Nobusuke Kishi

Kishi was born Nobusuke Satō in Tabuse, Yamaguchi Prefecture, the son of a sake brewer from a once illustrious samurai family that had recently fallen on hard times.[7] His older brother, Ichirō Satō, would go on to become a Vice Admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy, and his younger brother, Eisaku Satō, would also go on to become a prime minister.[8] Nobusuke attended an elementary school and middle school in Okayama, and then transferred to another middle school in Yamaguchi.[9] When he was about to graduate from middle school, Nobusuke was adopted by his father's older brother, Nobumasa Kishi, adopting their family name.[8] The Kishi family lacked a male heir, so they adopted Nobusuke in order to continue the family line.[10]

Kishi passed the extremely difficult entrance examination to enter First High School in Tokyo, the most prestigious high school in the country, and then attended Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), where he graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1920 at the top of his class and with the highest grades in the university's history.[11][12] While at the university, Kishi became a protégé of the right-wing legal scholar Shinkichi Uesugi.[11][13] Because he studied German law under Uesugi, Kishi's views tended toward German-style statism, compared to the more progressive approaches favored by some of his classmates who studied English law.[13] Upon graduation, Kishi entered the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.[11] This was an unusual choice, because at the time, the most brilliant aspiring bureaucrats typically sought to enter the Home Ministry and eventually gain appointment as a prefectural governor.[11] Some of Kishi's mentors even criticized his choice.[11] However, Kishi was uninterested in administrative work, and aimed to be directly involved in Japan's economic development.[11]

In 1926–27, Kishi traveled around the world to study industry and industrial policy in various industrialised states around the world, such as the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union.[14] Besides the Five-Year Plan, which left Kishi with an obsession with economic planning, Kishi was also greatly impressed with the labor management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor in the United States, the German policy of industrial cartels and the high status of German technological engineers within the German business world.[15][14] Kishi became known as one of the more prominent members of a group of "reform bureaucrats" within the Japanese government who favored a statist model of economic development with the state guiding and directing the economy.[16]

In the "Manchurian Incident" of September 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army seized the Chinese region of Manchuria ruled by the warlord Zhang Xueliang (the "Young Marshal") and turned it into a puppet state called "Manchukuo." Although nominally ruled by Puyi, who had been the last emperor of Qing dynasty, Manchukuo was de facto a Japanese colony.[17] All of the ministers in the Manchukuo government were Chinese or Manchus, but all of the deputy ministers were Japanese, and these were the men who really ruled Manchukuo. From the start, the Japanese Army sought to turn Manchukuo into an industrial powerhouse in support of the Japanese Empire and carried out a policy of forced industrialization. Reflecting the military's ideas about the "national defense state", Manchukuo's industrial development was focused completely upon heavy industry such as steel production for the purposes of arms manufacture.[18]

Location of Manchukuo (red) within Imperial Japan's sphere of influence

Kishi has been described as the "mastermind" behind the industrial development of Japan's puppet state in Manchuria.[19] Kishi had first come to the attention of the Kwantung Army officers as a rising star in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry who openly touted the policies of Nazi Germany and called for policies of "industrial rationalization" to eliminate capitalist competition in support of state goals—ideas that accorded with the Army's idea of a "national defense state."[20] In 1935, Kishi was appointed Manchukuo's Deputy Minister of Industrial Development.[18] Kishi was given complete control of Manchukuo's economy by the military, with the authority to do whatever he liked just as long as industrial growth was increased.[21]

