeda years, his star began to rise again under Satō. Fukuda rose to the prestigious posts of Minister of Finance (1965–66, 1968–71) and Minister of Foreign Affairs (1971–72). After Satō's third and final term as prime minister came to an end in 1972, Fukuda ran as a candidate to replace him but lost out to insurgent candidate Kakuei Tanaka. Under Tanaka, Fukuda once again served as Minister of Finance (1973–74), and even when the Tanaka cabinet fell due to a corruption scandal, Fukuda was seen as "clean" and served a stint as Director of the Economic Planning Agency under the ensuing cabinet of Takeo Miki (1974–76).

Premiership
After the LDP's poor showing in the 1976 election, Miki stepped down as prime minister and Fukuda was elected to replace him. Fukuda remained in office until 1978, but was forced to rely on the support of minor parties to maintain a parliamentary majority. Although he was regarded as a conservative and a hawk on foreign policy, Fukuda drew international criticism when he caved in to the demands of a group of terrorists who hijacked Japan Airlines Flight 472, saying "Jinmei wa chikyū yori omoi (The value of a human life outweighs the Earth)." In matters of Sino-Japanese relations, Fukuda began as one of the LDP's conservative pro-Taiwan voices. However, by the time he had become prime minister, he was forced to accommodate increasing calls within both the LDP as well as Japanese big business to further pursue peace treaty negotiations with the People's Republic of China in order to bring about increased access to trade in the long run. Fukuda stalled on this for a number of reasons. For one, there was still continued resistance among some in the LDP who were pro-Taiwan. Moreover, relations with the Soviet Union were only recently recovering from disputes over fisheries, and as China and the Soviet Union had strained relations, Fukuda was careful not to favour one too much over the other. The primary dispute, however, was China's insistence on the treaty to contain an "anti-hegemony clause" which Japan viewed as being directed towards the Soviet Union, and Fukuda did not wish Japan to become involved in the Sino-Soviet schism. After treaty discussions spent much time in limbo, the Chinese side eventually expressed flexibility on the anti-hegemony issue, and Fukuda gave the greenlight to pursue them. Before long, however, pro-Taiwan voices in the LDP placed intense pressure on the Fukuda, and further indecision led to Fukuda's approval ratings to dip down to 20%. Eventually, after further discussion, Fukuda finally consented to a modified version of the treaty which later became the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and China. On 18 August 1977, Fukuda delivered an address at the ASEAN summit in Manila, which had been popularly dubbed as the "Fukuda Doctrine." In this speech, Fukuda was mainly concerned with three goals: overcoming the psychological barriers between Southeast Asia and Japan which came about due to World War II by reaffirming Japan's commitment to pacifism, increasing mutual "heart-to-heart" confidence between Japan and ASEAN countries, and the willingness of Japan to be an "equal partner" with ASEAN countries (rather than the economic giant it was feared as). In order to bolster these promises, Fukuda clarified Japanese willingness to provide for loans and development assistance, but under the condition that ASEAN does not require Japan to commit to joining an exclusivist trading block.

In an effort to end the LDP's faction system, Fukuda introduced primary elections within the party. In the first primary towards the end of 1978, he was beaten by Masayoshi Ōhira for the presidency of the LDP, and forced to resign as prime minister. Fukuda was later instrumental in the formation of the Inter Action Council. He retired from politics in 1990.

Personal life
Fukuda was married and had five children: three sons and two daughters. His eldest son, Yasuo Fukuda, became prime minister in September 2007, after the sudden resignation of Shinzō Abe, and remained in that office for one year, making him the first son of a Japanese prime minister to become a prime minister himself. In addition, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi began his political career as a secretary to Fukuda, and the two were very close in their political and personal lives from the 1970s onward (Fukuda was the best man at Koizumi's wedding).

In his 1977 speech delivered to ASEAN, Fukuda identified controversial Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos as a close friend of his.

Death
Fukuda died of chronic emphysema in the hospital of Tokyo Women's Medical College on 5 July 1995 at the age of 90.

Honours

 * Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (5 July 1995; posthumous)
 * Golden Pheasant Award of the Scout Association of Japan (1979)

title: Takeo Fukuda


text:
Masayoshi Ōhira

Masayoshi Ōhira (大平 正芳) was a Japanese politician who was Prime Minister of Japan from 1978 to 1980. Ōhira's term was cut short when he died in office; he remains the most recent Japanese Prime Minister to die in office.

