Working Paper No.
83, December 2001
Kishi and Corruption: An Anatomy of the 1955 System
by Richard J. Samuels
The
extended period in Japanese politics during which a single conservative party
(i.e., the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP) was dominant-- what has come to be
known as the "1955 System"-- was virtually coterminous with the Cold War.
Yoshida Shigeru (1878-1967) deserves credit for laying the foundation of this
system, but his "mainstream" conservatism was just one of several streams
flowing into the reservoir of postwar Japanese political power.* Yoshida's
preeminence and his legacy is challenged by a very different kind of
conservative, Kishi Nobusuke (1896-1987), who was also an architect of the
"transwar" system of industrial and economic policy. Yoshida and his disciples
represented the more decorous "mainstream" of LDP hegemony and worked
comfortably with the "orthodox" business community (seitoha zaikai).
Kishi, by contrast, managed to maintain contacts with the mainstream while also
connecting the non-zaibatsu business community and selected parts of the
discredited prewar world of ultra-nationalist politicians and control
bureaucrats (tosei kanryo) to the postwar conservative hegemony.
The
political choices of each contributed significantly and quite directly to the
"structural corruption" (kozo oshoku) that came to be a central feature
of Japanese politics and that sustained conservative power. Yoshida's
contribution was made before the consolidation of the conservative camp, Kishi's
came later. The system was not the result of their collusion, but of their
vigorous political competition. Yoshida never belonged to the Liberal Democratic
Party. The LDP was created by Kishi and his allies to take power away from
Yoshida and to undo many of the reforms that they felt Yoshida had rashly
acceded to under American pressure. Thus, it was Kishi who wove together the
still disparate threads of conservatism in postwar Japan. He did not displace
the Yoshida mainstream-- he widened conservative hegemony to accommodate the
rest of its constituent parts. While LDP dominance would not be fully
consolidated until Kishi's revisionist platform had been rejected and after the
LDP had moved back to the center, Kishi made the "golden age" of the LDP
possible-- above all for men like Tanaka Kakuei, who later elaborated and
transformed his model of money politics, and for maverick successors like
Nakasone Yasuhiro and Ozawa Ichiro, who took up his ideas for constitutional
reform. Kishi Nobusuke did not dictate the final terms of the conservative
project or of LDP dominance, but he contributed more than any other to its main
characteristics-- both respectable and disreputable. Nakasone has identified
Kishi Nobusuke as Japan's greatest postwar political leader.1
Reinvention and Rediscovery
Even in a Cold War world of
cynical opportunism and rapidly shifting alliances, Kishi's postwar
"resurrection" was remarkable. Kishi had been General Tojo's closest deputy for
nearly a decade, until the fall of Saipan. Yet, in June 1957, in the same U.S.
Senate chamber where a decade and a half earlier a declaration of war against
Japan had been approved, Vice President Richard Nixon banged the gavel to
introduce Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, proclaiming him an "honored guest" who
was "not only a great leader of the free world, but also a loyal and great
friend of the people of the United States."
Kishi responded
grandiloquently, testifying to his "honor of speaking in this citadel of
democracy" and his "belie(f) in the lofty principles of democracy-- in the
liberty and dignity of the individual." Many friends in high places-- both
Japanese and American-- had facilitated his postwar ascent to power but most
important was his ability to reinvent himself. Upon his release from prison in
December 1948, for example, Kishi drove directly to the Prime Minister's
residence, where he met his brother, Sato Eisaku, the Chief Cabinet Secretary,
literally to exchange his prison uniform for a business suit. He recalled to his
biographer that more than the clothing felt odd. "Strange, isn't it?" he asked
his brother, "We're all democrats now."2
Kishi began building his
political career long before the end of the war. He first ran for elective
office in 1942, while serving as Minister of Commerce and Industry. The
election, under the auspices of the corporatist Imperial Rule Assistance
Association (Yokusan Seiji Taisei Kyogikai-- IRAA), was minimally competitive,
as two-thirds of the successful candidates had been "approved" and subsidized by
the state. Future LDP leaders Hatoyama Ichiro, Kono Ichiro, and Miki Bukichi
were among the eighty-five successful independent candidates, as was the future
political "fixer," Sasakawa Ryoichi.
The wartime campaign gave him
considerable insight into the darker side of campaign financing. There were
rumors that Kishi had already enriched himself and his political allies while
serving as a bureaucrat in Manchuria. Connections to the opium trade through
radical nationalists and to industrialists, combined with his personal control
of the movement of capital in and out of the puppet state, made Kishi singularly
influential-- and likely very rich. Indeed, while still in China Kishi became
known for his consummate skill in laundering money. It was said that he could
move as much money around as he wished "with a single telephone call," and that
he did so both legally and illegally and for public and private purposes. By the
time Kishi returned to Tokyo in 1939, he had built up an impressive network of
political allies inside and outside government. He was already the prototypical
LDP political elder.
In 1944, even before the war's end, Kishi began
mobilizing this network. Once it became clear to him that the IRAA program of
"one party in onecountry" would not work in an environment of competing
interests, he created the "Kishi New Party" (Kishi Shinto). Building upon his
ties to industry-- virtually none of which were old zaibatsu affiliates-- Kishi
recruited thirty-two Dietmen. It was an eclectic mixture. Some, like his future
Foreign Minister Fujiyama Aiichiro, were independent businessmen with whom he
had collaborated in China. Others were ultranationalists who had planned the
ill-fated coups d'etat in 1931. Standing ready to help were senior executives of
the "public policy companies" that Kishi had helped to create, independent
(non-zaibatsu) businesses that Kishi had helped to nurture, and a large number
of small and medium-sized businesses that had profited from his wartime control
program.
Sorting out the Parties
The decade following the
end of the war was a period of intense upheaval for Japanese political parties.
The Japan Socialist Party (JSP), as the main opposition to the conservative
parties, led a coalition government under Prime Minister Katayama for ten months
from April 1947 to February 1948. Although some small splinter groups broke off
during 1948, the bulk of the JSP remained together until October 1951, when the
party split into separate Left and Right factions over the question of
ratification of the Peace Treaty and the Security Treaty with the United States.
The Communist Party, which had done well in the 1949 elections, veered off into
a strategy of violent revolution that cost it popular support.
The
conservative parties were more divided and underwent even more transformations
than the Socialists. When parties were reestablished in 1945, there were three
major conservative parties: the Liberals (Nihon Jiyuto), the Progressives
(Nihon Shinpoto), and the Cooperative Party (Nihon Kyodoto). But their ranks
were soon decimated by the purge of politicians who had ties to wartime
politics. Their greatest loss was the Liberal Party leader, Hatoyama Ichiro, who
was purged in 1946 when the Liberals had become largest party in Diet. In his
place, Yoshida Shigeru became party leader and prime minister. By the early
1950s the conservatives had settled into the mainstream conservative party of
Prime Minister Yoshida (the Liberal Party) and the Japan Reform Party (Nihon
Kaishinto), but the conservative political landscape was still far from
settled. Efforts to reconcile Yoshida and Hatoyama, after the latter was
de-purged in 1951, failed. Yoshida refused to relinquish control of the party to
Hatoyama, who had been instrumental in creating it. Prewar associations,
personal enmities, and numerous debts were all in play, and no unified
conservative solution seemed possible.
Conservative disunity was not
only personal. Much of it was substantive and policy-oriented-- and began with
the Constitution itself. No politician was more outspoken and energetic on the
need to revise the Constitution than Kishi. He worked relentlessly to gain
political support for revision so that Japan could rearm, become an equal
security partner of the United States, and enjoy an autonomous foreign policy.