In 1936, Kishi was one of the drafters of Manchukuo's first Five-Year Plan.[22] Clearly modeled on the Soviet Union's First Five-Year Plan, Manchukuo's Five-Year Plan was intended to dramatically boost heavy industry in order to vastly increase production of coal, steel, electricity, and weapons for military purposes.[18][23] In order to enact the new plan, Kishi persuaded the military to allow private capital into Manchukuo, successfully arguing that the military's policy of having state-owned corporations leading Manchukuo's industrial development was costing the Japanese state too much money.[18] One of the new public-private corporations founded to assist in carrying out the Five-Year Plan was the Manchuria Industrial Development Company (MIDC), established in 1937, which attracted a staggering 5.2 billion yen in private investment, making it by far the largest capital project in the Japanese empire; by comparison, the total annual budget of Japan's national government was 2.5 billion yen in 1937 and 3.2 billion yen in 1938.[23] The man handpicked by Kishi to lead the MIDC was his distant relative and old First High School classmate, Nissan Group founder Ayukawa Yoshisuke.[24] As part of the deal, the Nissan Group's entire operations were supposed to be transferred over to Manchuria to form the basis of the new MIDC.[24] The system that Kishi pioneered in Manchuria of a state-guided economy where corporations made their investments on government orders later served as the model for Japan's post-1945 development, and subsequently, that of South Korea and China as well.[19]

In order to make it profitable for the zaibatsu to invest in Manchukuo, Kishi had a policy of lowering the wages of the workers to the lowest possible point, even below the "line of necessary social reproduction."[25] The purpose of Manchukuo was to provide the industrial basis for the "national defense state," with American historian Mark Driscoll noting that, "Kishi's planned economy was geared towards production goals and profit taking, not competition with other Japanese firms; profit would come primarily from rationalizing labor costs as much as possible. The ne plus ultra of wage rationalization would be withholding pay altogether—that is, unremunerated forced labor."[26] Accordingly, the Japanese conscripted hundreds of thousands of Chinese as slave labor to work in Manchukuo's heavy industrial plants. In 1937, Kishi signed a decree calling for the use of slave labor to be conscripted both in Manchukuo and in northern China, stating that in these "times of emergency" (i.e. war with China), industry needed to grow at all costs while guaranteeing healthy profits for state and private investors.[27] Starting in 1938 and continuing to 1945, about one million Chinese were taken every year to work as slaves in Manchukuo.[28] The harsh conditions of Manchukuo were well illustrated by the Fushun coal mine, which at any given moment had about 40,000 men working as miners, of whom about 25,000 had to be replaced every year as their predecessors had died due to poor working conditions and low living standards.[23]

Kishi showed little interest in upholding the rule of law in Manchukuo.[29] Kishi expressed views typical of his fellow colonial bureaucrats when he disparagingly referred the Chinese people as "lawless bandits" who were "incapable of governing themselves".[29] According to Kishi's subordinates, he saw little point in following legal or juridical procedures because he felt the Chinese were more akin to dogs than human beings and would only understand brute force.[29] According to Driscoll, Kishi always used the term "Manshū" to refer to Manchukuo, instead of "Manshūkoku", which reflected his viewpoint that Manchukuo was not actually a state, but rather just a region rich in resources and 34 million people to be used for Japan's benefit.[29] In his later years, Kishi recalled how "inhuman" treatment of Chinese people had become naturalized among the Japanese colonial elite, turning human beings into "mechanical instruments of the Imperial Army, non-human automatons, absolutely obedient" to their Japanese masters.[29]