Early life
Masayoshi Ōhira was born on 12 March 1910, in Wada, Kagawa Prefecture (present-day Kan'onji, Kagawa), the third son of farmer Toshiyoshi Ōhira and his wife Saku. His father was a representative of the village council and the irrigation union although he had not received any education. He had eight siblings (two elder brothers, three elder sisters, a younger brother and a younger sister) but the eldest of the sisters had died before her first birthday and one of his elder brothers had died at age two. Ōhira referred to himself as "the son of an impoverished farmer of Sanuki" but in reality his family was middle-class. But even then, the parents had a hard time supporting their six children, and Ōhira assisted their side job from a young age.

In 1926, when he was 16 years old, Ōhira contracted typhoid fever and nearly died. This near death experience contributed to his conversion to Christianity around that time.

In 1933, when he was 23, Ōhira won two scholarships and was able to belatedly attend university at the Tokyo University of Commerce (present-day Hitotsubashi University), where he studied economics. In 1936, he entered the Ministry of Finance, where he became a protégé of Hayato Ikeda.

Ōhira worked in the Ministry of Finance throughout World War II. In the postwar period, when Ikeda became Minister of Finance from 1949 to 1952, Ōhira served as his private secretary.

Early political career
In 1952, at Ikeda's urging, Ōhira ran for and won the first of 10 terms in the House of Representatives of the Japanese National Diet, first representing the Liberal Party, and later its successor party the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

In 1957, as Ikeda prepared a push to try to become prime minister, Ōhira became a founding member of Ikeda's "Kōchikai" think tank, and was widely viewed as Ikeda's "right-hand man". He helped Ikeda write speeches and election manifestos.

Ikeda became prime minister in 1960, when Nobusuke Kishi resigned following the disastrous 1960 Anpo Protests. As a trained economist and trusted member of Ikeda's "brain trust", Ōhira helped design and implement Ikeda's famed Income Doubling Plan, which helped turn the attention of the Japanese people away from contentious political struggles to a nationwide drive for economic growth.

From 1962–1964, Ōhira served as Ikeda's Foreign Minister. In this role, he conducted the delicate negotiations which paved the way for Japan's normalization of relations with South Korea in 1965. When Ikeda died in 1964, Ōhira inherited control of his faction.

LDP power broker and prime minister
At the apex of his political life, Ōhira came to represent what were known as the "mainstream factions" within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which put him at odds with Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda, who led what were known as the "anti-mainstream" factions. From 1968 to 1970, Ōhira served as Minister of International Trade and Industry under Ikeda's successor Eisaku Satō. In 1972, Ōhira unsuccessfully competed for the party leadership before throwing his support to ultimate winner Kakuei Tanaka. Ōhira was then rewarded for his support with a post as Tanaka's first Foreign Minister, which he held until mid-July 1974. In a cabinet reshuffle in July 1974, he was replaced by Toshio Kimura as Foreign Minister but then immediately appointed Finance Minister, replacing Takeo Fukuda.

Ōhira was elected to the presidency of the LDP in late 1978. On 7 December 1978, he was appointed 68th Prime Minister, successfully pushing longtime rival Takeo Fukuda from his position.

Ōhira was the sixth Christian to hold this office after Hara Takashi, Takahashi Korekiyo, Ichirō Hatoyama, Tetsu Katayama, and Shigeru Yoshida.

In the general election of 1979, the LDP narrowly failed to win an outright majority, but enough independent members of the Diet joined the party to enable Ōhira to remain in office, and he was duly reappointed on 9 November of that year. On 16 May 1980, a vote of no confidence was held in the Diet.

Ōhira expected the motion to fail, and was visibly shaken when it passed 243–187. 69 members of his own LDP, including Fukuda, abstained. Given the choice of resigning or calling new elections, Ōhira chose the latter and began campaigning for LDP candidates.

Death
Ōhira's health started to deteriorate in his 60s. He was hospitalized for exhaustion on 31 May 1980 and died of a massive heart attack on 12 June, ten days before the general elections.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Masayoshi Ito acted in Ōhira's place as deputy after his death. Yoshio Sakurauchi, the Secretary General of LDP, led the LDP to its greatest victory in fifteen years, capitalizing on the "sympathy vote" generated by Ōhira's death. Zenkō Suzuki became Ōhira's successor as prime minister following the election.

Religion
Ōhira converted to Christianity during his time at the Takamatsu Higher School of Commerce (now the Takamatsu College of Economics), though without becoming a member of any formal Christian denomination. However, others have stated that he was a member of the Anglican Church in Japan during the 1970s.

Honours

 * Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (12 June 1980; posthumous)
 * Golden Pheasant Award of the Scout Association of Japan (1980)
 * In Mexico City, Mexico, a park was named after him; it is located south of Rio Churubusco avenue and East of Tlalpan avenue.