He captured the attention of most of Japan's postwar right when he 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."3
Kishi was determined
to lead the right-wing conservatives to power, and he considered a number of
routes to that end. While still in prison he developed a plan for combining
right-wing Socialists and conservatives into a "popular movement of national
salvation" (kukoku kokumin undo) that would serve as a large umbrella for
politicians and policymakers like himself who believed in the efficacy of an
activist state that, working with a mobilized populace, could define and act in
the national interest. Kishi had a well-developed vision of a stable Japanese
polity ruled by a dominant party. Upon his release from prison, he revived the
model of his late wartime "Kishi New Party" and his prewar "Association for
Defense of the Fatherland" (Gokoku Doshikai) in the form of a "Japan
Reconstruction Federation" (Nippon Saiken Renmei). He built his
federation party around a number of former Minseito (one of the two main prewar
conservative parties) politicians and control bureaucrats, and made Shigemitsu
Mamoru, the former Foreign Minister, its nominal leader. The party goals were
anti-communism, promotion of small and medium-sized businesses, deepening of
U.S.-Japan economic relations, and revision of the Constitution.
Kishi
also tried to reach out to the moderate left, but when Socialist leaders Asanuma
Inejiro and Nishio Suehiro rejected him, he resigned himself to building his
party from within the conservative camp alone. Despite having raised hundreds of
millions of yen from industrialists-- many in the defense industry-- Kishi's
federation failed in its first (and only) electoral test. When Yoshida Shigeru
called for elections in the autumn of 1952, Kishi was not prepared and his young
party was crushed at the polls. Kishi, who had not run on his own ticket, had to
consider other options.
He flirted with joining the Socialist Party but,
at the urging of his brother, Sato Eisaku, he turned reluctantly to Yoshida's
Liberal Party. Kishi rationalized cooperation with Yoshida as a way of getting
inside the main conservative tent so that he might transform it from within. At
first, Yoshida-- whose battles with Kishi dated from their opposing positions
during the wartime mobilization-- wanted no part of him, so much so that he had
intervened with the Occupation authorities to keep Kishi from being de-purged.
But this was a time of fluid ideological borders and great political
desperation. Kishi brought to the table considerable political resources. He had
money and (not unrelatedly) a battalion of politicians, both of which made his
partnership palatable, if not appealing, to Yoshida. In the event, Yoshida took
him in and Kishi won his first postwar Diet seat in 1953.
Now a Liberal
Party Diet member with his own faction, Kishi lost no time in denouncing his
party's defects from within. He painted a picture of the party's leader, Japan's
prime minister, as a collaborator with the Americans who was unable to defend
Japanese interests. Kishi argued vigorously for Japanese rearmament and economic
planning, based upon a "democratic" anti-communism. Constitutional revision was
tougher. Yoshida tried to co-opt the issue by setting Kishi up as chairman of a
Diet committee to study constitutional reform. But Kishi used the committee as a
bully pulpit to undercut Yoshida's leadership. He pulled to his side several of
Yoshida's most senior colleagues, including Ishibashi Tanzan, the future Prime
Minister, as well as the Japan Federation of Employers (Nikkeiren), which
announced its support for a strong, new government. "We Liberals," Kishi argued
with extraordinary chutzpah, "must be prepared to make concessions to our fellow
conservatives. We must not insist that Yoshida be returned as Prime Minister if
this issue is a stumbling block to unity. We must be realistic."4
Kishi
Nobusuke was surely the equal of any realist politician in history. There was no
stratagem too cynical and no ally too close to betray in his pursuit of power.
Unwilling to wait for the outcome of negotiations between Yoshida and Hatoyama
to resolve their differences, Kishi forced the issue. He joined Ishibashi and
Ashida Hitoshi in April 1954 to create a "New Party Formation Promotion Council"
(Shinto Kessei Sokushin Kyogikai). Flashing "show money"
(misegane) that seemed evidence of his close ties to deep corporate
pockets, Kishi and his colleagues convinced two hundred politicians to join
their call for a new conservative alternative to Yoshida's Liberal Party. Not
surprisingly, Yoshida expelled him from the party after this open revolt.
In November 1954, Kishi took his faction and joined Hatoyama and others
to form the Democratic Party. Hatoyama, the once purged prewar Seiyukai
politician, became the party head. In Japanese parlance, he was the "omikoshi,"
the portable Shinto shrine carried (and steered) by Kishi Nobusuke, who reserved
for himself the post of party secretary-general. Together they called for a
conservative camp united against communism, for rearmament, for a more
independent foreign policy, and for regaining control of Japanese security.
Promising to call an early election, the Democrats gained the support of the
Left and Right Wing Socialist Parties for a no confidence vote that ended the
political career of Yoshida Shigeru and that brought Hatoyama to power. In the
subsequent election, the Democrats took 185 of 467 seats, while the decimated
Liberals lost nearly half their Diet strength. Kishi, now widely recognized as
the king maker, saw his own faction triple in size. Aware that the DP would not
be a stable solution, he immediately reached out to the rump Liberal Party to
complete the conservative consolidation.5
Just one day after the
Hatoyama government was installed, Kishi began negotiations with Ishii
Mitsujiro, the Secretary General of the Liberal Partyand other powerful
conservatives, such as Miki Bukichi. Hatoyama was not enthusiastic. He might,
after all, have to step aside in the event of a merger. Once again the
indefatigably ambitious Kishi was subverting his party leader. This time he got
even more than he had sought. What had begun as a campaign to create a stable
two-party system as a way to prevent the left from gaining power became a
hegemonic "one and a half party system" in which the consolidated conservative
camp, under the expansive Liberal Democratic Party, governed Japan for more than
four decades across a broad ideological divide rigidified by the cold war.
The New Political System
While it is now recognized that
"Kishi was the father of LDP dominance," and that he was "the central figure" in
building the 1955 system, the formation of the Liberal Democratic Party in
November 1955 must be one of the most over-determined events in Japanese
political history.6 Not only had Kishi been maneuvering to achieve it for half a
decade, but the Japanese business community and U.S. Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles each had openly demanded it. However, the clincher and proximate
cause was the reunification of the Japan Socialist Party in October 1955.
Business leaders issued the first open call for consolidation of the
conservative camp in late 1954 when they shifted support from Yoshida's Liberals
to Hatoyama's Democrats. The business community had been vigorously criticized
for their behavior in the corruption scandals of 1954 concerning subsidized
shipbuilding, and Keidanren's Uemura Kogoro became convinced that unless order
was restored to political finance, the conservatives would lose public trust and
the left would be free to attack business from a position of great strength.
Thus, in early 1955, in an effort to establish what he referred to as an
"insurance policy for the maintenance of a free economy," Uemura inaugurated an
"Economic Reconstruction Group" (Keizai Saiken Kondankai) "to clean up
and consolidate" political funding.7 Keidanren would try to short circuit the
direct links between firms and politicians that invited corruption by collecting
and distributing funds centrally, through a single channel. Two contemporary
journalists referred to Uemura's Keidanren fund as "Kishi's piggy bank."8 With
the new, somewhat more transparent, distribution system in place, Keidanren
reissued its appeal for consolidation of the conservative parties in May.
Nor was the government of the United States idle. In August 1955, with
then Democratic Party Secretary-General Kishi Nobusuke present, Dulles told
Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru that the U.S. had a strong interest in the
consolidation of the conservative camp; he may even have made further U.S.
support conditional on its coming to pass. Dulles reportedly told Shigemitsu
that-- like the zaikai -- the U.S. government was constantly getting
requests from Japanese politicians for financial assistance, and that it found
it difficult to respond. "If, however," he reportedly said, "the Japanese
government can unify, we will certainly be in a position to help even more than
we have (to date)." Dulles explained that the United States wanted a strong
Japan to help it contain communism and clearly thought that a strong Japan
required a unified center-right political organization.