Tokyo's Pan-Asian rhetoric, where Manchukuo was a place where Manchus, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Mongols would all to come together to live harmoniously in Pan-Asian peace, prosperity and brotherhood meant little to Kishi or the other Japanese bureaucrats governing Manchukuo. Kishi only associated with other Japanese during his time in Manchukuo and did not mix socially with Chinese or other ethnic groups.[30] Instead, Kishi's dinner companions were fellow bureaucrats, businessmen seeking government contracts, Army officers and yakuza gangsters.[30] The presence of the latter was due to Kishi's involvement with the opium trade; the Manchukuo State Opium Monopoly needed distributors to move its products around the world, which in turn required contacts with the underworld in the form of the yakuza.[31] Additionally, Kishi used yakuza thugs to terrorize the Chinese workers in Manchukuo's factories into submission, and ensure that there were no strikes caused by the long hours, low pay and poor working conditions.[32] Because the Kwantung Army expected to settle Manchukuo with millions of Japanese to solve the problem of overpopulation in Japan, after the Manchurian Incident the army generals had sought to curtail Han Chinese migration into Manchukuo.[21] However, Kishi reversed these policies in 1935, arguing successfully to the generals that the yakuza would keep the Chinese workers in line and that to grow Manchukuo's industries required cheap Chinese labor to be exploited.[21] At the same time, Kishi repeatedly expressed a disdain for Chinese people as impure and unclean.[33] One of Kishi's closest friends and business partners, the yakuza gangster Yoshio Kodama, summed up his boss's thinking about the Chinese as follows: "We Japanese are like pure water in a bucket; different from the Chinese who are like the filthy Yangtze river. But be careful. If even the smallest amount of shit gets into our bucket, we become totally polluted. Since all the toilets in China empty into the Yangtze, the Chinese are soiled forever. We, however, must maintain our purity".[34]

As a self-described "playboy of the Eastern world", Kishi was known during his four years in Manchukuo for his lavish spending amid much drinking, gambling, and womanizing.[35] Kishi spent almost all of his time in Manchukuo's capital, Hsinking (modern Changchun, China) with the exception of monthly trips to Dalian on the world famous Asia Express railroad line, where he indulged in his passion for women in alcohol- and sex-drenched weekends.[30] When not visiting the brothels of Manchuria, Kishi was demanding sex from the waitresses who served him at the expensive restaurants he patronized. When he was locked up in Sugamo prison in 1946 awaiting trial, he reminisced about his Manchukuo years: "I came so much, it was hard to clean it all up”.[30] According to Driscoll, "photographs and written descriptions of Kishi during this period never fail to depict a giddy exuberance: laughing and joking while doling out money during the day and looking forward to drinking and fornicating at night."[36] Kishi was able to afford his hedonistic, free-spending lifestyle as he had control over millions of yen with virtually no oversight, alongside being deeply involved in and profiting from the opium trade.[31] Before returning to Japan in October 1939, Kishi is reported to have advised his colleagues in the Manchukuo government about corruption: "Political funds should be accepted only after they have passed through a 'filter' and been 'cleansed'. If a problem arises, the 'filter' itself will then become the center of the affair, while the politician, who has consumed the 'clean water', will not be implicated. Political funds become the basis of corruption scandals only when they have not been sufficiently 'filtered.'"[4]

Hideki Tōjō (right) and Nobusuke Kishi, October, 1943

In 1939, Kishi became Vice Minister of Commerce in the government of Prince Fumimaro Konoe. Kishi intended to create within Japan the same sort of totalitarian "national defense state" that he had pioneered in Manchuria, but these plans ran into vigorous opposition from the zaibatsu, who accused him of being a communist,[37] and Kishi was fired from his post in December 1940.[38] However, Kishi entered the cabinet as Minister of Commerce under new prime minister Hideki Tōjō less than one year later, in October 1941.[39] Kishi and General Tōjō had worked closely together in Manchuria, and Tōjō regarded Kishi as his protégé.[40]

On 1 December 1941, Kishi voted in the Cabinet for war with the United States and Britain, and co-signed the declaration of war issued on 7 December 1941. Kishi was also elected to the Lower House of the Diet of Japan in April 1942 as a member of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.[4] Kishi's many connections with the business world and his organizational skills proved an asset to keeping Japan's war effort going despite growing obstacles.[41] In 1943, the Ministry of Commerce was abolished and replaced with the newly created Ministry of Munitions. Kishi was forced to accept a demotion, becoming Vice Minister of Munitions as Tōjō concentrated power in his own hands by simultaneously serving as Prime Minister, Minister of War, and Minister of Munitions, although Kishi retained his status as a member of the cabinet. This demotion was the beginning of a rift in the relationship between the two men.

