was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1982 to 1987. His political term was best known for pushing through the privatization of state-owned companies, pursuing a hawkish and pro-United States foreign policy and his rejection of Keynesianism and his support of neoliberalism.
Born in Gunma Prefecture, Nakasone graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and served in the imperial navy during the Pacific War. After the war, he entered the National Diet in 1947 and rose through the ranks of the Liberal Democratic Party, serving as chief of the Defense Agency from 1970 to 1971 under Eisaku Satō, international trade and industry minister from 1972 to 1974 under Kakuei Tanaka, and administration minister from 1980 to 1982 under Zenkō Suzuki. As prime minister, he passed large defense budgets and controversially visited the Yasukuni Shrine. A conservative contemporary of U.S. president Ronald Reagan, Nakasone privatized the Japanese National Railways and telephone systems, and favored closer ties with the U.S., once calling Japan an "unsinkable aircraft carrier". After leaving office in 1987, he was implicated in the Recruit scandal, causing the influence of his LDP faction to wane before he retired from the Diet in 2003.
Early life
Family background
thumb|left|200px|One-year-old Nakasone (1919)
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.
In the autumn of 1938, Nakasone entered the Faculty of Law of the Imperial University of Tokyo. During his time at the university, he was strongly influenced by , whose lectures on politics fascinated him. He also developed the belief that personality should not be used as a means to achieve something, which contributed to his strong anti-communist and anti-Nazi views. On the night of 10 March 1940, he received a phone call from his father telling him that his mother in Takasaki had fallen seriously ill. By the time he arrived in Takasaki on the first train the next morning, she had already passed away. The fact that his mother had not told him about her illness, so as not to distract him from his studies, became an impetus for him to work harder. He passed the high-level bureaucrat recruitment examination. He began working for the Home Ministry, which was as prestigious as the Ministry of Finance due to its extensive authority. On the beach, he cremated the first 23 casualties among his staff, including his ex-yakuza assistant. This experience left a deep and lasting impression, which profoundly influenced his political beliefs. 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.
Upon returning to Tokyo after the end of the Second World War, he resumed his suspended career at the Home Ministry. He observed the growing prevalence of communism among the Japanese people, but the Civil Service was largely powerless to address it under the absolute authority of the Allied Occupation Forces. While supervising the police force in Kagawa Prefecture, he decided to abandon his bureaucratic career and stand in the upcoming general election. 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".
Early parliamentary career
thumb|Nakasone's first cabinet role was as Minister of Science and Technology in the [[Second Kishi Cabinet#Reshuffled Cabinet|reshuffled Second Kishi Cabinet in 1959. He can be seen at the centre of the fourth row from the front.]]
He stood in the 1949 general election as a Democratic Party candidate. 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." 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% GNP to 3% of GNP. 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. 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". 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.</blockquote>
For the first time in Japan's post-war history, bureaucrats lost their leading role.
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. 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. He then clarified his comments, stating that he meant to congratulate the U.S. on its economic success despite the presence of "problematic" minorities. Ainu people living in Japan criticized this comment as ignoring the reality of racial discrimination against them.
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.
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 2004, he attended the funeral of his old friend Ronald Reagan.
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". 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 third oldest Prime Minister of Japan by age after Naruhiko Higashikuni and Tomiichi Murayama.
Honours
thumb|[[Prime Minister of Japan Yoshihide Suga addressed at the official funeral for Yasuhiro Nakasone at the Grand Prince Hotel Shin Takanawa in Minato Ward, Tōkyō Metropolis on October 17, 2020]]
National honours
- Order of the Chrysanthemum:
- 70px Grand Cordon, 29 April 1997
- 70px Collar, 29 November 2019 (posthumously)
- 70px Golden Pheasant Award of the Scout Association of Japan (1986)
- Junior First Rank (29 November 2019; posthumously)