Какуэй Танака: Жапония премьер-министрі және саяси өмір жолы

Prime Minister of Japan from 1972 to 1974

Kakuei Tanaka (田中 角栄) was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1972 to 1974. He served in the House of Representatives from 1947 to 1990. As prime minister, Tanaka advocated large scale infrastructure development and oversaw the normalization diplomatic relations with China. Afterwards he was arrested in connection to the Lockheed bribery scandals, but nevertheless exercised a dominant influence on Japanese politics until suffering a stroke in 1985. Born in rural Niigata Prefecture, Tanaka grew up under poor circumstances and received little formal education. As a young man he worked in the construction industry, becoming the president of his own construction company at a young age. He made a fortune from military contracts during the Pacific War. After the war, Tanaka went into politics and became noted for his earthy and tenacious political style. Becoming a member of the Liberal Democratic Party when it was founded in 1955, Tanaka successively served as minister of posts and telecommunications, chairman of the LDP Policy Research Council, minister of finance, secretary general of the LDP and minister of international trade and industry. After a power struggle with Takeo Fukuda, he became prime minister in 1972. Diplomatically, he pursued negotiations leading to the Japan–China Joint Communiqué. Domestically he pursued his "Plan to Remodel the Japanese Archipelago," an infrastructure development program, but his standing was hurt by the 1973 oil crisis. He resigned amidst allegations of corruption in 1974. Two year later Tanaka was implicated in the Lockheed bribery scandals, which led to his arrest and trial; he was found guilty by two lower courts, but his case remained open before the Supreme Court until his death. Throughout his legal problems, he maintained influence through his faction, the largest faction in the LDP, and was able to serve as kingmaker for subsequent prime ministers, which led to him being called Shōgun (闇将軍). 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. He was nicknamed Kaku san (角さん) and was known as the "ima taiko" (今太閤, modern taiko) and Shōgun (闇将軍). His politico economic direction is called the construction state (土建国家). He was strongly identified with the construction industry but never served as construction minister. When Tanaka was young, his father was involved with a series of financially disastrous ventures in koi farming, importing cattle and starting Niigata's first dairy farm,

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 an enlisted clerk in the Morioka Cavalry, reaching the rank of superior private (jōtōhei) in March 1940. After two years in the military, he contracted pneumonia in February 1941 and was returned to Tokyo to recover; he never re enlisted, leaving the army in October. Back in Japan, Tanaka ended up at 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.

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 Masanori Tanaka in 1942 (died 1948), and a daughter named Makiko Tanaka 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 ¥15b (about US$78m) in Japanese war bonds. In December 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% 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 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 Kenji Osano, who would remain one of Tanaka's most loyal supporters to the end.

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.

Tanaka became a member of the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955, when it absorbed the Liberal Party. When Nobusuke Kishi became prime minister in 1957, Tanaka was given 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).

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. 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.

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.

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. Tanaka built his faction largely by recruiting and supporting new candidates. This technique was used to some success by two prominent politicians decades later: Junichiro Koizumi, who recruited a large number of new LDP representatives dubbed "Koizumi Children" in the 2005 election, and Ichiro Ozawa, who did the same for the Democratic Party of Japan in the 2009 election. However, neither the "Koizumi Children" nor the "Ozawa Children" showed the same degree of loyalty as the Tanaka faction, with many "Koizumi Children" voting against Koizumi's reform agenda, and many "Ozawa Children" voting against Ozawa in his 2010 bid for the DPJ presidency. Makiko Tanaka, who was not associated with Etsuzankai, was elected to her father's old seat in Niigata in the 1993 election She lost her seat in the December 2012 general election, by which point Etsuzankai had disbanded with only a few elderly surviving members.