Meanwhile, Kishi increasingly became convinced that the war was unwinnable and that peace should be sought with the Americans. In July 1944, during the political crisis caused by the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Saipan, Tōjō attempted to save his government from collapse by reorganizing his cabinet. However, Kishi refused a request to resign, telling Tōjō he would only resign if the prime minister also resigned along with the entire cabinet, saying a partial reorganization was unacceptable.[40] Despite Tōjō's tears as he begged Kishi to help him save his government, Kishi was unmoved.[40] Kishi's actions succeeded in bringing down the Tōjō cabinet and led directly to Tōjō's replacement as prime minister with General Kuniaki Koiso.

In March 1945, Kishi founded a new political party, the National Salvation Society (Gokoku dōshikai), to oppose the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.[7] Kishi took with him 32 members of the Diet into his party. The National Salvation Society was noteworthy because almost none of its members were connected to the zaibatsu; instead the Kishi's new party comprised small and middle-sized businessmen who had invested in Manchukuo during Kishi's time in Manchuria or who had benefited from state contracts during Kishi's time as Vice Minister of Munitions; senior executives at the "public policy corporations" Kishi had created for investments in Manchukuo; and ultra-nationalists who had participated in coup attempts in the 1930s.[4]

After the Japanese surrender to the Allies in August 1945, Kishi, with other members of the former Japanese government, was held at Sugamo Prison as a suspected "Class A" war criminal by the order of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. Kishi, Yakuza boss Yoshio Kodama, his friend Ryōichi Sasakawa, a preeminent fascist political fixer and Matsutarō Shōriki, the former president of the Yomiuri Shimbun, lived in the same prison cell and were never judged. Their fraternity formed in prison continued for the rest of their lives.[42]

During this time, a group of influential Americans who had formed themselves into an "American Council on Japan" came to Kishi's aid, and lobbied the American government to release him as they considered Kishi to be the best man to lead a post-war Japan in a pro-American direction.[43] The American Council on Japan included former ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew, Newsweek journalists Harry Kern and Compton Packenham, and corporate lawyer James L. Kauffman.[43] Unlike Hideki Tōjō (and several other Cabinet members) who were put on trial, Kishi was released in 1948 and was never indicted or tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. However, he remained legally prohibited from entering public affairs because of the Allied occupation's purge of members of the old regime.

During his time as a prisoner, Kishi had already begun plotting his political comeback. He conceived of the idea of building on his earlier "National Salvation Society" to establish a mass party uniting the more moderate socialists and conservatives into a "popular movement of national salvation," a populist party that would use statist methods to encourage economic growth and would mobilize all Japanese citizens to rally in support of its nationalist policies.[4]

Nobusuke Kishi (left) relaxes at the house of his brother, the then Chief Cabinet Secretary Eisaku Satō (1901–75), shortly after he was released from Sugamo Prison on 24 December 1948.

When the prohibition on former government members was fully rescinded in 1952 with the end of the Allied occupation of Japan, Kishi returned to politics and was central in creating the "Japan Reconstruction Federation" (Nippon Saiken Renmei), drawing upon his earlier efforts with the National Salvation Society. Besides becoming Prime Minister, Kishi's main aim in politics was revise the American-imposed constitution, especially Article 9.[4] Kishi wrote that in order for Japan to regain its status as a "respectable member (of) the community of nations it would first have to revise its constitution and rearm: If Japan is alone in renouncing war ... she will not be able to prevent others from invading her land. If, on the other hand, Japan could defend herself, there would be no further need of keeping United States garrison forces in Japan... Japan should be strong enough to defend herself."[4]

Kishi's Japan Reconstruction Federation fared disastrously in the 1952 elections, and Kishi failed in his bid to be elected to the Diet.[4] After that defeat, Kishi disbanded his party, and tried to join the Socialists; after being rebuffed, he reluctantly joined the Liberal Party instead.[4] After being elected to the Diet as a Liberal in 1953, Kishi's main activities revolved around undermining the leader of the Liberal Party, Shigeru Yoshida, so he could become the Liberal leader in his place.[4] Kishi's main avenues of attack were that Yoshida was far too deferential to the Americans and for the need to do away with Article 9.[4] In April 1954 Yoshida expelled Kishi for his attempts to depose him as Liberal leader.[4]

