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Tanaka Kakuei (田中 角栄
May 4,
1918 -
December 16,
1993) was a Japanese politician and the 64th and 65th
Prime Minister from
July 7,
1972 to
December 22,
1972 and from
December 22,
1972 to
December 9,
1974 respectively. He was also the most influential member of the
ruling
LDP until the mid-1980's, when he fell from power after a long series
of scandals.
Early Life
Tanaka was born into a rural family with seven children in
Nishiyama,
Niigata Prefecture. His father was involved with a distastrous venture
to start Niigata's first
dairy farm, and so the family scraped by in abject
poverty. Kakuei left school after the equivalent of the eighth grade
and went to work in the
construction business, and soon moved to
Tokyo.
In
1937, while running errands for a construction firm, Tanaka ran into
an elevator occupied by the
Viscount
Okochi Masatoshi, head of the
Riken corporation. Okochi, apparently impressed with Tanaka's energy
and ambition, agreed to help the young man start a drafting office in
Tokyo.
The drafting office only kept Tanaka busy for two years: he was drafted
into the army in
1939 and sent to
Manchuria, where he served as a clerk in the
Morioka Cavalry. After two years in the military, he contracted
pneumonia and was returned to Tokyo to recover; he never re-enlisted.
Tanaka went to the Sakamoto Civil Engineering firm, looking for office
space to restart his drafting 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,
Sakamoto Hana. 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 Civil Engineering and Construction Industries. He soon had two
children: a son named
Tanaka Masanori in
1942 (d.
1948), and a daughter named
Tanaka Makiko 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 ¥15m (about US$78m) in Japanese
war bonds. In December of 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 Moderate 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 percent 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
Shidehara Kijuro and joined Shidehara's
Doshi Club. Then in
1948, the Doshi Club defected to the new
Democratic Liberal Party, and Tanaka instantly won favor with the
DLP's leader,
Yoshida Shigeru. Yoshida appointed Tanaka as a Vice Minister of
Justice, the youngest in the nation's history.
Then, on December 13, Tanaka was arrested and imprisoned on charges of
accepting ¥1m (US$128,000) in bribes from coal mining interests in
Kyushu. 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
Sato Eisaku 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
Osano Kenji, 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, lit. "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 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
Joetsu Shinkansen
high speed rail line.
During the 1950's, 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 DLP.
When
Kishi Nobusuke became prime minister in
1957, Tanaka was given his first cabinet post,
Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. He already carried great
influence in the LDP, despite his lack of seniority: this was partly
because of his friendship with future prime minister Sato Eisaku, and
partly because his stepdaughter had married future prime minister
Ikeda Hayato'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. When Sato became prime minister in
1965, Tanaka was slated to become the LDP's new
secretary general, but the emergence of the
Black Mist Scandal, where Tanaka was accused of shady land deals in
Tokyo, meant that
Fukuda Takeo got the job instead.
Fukuda and Tanaka soon became the two battling heir apparents of Sato's
faction, and their rivalry was dubbed by the Japanese press as the "Kaku-Fuku
War." Despite the scandal, Tanaka made a record showing in the
1967 general election, and Sato re-appointed him as secretary general,
moving Fukuda to the post of finance minister. In
1971, Sato gave Tanaka another important stepping stone to taking over
the government: minister of international trade and industry (MITI).
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 Sato himself.
Although Sato wanted Fukuda to become the next prime minister, Tanaka's
popularity, along with support from the factions of
Nakasone Yasuhiro and
Ohira Masayoshi, gave him a 282-190 victory over Fukuda in the LDP's
1971 prime ministerial election. He entered the office with the
highest popularity rating of any new premier in Japanese history.
Tanaka's foreign policy mirrored that of
Richard Nixon, and his most notable achievement was the normalization
of Japan's relations with the
People's Republic of China. On the domestic front, he proposed an
enormous infrastructure investment program that never got off the ground,
primarily because it required more money than Japan had at the time.
Scandals
In October of
1974, the popular
Bungei Shunju magazine wrote a critical article of Tanaka's
business practices, which inspired his 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,
Sato Aki, as its first witness. Unbeknownst 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
November 26,
1974.
The Tanaka faction supported
Miki Takeo's "clean government" bid to become prime minister, and
Tanaka once again became a rank-and-file Diet member.
Then, on
February 6,
1976, the vice chairman of the
Lockheed Corporation told a
United States Senate subcommittee that Tanaka had accepted $1.8
million in bribes during his term as prime minister, in return for having
Japan's parastatal airlines purchase
Lockheed L-1011 aircraft. 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. On July 27, Tanaka was arrested: he was
released in August on a ¥200m (US$2.46m) bond.
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
Suzuki Zenko. Suzuki hated his position so much that he resigned in
1982: Tanaka responded by re-electing him.
The Lockheed trial ended on
October 12,
1983. Tanaka was found guilty and sentenced to 4 years in jail. 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.
In the "Second Lockheed Election," Tanaka retained his Diet seat by an
unprecedented margin, winning more votes than any other candidate in the
country. Nakasone placed six members of the Tanaka faction on his 1984
cabinet, including future prime minister
Takeshita Noboru.
Fall from power
Early in 1985, Tanaka finally lost his power. Takeshita formed a "study
group" called
Soseikai, and this group quickly won over 83 of the faction's 120
Diet members. The split in Tanaka's faction aggravated his existing
problems with
alcoholism and
hypertension, and he suffered a
stroke just three weeks after Takeshita's departure. 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.
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. In that year's election, virtually all of his faction
members joined behind Takeshita, and Etsuzankai lost five of its twenty
seats in Niigata.
The
Tokyo High Court dismissed Tanaka's appeal on July 29th, and the
original sentence passed down in 1983 was reinstated. Tanaka immediately
posted bail and appealed to the Supreme Court.
While his appeal lingered in the Court's docket, Tanaka grew older and
increasingly more ill. He resigned from the Diet in
1989, was diagnosed with
diabetes, and finally died of
pneumonia at
Keio University Hospital on
December 16,
1993.
Makiko Tanaka, who was not associated with Etsuzankai, was elected to
her father's old seat in Niigata in
1991, and became foreign minister in the cabinet of
Koizumi Junichiro in
2001.
Preceded by:
Sato Eisaku |
Prime ministers of Japan |
Succeeded by:
Miki Takeo |
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