70 Facts About Nobusuke Kishi

Nobusuke Kishi was a Japanese bureaucrat and politician who served as prime minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960.

Nobusuke Kishi rose through the ranks at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and during the 1930s led the industrial development of Manchukuo, where he exploited Chinese slave labor.

Nobusuke Kishi served in the wartime cabinet of Hideki Tojo as minister of commerce and industry from 1941 to 1943 and vice minister of munitions from 1943 to 1944.

Nobusuke Kishi was thus key in establishing the "1955 System" under which the LDP remains Japan's dominant party.

Nobusuke Kishi served as the first secretary-general of the LDP and as foreign minister under Prime Minister Tanzan Ishibashi before succeeding Ishibashi in 1957.

Nobusuke Kishi remained a member of the House of Representatives until 1979 as a staunch anti-communist and conservative with links to right-wing groups.

Nobusuke Kishi attended an elementary school and middle school in Okayama, and then transferred to another middle school in Yamaguchi.

When he was about to graduate from middle school, Nobusuke was adopted by his father's older brother, Nobumasa Kishi, adopting their family name.

Nobusuke Kishi passed the difficult entrance examination to enter First Higher School in Tokyo, the most prestigious preparatory school in the country, and then attended the Faculty of Law of Tokyo Imperial University.

However, Nobusuke Kishi was uninterested in administrative work, and aimed to be directly involved in Japan's economic development.

In 1925, the Ministry was split into the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, with Nobusuke Kishi becoming part of the latter.

Nobusuke 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.

Nobusuke Kishi was a trusted subordinate of Shinji Yoshino, his senior in the ministry.

Nobusuke Kishi was named chief of the industrial policy section in January 1932, chief of the documents section in December 1933, and ultimately chief of the Industrial Affairs Bureau in April 1935.

Nobusuke Kishi has been described as the "mastermind" behind the industrial development of Japan's puppet state in Manchuria.

In 1935, Nobusuke Kishi was appointed Manchukuo's Vice Minister of Industrial Development.

Nobusuke 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.

In 1936, Nobusuke Kishi was one of the drafters of Manchukuo's first Five-Year Plan.

Nobusuke Kishi was instrumental in recruiting Nissan Group founder Yoshisuke Aikawa as president of the MIDC.

The system that Nobusuke 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.

Nobusuke Kishi showed little interest in upholding the rule of law in Manchukuo.

Nobusuke Kishi expressed views typical of his fellow colonial bureaucrats when he disparagingly referred to Chinese people as "lawless bandits" who were "incapable of governing themselves".

In 1939, Nobusuke Kishi became Vice Minister of Commerce and Industy in the government of Prince Fumimaro Konoe.

Nobusuke 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, and Nobusuke Kishi was fired from his post in December 1940.

However, Nobusuke Kishi entered the cabinet as Minister of Commerce and Industry under new prime minister Hideki Tojo less than one year later, in October 1941.

On 1 December 1941, Nobusuke 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.

Nobusuke Kishi was elected to the Lower House of the Diet of Japan in April 1942 as a member of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.

Nobusuke Kishi was forced to accept a demotion, becoming Vice Minister of Munitions as Tojo concentrated power in his own hands by simultaneously serving as prime minister, Minister of War, and Minister of Munitions, although Nobusuke Kishi retained his status as a member of the cabinet.

Meanwhile, Nobusuke Kishi increasingly became convinced that the war was unwinnable under Tojo.

However, Nobusuke Kishi refused a request to resign, telling Tojo he would only resign if the prime minister resigned along with the entire cabinet, saying a partial reorganization was unacceptable.

Nobusuke Kishi's actions succeeded in bringing down the Tojo cabinet and led directly to Tojo's replacement as prime minister with General Kuniaki Koiso.

Between January and March 1945 Nobusuke Kishi held meetings with several close associates such as Ryoichi Sasakawa, a preeminent fascist political fixer; Yoshio Kodama, a prominent rightist deeply involved in Japan's criminal underworld; Mamoru Shigemitsu, the then-Foreign Minister; and party politician and future prime minister Ichiro Hatoyama.

Nobusuke Kishi's plans coincided with the dissolution of the Imperial Rule Assistance Political Association in March 1945.

Unlike Hideki Tojo who were put on trial, Nobusuke Kishi was released in December 1948 as part of the Reverse Course, and was never indicted or tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

Nobusuke Kishi conceived of the idea of building on his earlier National Defense Brotherhood 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.

Nobusuke Kishi had foreseen this eventuality, and by this time, had already identified over 200 members of the Diet who would be willing to join him in forming a new political party to challenge Yoshida.

Nobusuke Kishi wooed these politicians by flashing "show money" that he had been supplied by his powerful big business backers.

In November 1954, Nobusuke Kishi co-founded the new Democratic Party along with Ichiro Hatoyama.

Hatoyama was the party leader, but Nobusuke Kishi was the party secretary, and crucially, controlled the party's finances, which thus made him the dominant force within the Democrats.