The mutually
mistrustful conservative Japanese politicians were feeling the pressure from all
sides, and it was Kishi who first moved to take it all in hand. He convened at
least ten meetings, and the discussions frequently stalled over fundamentals:
Were they aiming merely for cooperation? Or did they seek full consolidation?
And on whose terms? Would the Liberals be humiliated and forced to join the
Democratic Party, or would a new party be created? Kishi pressed for the latter.
After a summer of protracted negotiations, the Socialists inadvertently broke
the logjam. Their consolidation in October 1955 led to acceptance of Kishi's
complicated "proxy system" (daiko iinsei) for selection of a new party
president, and to the formation of the Liberal Democratic Party one month later,
under the nominal leadership of Hatoyama Ichiro.
Kishi felt he could
maximize his own chances at a future premiership by refusing a government post
in the cabinet and instead reserving for himself the party position of
secretary-general. He already had the knowledge, experience, and financial
resources that a cabinet post would have bestowed, and now, as party
secretary-general, he would be responsible for all decisions about formal party
endorsements and campaign funding. He knew that he was distrusted by many former
Liberals, and saw in this post the chance to circumvent their animosity by
making each LDP candidate dependent on him. In its first test, the LDP won an
absolute majority of seats in the Diet, a position it would maintain for two
decades.
Revising the Security Treaty
The announcement in
1947 of the Truman Doctrine marked the turning point when the United States no
longer cared as much about democratizing Japan as about anti-communism. Yoshida
gave it his enthusiastic support, but Kishi would carry it even further,
pressing for changes in education, police administration, and, above all, the
Constitution. Once the LDP was returned to power in the June 1958 election, the
Kishi government moved vigorously to amend laws related to national defense--
including the basic laws that established the Self-Defense Forces and the
Defense Agency-- with the result that the number of Japanese uniformed soldiers
increased by 10,000 men. Concerned that the teachers were too sympathetic to
communism, the Kishi government also introduced legislation to force public
schools to provide moral education and to implement a system to evaluate the
teachers.
However, Kishi's efforts to revise the Police Law and amend
the Constitution led to failure. The former-- submitted without prior notice--
was widely interpreted as giving the police prewar levels of power. The new
legislation-- drafted after secret consultation with the Public Safety
Commission-- would have enabled the police to conduct searches and seizures
without warrants in order "to maintain public security and order" and to prevent
crimes.9 Kishi's proposals had to be abandoned in face of protests by both the
left (Sohyo called a general strike) and from within the LDP. Three members of
Kishi's Cabinet resigned to protest his bill to increase and centralize police
power. His effort to revise the Constitution, which he undertook even before the
1958 election, dragged on interminably, and was finally abandoned by Prime
Minister Ikeda Hayato in favor of a "low posture" in the wake of the tumult over
the Security Treaty revision in 1960.
The revision of the U.S.-Japan
Security Treaty (known as the Ampo in its Japanese abbreviation) is widely
understood as Kishi's greatest politicallegacy. For his supporters it stands as
his "monument." For his detractors, it stands as evidence of his unreconstructed
authoritarianism. Viewed either way, it clearly was a turning point in
conservative hegemony, as the LDP rejected Kishi's leadership and turned away
from a focus on foreign affairs toward high speed growth. Kishi's enemies on the
left were no less determined than his enemies within the LDP itself, many of
whom preferred to see the revision fail than to see him retain power.
To
proud nationalists, Ampo was yet another "unequal treaty." While the United
States expected Japan to increase its defense capabilities, it had also
handcuffed it to an immensely popular Article Nine that renounced the use of
force as a sovereign right of the state. U.S. troops were allowed to quell
domestic disturbances even after the end of the Occupation, and could prevent
the use of Japanese bases by any other power. The political right was encouraged
by the establishment of the Self-Defense Forces in 1954, but it was not
satisfied that this would suffice without Constitutional revision and a change
in the terms of the treaty with the United States.
Once it was clear
that the former was out of reach in the short term, revision of the treaty
became the main item on Kishi's agenda. After securing agreement with the United
States, Kishi battled forces within his own party, squared off against a popular
left, and had to contend with the largest mass demonstrations in modern Japanese
history. The Americans were easier to deal with. The United States was more than
willing to change the terms of the treaty, and through secret side agreements
was able to protect those privileges-- such as the transport and introduction of
nuclear weapons-- that it most cared about. Nor did the United States even have
to agree to return Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty for another decade. But the
Japanese public was another matter. In June 1960, hundreds of thousands of
demonstrators surrounded the national Diet building in central Tokyo. They
forced Prime Minister Kishi to cancel a scheduled visit to Japan by President
Eisenhower, for what he had hoped would be his crowning achievement as an
international statesman. A week later, after forcing the treaty bill through the
Diet without debate and without the opposition present, Kishi abruptly announced
his resignation.
The Public Face of Political
Finance
Business disillusionment with Kishi's leadership was already
widespread by the time he was ramming the revised Security Treaty through Diet.
Business leaders in Tokyo and in local LDP branches were calling for his
resignation as a way to restore political stability. While Kishi claimed that
"the business community was not divided" in its support for him, Keidanren (and
Uemura) had abandoned him in favor of the less controversial Ikeda. Of the major
business interest groups, only the Nikkeiren stood by him throughout the crisis.
Keidanren's political influence was threatened. By 1960 Uemura's
"Economic Reconstruction Group" accounted for some sixty percent of all reported
political contributions. He had assembled more than 120 firms and seventy
industry groups to make contributions. While the Group gave funds to each of the
other parties (except for the Communists), more than ninety percent went to the
LDP.10 The problem from Uemura's perspective was that this was only a part of
the total funds flowing from business to the LDP. He was clearly frustrated by
how many uncoordinated requests came from politicians to businessmen. The bigger
problem was that Keidanren's contributions were a declining part. Kishi had
unleashed factional competition for funds and undermined Keidanren's efforts to
consolidate the process by actively seeking to broaden the LDP's dependence
beyond Keidanren.
Two tracks had developed for business support of
conservative Japanese politicians. On the one hand, there was the formal track
of Uemura's single channel and the "Hanamura List," i.e., the preferred
recipients on the list maintained by Uemura's chief assistant. Uemura and the
Keidanren wished to fund only the party, and insisted that their contributions
be earmarked for election campaigns. These funds were fully legal and
reported.This single channel also provided firms with an excuse to decline
direct requests from the party and from politicians. They could claim they had
given all they were capable of giving. On the other hand, internal campaigns
among faction leaders to determine the party presidency were becoming even more
critical to the politicians-- and ever more expensive. That the Keidanren did
not want its funds to be used to support factional infighting was immaterial.
Factional considerations came to dominate most LDP stratagems-- and the factions
needed money. Kishi creatively turned to the non-Keidanren business class.
Theoretically, Keidanren became the source of "clean" funds and other sources
were found for factional support.
