74 Facts About Kakuei Tanaka

Kakuei Tanaka was a Japanese politician who served as prime minister of Japan from 1972 to 1974.

Kakuei Tanaka later received an engineering education and founded his own construction company in 1936.

Kakuei Tanaka joined the Liberal Democratic Party on its foundation in 1955, and held a series of cabinet positions, including posts and telecommunications minister from 1957 to 1958, finance minister from 1962 to 1965, and international trade and industry minister from 1971 to 1972.

Kakuei Tanaka built up a large faction in the party by political maneuvering and extensive use of money.

In 1972, Kakuei Tanaka established relations with the People's Republic of China.

However, Kakuei Tanaka remained free on appeal to the Supreme Court until his death in 1993.

Kakuei Tanaka was born on 4 May 1918, in the village of Futada in the Kariwa District of Niigata Prefecture, now part of Kashiwazaki.

Kakuei Tanaka was born to a farming family, the second son of Kakuji Tanaka and his wife Fume.

Kakuei Tanaka otherwise had six sisters, two elder and four younger.

Kakuei Tanaka contracted diphtheria at the age of two and the aftereffects caused him to stutter, but he lost it by practicing his speech by himself for long periods as a child.

Kakuei Tanaka excelled in school, but his family's poverty meant he could not pursue higher education after graduating from higher elementary school at the age of fourteen.

Kakuei Tanaka ended up quitting his job after a dispute with his foreman, later working briefly for an insurance industry magazine and a trading company.

In 1935 the fortunes of Kakuei Tanaka's father turned, so Kakuei Tanaka was able to spend more time on his education.

Kakuei Tanaka took courses at a number of schools with the goal of entering Naval Academy, but he later decided to go into the construction industry instead.

In 1937, while running errands for the firm, Kakuei Tanaka had a chance meeting with the Viscount Masatoshi Okochi in an elevator.

The fledgling firm was successful as it received contracts from the Riken Concern, but after only two years Kakuei Tanaka was drafted into the army and sent to Manchuria, where he served as an enlisted clerk in the 24th Cavalry Regiment, reaching the rank of superior private in March 1940.

Kakuei Tanaka contracted pneumonia and pleurisy and was sent to military hospital in Japan in February 1941; he was discharged in October 1941.

Kakuei Tanaka was seven years Tanaka's senior and had a daughter from a previous marriage.

The marriage allowed Kakuei Tanaka to take control of Sakamoto Construction, which he merged with his own business to form the Kakuei Tanaka Construction Company in 1943.

Kakuei Tanaka revived his relationship with Riken, serving regularly as a subcontractor.

Kakuei Tanaka received a particularly profitable contract to relocate a piston ring factory from Tokyo to Daejeon in Korea.

In November 1945, Kakuei Tanaka met with Tadao Oasa, a veteran politician who served as adviser to the Kakuei Tanaka Construction Company.

Oasa was in the middle of forming the Japan Progressive Party and asked Kakuei Tanaka to contribute money, which he happily did.

Kakuei Tanaka worked around the election laws of the time by opening a branch office in Kashiwazaki and placing large "Tanaka" sign on the building to gain name recognition.

Kakuei Tanaka was better prepared for the next election, which came in April 1947.

Kakuei Tanaka had set up Tanaka Construction branch offices in Kashiwazaki and Nagaoka, employing a hundred people who would assist him in the campaign.

Kakuei Tanaka targeted rural voters; he became known for his diligence in visiting remote villages.

Kakuei Tanaka was elected in third place out of five seats.

Kakuei Tanaka took his Diet seat as a member of the new Democratic Party.

Yoshida and the DLP dropped most of their ties with Kakuei Tanaka, removed him from his official party posts, and refused to fund his next re-election bid.

Kakuei Tanaka was re-elected, and made a deal with Chief Cabinet Secretary Eisaku Sato to resign his vice-ministerial post in exchange for continued membership in the DLP.

Kakuei Tanaka's most important support base was a group called Etsuzankai.

Kakuei Tanaka became a member of the Liberal Democratic Party when it formed in November 1955, from the merger of the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party.

Kakuei Tanaka followed Sato rather than Ikeda, even though Kakuei Tanaka's stepdaughter married a nephew of Ikeda that same month.

Nevertheless, Kakuei Tanaka maintained close ties with the Ikeda and befriended his right-hand man Masayoshi Ohira.

Kakuei Tanaka was a friend of the commissioned postal system, by which local notables were commissioned by the state to serve as local postmasters.

Under his tenure, Kakuei Tanaka forged a strong relationship between the postmasters and the young LDP, and the postmasters would serve as important supporters for the party.

Kakuei Tanaka was appointed deputy secretary-general of the LDP in June 1959.