By this time, the very wealthy Kishi had well over 200 members of the Diet as his loyal followers.[4] In November 1954, Kishi took his faction into the Democratic Party led by Ichirō Hatoyama. Hatoyama was the party leader, but Kishi was the party secretary, and crucially he controlled the party's finances, which thus made him the dominant force within the Democrats.[4] Elections in Japan were very expensive, so few candidates to the Diet could afford the costs of an election campaign out of their own pockets or could fund-raise enough money for a successful bid for the Diet. As a result, candidates to the Diet needed a steady infusion of money from the party-secretariat to run a winning campaign, which made Kishi a powerful force within the Democratic Party as he determined which candidates received money from the party-secretariat and how much.[4] As a result, Democratic candidates for the Diet either seeking election for the first time or reelection were constantly seeing Kishi to seek his favor. Reflecting Kishi's power as party secretary, Hatoyama was described as an omikoshi, a type of portable Shinto shrine carried around to be worshipped.[4] Everyone bows downs and worships an omikoshi, but to move an omikoshi, it must be picked up and carried by somebody.

In February 1955, the Democrats won the general elections. On the day after Hatoyama was sworn in as prime minister, Kishi began talks with the Liberals about merging the two parties now that his arch-enemy Yoshida had stepped down as Liberal leader after losing the elections.[4] In November 1955, the Democratic Party and Liberal Party merged to elect Ichirō Hatoyama as the head of the new Liberal Democratic Party. Within the new party, Kishi once again become the party secretary with control of the finances.[4] Kishi had reassured the American ambassador John Allison that "for the next twenty five years it would be in Japan's best interests to cooperate closely with the United States."[43] The Americans wanted Kishi to become Prime Minister and were disappointed when Tanzan Ishibashi, the most anti-American of the LDP politicians, won the party's leadership, leading an American diplomat to write the U.S had bet its "money on Kishi, but the wrong horse won."[43] Just 65 days later, however, in February 1957, Ishibashi was forced to resign due to illness and Kishi was elected to lead his party and the nation as prime minister.

On July 14, 1960, Kishi was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant as he was leaving the prime minister's residence to host a garden party celebrating Hayato Ikeda's impending ascension to the premiership.[75] The assailant was Taisuke Aramaki, an unemployed 65-year-old man affiliated with various right wing groups.[75] Aramaki stabbed Kishi six times in the thigh, causing Kishi to bleed profusely, although Kishi survived because the blade had missed major arteries.[75] Kishi was rushed to nearby hospital, where he received a total of 30 stitches to close his wounds.[75] Reporters raced after him and climbed on stepladders to peer into his hospital room, with nurses angrily closing the curtains on them.[75]

Aramaki was arrested at the scene, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to three years in prison in May 1962.[75] Despite being unemployed, he had somehow been able to post a substantial bail during the intervening two years.[75]

Aramaki never clearly stated the motivations for his attack. Despite the violent nature of the attack, Aramaki denied that he had intended to kill Kishi, later telling a reporter in an interview, "Yeah, I stabbed him six times, but if I wanted him dead, I would have just killed him."[75] Aramaki told the same reporter that he had visited with the family of Michiko Kanba prior to his attack, perhaps suggesting that he sympathized with Kanba and blamed Kishi for her death.[75] According to court records, Aramaki told police that he was angry at Kishi's mishandling of the Security Treaty crisis and wanted to "encourage Kishi to feel remorse."[75][76]