Kishi's strength was that he knew how
to suck money from both pipes. He was undeterred by complaints from Keidanren
about the escalating demands of LDP politicians. One of Kishi's political
secretaries explains: "Individual politicians and individual faction leaders
were all going to the same businessmen for money. The competition got so intense
that some of them made direct promises to the businessmen. It wasn't `dirty'
money exactly, but the business leaders did want to avoid giving `inconvenient'
(guai ga warui) and `strange' (henna) money."11
Under Kishi's
leadership, LDP factions were first institutionalized as separate entities to
compete for seats in Diet, for party endorsements, for the presidency of the
party, as well as for the business funds that would make each possible. They
became the leading object of political fund-raising. Kishi resorted to the
frequent reshuffling of his cabinet as a way to balance factions and to rotate
needy politicians through the high rent district of ministerial real estate.
Rather than replacing individual ministers, as Yoshida had done, Kishi changed
entire cabinets in order to spread the wealth. His successors, starting with
Ikeda Hayato, took the idea even further, and routinely changed cabinets on an
annual basis. As a result, Keidanren was not the only organized business group
being hit up by politicians in search of, in Hanamura Nihachiro's words, "the
money from which sprout the wings that let us fly."
There was little
Uemura and the Keidanren could do. Uemura explained that:
"It takes
money to run a party-- staff, meetings, study. But parties do not have their own
source of funds. Someone has to give it to them. The same is true at election
time. There are fees for filing for candidacy, costs for speech meetings,
publications, and so forth. . . . Instead of giving separately to each faction
member, we think it better to give to the party headquarters. Then again, there
are still a number of businessmen who give funds directly to individual
politicians; we cannot control this."12
But Uemura certainly tried.
Under pressure from the other business interest groups, especially the Keizai
Doyukai, which protested the misuse of their funds for factional purposes,
Uemura abolished the Economic Reconstruction Council and replaced it, in March
1961, with a higher sounding "Citizens' Association" (Kokumin Kyokai).
The purpose of the reorganization was to broaden the sources of conservative
party support to include money from small and middle size companies and
individuals as well as large companies.
Kishi was not invited to speak
at the inauguration of this group, while his successors-- and rivals-- displayed
the LDP's "kinder, gentler" face to the Japanese public. Ikeda Hayato, the new
prime minister delivered a speech at the inauguration of the new Citizens'
Association in which his references to-- and disdain for-- Kishi's practices
were barely veiled: "Ever since I became Prime Minister in the midst of the
uproar surrounding the Security Treaty crisis, I have not been able to keep the
issue of `correct political posture' out of my mind. . . . Our LDP, on its own,
has reflected about political finance and factional problems, as well as about
the way in which we connect to the people. We have come up with a major new
program-- shedding our old practices in name and in fact, as a modern party."
But skins are not so easily "shed," certainly not this one.
As Jacob
Schlesinger puts it, "Two distinct classes of leadership evolved in the LDP in
the 1950s and 1960s, the bagmen and the statesmen."13 Kishi wanted to be
recognized as one of the latter, but was not averse to playing the former. Kishi
himself offered the bluntest assessment of Japanese money politics. A half
decade earlier, during the battle for control of the party in 1957, he had been
attacked by Ishii Mitsujiro, formerly of the Liberal Party, for raising dirty
money. Ishii remarked of Kishi that "no matter how tightly you seal a bucket of
shit, you still can't put it in the tokonoma (place of honor in a Japanese
home)." Years later Kishi commented on the charge that "there are plenty of
buckets of shit to go around."14
There was a sharp increase in funds
consumed by the LDP after Kishi became Prime Minister. Kishi recalls confidently
(and with decided understatement) that he was not without resources and contacts
upon which he could call during his rise to power: "Among business leaders at
that time, I was closest to Fujiyama Aichiro, the Chairman of the Japan Chamber
of Commerce and Industry, and to Uemura Kogoro at Keidanren. Because I was at
the Ministry of Commerce and Industry for so long, I had connections with
businessmen in Osaka, Nagoya, other local areas, and was relatively well known
all around." Kishi's power to collect political money resulted from his
experience in MCI, especially when he was in Manchuria. The staffs at Keidanren
and at the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Nissho) were filled
with retired officials of MCI and the wartime control companies that Kishi had
organized and supervised. Collectively they were called "Kishi's savings banks"
(Kishi no chokinbako).
Those who did not go to these business
interest groups remained in industry where they were also in a position to help
him. In particular, a great many former bureaucratic subordinates of his had
"descended from heaven" (amakudari) into the steel industry, which was under
strong governmental control both before and after war. Yawata and Fuji Steel
donated much more political money to Kishi than did any other companies. It was
only after Kishi formed his first cabinet that he began to attract funds from
some of the more elite trading companies, such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui, and
from manufacturing firms such as Sumitomo Chemicals. But even then, his
relationships to them were dwarfed by his relationships to the non-zaibatsu
companies such as Nissan, Marubeni, and Ito Chu, relationships that had been
cemented in Manchuria two decades earlier.
The nature of these
connections-- and others-- nurtured so long and so diligently, allowed Kishi to
exploit a number of alternative sources of political funding. Realizing that
official Keidanren money could not be used to support either his faction or
other factions during party presidential elections, he devised different means
of raising money. He moved closer to small and medium sized firms (SMEs) through
his former Manchukuo ally, Ayukawa Gisuke, who had been made head of the leading
SME association upon his release from jail.
While Tanaka Kakuei, Kishi's
successor as the party's greatest "bagman," elaborated broadly on this basic
model, it was Kishi who opened the door to alternative sources of political
funds and who originated the most sophisticated money laundering operation in
Japanese politics. His "filtering apparatus" (roka sochi) has attracted a great
deal of attention, but it is more important to understand how Kishi built what
one of his biographers, Hara Shinsuke, has called an "exquisitely
institutionalized" system of money politics in Japan. This system took at least
three forms, each of which is close to impossible to document adequately but
each of which also had important institutional ramifications for Japanese
politics. Each is associated with the less reputable aspects of LDP dominance,
which were nonetheless as real and as important as any of those pioneered by
Yoshida Shigeru. Some of them, of course, intersected repeatedly and deeply with
Yoshida's mainstream. Together they constituted important and only dimly
understood resources of the "1955 System."
Using American Money
Kishi brilliantly exploited American paranoia about communism during
the Cold War. The historian Michael Schaller reports that Ambassador Douglas
MacArthur II convinced Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that the United
States had to support Kishi or risk losing the alliance. Kishi returned
triumphant from his June 1957 visit to Washington with promises that the
security treaty would be revised and, possibly, with promises of secret funding
from the Central Intelligence Agency. There have been rumors for decades about a
secret "M-Fund" that was constructed out of surplus military materiel that came
under allied control at the war's end in 1945. These stockpiles allegedly
included rare metals and diamonds, proceeds from the sale of which were used by
General Marquat, chief of SCAP's Economic and Science Section (hence "M"-Fund)
as a sort of Japan-specific secret Marshall Plan to stimulate the postwar
Japanese economy. The Fund was probably also used to underwrite the sudden (and
unbudgeted) formation of the National Police Reserve at the start of the Korean
War and to buy conservative politicalsupport for the alliance with the United
States.
According to journalists, M-Fund disbursements went to two
channels. One was to mainstream conservatives led by Yoshida Shigeru. A separate
channel was purportedly opened to Kishi Nobusuke to help sustain the
anti-mainstream group. Both were allegedly managed jointly with U.S. officials.
