Kakuei Tanaka
Kakuei Tanaka 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 "Shadow Shōgun", 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 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
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 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. 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 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
Tanaka's most important support base, however, was a group called Etsuzankai. 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.