When Hatoyama stepped down in December 1956, Nobusuke Kishi was considered the leading candidate to succeed him.

Nobusuke Kishi came first in the first round in the party presidential election, but was narrowly defeated by Tanzan Ishibashi in the second due to the Ishibashi camp cooperating with the third candidate Mitsujiro Ishii.

The Americans wanted Nobusuke Kishi to become prime minister and were disappointed when Ishibashi, the least pro-American among the major LDP figures, won the party's leadership, leading an American diplomat to write the US had bet its "money on Nobusuke Kishi, but the wrong horse won".

In February 1957, Nobusuke Kishi became prime minister following the resignation of the ailing Tanzan Ishibashi.

Besides his desire for a more independent foreign policy, Nobusuke Kishi wanted to establish close economic relations with the various states of South-East Asia.

Finally, Nobusuke Kishi wanted the Allies to commute the remaining sentences of the Class B and Class C war criminals still in serving their prison sentences, arguing that for Japan to play its role in the Cold War as a Western ally required forgetting about Japan's war crimes in the past.

In 1957, Nobusuke Kishi presented a plan for a Japanese-dominated Asian Development Fund, which was to operate under the slogan "Economic Development for Asia by Asia", calling for Japan to invest millions of yen in Southeast Asia.

In pursuit of the ADF, Nobusuke Kishi visited India, Pakistan, Burma, Thailand, Ceylon, and Taiwan in May 1957, asking the leaders of those states to join the ADF, but with the exception of Taiwan, which agreed to join, the other nations gave equivocal answers.

Nobusuke Kishi always saw the system created by the Americans as temporary and intended that one day Japan would resume its role as a great power; in the interim, he was prepared to work within the American-created system both domestically and internationally to safeguard what he regarded as Japan's interests.

The American ambassador Douglas MacArthur II had reported to Washington that Nobusuke Kishi was the only Japanese politician who could stem the tide towards anti-Americanism in the country, and if the US refused to revise the security treaty in Japan's favor, Japan could turn toward neutralism or accommodation with the communist bloc.

The US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, wrote in a memo to President Eisenhower that the United States was "at the point of having to make a Big Bet" in Japan and Nobusuke Kishi was the "only bet we had left in Japan".

Meanwhile, Nobusuke Kishi was able to take advantage of a growing anti-US military base movement in Japan, as exemplified by the ongoing Sunagawa Struggle over proposed expansion of the US air base at Tachikawa and the explosion of anger in Japan over the Girard Incident, to insinuate to US leaders that if the treaty were not revised the continued existence of US bases in Japan might become untenable.

In late 1959, it became clear that Nobusuke Kishi intended to break with longstanding precedent that prime ministers serve no more than two consecutive terms.

Nobusuke Kishi hoped that by successfully revising the Security Treaty, he would have attained the political capital necessary to pull off this feat.

Meanwhile, final negotiations on the new treaty wrapped up in 1959, and in January 1960, Nobusuke Kishi traveled to Washington, DC, where he signed the new treaty with President Eisenhower on January 19.

On May 19,1960, Nobusuke Kishi suddenly called for a snap vote on the Treaty.

When Socialist Diet members attempted a sit-in to block the vote, Nobusuke Kishi introduced 500 policemen into the Diet and had his political opponents physically dragged out by the police.

Nobusuke Kishi then passed the revised Treaty with only members of his own party present.

Desperate to stay in office long enough to host Eisenhower's visit, Nobusuke Kishi hoped to secure the streets in time for Eisenhower's arrival by calling out the Japan Self Defense Forces and tens of thousands of right-wing thugs that would be provided by his friend, the yakuza-affiliated right-wing "fixer" Yoshio Kodama.

On July 15,1960, Nobusuke Kishi officially resigned and Hayato Ikeda became prime minister.

Ikeda soon made clear that there would be no further attempts by the LDP to revise Article 9 of the Constitution for the foreseeable future, which from Nobusuke Kishi's perspective, meant that all of his efforts had been for naught.

On July 14,1960, Nobusuke 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.

Nobusuke Kishi was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he received a total of 30 stitches to close his wounds.

However, some figures close to Nobusuke Kishi considered Aramaki's supposed anger in relation to the Anpo protests to be a cover story.

Curiously, Nobusuke 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 Nobusuke Kishi's brother Eisaku Sato did not even mention the attack in his diary entry for that day.

Nobusuke 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 Nobusuke Kishi himself employed.

Nobusuke Kishi remained in the Diet until retiring from politics in 1979.

At that point, Nobusuke Kishi asked one of his close friends, the yakuza gangster Yoshio Kodama, to provide thugs from the underworld for Sukarno's protection.

Nobusuke Kishi sought to commemorate executed Class A war criminals.

In 1960, Nobusuke Kishi was involved in dedicating, on Mount Sangane in Aichi prefecture, a headstone to General Tojo and six other military leaders executed after the Tokyo war crimes trial, marking their grave as that of "the seven patriots who died for their country".

Nobusuke Kishi was publicly known as a friend of the sect's leader Sun Myung Moon.