Former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei alleges that Vice
President Nixon turned over exclusive control of the M-Fund to Kishi (presumably
during their 1957 Washington meeting) and that this was when things changed:
"Beginning with Prime Minister Kishi, the Fund has been treated as a private
preserve of the individuals into whose control it has fallen. Those individuals
have felt able to appropriate huge sums from the Fund for their own personal and
political purposes. . . . The litany of abuses begins with Kishi who, after
obtaining control of the fund from (then Vice President Richard) Nixon, helped
himself to a fortune of one trillion yen. . . . Kakuei Tanaka, who dominated the
Fund for longer than any other individual, took from it personally some ten
trillion yen. . . . Others who are said to have obtained personal fortunes from
the Fund include Mrs. Eisaku Sato . . . and Masaharu Gotoda, a Nakasone ally and
former chief cabinet secretary."15
All, some, or none of this may be
true, but we know for certain that Kishi and his brother Sato Eisaku frequently
approached Ambassador MacArthur to play the anti-communist card in the hope of
securing financial support. According to Kishi's own account, he frequently used
the good offices of his friend, Harry Kern, a former Newsweek Bureau Chief, to
make arrangements for him at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo.16 Declassified U.S.
State Department records note efforts by Sato, then Kishi's Finance Minister, to
seek U.S. funds "to combat extremist forces." In July 1958, Sato met secretly
with one S. S. Carpenter, the First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy. According to
Carpenter's declassified memorandum of a conversation on July 25, 1958, Sato
explained that a "secret organization (of) top business and financial leaders"
had been established by the LDP and that this group had "contributed heavily" to
the recent electoral campaign. Sato explained that they would shortly have to
return to these business leaders for an expensive upper house campaign and felt
that the LDP and the zaikai could not "combat communism" alone. If there was
already an M-Fund to cover these requests, Carpenter did not let on. He told
Sato that the Ambassador "had always tried to help Mr. Kishi and the
Conservatives in every way possible,"but he declined to authorize the funds Sato
was seeking. In short, it is plausible but not yet demonstrable that Kishi
Nobusuke played a central role in establishing a financial relationship between
conservative Japanese politicians and the government of the United States.
Public Resources
Now that the archives of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs have been opened for this period, we have a better understanding
of how Kishi pioneered an equally intriguing-- and equally corrupt-- alternative
source of political funds. He systematically employed government programs to
generate business for political supporters and that, in turn, probably generated
substantial kickbacks for himself and his faction. This "public resources" model
opened a new and lucrative avenue for political finance. Tanaka Kakuei
significantly expanded and deepened it to the point that it became the
archetypal form of structural corruption in the 1955 system. Tanaka actually
once bragged that he got his first cabinet post by giving Kishi a backpack
stuffed with three million yen in cash.17
Kishi saw and seized a
splendid opportunity that Yoshida had dismissed out of hand by addressing the
demands of Japan's Southeast Asian neighbors for reparations after the Pacific
War. At first acting on behalf of the Hatoyama government and then on his own
account, Kishi negotiated reparations agreements with Burma, Thailand, the
Philippines, Indonesia, and Cambodia. Yoshida had stalled all negotiations over
reparations and criticized foreign aid, saying, "You have to trade with rich
men; you can't trade with beggars."18 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had
followed Yoshida's lead, promising little and dragging out negotiations
interminably.
Kishi was far more creative. He showed Japanese
politicians that one could not only trade with beggars but also enrich oneself
and one's allies at the same time. His innovation was deceptively simple. Kishi
noted the language in the various peace treaties allowing reparations to be paid
"in the form of capital and consumer goods produced by the Japanese industries
and services of the Japanese people," and he made sure that his business
supporters would be the companies that supplied the goods and services. Kishi
also increased the amounts being offered in reparations to the southeast Asian
countries as a way to direct even more public resources toward Japanese
industry. Kishi's pioneering use of Indonesian and Korean aid seems to have
inspired Tanaka Kakuei, who later took up the technique and applied it to China,
as well as Nakasone Yasuhiro, who expanded the practice elsewhere in the region.
The most visible and controversial example of the early use of
reparations for political finance was a contract let in February 1958 to the
KinoshitaTrading Company for providing ships to the Sukarno government in
Indonesia. Kinoshita Trading was run by Kinoshita Shigeru, who had been a metals
broker in Manchuria before the war, where he had forged close ties to Kishi.
When Kishi returned to Japan in the late 1930s, Kinoshita also did so and was
placed in the Iron and Steel Control Company, where he established close
relationships with Nagano Shigeo of Fuji Iron and Steel and Inayama Yoshihiro of
Yawata Steel, both of whom became enormously influential business leaders in the
postwar zaikai.
There was nothing subtle about these
relationships. When Kishi was released from prison in December 1948, Kinoshita
promptly made him president of his trading company, a nominal post Kishi held
until he was de-purged and could return to politics. Much to the chagrin of the
established firms in the industry, Kinoshita Trading won the first
reparations-based contract for Indonesia even though it had never dealt in ships
before. According to the declassified records, when Indonesian Foreign Minister
Soebandrio visited Japan in April 1958, Kishi told him that he would appreciate
the Indonesian government's awarding ship contracts to Kinoshita Trading. The
deal was investigated and roundly criticized in the Diet and the press, but
Kishi escaped unscathed. In addition, Kinoshita won overseas contracts for
office buildings, machinery factories, and hotels, making it the largest
recipient of reparations contracts among Japanese firms. By 1964, when it went
bankrupt, Kinoshita Trading was Japan's seventh largest trading firm.
The large and prestigious trading houses were shut out of this early
business in Southeast Asia using reparations funds. The winners were all
non-zaibatsu independents like Kinoshita that had special Manchurian ties to
Kishi and to other non-"mainstream" factions. The two other businessmen of the
so-called "Indonesia trio"-- Ayukawa Gisuke and Matsunaga Yasuzaemon-- who went
there in the mid-1950s to examine the prospects for resource development also
were linked to Kishi's Manchurian program. No complete list of contracts for
reparations has ever been published, but a 1968 MITI report showed that
Kinoshita Trading had the largest share, followed by Nippon Koei, run by a
former Manchurian economic planner under Kishi, and Ito Cho (C. Ito), in which a
former Kwantung Army officer, Sejima Ryuzo, was a rising star (he later became
chairman of Ito Chu).19 A fourth major winner was an unknown firm called Tonichi
Trading, whose board members included Kishi's factional rival, Kono Ichiro, as
well as their mutual ally, the mob-connected Kodama Yoshio.
The system
worked in much the same way as it did with domestic contractors for local
projects but involved many fewer competitors for use of the funds. Also, because
there was no open bidding, it required less widespread domestic collusion and
cartellization (dango) and fewer compensating transfer payments. In 1957, Kishi
institutionalized the program by establishing an "Overseas Economic Cooperation
Fund" to distribute reparations and, later, foreign aid (i.e., official
development assistance or ODA) through contracts let to favored trading
companies. The system involved collusion among LDP politicians, the aid
recipients, and conservative business interests in Japan. Nishihara reports that
the reparations payments involved "large sums of money," much of which ended in
the pockets of high ranking Indonesian officials who "were given a cut from
(inflated) profits." The Diet never enacted a basic law to establish guidelines
and regulate either the reparations programs or the larger ODA program that
derived from it. Each time legislation was proposed, the bureaucracy and
segments of the LDP strongly opposed it.
Kishi's exploitation of public
resources was a prototype for the even more aggressive Tanaka Kakuei. During the
decade of Japan's phenomenal high-speed growth in the 1960s, Tanaka built what
he called a "general hospital" to take care of his constituents, faction
members, and himself. Resources were generated in a variety of ways. One he
developed when he was the Minister of Finance in the Ikeda cabinet was to
confiscate unclaimed property, which he would then arrange to sell to associates
for a consideration. Another was so-called "land flipping" whereby a dummy
corporation controlled by Tanaka or his family would buy under-priced stock to
be resold at market prices for a large profit. The firms they bought and sold
would incur large paper losses due to inflated expenses while they were stripped
of cash. More important were those firms, much like those that cooperated with
Kishi's reparations program, that benefited from Tanaka's inside knowledge of
(and control over) the location of new public works projects.
