Eisaku Satō

From left Sato (then Minister of Construction), Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida and Party chairman Saeki Ozawa (1953)

Satō was born on 27 March 1901, in Tabuse, Yamaguchi Prefecture, the third son of businessman Hidesuke Satō and his wife Moyo. His father had worked in the Yamaguchi Prefectural Office, but quit in 1898, and started a sake brewing business in Kishida, Tabuse. The family had a history in sake brewing and had held the right for sake brewing for generations.[1] Sato's great-grandfather was a samurai of the Chōshū Domain, with their outsized influence in Meiji era Japan, with more Meiji and Taisho prime ministers coming from Yamaguchi than any other prefecture. His two older brothers were Ichirō Satō, who would become a vice admiral, and Nobusuke Kishi, who served as prime minister from 1957-1960.[2]

Satō studied German law at Tokyo Imperial University and in 1923, passed the senior civil service examinations. Upon graduation the following year, he became a civil servant in the Ministry of Railways. He served as Director of the Osaka Railways Bureau from 1944 to 1946 and Vice-Minister for Transport from 1947 to 1948.[3]

Satō entered the Diet in 1949 as a member of the Liberal Party.

He served as Minister of Postal Services and Telecommunications from July 1951 to July 1952. Sato gradually rose through the ranks of Japanese politics, becoming chief cabinet secretary to then prime minister Shigeru Yoshida from January 1953 to July 1954. He later served as minister of construction from October 1952 to February 1953.

After the Liberal Party merged with the Japan Democratic Party to form the Liberal Democratic Party, Satō served as chairman of the party executive council from December 1957 to June 1958, followed by a post as minister of finance in the cabinet of his brother Nobusuke Kishi from 1958-1960. As minister of finance, Sato requested the US to fund conservatives.[4]

Satō also served in the cabinets of Kishi's successor as prime minister, Hayato Ikeda. From July 1961 to July 1962, Satō was Minister of International Trade and Industry. From July 1963 to June 1964 he was concurrently head of the Hokkaidō Development Agency and of the Science and Technology Agency.

Satō negotiated with U.S. president Richard Nixon for the repatriation of Okinawa.

Satō succeeded Ikeda after the latter resigned due to ill health.[5] He would go on to serve the longest stint of any prime minister up until that time, and by the late 1960s he appeared to have single-handed control over the entire Japanese government. He was a popular prime minister due to the growing economy; his foreign policy, which was a balancing act between the interests of the United States and China, was more tenuous. Student political radicalization led to numerous protests against Satō's support of the United States–Japan Security Treaty, and Japanese tacit support for American military operations in Vietnam. This opposition peaked with the 1968–1969 Japanese university protests, which eventually forced Satō to close the prestigious University of Tokyo for a year in 1969.[6]

After three terms as prime minister, Satō decided not to run for a fourth. His heir apparent, Takeo Fukuda, won the Sato faction's support in the subsequent Diet elections, but the more popular MITI minister, Kakuei Tanaka, won the vote, ending the Satō faction's dominance.

Okinawa issues

Since the end of the Second World War, Okinawa had been occupied by the United States. While visiting the United States in January 1965, Satō openly asked President Lyndon Johnson to return Okinawa to Japan. In August 1965, Satō became the first post-war prime minister of Japan to visit Okinawa.

In 1969, Satō struck a deal with U.S. president Richard Nixon to repatriate Okinawa and remove its nuclear weaponry: this deal was controversial because it allowed the U.S. forces in Japan to maintain bases in Okinawa after repatriation.[11] Okinawa was formally returned to Japan on 15 May 1972, which also included the Senkaku Islands (also known as the Diaoyu Islands in China and the subject, since 1971, of a Sino-Japanese sovereignty dispute; see Senkaku Islands dispute).

Satō and his wife with Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos

Satō shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Seán MacBride in 1974. He was awarded for representing the Japanese people's will for peace, and for signing the nuclear arms Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970.[13] He was the first Asian to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. (In 1973, Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho had become the first Asian to win the prize, but Tho had rejected it.[14])

While at a restaurant on 19 May 1975, Satō suffered a massive stroke, resulting in a coma. He died at 12:55 a.m. on 3 June at the Jikei University Medical Center, aged 74. After a public funeral, his ashes were buried in the family cemetery at Tabuse.

Satō was posthumously honored with the Collar of the Order of the Chrysanthemum, the highest honor in the Japanese honors system.

From left - Hiroko, Shinji, Eisaku, Ryutaro, & Fujieda (Matsuoka), 1931

Satō married Hiroko Matsuoka (松岡 寛子, 5 January 1907 – 16 April 1987) in 1926 and had two sons, Ryūtarō and Shinji. Hiroko's father, Matsusuke Satō, was Eisaku's paternal uncle. After Matsusuke died in 1911, Hiroko was raised by her maternal uncle, diplomat Yōsuke Matsuoka. Their son Shinji followed his father into politics, serving in both houses and as a cabinet minister. Shinji's son-in-law, Masashi Adachi, currently serves in the House of Councillors, and formerly worked as an aide for his cousin-in-law, Eisaku's grandnephew, Shinzo Abe.

In a 1969 Shukan Asahi interview with novelist Shūsaku Endō, Hiroko accused Satō of being a rake and a wife-beater.[15] His hobbies included golf, fishing, and the Japanese tea ceremony.[3] Nobusuke Kishi (his older brother) and Shinzō Abe (his grandnephew) were also both prime ministers.[16]

Satō received the following awards:

• Golden Pheasant Award of the Scout Association of Japan (1970)[17]
• Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (3 November 1972)
• Nobel Peace Prize (12 May 1974)[3]
• Collar of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (3 June 1975; posthumous)
• Junior First Rank (3 June 1975)

• List of Japanese Nobel laureates
• List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Tokyo

• Dufourmont, Eddy (2008). "Satō Eisaku, Yasuoka Masahiro and the Re-Establishment of 11 February as National Day: the Political Use of National Memory in Postwar Japan". In Wolfgang Schwentker and Sven Saaler ed., The Power of Memory in Modern Japan, Brill, pp. 204–222. ISBN 978-19-05-24638-0
• Edström Bert (1999). Japan's Evolving Foreign Policy Doctrine: From Yoshida to Miyazawa. Palgrave Macmillan. Chapter 5: "The Cautious and Discreet Prime Minister: Satō Eisaku". ISBN 978-1-349-27303-4
• Hattori, Ryuji (2020). Eisaku Sato, Japanese Prime Minister, 1964-72: Okinawa, Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics and the Nobel Prize. Routledge. ISBN 978-1003083306
• Hoey, Fintan (2015). Satō, America and the Cold War: US-Japanese Relations, 1964–72. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-45763-9
• Kapur, Nick (2018). "The Empire Strikes Back? The 1968 Meiji Centennial Celebrations and the Revival of Japanese Nationalism". Japanese Studies 38:3. pp. 305–328.
• Tsuda, Taro (2019). Satō Eisaku and the Establishment of Single-Party Rule in Postwar Japan. PhD dissertation. Harvard University.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Eisaku Sato.

• Film Footage of Eisaku Sato's State Visit to Washington DC
• Eisaku Satō on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture 11 December 1974 The Pursuit of Peace and Japan in the Nuclear Ageää
• Satō Eisaku EB article
• Japanese government home page
• Brief summary of the debate around Eiskau Sato's Nobel Prize at OpenLearn Archived 7 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine