The Yoshida faction and followers dominated
Japanese politics from 1946 through to the
1980s. A rival was Hatoyama, who had earlier
stepped down and passed the presidency to
Yoshida, whom he expected to make way for
him later. From 1956 to 1960 two protégés of
Hatoyama became successively president of the
party and prime minister. But the second of these,
Nobusuke Kishi, fell from power in 1960. Kishi’s
anti-unionist and anti-socialist stance earned him
the hatred of a wide grouping among the oppo-
sition. The renewal of the US–Japanese Security
Treaty in 1960 became the catalyst that brought
the opposition on to the streets in April and May
- The polarisation, the violence of demon-
strators and police, and the intemperate scenes in
the Diet itself presented the ugly face of Japanese
politics. These spectacles and the manoeuvring of
the factions within the LDP forced Kishi to step
down. Hayato Ikeda took his place, representing
the Yoshida line, as did his own successor Eisaku
Sato (1964–72). Eisaku Sato’s selection was prob-
ably effected by a deal between Ikeda and Kishi;
he had the advantage of being Kishi’s brother,
and he proved himself a very adept politician.
Sato’s eight years in office were notable for the
estrangement between Japan and the US arising
out of the Nixon administration’s demands that
Japanese textile exports to the US should be
restricted. Nonetheless, the renewal of the
US–Japanese Security Treaty in June 1970
prompted Nixon, after much Japanese agitation,
to promise to return Okinawa, and an agreement
to that effect was concluded in June 1971. A
month later relations were soured again by
Nixon’s announcement that he would visit China;
his failure to inform Japan of this reversal of US
policy towards Nationalist China on Taiwan,
which the Japanese had hitherto supported,
greatly angered the Japanese, who did not relish
being treated as very much a junior partner in
Asia. The second ‘Nixon shock’, in August 1971,
was a devaluation of the dollar – in effect making
Japanese exports more expensive – and the impo-
sition of a temporary import surcharge. The
Japanese interpreted America’s defensive eco-
nomic moves as unfriendly to themselves. These
foreign-policy difficulties and internal LDP
manoeuvres ended Sato’s premiership. In July
1972, after bitter internal feuding between Sato’s
two principal lieutenants, the younger, more
ambitious Kakuei Tanaka defeated Takeo Fukuda
to win the presidency and become prime minister.
Tanaka was unusually active in foreign affairs.
He visited Beijing, following in Nixon’s footsteps,
and toured south-east Asia, where memories of
the Japanese occupation were still too recent to
ensure a good reception. In Indonesia, the
Philippines and Thailand, demonstrators carried
placards demanding ‘Tanaka Go Home’. His pre-
miership was anyway a stormy one. In 1973 the
Arab–Israeli War produced the shock of the qua-
drupling in the price of oil. This hit Japan par-
ticularly badly, as it depended overwhelmingly for
oil on the Middle East, and there was widespread
panic. Tanaka now called in his arch-rival Takeo
Fukuda, a financial expert, to take charge of the
Ministry of Finance. Fukuda imposed drastic
measures to squeeze the economy. It worked. By
1975 the Japanese economy was expanding once
more by a healthy 6 per cent, which it continued
to do for the rest of the decade. Tanaka’s ambi-
tious plans to develop the Japanese regions had
been put into cold storage and were only gradu-
ally revived after 1975. More significantly, Japan
took effective steps to reduce its reliance for power
on Middle Eastern oil by securing alternative
sources and developing nuclear power stations.
Even among Japanese political leaders, Tanaka
was exceptional in the power and money he com-
manded. Institutionalised corruption had reached
new heights. In the end publicity about his finan-
cial misdeeds in Japan and in the foreign press
undermined his standing. The LDP factions
agreed to replace him with a minor figure, Takeo
Miki, to restore an image of propriety. But Miki
proved rather too energetic in trying to reform
the LDP, especially when he had Tanaka arrested
in 1976 for accepting bribes in the Lockheed
aircraft-purchase scandal. Lockheed had handed
over $12 million in bribes to Japanese bureaucrats
and politicians, including Tanaka, to ensure that
the aircraft order went to them. Tanaka spent
only a short time in jail and was then let out on
bail, still a power-broker behind the scenes
among the LDP factions. The close of the 1970s
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