Around this time, Kakuei Tanaka came to be regarded as one of the "five commissioners of the Sato faction," along with Shigeru Hori, Kiichi Aichi, Tomisaburo Hashimoto and Raizo Matsuno: the principal executives who managed the faction of Eisaku Sato.

Under Ikeda, Kakuei Tanaka became chairman of the Policy Affairs Research Council, and eventually Minister of Finance.

When Sato reshuffled the cabinet and party leadership in June 1965 Kakuei Tanaka was appointed Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party.

Kakuei Tanaka's tenure saw the emergence of a number of corruption scandals involving LDP Diet members, collectively known as the Black Mist Scandal.

Kakuei Tanaka was given a low-profile position as chairman of the LDP Urban Policy Research Commission.

Kakuei Tanaka had so many contacts within the American diplomatic corps that he was said to have played a larger role in the repatriation of Okinawa than Sato himself.

Kakuei Tanaka entered the office with the highest popularity rating of any new premier in Japanese history.

One of Kakuei Tanaka's most remembered achievements is normalizing Japanese relations with the People's Republic of China, which occurred around the same time as Richard Nixon's efforts to do the same for Chinese relations with the United States.

In 1972, Kakuei Tanaka met with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to discuss the normalization of relations between the two countries.

Kakuei Tanaka's visit to Europe was the first visit by a Japanese prime minister since 1962, and his visit to the USSR was the first since 1956.

Kakuei Tanaka's 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.

Kakuei Tanaka's government expanded the welfare state through measures such as the doubling of national pension benefits, 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.

The Japanese economy, and thus Kakuei Tanaka's popularity, was severely hurt by the inflationary effects of the 1973 oil crisis.

In October 1974, the popular Bungeishunju magazine published an article detailing how businesspeople close to Kakuei Tanaka had profited by setting up paper companies to purchase land in remote areas immediately prior to the announcement of public works projects nearby.

Unknown to the committee members, Sato and Kakuei Tanaka had been involved in a romantic relationship for several years, and Kakuei Tanaka took pity on Sato's troubled upbringing.

The Kakuei Tanaka faction supported Takeo Miki's "clean government" bid to become prime minister, and Kakuei Tanaka became a rank-and-file Diet member.

Kakuei Tanaka was arrested on 27 July 1976, initially on charges of violating Japanese foreign exchange restrictions by not reporting the payment.

Many Kakuei Tanaka supporters viewed the scandal as an effort by American multinational corporations to "get" Kakuei Tanaka in response to his hard-line stance in trade talks with the United States, based on the fact that the scandal originated with congressional testimony in the US.

Kakuei Tanaka's 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, Kakuei Tanaka persuaded his faction to vote for Fukuda in the 1976 "Lockheed Election".

Kakuei Tanaka was found guilty and sentenced to 4 years in jail and a 500 million yen fine.

The LDP performed poorly, and Prime Minister Nakasone publicly vowed to distance the party from Kakuei Tanaka's politics, stating that the party should be "cleansed" with a new code of ethics.

The division in the Kakuei 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.

Public chiding of Kakuei Tanaka continued during 1985, including Sega's publication of an arcade game titled Gombe's I'm Sorry featuring a caricature of Kakuei Tanaka dodging various celebrities in a quest to collect gold bars and grow wealthy, with the title punning on the Japanese term for "prime minister", Sori.

Kakuei Tanaka remained in convalescence through the election of 1986, where he retained his Diet seat.

Kakuei Tanaka immediately posted bail and appealed to the Supreme Court.

Kakuei Tanaka announced his retirement from politics in October 1989, at the age of 71, in an announcement made by his son-in-law Naoki Tanaka.

Kakuei Tanaka's faction remained within the Liberal Democratic Party even after his death.

Keizo Obuchi inherited what was left of the Kakuei Tanaka faction, supported the election of Ryutaro Hashimoto as prime minister, and himself became prime minister from 1999 to 2000.

Kakuei Tanaka built his faction largely by recruiting and supporting new candidates.

Makiko Kakuei Tanaka, who was not associated with Etsuzankai, was elected to her father's old seat in Niigata in the 1993 election and became foreign minister in the Koizumi cabinet in 2001.

Kakuei Tanaka left the LDP in 2002 and subsequently became a minister in the last days of Democratic Party of Japan government in 2012.

Kakuei Tanaka lost her seat in the December 2012 general election, by which point Etsuzankai had disbanded with only a few elderly surviving members.

Makiko Kakuei Tanaka ascribed the fire to an incense stick that had not been extinguished in the Buddhist family altar.

Kakuei Tanaka advocated for an classical free-enterprises system with a welfare state and regulation of the national economy.

Kakuei Tanaka embraced something which is called Pragmatic Conservatism and High-Modernism which is seen as populist and technocratic.