Eisaku Satō

Prime minister of Japan (1964-1972)

• Born: March 27, 1901
• Birthplace: Tabuse, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan
• Died: June 3, 1975
• Place of death: Tokyo, Japan

Satō served consecutively as prime minister of Japan longer than any other individual. He is the only modern Japanese politician to expand the country permanently. One of the founders of the Liberal Democratic Party, he not only followed its traditional probusiness policy but also tripled the per capita income of the Japanese. In 1974, he became the first Asian to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Early Life

Eisaku Satō (ayi-sah-kew sah-toh) was born to a samurai family in Tabuse, Yamaguchi Prefecture, in southwestern Japan, far from the center of power. The family, however, was one of the leaders in that area, and his two elder brothers also became famous. The eldest was Ichiro, who ultimately became a vice admiral in the Japanese navy. The second son was adopted by his wife’s family and took the name of Nobusuke Kishi. He served as prime minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960.

Satō was born on March 27, 1901. Relatives at first considered him as the most personable of the brothers but the least intelligent, which was not a large slight in a brilliant family. He attended the Fifth Higher School in Kumamoto (essentially a combination high school and community college). One of the other graduates was Satō’s immediate predecessor as prime minister, Hayato Ikeda.

Satō then entered the Imperial University at Tokyo (Todai), the traditional school for governmental and top business leaders in Japan. He received a law degree in 1924. His classmates included six other members of the diet, one supreme court justice, three bank presidents, Fuji Iron and Steel president Shigeo Nagano, and Sankei Shimbun (newspaper) president Shigeo Mizuno. The latter two formed half of Satō’s Koba Chu quartet, giving him in effect a joint chiefs of staff relationship to the business community during his prime ministry.

Immediately on graduation, Satō joined the ministry of railways (later transportation), for which he held a number of administrative positions. In 1926, he married the niece of the president of the Manchurian Southern Railroad. It was a typical arranged marriage, and his wife said it took her ten years to understand him. They had two sons, Ryutaro and Shinji, the latter of whom has a close marital relationship to Michiko, empress of Japan. From August, 1934, to April, 1936, Satō was on a study tour of the United States, learning railroad operations and business methods. In both 1938 and 1939, he was sent to China to direct railroad construction. During World War II, he continued to operate in the ministry, trying to keep transportation going during wartime. Satō remained a part of the Asian Study Group throughout his political career.

Life’s Work

At the end of the Pacific War, Satō was not imprisoned, as was his second brother, who had served in the Tōjō cabinet. Fortunately, Satō was still at the subdirector level, whose members mostly escaped imprisonment. In 1945, he was named director of the Osaka District Railway Bureau and then vice minister of transportation in 1947. His efficiency in dealing with the construction led him to the attention of Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who named him cabinet secretary in 1948. The next year he was elected to the diet as a member of the Liberal Party. Working well with the liberal, pro-United States Yoshida (the U.S.-installed prime minister), Satō also served as minister of posts and telecommunications and as minister of construction. In 1953, he became the secretary-general of the Liberal Party. By now he was displaying the ability to work well with all factions in politics, which was one of his greatest assets.

In 1954, the zosen gigoku scandal rocked Japanese politics. Several shipping companies were accused of giving kickbacks and bribes to government officials and party leaders in return for government contracts and subsidies. Satō was involved, and a warrant was issued for his arrest; yet Prime Minister Yoshida had his minister of justice order that Satō not be arrested. Later in the year, however, Satō was indicted on charges of violating the Public Funds Regulation Law, but the case was dropped in 1956 as a part of a general amnesty celebrating Japan’s entry into the United Nations. Meanwhile, in 1955, Satō had been one of the founding members of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), emerging in 1957 as the head of his own faction in the party.