Foreign honours

 * Order of Leopold (20 January 1964)
 * Honorary Grand Commander of the Order of the Defender of the Realm (S.M.N.) (1964)
 * Order of the Southern Cross (16 September 1976)

title: Masayoshi Ōhira


text:
Zenkō Suzuki

Zenkō Suzuki (鈴木 善幸) was a Japanese politician who was Prime Minister of Japan from 1980 to 1982. He was the last prime minister to have been born in the Meiji era.

Early life and education
Suzuki was born on 11 January 1911, Yamada, Iwate Prefecture, the eldest son of a fishery owner. He graduated from Tokyo University of Fisheries in 1935.

Career
Suzuki joined the Liberal Party in 1948, and helped merge it with another right of center party to establish the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1955. He was Minister of Health from 1965 to 1966, and Minister of Agriculture & Fisheries from 1976 to 1977.

Suzuki was appointed Prime Minister following the sudden death of Masayoshi Ōhira, who died of a heart attack during a general election campaign. The sympathy vote generated by Ohira's death resulted in a landslide for the ruling LDP, handing Suzuki the largest parliamentary majority any Prime Minister had enjoyed for many years. He chose not to run for reelection to the presidency of the LDP in 1982, and was succeeded by Yasuhiro Nakasone.

He served during a period of instability; cabinet members frequently changed, and parties were often split by fractional politics. His diplomatic skills allowed him to chair his party's executive council ten times, winning him support in his early career. Despite his foreign policy gaffes as prime minister, he later helped further foreign relations with the United States, during a 1988 summit with Ronald Reagan.

Personal life and death
Suzuki's daughter, Chikako Aso, is the wife of Taro Aso, who served as the Prime Minister of Japan from 2008 to 2009. His son Shun'ichi Suzuki serves in the Diet.

Suzuki died at the International Medical Center of Japan in Tokyo of pneumonia on 19 July 2004 at the age of 93. His wife died in 2015.

Honours
From the corresponding article in the Japanese Wikipedia

 * Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (July 2004; posthumous)

title: Zenkō Suzuki


text:
Yasuhiro Nakasone

Yasuhiro Nakasone (中曽根 康弘) was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party from 1982 to 1987. He was a member of the House of Representatives for more than 50 years. His political term was best known for pushing through the privatization of state-owned companies and pursuing a hawkish and pro-U.S. foreign policy.

Early life
Nakasone was born in Takasaki in Gunma, a prefecture northwest of Tokyo, on 27 May 1918. He was the second son of Nakasone Matsugoro II, a lumber dealer, and Nakamura Yuku. He had five siblings: an elder brother named Kichitaro, an elder sister named Shoko, a younger brother named Ryosuke and another younger brother and younger sister who both died in childhood. The Nakasone family had been of the samurai class during the Edo period, and claimed direct descent from the Minamoto clan through the famous Minamoto no Yoshimitsu and through his son Minamoto no Yoshikiyo (d. 1149). According to family records, Tsunayoshi (k. 1417), a vassal of the Takeda clan and a tenth-generation descendant of Yoshikiyo, took the name of Nakasone Juro and was killed at the Battle of Sagamigawa. In about 1590, the samurai Nakasone Sōemon Mitsunaga settled in the town of in Kōzuke Province. His descendants became silk merchants and pawnbrokers. Nakasone's father, originally born Nakasone Kanichi, settled in Takasaki in 1912 and established a timber business and lumberyard which had success as a result of the post-WWI building boom.

Nakasone described his early childhood and youth as a happy one, and himself as a "quiet, easy-going child" nicknamed "Yat-chan". He attended a local primary school in Takasaki and was a poor student until the fourth grade, after which he excelled and was at the top of his class. He entered Shizuoka Higher School in 1935, where he excelled in history and literature, and learned to speak fluent French. In the autumn of 1938, Nakasone entered the Faculty of Law of the Imperial University of Tokyo. During World War II, he was commissioned into the Imperial Japanese Navy as a paymaster. As a lieutenant, he was stationed at Balikpapan in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, to build an airfield. There, he realized that the construction of the airfield had been stalled due to the prevalence of sexual crimes, gambling, and other problems among his men, so he gathered comfort women and organized a brothel called “comfort station” as a solution. He managed to procure four Indonesian women, and a Navy report praised him for having “mitigated the mood of the his troops". His decision to provide comfort women to his troops was replicated by thousands of Imperial Japanese Army and Navy officers across the Indo-Pacific both before and during World War II, as a matter of policy. From Nauru to Vietnam, from Burma to Timor, women were treated as the first reward of conquest." He later wrote of his return to Tokyo in August 1945 after Japan's surrender: "I stood vacantly amid the ruins of Tokyo, after discarding my officer's short sword and removing the epaulettes of my uniform. As I looked around me, I swore to resurrect my homeland from the ashes of defeat".