However, some figures close to Kishi considered Aramaki's supposed anger in relation to the Anpo protests to be a cover story. In her 1992 memoir, Kishi's daughter Yōko wrote that Aramaki was "a paid assassin, who knew how to use a knife, who was hired by someone who hated my father and wanted to hurt him."[75] In the prewar period, Aramaki had been secretary general of the right-wing ultranationalist Taikakai ("Great Reform Society"),[75] and in the post-war period, he became a member of LDP factional leader Banboku Ōno's private extraparliamentary pressure group (ingaidan). Many LDP politicians felt that the stabbing had been carried out at Ōno's behest, as Ōno had openly hoped to succeed Kishi as prime minister and was known to be angry that Kishi had thrown his support behind Ikeda.[76]

Curiously, Kishi was largely silent on the attack in his memoirs, devoting only two lines to it and saying only that he did not know the reason, and Kishi's brother Eisaku Satō did not even mention the attack in his diary entry for that day.[75]

After taking power in a coup d'état in May 1961, the South Korean dictator General Park Chung-hee visited Japan in November 1961 to discuss establishing diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea, which were finally achieved in 1965.[77] Park had been a Japanese military officer serving in the Manchukuo Army and had fought with the Kwantung Army against guerrillas in Manchuria. During his visit to Japan, Park met with Kishi, and speaking in his fluent, albeit heavily Korean-accented Japanese, praised Japan for the "efficiency of the Japanese spirit", and said that he wanted to learn "good plans" from Japan for South Korea.[77] Besides fond reminiscences about the Japanese officers in Manchukuo who taught him about how to give a "good thrashing" to one's opponents, Park was very interested in Kishi's economic policies in Manchuria as a model for South Korea.[77] Kishi told the Japanese press after his meeting with Park that he was a "little embarrassed" by Park's rhetoric, which was virtually unchanged from the sort of talk used by Japanese officers in World War II, with none of the concessions to the world of 1961 that Kishi himself employed.[77] During his time as president of South Korea, Park launched the Five-Year Plans for the economic development of South Korea featuring statist economic policies that very closely resembled Five-Year Plan Kishi had administered in Manchukuo.[77]

For the rest of his life, Kishi remained devoted to the cause of revising the Japanese Constitution to get rid of Article 9 and remilitarizing Japan. In 1965, Kishi gave a speech where he called for Japanese rearmament as "a means of eradicating completely the consequences of Japan's defeat and the American occupation. It is necessary to enable Japan finally to move out of the post-war era and for the Japanese people to regain their self-confidence and pride as Japanese."[19] In his final years, Kishi grew increasingly bitter that constitutional revision had not yet come to pass.[78] In his memoirs, he somewhat angrily recalled, "the idea of constitutional revision had always remained at the forefront of [my] mind... The two main culprits in destroying the momentum toward constitutional revision were Hayato Ikeda and my brother, Eisaku Satō, who, while they held power, made sure the constitution would remain unchanged. That is why the call for constitutional revision died with my administration."[79]

Kishi remained in the Diet until retiring from politics in 1979. Even after he retired, he remained a strong influence behind the scenes in LDP politics.[10] After several months of illness, Kishi died on August 7, 1987, at the age of 90.[10]

Kishi's family in 1923: from left to right, Kishi's wife Yoshiko, Kishi's brother Eisaku Satō (rear), Kishi's son Nobukazu, Kishi, Kishi's cousin Hiroshi Yoshida

In 1919, Kishi married his cousin Yoshiko Kishi, and was adopted by her parents. Their son Nobukazu was born in 1921, and their daughter Yōko was born in 1928.

Kishi's daughter Yōko Kishi married politician Shintarō Abe. Their second son, Shinzō Abe, served as prime minister of Japan from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 2020. Their third son, Nobuo Kishi, was adopted by Kishi's son Nobukazu shortly after birth, lived with Kishi during the later years of his life, won Kishi's historical Diet seat in 2012, and became Minister of Defense in 2020.

From the corresponding article in the Japanese Wikipedia

• Coronation Medal (10 November 1928)
• Order of the Sacred Treasure, 5th Class (April 1934)
• Military Medal of Honor (April 1934)
• Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun with Paulownia Flowers (29 April 1967)
• Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum (7 August 1987; posthumous)