was a Japanese politician who served as prime minister of Japan from 1972 to 1974. Known for his background in construction and earthy and tenacious political style, Tanaka is the only modern Japanese prime minister who did not finish high school or graduate from a university.

Born in Niigata Prefecture to a poor farmer, Tanaka left school at age 14. He later received an engineering education and founded his own construction company in 1936. In 1940, he was drafted into the army and served in Manchuria until 1941; during the Pacific War, he made a fortune from government contracts. After the war, Tanaka was first elected to the National Diet in 1947. He joined the Liberal Democratic Party on its foundation in 1955, and held a series of cabinet positions, including posts and telecommunications minister from 1957 to 1958, finance minister from 1962 to 1965, and international trade and industry minister from 1971 to 1972. He built up a large faction in the party by political maneuvering and extensive use of money.

After a power struggle with Takeo Fukuda, Tanaka succeeded Eisaku Satō as prime minister in 1972. Domestically, he pursued his "Plan to Remodel the Japanese Archipelago", an infrastructure development program, before it was shelved due to inflation and the 1973 oil crisis. In 1972, Tanaka established relations with the People's Republic of China. Although he had entered office with a very high popularity rating, this declined quickly amid allegations of corruption before his resignation in 1974. In 1976, Tanaka was arrested and charged with taking ¥500 million in bribes in the Lockheed scandal, and in 1983 was sentenced to four years in prison. However, Tanaka remained free on appeal to the Supreme Court until his death in 1993.

Throughout his legal problems, he maintained influence through his faction, the largest faction in the LDP, and continued to serve as kingmaker for subsequent premiers, which earned him the nickname , among others. 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.

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, notably 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.

Career in Tokyo

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 an 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 found office space at the Sakamoto Construction Company and restarted his business. His landlady, the late company president's widow, was trying to find a match for her daughter, Hana Sakamoto, so Tanaka married Hana in March 1942. She was seven years Tanaka’s senior and had a daughter from a previous marriage. They soon had two children of their own: a son named Masanori in 1942, who died young in 1947, and a daughter named Makiko in 1944.

The marriage allowed Tanaka to take control of Sakamoto Construction, which he merged with his own business to form the Tanaka Construction Company in 1943. Tanaka revived his relationship with Riken, serving regularly as a subcontractor. In the midst of the Pacific War, Riken and Tanaka Construction received many government contracts for military facilities and factories. Luck favored Tanaka in the endgame of the war. Tanaka received a particularly profitable contract to relocate a piston ring factory from Tokyo to Daejeon in Korea. The rebuilding in Korea had just begun by the time it was abandoned due to the surrender of Japan, but Tanaka had been able to go to cash in his advance on the contract, ¥15 million in Japanese war bonds, at a bank in Seoul before it became worthless. In addition, none of his major buildings were damaged in the firebombing of Tokyo.

Political career

Rise into politics

thumb|left|200px|Tanaka in 1951

In November 1945, Tanaka met with , a veteran politician who served as adviser to the Tanaka Construction Company. Oasa was in the middle of forming the Japan Progressive Party (日本進歩党, Nihon Shinpoto) and asked Tanaka to contribute money, which he happily did. Oasa later recruited Tanaka as a candidate for the party in Niigata Prefecture for the first postwar election in April 1946.

During this first bid for a Diet seat, Tanaka relied on local political notables and associates from Riken to support his campaign. He worked around the election laws of the time by opening a branch office in Kashiwazaki and placing large "Tanaka" sign on the building to gain name recognition. However, his bid unraveled as three of the notables supposed to support him ran as candidates themselves, as did the brother of the Riken Kashiwazaki factory manager, splitting Tanaka's support base. Tanaka only captured 4% of the vote, finishing in eleventh place whereas the district was filling eight seats.

Tanaka was better prepared for the next election, which came in April 1947. He had set up Tanaka Construction branch offices in Kashiwazaki and Nagaoka, employing a hundred people who would assist him in the campaign. Tanaka targeted rural voters; he became known for his diligence in visiting remote villages. He was elected in third place out of five seats. He took his Diet seat as a member of the new Democratic Party (民主党, 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 , who would remain one of Tanaka's most loyal supporters to the end.

Etsuzankai

thumb|left|Kakuei Tanaka in October 1954

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

left|thumb|Kakuei Tanaka following his appointment as Minister of Finance with Tanaka's mother, Fume and Tanaka's wife, Hana on 18 July 1962.

Tanaka became a member of the Liberal Democratic Party when it formed in November 1955, from the merger of the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party. In November 1956 there was a party leadership race to succeed Ichirō Hatoyama. A split occurred in the Yoshida school between the factions of Eisaku Sato and Hayato Ikeda; Sato supported his brother Nobusuke Kishi and Ikeda supported Mitsujirō Ishii. Tanaka followed Sato rather than Ikeda, even though Tanaka’s stepdaughter married a nephew of Ikeda that same month. Nevertheless, Tanaka maintained close ties with the Ikeda and befriended his right-hand man Masayoshi Ōhira.

Nobusuke Kishi narrowly lost to Tanzan Ishibashi, but Ishibashi soon fell ill, so Kishi succeeded him in March 1957. When Kishi reshuffled the cabinet in July, Tanaka received his first cabinet post, Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. In this role, he granted the first television broadcasting licenses in Japan. Just two months after taking office, Tanaka met Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong.

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. 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. Although this implied a degree of corruption, none of the activity detailed was actually illegal. initially on charges of violating Japanese foreign exchange restrictions by not reporting the payment. 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.

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 the Takeshita faction

thumb|250px|Tanaka (third from left) with American scientist [[Stanford R. Ovshinsky and his political disciple Ichirō Ozawa]]

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.

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. 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. She left the LDP in 2002 and subsequently became a minister in the last days of Democratic Party of Japan government in 2012. She lost her seat in the December 2012 general election, by which point Etsuzankai had disbanded with only a few elderly surviving members.

In January 2024, the Mejiro Goten, Tanaka's former Tokyo residence, burned down. Makiko Tanaka ascribed the fire to an incense stick that had not been extinguished in the Buddhist family altar. The former LDP Secretary General and future prime minister Shigeru Ishiba, one of Tanaka's proteges, commented: "The residence represented the pinnacle of Tanaka’s power. Another such place will never emerge. The symbol of that time has disappeared."

As of 2017, there was nostalgia for Kakuei Tanaka.

Political philosophy, ideology and views

Tankara supported a business-backed capitalist oriented party. He advocated for a classical free-enterprises system with a welfare state and regulation of the national economy. His economics were later described as "Neither Keynesian nor Milton Friedmanian but Schumpeterian". While not Keynesian, his government was public-oriented and supported a bigger welfare state, which can be seen in his support of public spending or the free medical care for the elderly. He also embraced "pragmatic conservatism", as well as "high-modernism", which is seen as populist and technocratic.

Honours

Foreign honours

  • :
  • 70px Grand Collar of the Order of Sikatuna

See also

  • I'm Sorry (video game)
  • Malari incident

References

Informational notes

Citations

Bibliography

  • Tanaka biography , rcrinc.com; accessed 18 June 2015.

|-

|-

|-

|-

|-

|-

|-