In 1947, he gave up a promising career in an elite government ministry to run for Parliament with the belief that in its postwar remorse, Japan was in danger of discarding its traditional values. He campaigned on a nationalist platform, arguing for an enlarged Self-Defence Force, to amend Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution (which outlawed war as a means to settling international disputes), and to revive Japanese patriotism, especially in reverence for the Emperor. He entered the Japanese Diet as a member of the House of Representatives for the Democratic Party. "As a freshman lawmaker in 1951, he delivered a 28-page letter to General MacArthur criticising the occupation, a brazen move. The General angrily threw the letter in [the] bin, Yasuhiro was later told. This stand established [Yasuhiro Nakasone's] credentials as a right-wing politician." He gained brief notoriety in 1952 for blaming Emperor Hirohito for Japan's defeat in the war. In 1955, at Nakasone's urging, the government granted the equivalent of $14,000,000 to the Agency for Industrial Science and Technology to begin nuclear power research. Nakasone rose through the LDP's ranks, becoming Minister of Science in 1959 under the government of Nobusuke Kishi, then Minister of Transport in 1967, Director General of the Japan Defense Agency from 1970 to 1971, Minister of International Trade and Industry in 1972 and Minister of Administration in 1981.

As the head of the Self-Defence Force, Nakasone argued for an increase in defence spending from less than 1% GDP to 3% of GDP. He was also in favour of Japan having tactical nuclear weapons. He was labelled "the weathervane" in 1972 because he switched his support from Takeo Fukuda to Kakuei Tanaka in the leadership election, ensuring Tanaka's victory. In turn, Tanaka would give his powerful support to Nakasone against Fukuda a decade later in the fight for the premiership.

Premiership
In 1982, Nakasone became prime minister. Along with Minister of Foreign Affairs Shintaro Abe, Nakasone improved Japanese relations with the USSR and the People's Republic of China. Nakasone was best known for his close relationship with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, popularly called the "Ron-Yasu" friendship. Nakasone sought a more equal relationship with the United States, and said: "President Reagan is the pitcher and I'm the catcher. When the pitcher gives the signs, I'll co-operate unsparingly, but if he doesn't sometimes follow the catcher's signs, the game can't be won". Nakasone said Japan would be "America's unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the Pacific and that Japan would "keep complete control of the four straits that go through to Japanese islands, to prevent the passage of Soviet submarines". He was attacked by political opponents as a reactionary and a "dangerous militarist". Nakasone responded by saying: "A nation must shed any sense of ignominy and move forward seeking glory". However his attempt to amend Article 9 failed.

In 1984, Nakasone visited China on the twelfth anniversary of Japan's diplomatic recognition of the People's Republic, for which the Chinese government arranged tours of China for 3,000 Japanese youths. On the trip, Nakasone's son was privately accompanied by the daughter of Hu Yaobang, the-then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. After the event, Hu was criticised by other members of the Chinese Communist Party for the extravagance and warmth of the event. Nakasone also visited President Corazon Aquino in a series of talks between the Philippines and Japan during a special state visit from 1986 to 1987, to provide good economic and trade relations.

In economic affairs, Nakasone's most notable policy was his privatisation initiative, which led to the breakup of Japan National Railways into the modern Japan Railways Group (JR). This led to 80,000 redundancies, unheard of in Japan until that point. He also privatized Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation and Japan Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation to create Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and Japan Tobacco Inc. (JT). The privatization of the three public corporations reduced the number of employees and significantly improved ordinary income per employee, productivity, and sales. According to a report by Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, 20 years after the privatization of NTT and JT and 16 years after the privatization of JR, the number of employees was reduced to 35% for JT, 65% for NTT and 70% for JR. In addition, NTT, JT and JR increased their ordinary income by 8 times, 5.5 times and 3 times, respectively. The productivity of NTT, JT and JR increased 3 times, 2.5 times and 1.5 times, respectively. Sales at NTT and JR increased 2.2 times and 1.2 times, respectively. Nakasone wrote of his economic reforms:

"I was carrying out a kind of 'improvement' of Japan's structure. For 110 years, ever since the Meiji restoration, Japan had been striving to catch up with America and Britain. In the 1970s we did catch up. Beyond that point the [state's] regulations only stand in the way of the growth of the economy. If government officials have too much power, the private sector of the economy will not grow. We had to change the system."

For the first time in Japan's post-war history, bureaucrats lost their leading role. In 1985, Nakasone appointed the former Governor of the Bank of Japan, Haruo Maekawa, to head a commission on Japan's economic future. In 1986, the Commission recommended that Japan should grow not through exports (which were angering Japan's trading partners) but from within. Nakasone advised the Japanese public to purchase foreign imports; in a well-publicised shopping trip, he bought an American tennis racket, an Italian tie and a French shirt. He said: "Japan is like a mah-jong player who always wins. Sooner or later the other players will decide that they do not want to play with him". The Japanese public were skeptical but the Commission created a good impression abroad, especially in America, where the Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs W. Allen Wallis called it a watershed in Japan's post-war economic policy.