Construction and real estate companies associated with Tanaka made vast
fortunes from public spending on railroads, schools, and other infrastructure.
They exchanged privileged access to government contracts in return for kickbacks
based on the value of contracts received. Tanaka's famous "Plan for Remodeling
the Japanese Archipelago," was essentially a blueprint for personal and
factional enrichment once he took office and controlled the Construction and
Transportation Ministries. Eventually, Masumi argues, in the process of amassing
a personal and factional fortune, Tanaka even emptied the LDP's safe.20 This may
help explain why he was the only senior postwar Japanese politician to be
prosecuted without political intervention.
The man who could have
intervened to block the Lockheed bribery case (in which Tanaka was indicted) but
chose not to, was Miki Takeo. Miki had been anointed prime minister by Kishi's
former disciple and comrade, Shiina Etsusaburo. It was widely expected that,
like Yoshida before him, Miki would invoke Article 14 of the Public Prosecutor's
law and put an end to Tanaka's prosecution. But the irascible Miki refused to
accommodate the LDP elders. Instead, he proposed to abolish all corporate
contributions to politicians. Although the leaders of the LDP were unable to
force him to block Tanaka's prosecution (assuming that they wished to do so),
they did succeed in eviscerating his reform proposals. The reform, which shifted
from a system of "a few sources of large sums" to "lots of sources of small
sums" had as many loopholes as it had teeth-- and even legalized some formerly
illegal conduits of funds. So it remained business as usual under the "1955
System."
Keidanren was dismayed by the failure of its efforts to
introduce reforms. At his first press conference in May 1974 as he took office
as Keidanren Chairman, Doko Toshio made a startling announcement to an
unsuspecting audience: "The LDP should be based on its party members and
supporters, and it is strange for it to be based on commercial firms. If firm
managers wish to support the LDP, they should join a citizens' association on an
individual basis. In general, there is something wrong with Keidanren's having
the role of collecting political funds. In the course of time, I want to go
about correcting this somehow.21
Doko correctly anticipated what was
ahead. In the July 1974 upper house elections, after Keidanren had provided
Tanaka and the LDP with a 30-billion-yen war chest, an LDP majority was barely
achieved. Doko was so annoyed by Tanaka's profligacy that he demanded political
reform. The electric power and gas utilities refused further political donations
as well. It looked as if the 1955 system of political finance-- or at least the
visible Keidanren track-- had hit the wall. Doko announced that Keidanren was
ceasing immediately to collect political funds for the Citizens' Association,
and that it was firmly in support of political reform. He declared that the
LDP's faction system was the source of much of the problem; firms would have to
make contributions to political parties directly, and Keidanren would exclude
from its ranks any firm that was found to have contributed to a faction.
It sounded good, and it played well in the press and the court of public
opinion, but, "the system" still had legs. Doko ran into stiff opposition from
within the business and political communities. Nagano Shigeo, head of the rival
Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (and a former close associate of Kishi
Nobusuke), called him a "damn fool" and refused to cooperate. Within the LDP,
anger at Doko was so great that no one from the Miki cabinet (despite the "clean
Miki" image) attended Keidanren's 1974 annual councilors' meeting-- an
unprecedented snub.
Doko gamely pressed on. Keidanren formed a committee
to study the "modernization" of political funding, but advocates of reform were
worn down by demands from the politicians. After a year, the committee's two
main recommendations were a gradual transition from Keidanren's collection of
political contribution to firms' making their own contributions and an
"increased transparency" by renaming the Citizens' Association the Citizens'
Political Association (Kokumin Seiji Kyokai) and publishing the amounts of funds
distributed to political organizations. The best they could do was to return to
a Kishi-era common pool of funds. A year after his remarkable press conference,
Doko was out making the rounds of companies and collecting political
contributions. Despite severe cost-saving measures adopted after the drop off in
contributions during 1974, the LDP had accumulated an operating debt of ´5
billion. Keidanren managing director Hanamura Nihachiro quietly collected
contributions from members and paid off the debt.
Thus, after a short
interlude of withheld contributions, Keidanren's support for the LDP was
stronger than ever. Even the reported contributions tripled over the next
decade, and the number of political organizations receiving donations increased
from under 2,000 to nearly 5,000. There was no increased mobilization of the
electorate, just a new set of rules that allowed politicians to establish as
many as fifty separate paper organizations as recipients of funds.
Two
important consequences of this failure were that factional competition grew more
intense and the locus of competition for funds devolved to the level of
individual politicians. By the late 1980s, every conservative politician with
national aspirations was desperate to secure a corporate backer. As significant
as they were, "public resources" alone were not sufficient. There was thus a
return to the use of inside information, but at a much higher price than in the
days of the shipbuilding scandal. Voracious parvenu businessmen embraced equally
voracious politicians. Hanamura Nihachiro, who ought to know as well as any
other principal, estimates that at a minimum it now took three times more money
than Keidanren distributed to run a political campaign. Japan was in the midst
of its "bubble economy," and money was demanded by and flowing to politicians
from every direction.
This came to a head in the "Recruit Scandal" of
1989 in which more than forty politicians-- including virtually every ranking
LDP official from Prime Minister Takeshita to former prime Minister Nakasone,
Finance Minister Miyazawa, and Party Secretary-General Abe-- were named by
prosecutors as having received and profited from "pre-floated" shares of stock
in a new company, Recruit Cosmos. The president of the upstart firm, Ezoe
Hiromasa, leaving no political stone unturned, also provided shares to the
chairman of the Democratic Socialist Party, to several Socialist Party members,
and to the president of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper, the chairman of NTT,
and senior bureaucrats in the Education and Transport Ministries. Kishi's
"filtering apparatus" had been supplanted by recklessness. There were twelve
indictments, but only two were politicians. The others fell from power but
climbed back up in short order. Miyazawa became prime minister, Takeshita became
king-maker within the party's largest faction, and Nakasone resumed his role as
respected party elder. Once again the political world was under pressure to
reform politics, and once again, the institutions of the "1955 System" would
prove resistant to change. Recruit ended with a whimper, the prosecutors backing
away, indicating that they still feared political intervention more than public
anger.22
Kuromaku and the Underworld
As poorly documented
as the M-Fund and its transformation into "public resources" are, there is still
an even more difficult (and likely more consequential) aspect of Kishi's
political activities-- his relationships with ultra-nationalists and the
underworld. His connection to them is through two of the most controversial
figures in twentieth century Japanese politics-- the political "fixers"
(kuromaku) Sasakawa Ryoichi and Kodama Yoshio. Kishi, Sasakawa, and Kodama are
tied together by their prewar and wartime activities and, most directly, by the
fact that they were cellmates for three years in Sugamo Prison, where they
allegedly concocted a plan for mutual assistance.
Kodama Yoshio
(1911-1984) cast a ubiquitous shadow over many of the less pleasant aspects of
pre- and postwar Japanese politics. After serving time in jail for plotting the
assassination of leading prewar business and party leaders, he spent the war
years in China where he procured strategic materials for the military. The
activities of his "Kodama Agency" reportedly included drug trafficking,
smuggling, and black marketeering. War profits made Kodama a personal fortune,
which he was quick to turn to political advantage. He was said to have been
released from Sugamo prison after making a deal with the occupation authorities
to work for U.S. intelligence. Upon his release he served on the board of the
National Council of Patriotic Societies, an umbrella group for more than 400
rightwing and underworld groups, some of which he mobilized to assist the
Occupation in combatting labor demonstrations. He is also credited with
providing the funds to create Hatoyama's Liberal and Democratic Parties.
