Yasuhiro Nakasone
On Friday, November 29, 2019, former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone (May 27, 1917 – November 29, 2019) died at age 101.
Prime Minister of Japan from 1982 - 1987, during the Ronald Reagan years in the U.S., he was a conservative of the Liberal Democratic Party, a former officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy in WWII who challenged many postwar political taboos, based on his conservative political creeds.
Nakazone was the first Japanese Prime Minister I was aware of by name. He is one of a handful of Japanese politicians dubbed “yokai” (monster) due to their lengthy political careers and powerful influence - people like Kakuei Tanaka, Noboru Takeshita, Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe.
He pursued many of the same conservative issues that occupy hard-core members of the LDP today: revising the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution; increasing military spending; deepening Japan-U.S. military ties; paying official state visits to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which enshrines the souls of Japan’s war dead - including Class A war criminals from WWII. (It is important to remember that Yasukuni Shrine does not, in fact, contain any interred human remains. The souls of the war dead are “enshrined” there, not “interred” there. There’s a difference.)
Nakasone governed Japan at a time of rising international status and economic power, leading to trade frictions with the U.S. He boasted that Japan was an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for the U.S. in East Asia. He privatized the national railway company and split Japan National Rail into JR East and JR West. He abolished a long-standing policy of restricting Japan’s military budget to less than 1% of GDP. In 1986 he caused controversy by making a racist remark against minorities in the U.S. He said the “average” intellectual level of American people is “still very low because there are many blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans” in that country.
At first, he was thought to be a political opportunist. But he cleverly and deftly worked the election system well enough to survive an unusually long time in office.