Nakasone also became known for having a nationalist attitude and for wanting to stimulate ethnic pride amongst the Japanese. He was an adherent to the nihonjinron theory that claims Japan is incomparably different from the rest of the world. Influenced by Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji, Nakasone believed that Japan's "monsoon culture" inspired a special Japanese compassion, unlike the desert culture of the Middle East that produced the Judeo-Christian "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth". In a speech in 1986, Nakasone said it was Japan's international mission to spread the monsoon culture abroad.

On 15 August 1985, the fortieth anniversary of Japan's surrender, Nakasone and his Cabinet visited the Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan's war casualties - including convicted war criminals - were buried, in full mourning dress. This had great symbolic significance as he visited the shrine in his official capacity, intending to reassert the Japanese government's respect for the spirits of the ancestors killed in battle, including those who died in World War II. This turned out however to be a controversial move which was heavily criticised by the Chinese Government (including in its newspaper, People's Daily) and led to angry demonstrations in Beijing. It was also attacked by opponents at home for violating the Constitution's separation of religion and state. Nakasone defended his actions by saying, "The true defence of Japan ... becomes possible only through the combination of liberty-loving peoples who are equal to each other ... The manner is desired to be based on self-determination of the race". He also said, "It is considered progressive to criticise pre-war Japan for its faults and defects, but I firmly oppose such a notion. A nation is still a nation whether it wins or loses a war".

Nakasone also sought educational reform, setting up a commission. Its report recommended that "a spirit of patriotism" should be inculcated in children, along with respect for elders and authority. This was not fully implemented and came under attack from the teachers' trade union. The commission also recommended that the national anthem should be taught and that the Rising Sun Flag should also be raised during entrance and graduation ceremonies. History textbooks were also reformed. In 1986, Nakasone dismissed his Education Minister, Masayuki Fujio, after he justified Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910.

Nakasone aroused controversy in September 1986 when he claimed that Americans were, on average, less intelligent than Japanese because "the US has many immigrants, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Blacks, who bring the average level down" and also said that "in America today there are still many Blacks who can't even read." He then clarified his comments, stating that he meant to congratulate the U.S. on its economic success despite the presence of "problematic" minorities.

In 1987, he was forced to resign after he attempted to introduce a value added tax to reduce the burden of direct taxes in a policy designed to cut the budget deficit.

Later political life

Nakasone was replaced by Noboru Takeshita in 1987, and was implicated, along with other LDP lawmakers, in the Recruit scandal that broke the following year.

Although he remained in the Diet for another decade and a half, his influence gradually waned. In 2003, despite a fight, Nakasone was not given a place on the LDP's electoral list as the party, by then led by Jun'ichirō Koizumi, introduced an age limit of 73 years for candidates in the proportional representation blocks, ending his career as a member of the Diet.

In 2010, "aware of his status as one of the few leaders revered across Japan's suddenly fractured political landscape" and the country's "most revered elder statesman", Nakasone launched a series of interviews to address the direction of prime minister Yukio Hatoyama's government. In a profile at that time, he saw Hatoyama's "inexperienced left-leaning" government as "challenging Japan's postwar political order and its close relationship with the United States". As well, the LDP was "crumbling into disarray" in the wake of Hatoyama's victory. In the profile, Nakasone described the moment "as a national opening on par with the wrenching social and political changes that followed defeat in the [world] war [and] praised the appearance of a strong second political party as a step toward true democracy". "Being knocked out of power is a good chance to study in the cram school of public opinion", he was quoted as saying of the LDP. He "faulted Mr. Hatoyama for giving Washington the impression that [Hatoyama] valued ties with China more than he did those with the United States. 'Because of the prime minister’s imprudent remarks, the current situation calls for Japan to make efforts to improve things,' he said. The [Japanese] relationship with the United States is different from that with China, he said, because 'it is built on a security alliance, and not just on the alliance, but on the shared values of liberal democracy, and on its shared ideals.'" And relative to another high-profile current source of friction between Japan and the United States, Nakasone said: "Problems like Okinawa [and the American military base there] can be solved by talking together."

Personal life and death
On 11 February 1945, Nakasone married Tsutako Nakasone (30 October 1921 – 7 November 2012). Nakasone's son, Hirofumi Nakasone, is also a member of the Diet; he has served as Minister of Education and as Minister of Foreign Affairs. His grandson, Yasutaka Nakasone, is a member of the House of Representatives.