In 1957, Satō’s brother Kishi became prime minister, and the next year brought Satō back into the cabinet as minister of finance. Satō and Kishi both strongly supported Prime Minister Ikeda from 1960 to 1964, and Satō served as minister of international trade and industry at a time when Japan was vastly increasing its international efforts. The climactic effort of Satō’s early career was the directorship of the Tokyo Olympic Games, which is considered to be the extravaganza that notified the world of the reemergence of Japan as a major power. Certainly it was quite successful for Satō.

On July 10, 1964, Satō challenged the incumbent Ikeda for the LDP presidency and prime ministry. Also in the race was Aiichiro Fujiyama. The election was close and hard-fought, but Ikeda was reelected. The fellow graduate of the Fifth Higher School in Kumamoto, however, was stricken with terminal cancer. In October, Ikeda announced his decision to resign. There was great concern in two areas. The LDP members in the diet feared another acrimonious election. Furthermore the zaikai, or leaders of the community of large businesses, were fearful of both of the other major contenders, Fujiyama and Ichirō Kono. Consequently the secretary-general of the party and the vice president of the party were allowed to choose the successor through consultation. Ikeda announced on November 9, 1964, that the sole candidate for the party presidency was Satō, and he was unanimously elected to begin the longest single term of any Japanese prime minister, serving until July 6, 1972.

During his prime ministry, Satō was always closely aligned with the business community, which gave him strong support and advice. The leading business club was the Choeikai, made up of approximately fifty presidents, vice presidents, and chairmen of big corporations, including the Bank of Japan, the Fuji Bank, Mitsubishi Heavy Industry, Hitachi Shipbuilding, Sony, Tokyo Gas, and Nissan, among others. The club was co-led by the vice president of Tokyo Gas, who was the father of Satō’s daughter-in-law. However, Satō was highly unusual in one way in his relationship to business, which was a long-term LDP policy. He had approximately twenty clubs, which included a total of 280 different members from business. Even his elder brother Kishi had been unable to maintain such a pace. In fact, older zaikai members were quite unhappy at times with this larger advisory group, even saying that their era had ended. It was during Satō’s regime, however, that Time magazine named the combination of business, bureaucracy, and legislative/executive leadership in Japan “Japan, Inc.” Certainly, Japanese business continued to prosper and expand under the Satō administration, but it was a Japanese business of far greater diversification.

One of Satō’s main interests was in party politics. He was reelected as prime minister three more times in 1966, 1968, and 1970. Only during the first election was there serious opposition, and he beat Fujiyama by 289 to 94 with 81 other scattered votes. Quickly he became known as Satō the “personnel manager” for his ability to see that each of the factions in the party, of which his was the largest, had a stake in the jobs available in the government.

As for any politician, domestic activities were extremely important to Satō. One of his major efforts was to persuade the businesses of Japan, in exchange for continued governmental assistance, to liberalize their pay policy. The average factory worker’s pay went from $500 to $1,500 annually, making this a very prosperous period for the worker in Japan. Satō also increased the governmental support for the national health insurance and the rice subsidy for the farmers. Always interested in transportation, he extended the Shinkansen (bullet train) line fromŌsaka to Okayama between 1967 and 1972. Discovering that Haneda (Tokyo International) Airport was seriously overcrowded, he originated in 1966 the New Tokyo International Airport Authority, which began construction at the farming village of Narita, Chiba Prefecture, about forty miles east of Tokyo in 1969. Serious opposition developed among both local residents and the opposition parties, which led to riots and eventual suspension of construction in 1971. Eventually, the airport was completed in 1978, after Satō’s death. In 2004, it was renamed Narita International Airport.

Satō’s policy concerning atomic weapons was extremely popular in Japan. It was named Hikaku Sangensoku, or “three nonnuclear principles,” and called for nonmanufacturing of atomic weapons in Japan, nonpossession of atomic weapons by Japan, and nonintroduction into Japan of atomic weapons. The latter policy, though widely popular in Japan, led to problems with the United States at times, particularly over the reversion of Okinawa to Japan. The sponsorship of theŌsaka International Exposition (World’s Fair) in 1970 was also considered a great success. These policies made Satō extremely popular in Japan and allowed him to win general elections in 1967 and 1970.

