Japanese statesman and prime minister (19724), born in Kariwa Niigata Prefecture, WC Japan. A civil engineer, he established a highly successful building contracting business, and was elected to Japan's House of Representatives in 1947. He rose swiftly within the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), becoming minister of finance (19624), secretary-general (1965 and 1968), and minister of international trade and industry (19712), before serving as LDP president, and prime minister. He resigned in 1974, and in 1976 was arrested on charges of accepting bribes from the Lockheed Corporation while he was prime minister. He was found guilty, and subsequently convicted, but remained at home pending an appeal.
Kakuei Tanaka (田中 角栄 Tanaka Kakuei May 4, 1918–December 16, 1993) was a Japanese politician and the 64th and 65th Prime Minister of Japan from July 7, 1972 to December 22, 1972 and from December 22, 1972 to December 9, 1974 respectively.
Early life
Tanaka was born into a rural family with seven children in Nishiyama, Niigata Prefecture.
In 1937, while running errands for a construction firm, Tanaka ran into an elevator occupied by the Viscount Okochi Masatoshi, head of the Riken corporation.
The drafting office only kept Tanaka busy for two years: he was drafted into the army in 1939 and sent to Manchuria, where he served as a clerk in the Morioka Cavalry.
Tanaka went to the Sakamoto Civil Engineering firm, looking for office space to restart his drafting business.
Rise into politics
In 1942, Tanaka took over the Sakamoto company and renamed it Tanaka Civil Engineering and Construction Industries.
Luck favored Tanaka during the endgame of World War II. In December of 1945, as the first postwar Diet was being planned by the American occupation authorities, Tanaka was able to give generous donations to an associate affiliated with the Japan Moderate Progressive Party (Nihon Shinpoto).
In 1946, he moved from Tokyo to Niigata to prepare his first bid for a Diet seat: he worked around the election laws of the time by buying buildings throughout the district and placing large "TANAKA" signs on them.
Then, on December 13, Tanaka was arrested and imprisoned on charges of accepting ¥1m (US$128,000) in bribes from coal mining interests in Kyūshū. Yoshida and the DLP dropped most of their ties with Tanaka, removed him from his official party posts, and refused to fund his next re-election bid. Despite this, Tanaka announced his candidacy for the 1949 general election, and was released from prison in January after securing bail.
The Tokyo District Court found Tanaka guilty in 1950, and Tanaka responded by filing an appeal. That year's election was also the first in which he was supported by billionaire capitalist Kenji Osano, who would remain one of Tanaka's most loyal supporters to the end.
Etsuzankai
Tanaka's most important support base, however, was a group called Etsuzankai (越山会, lit. In turn, the local villagers all financially supported Etsuzankai, which, in turn, funded the re-election campaigns of local Diet members, including Tanaka.
During the 1950's, Tanaka brought Etsuzankai members to his residence in Tokyo by bus, met with each of them individually, and then provided them with tours of the Diet and Imperial Palace.
Consolidation of power
Tanaka became a member of the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955, when it absorbed the DLP.
When Nobusuke Kishi became prime minister in 1957, Tanaka was given his first cabinet post, Minister of Posts and Telecommunications.
Under Ikeda's cabinet, Tanaka became chairman of the Policy Affairs Research Council, and eventually Minister of Finance. When Satō became prime minister in 1965, Tanaka was slated to become the LDP's new secretary general, but the emergence of the Black Mist Scandal, where Tanaka was accused of shady land deals in Tokyo, meant that Takeo Fukuda got the job instead.
Fukuda and Tanaka soon became the two battling heir apparents of Satō's faction, and their rivalry was dubbed by the Japanese press as the "Kaku-Fuku War." Despite the scandal, Tanaka made a record showing in the 1967 general election, and Satō re-appointed him as secretary general, moving Fukuda to the post of finance minister. In 1971, Satō gave Tanaka another important stepping stone to taking over the government: minister of international trade and industry (MITI).
As head of MITI, Tanaka gained public support again by standing up to U.S. negotiators who wanted Japan to impose export caps on several products.
Although Satō wanted Fukuda to become the next prime minister, Tanaka's popularity, along with support from the factions of Yasuhiro Nakasone and Masayoshi Ohira, gave him a 282-190 victory over Fukuda in the LDP's 1971 party president election.
Tanaka's foreign policy mirrored that of Richard Nixon, and his most notable achievement was the normalization of Japan's relations with the People's Republic of China.
Scandals
In October of 1974, the popular Bungei Shunju magazine wrote a critical article of Tanaka's business practices, which inspired his LDP rivals to open a public inquiry in the Diet. (Among other things, Tanaka had purchased a geisha and used her name for a number of shady land deals in Tokyo during the mid-sixties.)
The Diet commission called Etsuzankai's treasurer, Aki Sato, as its first witness. Unbeknownst to the committee members, Sato and Tanaka had been involved in a romantic relationship for several years, and Tanaka took pity on Sato's troubled upbringing.
The Tanaka faction supported Takeo Miki's "clean government" bid to become prime minister, and Tanaka once again became a rank-and-file Diet member.
Then, on February 6, 1976, the vice chairman of the Lockheed Corporation told a United States Senate subcommittee that Tanaka had accepted $1.8 million in bribes during his term as prime minister, in return for having Japan's parastatal airlines purchase Lockheed L-1011 aircraft.
In retaliation for Miki's actions, Tanaka persuaded his faction to vote for Fukuda in the 1976 "Lockheed Election." This sparked a month-long war in the Diet over whether or not to censure Tanaka; eventually, Prime Minister Nakasone, himself elected by Tanaka's faction, dissolved the Diet and called for a new election.
In the "Second Lockheed Election," Tanaka retained his Diet seat by an unprecedented margin, winning more votes than any other candidate in the country. Nakasone placed six members of the Tanaka faction on his 1984 cabinet, including future prime minister Noboru Takeshita.
Fall from power
Early in 1985, Tanaka finally lost his power. The split in Tanaka's faction aggravated his existing problems with alcoholism and hypertension, and he suffered a stroke just three weeks after Takeshita's departure. His daughter Makiko spirited him from the hospital after authorities refused to give the former prime minister an entire floor, and the Diet session halted entirely while details of Tanaka's condition leaked out to the press.
Tanaka remained in convalescence through the election of 1986, where he retained his Diet seat.
The Tokyo High Court dismissed Tanaka's appeal on July 29th, and the original sentence passed down in 1983 was reinstated.
While his appeal lingered in the Court's docket, Tanaka grew older and increasingly more ill.
Makiko Tanaka, who was not associated with Etsuzankai, was elected to her father's old seat in Niigata in 1991, and became foreign minister in the cabinet of Junichiro Koizumi in 2001.
Tanaka's LDP faction has survived beyond his death. After Takeshita was sidelined by the Recruit scandal, the Tanaka faction rallied behind Ryutaro Hashimoto, who led the Tanaka faction (now called the Hashimoto faction) until scandal forced him to resign his leadership position in 2004.
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