Nakasone died in Tokyo on 29 November 2019, at the age of 101 years and 186 days. Nakasone was the second oldest Prime Minister of Japan by age after Naruhiko Higashikuni, who lived to 102 years, 73 days.

National honours

 * Order of the Chrysanthemum :
 * JPN Daikun'i kikkasho BAR.svg Grand Cordon, 29 April 1997
 * JPN Daikun'i kikkasho BAR.svg Collar, 29 November 2019 (posthumously)
 * Golden Pheasant Award ribbon.svg Golden Pheasant Award of the Scout Association of Japan (1986)
 * Junior First Rank (29 November 2019; posthumously)

Foreign honours

 * 🇲🇽 Mexico:
 * MEX Order of the Aztec Eagle 1Class BAR.png Grand Cross of the Order of the Aztec Eagle
 * 🇩🇪 Germany:
 * GER Bundesverdienstkreuz 7 Grosskreuz.svg Grand Cross 1st Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
 * 🇵🇭 Philippines:
 * PHI Order of Sikatuna 2003 Grand Collar BAR.svg Grand Collar (Raja) of the Order of Sikatuna
 * 🇪🇬 Egypt:
 * EGY Order of the Nile - Grand Cordon BAR.png Grand Cordon of the Order of the Nile
 * 🇮🇩 Indonesia:
 * Bintang Mahaputera Adipurna rib.svg Star of Mahaputera, 1st Class (Bintang Mahaputera Adipurna)
 * 🇳🇴 Norway:
 * St Olavs Orden storkors stripe.svg Grand Cross (Storkors) of the Order of Saint Olav
 * 🇦🇷 Argentina:
 * ARG Order of the Liberator San Martin - Grand Cross BAR.png Grand Cross of the Order of the Liberator General San Martín
 * Brunei:
 * BRU Order of the Crown of Brunei.svg The Most Honourable Order of Seri Paduka Mahkota Brunei, First Class
 * 🇵🇪 Peru:
 * Order of Merit for Distinguished Service (Peru).svg Grand Cross of the Order of Merit for Distinguished Service (Orden al Mérito por Servicios Distinguidos)
 * 🇫🇮 Finland:
 * FIN Order of the White Rose Grand Cross BAR.png Grand Cross of the Order of the White Rose of Finland
 * 🇰🇷 South Korea:
 * Order of Diplomatic Service Merit (Class 1) Grand Gwanghwa Medal ribbon.gif Order of Diplomatic Service Merit, 1st Class (Grand Gwanghwa Medal)
 * 🇹🇭 Thailand:
 * Order of the White Elephant - Special Class (Thailand) ribbon.svg Knight Grand Cordon of the Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant
 * 🇫🇷 France:
 * Legion Honneur GO ribbon.svg Grand Officier of the Légion d'honneur

title: Yasuhiro Nakasone


text:
Noboru Takeshita

Noboru Takeshita (竹下 登) was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1987 to 1989 during the bubble economy.

Takeshita led the largest faction at the time in the Liberal Democratic Party, which he inherited from Kakuei Tanaka, from the 1980s until his death in 2000. He was dubbed the "last shadow shogun" for his behind-the-scenes influence in Japanese politics. He was the last prime minister to serve during the long rule of Emperor Shōwa. He is the grandfather of musician and actor Daigo.

Early life and education
Noboru Takeshita was born on 26 February 1924, in present-day Unnan, Shimane Prefecture, the only son of Yūzō Takeshita, a sake brewer, and his first wife, Yuiko. His family had been sake brewers for generations, and Takeshita was the 20th head of the Takeshita brewing family. Both his father Yūzō and his grandfather Gizō had been men of high repute in the region, and Takeshita followed in their footsteps and decided to become a politician when he was in middle school.

Takeshita attended Waseda University in Tokyo.

He married Masae Takeuchi prior to joining the Imperial Japanese Army to serve as an instructor during World War II. His wife committed suicide while he was away for the war, which author Jacob Schlesinger argued made Takeshita obsessive about his composure and highly reserved about showing anger to others. After the war, he remarried, to Naoko Endō, a distant relative, worked as an English teacher and managed a high school judo team before entering politics in 1951. As a young judo competitor, he was known as "master of the draw" for his ability to avoid easy victories over weaker opponents and to avert defeat by stronger opponents.

Political career
Takeshita served as a local assemblyman in Shimane Prefecture from 1951. In the 1958 general election he won a seat in the House of Representatives, joining the powerful faction of Kakuei Tanaka in the Liberal Democratic Party. He was elected at the same time as Shin Kanemaru, and the two remained close allies through their respective political careers. Takeshita eventually became Tanaka's primary fundraiser, traveling the country to garner support for the LDP's coffers. Like Tanaka, Takeshita was fond of "pork barrel" politics, retaining his own seat by bringing excessively huge public works projects to Shimane. Takeshita served as chief cabinet secretary from 1971 to 1974 and as minister of construction in 1976.