Kishi first called upon Kodama, whose modus operandi, according to Jacob
Schlesinger, "was blackmail, intimidation, and violence," to provide protection
for Indonesian president Sukarno during the latter's visit to Tokyo in early
1958. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police had refused to help on grounds that it was a
personal, rather than an official visit. Kishi again called upon Kodama in 1960
to use his gangland connections to battle student demonstrators and to help the
government protect President Eisenhower during his aborted Ampo visit. Kodama's
connections with U.S. intelligence also may have provided his entrZ&Mac255;e
to the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, which used him twice as its
"representative"-- once in the successful effort to convince Prime Minister
Kishi to select the Lockheed F-104 over the Grumman F-11 fighter favored by the
Air Staff of the Defense Agency and again in the successful effort to convince
Prime Minister Tanaka to intervene with All Nippon Airways to buy the Lockheed
1011 jumbojet. In the first instance, the charge of bribery was never proven--
or even prosecuted-- while the second brought down the Tanaka government.
Sasakawa Ryoichi (1899-1995) was the more complex of the two Kishi-era
kuromaku. Drafted into the Imperial Navy as a pilot in 1918, Sasakawa returned
home after two years of service to expand the family fortune by speculating in
rice futures. He later turned his energies to rightwing politics, possibly
including membership in the violent Black Dragon Society. In 1931, Sasakawa used
his own resources to establish the National Essence Mass Party (Kokusui
Taishuto). His 15,000 party members, one of whom was Kodama Yoshio, wore black
shirts and modeled themselves on the Italian fascists. Sasakawa was a maverick.
He controlled a small independent air force of twenty-two airplanes, which he
made available to the Navy for training, and took it upon himself to airlift
supplies to the Japanese troops after the 1931 Manchurian incident. Later he was
arrested for alleged plans for "patriotic violence," including plots against the
prime minister and other government officials. After spending two and a half
years in jail (1935-1938), he flew one of his planes to Rome to meet Mussolini.
On the eve of the Pacific War, Sasakawa introduced Kodama to Imperial Navy
officers seeking a private organ for materiel procurement in China. Sasakawa
claimed credit for the creating the "Kodama Agency."23 During this period, he
spent considerable time in Shanghai with Kodama where they bought mines and sold
minerals to the military. They are alleged to have plundered millions of dollars
worth of Chinese gold, diamonds, and other rare minerals. According to one
account, Kodama shipped vast quantities of precious metals to Japan at the war's
end, a portion of which was stored in warehouses rented by Sasakawa.
Sasakawa formally entered politics with a successful run for the Diet as
an independent in the 1942 Yokusankai election. Although a vigorous critic of
the Tojo Cabinet, in which his postwar ally, Kishi Nobusuke, served, Sasakawa
was an ardent supporter of Kishi throughout his tenure in the wartime Diet. He
joined the Gokoku Doshikai, the group of Diet members organized to try to make
Kishi prime minister. After Japan's surrender, Sasakawa continued to be active
in politics. Alarmed at the prospect of the collapse of the Emperor system and
the advance of communism, Sasakawa entered into negotiations with a wide cross
section of leading politicians in an attempt to create a new "Japan Mass Party."
Various accounts trace the seed money for this effort to funds generated from
the sale of Kodama Agency loot. When this effort failed, Sasakawa threw his
support behind Hatoyama's Liberal Party, but his postwar political career was
cut short by his arrest and imprisonment as a war criminal.
Sasakawa
ultimately proved adept at building and wielding financial and political
influence under the changed conditions of the postwar period. After his release
from prison in 1948, he began to promote motorboat racing as a form of legal
gambling in Japan. Working with cellmates Kishi and Kodama to cultivate
political support-- some of which came from former Taishuto comrades now in the
postwar Diet-- Sasakawa in 1951 won Diet approval of a Motorboat Racing Law.
This law granted him monopoly control over this form of legalized gambling
throughout Japan. Seventy-five percent of all the gambling revenue was to be
returned as pari-mutuel winnings to gamblers, ten percent would go to the local
governments where the race courses were located, 11.7 percent was earmarked for
the Motorboat Racing Association, and 3.3 percent went to Sasakawa's Japan
Shipbuilding Industry Foundation. By 1962, when Sasakawa effectively became the
permanent chairman of the Foundation-- once again with Kishi's help-- he
personally controlled both the Association and the Foundation. He installed
Kodama as head of the Tokyo Motorboat Racing Association and used the revenues--
more than $8 billion annually by the early 1980s (as estimated by Forbes, June
20, 1983)-- to build a financial and philanthropic empire rivaling the greatest
foundations in the world.
In addition to directing the flow of vast sums
legally earmarked for philanthropic endeavors to organizations controlled by
himself and his family, Sasakawa expanded his personal fortune by leveraging his
gambling monopoly to gain control of virtually all businesses associated with
the motorboat racing circuits. In later years, he also began to cultivate
foreign charities, many associated with the United Nations, in order to bolster
his openly aggressive bid to win a Nobel Peace Prize-- a pursuit that, in the
end, eluded him. In 1990, the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation changed its
name to the Sasakawa Foundation, and after his death in 1995, to the Nippon
Foundation. In 1978, the Emperor of Japan awarded Sasakawa the nation's highest
honor, the "First Class Order of the Sacred Treasure."24
Needless to
say, Sasakawa Ryoichi continued to use his financial weight to pursue a
political agenda, much of it involving the nurture of conservative politicians.
By the late 1980s, his foundation listed some fifty-five Diet representatives
who had received "support for their districts," most notably including the once
and future prime ministers Nakasone Yasuhiro, Hashimoto Ryutaro, and LDP faction
head, Kato Koichi.
Sasakawa built "sports clubs" and other facilities in
the districts of friendly politicians. He gave "gift vouchers" to Transport
Ministry bureaucrats for golf outings, and it is widely assumed that Sasakawa's
influence was routinely used to shield favored public officials and politicians
from the law. Sasakawa never again ran for public office himself but pursued his
political ambitions vicariously, promoting the political careers of Sasakawa
Takashi, his second son, and Itoyama Eitaro, his business associate and a former
secretary to Nakasone Yasuhiro. Although the junior Sasakawa originally ran
unsuccessfully as an independent, backed by Sasakawa's immense financial
resources, both Takashi and Itoyama went on to serve in the Diet as members of
the LDP. In 1993, financial disclosure documents revealed that Sasakawa Takashi
was the wealthiest member of the Japanese Diet (Mainichi Shimbun, June
14, 1993). Thus equipped with several levers of political influence, Sasakawa
publicly boasted of his role as a powerful political insider and key figure in
the succession struggles that led to the governments of Kishi Nobusuke, Sato
Eisaku, and Tanaka Kakuei.
Another aspect of Sasakawa's postwar
political agenda, anti-communism, dovetailed neatly with his efforts in
conservative politics. Working closely with Kishi, he cultivated relationships
with other anti-communists throughout Asia. In the mid-1960s, this brought him
into contact with the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification
Church.25 In 1967, Sasakawa invited the Unification Church to use his motorboat
racing center in Yamanashi prefecture for its first rally in Japan. The
following year, three months after the Reverend Moon established his "Federation
for Victory over Communism" (Shokyo Rengo) in Korea, Sasakawa agreed to
become its honorary chairman in Japan. Kishi was impressed by the Federation,
suggesting that "If all younger people were like Shokyo Rengo members, Japan
would have a bright future." In this way, Sasakawa and Kishi shielded what would
become one of the most widely distrusted groups in contemporary Japan.