Satō is best known for his foreign policies. He was always interested in Asia, and one of his first policies was to normalize relationships with South Korea, a policy that was popular in the United States also. He also made a commitment of $800 million to build up Korea’s economy. In 1967, he made two visits to Southeast Asia and began assistance to several countries there. His China policy, however, was an anomaly. Though he had expressed interest in normalized relationships earlier, his original policy was support of the isolation of China, similar to that of the United States. In 1971, however, when Richard M. Nixon went to China, Satō and the Japanese government were not informed of the trip, and it created what was called the Nixon Shocks. This policy seemed a great affront to a loyal ally and was considered a possible hindrance in the continuation of normal relationships. However, Satō loyally continued to support the United States.

Much of this continued support related to the policy of reversion of Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu Islands. First acquired by Japanese rulers in the 1600’s, the Ryukyus had come under complete Japanese control in 1895. They had been occupied by U.S. forces in 1945 and not returned to Japan. Satō made it his policy from the first to obtain their reversion. At first he was unwilling to allow continued U.S. bases there but soon relented as long as atomic weapons were not allowed. In 1968, unable to effect a treaty for these islands, he obtained a reversion of the Bonin Islands, sixty miles south of Tokyo. The next year, Nixon and Satō signed a reversion agreement for the Ryukyus, which became completely Japanese on May 15, 1972.

Having obtained the desired foreign policy result that made him the only modern Japanese politician to expand the country permanently, Satō retired on July 6, 1972. One final honor, however, awaited him. In 1974, Satō was named a cowinner, with Sean MacBride of Ireland, of the Nobel Peace Prize. Several reasons were cited for his selection, the most notable being his nonnuclear policy. Also important were his Southeast Asia support, his support for the denunciation of war as set out in the 1947 constitution of Japan, and the reversion of the Ryukyu Islands peacefully to Japan. The honor was almost as much that of Japan as it was of Satō, since he was the first Asian to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, Satō emphasized the ordinary people’s portion in peace with their activities in art, culture, and religion, among other things, and saw himself as a practical politician who wanted to achieve policies peacefully and warned of nuclear dangers. Satō died in Tokyo on June 3, 1975.

Significance

Satō was a Japanese bureaucrat from a prominent country family who served continuously as prime minister from November, 1964, to July, 1972, longer than any other person in his country’s history. His greatest success was in the acquisition of the Ryukyu and Bonin islands for his country; he became the only modern Japanese politician to expand Japan permanently. He was also quite successful in expanding his country’s gross national product through an alliance with business, while at the same time tripling the average worker’s salary. He also normalized relationships with nearby South Korea and began the policy of assistance to less developed nations. The climax of his career was the receipt of the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize.

Bibliography

Edström, Bert, ed. Japan’s Evolving Foreign Policy Doctrine: From Yoshida to Miyazawa. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Examines in detail Japanese foreign policy.

Eiji, Tominomori. “Satō’s Legacy.” Japan Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1972): 154-159. This is a summary article mostly interested in Satō’s foreign policy, written just before his retirement.

Gray, Tony. Champions of Peace. New York: Paddington Press, 1976. This work has the best article on Satō and his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Kim, Hong N. “The Satō Government and the Politics of Okinawa Reversion.” Asian Survey 13, no. 11 (1973): 1021-1035. This article summarizes well the politics involved in persuading the United States to accept the reversion of the Ryukyus and the Japanese diet that it was permissible for the Americans to retain their bases.

Thayer, Nathaniel B. How the Conservatives Rule Japan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. Written during Satō’s administration, this book best summarizes Satō’s political policies.

Yanaga, Chitoshi. Big Business in Japanese Politics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968. This book, also written during Satō’s administration, illustrates well his election by business and his policies toward business.

Yasutomo, Dennis T. “Satō’s China Policy.” Asian Survey 17, no. 6 (1977): 530-544. An account of early China policy before the so-called Nixon Shocks.