Takeshita was the minister of finance from 1979 to 1980, and he again accepted the finance position and was in office from 1982 to 1986. In this period, he achieved prominence as Japan's negotiator during deliberations which led to the agreement which is known as the Plaza Accord in New York. In the period Takeshita was finance minister, the Yen appreciated relative to other international currencies. The rise of the strong Yen (endaka) enhanced Japan's status as a financial powerhouse and led to the Japanese asset price bubble of the 1980s.

Kakuei Tanaka was arrested in connection with the Lockheed bribery scandals in 1976 and found guilty by a lower court in 1983, placing pressure on his political strength. In February 1985, Takeshita formed a "study group" called Soseikai, which counted among its ranks 43 of the 121 Tanaka faction members. Weeks after this defection, Tanaka suffered a stroke and became hospitalized, sparking further uncertainty over the future of his faction. Tanaka never recovered from his stroke, and by July 1987, Takeshita's faction counted 113 of the 143 Tanaka faction members, while only thirteen supported Takeshita's rival Susumu Nikaido. The Tanaka faction members who moved to Takeshita's faction included Ichiro Ozawa, Tsutomu Hata, Ryutaro Hashimoto, Keizo Obuchi and Kozo Watanabe.

In July 1986, Takeshita left the Cabinet and was named to the key post of secretary general of the party.

In November 1987, Takeshita became president of the LDP and was thus elected Prime Minister of Japan, replacing Yasuhiro Nakasone. Among the highlights of the period in which Takeshita led the government, he acknowledged that Japan had been an aggressor during World War II. This statement was part of a speech in the Japanese Diet. Takeshita attended the third annual ASEAN summit in Manila in December 1987 and formalised a $2 billion development fund package in order to help stimulate ASEAN economies, continuing previous efforts at enhancing Japanese relations with East Asian countries. Takeshita also pursued diplomacy in the rest of the world, including tours of several western nations as well as discussions for debt forgiveness to developing countries. Takeshita's initial tenure was relatively comfortable due to steady success in the Japanese economy at the time, but soon his administration began to see some issues. The number of unskilled foreign workers (from areas such as the Philippines and Bangladesh) doubled between 1986 and 1988, and the American government passed into law the Omnibus Trade Bill, which threatened Japanese exports to the country. Moreover, despite Takeshita diplomatic gestures, trade imbalance with both Western Europe and East Asia continued to widen, leading to friction between the Japanese and foreign governments.

However, he was mainly remembered within Japan for implementing the country's first consumption tax, which his government forced through the Diet in 1988 amid public opposition. Takeshita's government also passed legislation liberalizing the beef, citrus and rice markets, and passed an enhanced security pact with the United States, with the support of Shin Kanemaru who bought the opposition's support.

The Recruit scandal forced Takeshita to resign in 1989.

Later years and death
Although Takeshita was accused of insider trading and corruption, he was never charged and was able to retain his seat in the Diet until shortly before his death. He remained a major behind-the-scenes player in the LDP, mentoring future prime ministers Sōsuke Uno, Toshiki Kaifu, and Keizō Obuchi. Tsutomu Hata and Ichiro Ozawa left Takeshita's faction to form the Japan Renewal Party. Keizo Obuchi inherited what was left of the faction, supported the election of Ryutaro Hashimoto as prime minister, and himself became prime minister from 1999 to 2000; he died of a stroke in early 2000 and Hashimoto took over control of the faction.

Takeshita himself died of respiratory failure in June 2000 after over a year in hospital, during which time he was said to have "masterminded" the coalition between the LDP and New Komeito and to have arranged the election of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori from his hospital bed. He had planned to retire from the Diet as of the 2000 general election, which occurred just days after his death. The Economist characterized his death as the end of an era that was "a dizzy mixture of brilliance and corruption" in Japanese politics.

Hashimoto led the former Takeshita faction until refusing to stand in the 2005 general election due to a fundraising scandal, and died shortly thereafter. The remnants of the faction, formally known by this time as Heisei Kenkyūkai (Heisei Research Council), remained active under the leadership of Yūji Tsushima, who resigned prior to the 2009 general election, passing control to Fukushiro Nukaga. The faction raised much less in donations during the 1990s and 2000s than it did under Tanaka and Takeshita in the 1980s, as electoral reforms enacted in 1994, coupled with new campaign finance regulations and the ongoing economic slump that followed the Japanese asset price bubble, weakened the power of factions in Japanese politics.

Personal life
Takeshita was twice married, and survived by three daughters (his only son, Rikidō, died one month after his birth in 1954) and several grandchildren, including singer Daigo (formerly known as Daigo☆Stardust) and manga artist Eiki Eiki.

His younger half-brother, Wataru (b. 1946-2021) was a reporter with NHK, who then began working for Noboru as an aide in 1985. Wataru entered politics in 2000 and served as leader of his old Takeshita faction (now known as the Heisei Kenkyūkai faction) from 2018 until his death in September 2021. Takeshita also had two more younger half-siblings, Saburō (b. 1949) and Sakae.

Honours

 * Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (20 June 2000; posthumous)
 * Golden Pheasant Award of the Scout Association of Japan (1991)

title: Noboru Takeshita


text:
Sōsuke Uno

Sōsuke Uno (宇野 宗佑) was a Japanese politician who was briefly Prime Minister of Japan in 1989, the first Prime Minister who came from Shiga Prefecture. A scandal exposed by the geisha Mitsuko Nakanishi contributed to his premature resignation from office after just sixty-eight days.

Early life and education
Uno was born in Moriyama, Shiga. His family owned a sake brewery called Arachō, and had served as town officials (Japanese: Toshiyori). The family had previously ran a hotel and a general store in his birth home.

In 1943, he graduated from Hikone Commercial College (later, Shiga University) where he led Hikone Commercial College to the national champion of Kendo among the commercial universities and colleges in Japan and attended the Kobe College of Commerce but had to leave the University two months later after the enrollment because he was called into the Imperial Japanese Army as an officer during World War II. After the war, he was sent to Siberia as a prisoner. He never came back to Kobe College of Commerce again.

As well as a politician, Uno was an accomplished writer, who wrote a book considered classic in Japan about his experiences as a prisoner of war in Siberia.

Political career
In 1960, he entered politics, winning election to the Diet of Japan. Six years later, he was promoted to Vice-Minister at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, then similar positions with the Science and Technology Agency, then the Administrative Agency until earning his place in Cabinet as Minister for Trade and Industry and then Foreign Secretary until he was Prime Minister. Whilst Foreign Secretary (in what were conflicted times) he was applauded for his tact as foreign secretary, navigating international demands for increased Japanese contributions to international commerce with stern loyalty to his own nation's interests.

In 1974, he served briefly as Director General of the Japan Defense Agency. As the Foreign Minister under then-Prime Minister Takeshita, Uno became the first Japanese Cabinet member to visit Israel since the 1973 oil crisis. Uno's career reached a peak in the most fraught times his party had seen, as he took the reins of his party after the Recruit Scandal, when 47 Japanese MPs (including mostly other members from his own Liberal Democrat Party) were found guilty of taking bribes and unfair trading. Of all prime-ministerial candidates, only Uno was free of blame from them, and he was given charge over the party, the government, and Japan. By this stage he had served his country for almost fifty years, and was placed in office on 3 June 1989.

Geisha affair
Uno encountered public scandal in 1989, when accused by the Geisha entertainer Mitsuko Nakanishi of being "immoral" and stingy in his financial support during their four-month affair in 1986. Nakanishi would claim in following newspaper interviews that Uno had treated older geisha with arrogance and contempt, had not paid the appropriate fee of ¥300,000 per month (roughly US$2,100 at the time) for her company of four months, and had not provided a traditional parting gift (a further monetary fee) as had been custom in geisha etiquette.

A Washington Post article published in July 1989 brought international attention to the affair, with some geisha denouncing Nakanishi as a whistleblower, effectively compromising the discreet nature of the profession and engaging with political and economic affairs in the public sphere. Nakanishi later quit the profession, remarried and divorced once, attended a Shingon Buddhist school temple in Shiga Prefecture, and held various secretarial jobs unrelated to the geisha community. Due to the severity of the scandal, Nakanishi's own son disowned her during this time.

To avoid further scandal, Sōsuke Uno resigned as prime minister on 10 August 1989 after just 68 days in office, but continued to serve his country in various government posts until he retired fully in 1996. On 29 April 1994, he was awarded with the highest possible honour for a non-head-of-state, the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun with Paulownia Flowers.

Death
At 72 years of age, Uno then enjoyed a peaceful retirement in Moriyama city. He died on 19 May 1998 in his private home. He had two daughters from his wife, Mrs. Chiyo Uno. He published two collections of Haiku poems, as well as his book on prisonership in Siberia, along with painting, poetry, and music. A year later in 1999, his Geisha affair was highlighted in the Secret Life of Geisha, a TV documentary.

Honours

 * Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun with Paulownia Flowers - (29 April 1994)

title: Sōsuke Uno