Although loathed and feared for its alleged kidnappings and mind control
of young Japanese, the Unification Church proved (and may still prove) to be of
incalculable benefit to many Japanese politicians. It built its Japan
headquarters on land in Tokyo once owned by Kishi. By the early 1970s, a number
of LDP politicians were using Unification Church members as campaign workers.
While the politicians were required to pledge to visit the Church's headquarters
in Korea and receive Reverend Moon's lectures on theology, it did not matter
whether they were members of the Church. Actual Church members -- so-called
"Moonies" -- were sent by the Federation to serve without compensation as
industrious and highly valued campaign workers. In return, for many years the
Church enjoyed protection from prosecution by Japanese authorities for their
often fraudulent and aggressive sales and conversion tactics. Not incidentally,
by the 1980s, Japan reportedly provided some four-fifths of Unification Church
revenues worldwide.26
Over time, the Kishi and allied factions
transferred the Kishi-Sasakawa-Moon link to other party leaders. In 1974, Fukuda
Takeo, the direct inheritor of the Kishi faction, praised Reverend Moon as "one
of Asia's great leaders," while Nakasone Yasuhiro, the youngest member of the
Kishi Cabinet and scion of the allied Kono faction, similarly honored Moon. Abe
Shintaro, Kishi's son-in law and inheritor of the faction from Fukuda, also
depended upon "Moonies" in his election campaigns. A list prepared by the Japan
Communist Party of 126 LDP and DSP politicians who used "volunteers" from the
Federation for Victory over Communism to staff their campaigns includes Ozawa
Ichiro, Hashimoto Ryutaro, and other senior party leaders. In the 1990 general
election, the Unification Church announced that it had provided financial and
campaign support to more than one hundred Japanese Diet members. As a measure of
the influence Moon enjoyed in Japan, in 1992 the government gave him special
permission to enter the country even though Japanese law forbids entry to a
foreign national who has served more than year in jail. Moon had served eighteen
months in U.S. jail for tax evasion and had been barred from entering Japan on
these grounds for nearly a decade. In March 1992, Kanemaru Shin, vice president
of the LDP and the head of the largest faction within the party, intervened on
Moon's behalf with the Minister of Justice.
Since the management of all
other forms of legal gambling in Japan had been entrusted to public
organizations, Sasakawa's private control of the gambling receipts from motor
boat racing was difficult to justify and vulnerable to reform efforts. In
addition, the "Sasakawa Empire" was a tempting target for political opportunists
hoping to seize control of its abundant financial flows. To defend his gambling
concession, Sasakawa mobilized his financial and political resources in a
variety of ways. First, he cultivated strong personal and financial ties with
conservative politicians in the ruling LDP and helped place his son and other
political allies in the Diet. Second, to counter bureaucratic assertiveness, his
Shipbuilding Industry Foundation provided trillions of yen to research
institutes, training centers, community associations, sports clubs, and other
non-profit organizations associated with government ministries. Recipient
organizations also served as retirement havens (amakudarisaki) for more
than one hundred former bureaucrats from the Ministry of Transportation, the
government organ with jurisdiction over motor boat racing. Finally, Sasakawa
defeated political challenges to his control of the state-granted gambling
monopoly with ruthless efficiency.
The best example was his rebuff of
then Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei's attempt to gain control over the
Shipbuilding Industry Foundation. After rejecting the prime minister's request
to install a Tanaka ally within the Foundation's leadership, Sasakawa became the
subject of a police investigation that many thought was Tanaka's attempt to
unseat him. Although the investigation, which focused on campaign finance
irregularities in Itoyama's 1974 Diet election, ended with the arrest of
Sasakawa's brother, he himself emerged unscathed. Now a vocal critic of Tanaka,
Sasakawa contributed mightily to the storm of condemnation that followed
revelations of Tanaka's own questionable financial practices and that led to his
resignation as prime minister in late 1974. Sasakawa's counterattack against
Tanaka is alleged to have included his being a key informer in the Lockheed
bribery scandal that resulted in Tanaka's arrest and conviction.27 Although most
of these allegations remain unconfirmed, Sasakawa's media campaign against
Tanaka during the scandal is a matter of public record. While vociferously
denying any personal involvement in the scandal, Sasakawa made public statements
that both suggested an intimate knowledge of the details of the affair and
pointed specifically to the culpability of Tanaka and his cohorts. Although
Sasakawa was also investigated by the Lockheed prosecutors because of his
personal involvement with the aircraft industry, he was never indicted.
Kishi and Sasakawa both seemed to be made of Teflon. Between 1955, when
Kishi helped create the LDP, and 1960, when he resigned as prime minister,
fourteen separate corruption cases involving politicians and bureaucrats swirled
around the party and the government. Kishi's name never once appeared on the
formal dockets of the prosecutors, but it was ubiquitously associated with them
in the popular imagination. Many of these scandals, e.g., the "Lockheed Grumman
Affair" of 1958 and the "Indonesian Kickback Problem" of 1959, are closely
associated with the "alternative routes" that Kishi had developed for amassing
political funds: the acceptance of U.S. support, the use of public resources,
and reliance upon political fixers.
Before leaving his post in Manchuria
in 1939, Kishi reportedly told his colleagues: "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.'"28 More than fifty years later, when
virtually the entire leadership of the LDP was tainted by the Recruit Scandal,
when Kanemaru Shin, Tanaka Kakuei's disciple and Ozawa Ichiro's mentor, was
prosecuted for accepting funds that had not been properly "filtered" (in this
case, four million dollars from a gang-related trucking company), and when Prime
Minister Takeshita Noboru was toppled for his ties to yakuza, Kishi's advice was
still relevant. It was, after all, Kishi who first connected the discredited
world of prewar politics to postwar conservative hegemony and it was Kishi who
welcomed organized crime and the nationalist rightwing into the mainstream of
LDP power. By the 1990s, however, few seemed to remember the connection. By
then, Kodama was dead, Sasakawa was weakened and dying, and a range of
newly-founded religious organizations had become active -- indeed indispensable
-- supporters of the LDP. Kishi's advice echoed faintly. Structural corruption
within the "1955 System" was taken for granted. It was just the way things
worked.
NOTES
* Japanese names are given in the Japanese
order, surname followed by given name.
1. Author's interview with former
Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, May 17, 2000.
2. Kurzman, Dan,
Kishi and Japan: The Search for the Sun (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1960),
p. 256.
3. Quoted by Kurzman, p. 267.
4. Quoted by Kurzman, p.
278.
5. For a detailed account of these developments, including the use
of "show money," see Hara Shinsuke, Kishi Nobusuke: kensei no seijika
(Kishi Nobusuke: Powerful Politician) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1995), pp. 162-9.
6. Hara, op. cit., p. 177; and Kitaoka Shinichi, "Kishi Nobusuke: yashin
to zassetsu" (Kishi Nobusuke: Ambition and Failure), in Watanabe Akio, ed.,
Sengo Nihon no saishotachi (The Prime Ministers of Postwar Japan) (Tokyo:
Chuo Koronsha, 1995), pp. 121-148 .
7. Uemura Kogoro Denki Henshushitsu,
ed., Ningen: Uemura Kogoro sengo keizai hatten no kiseki (Uemura Kogoro,
The Man: The Path of Postwar Economic Development) (Tokyo: Sankei Shuppan,
1979), pp. 343-4, 606; and Hanamura Nihachiro, Seizaikai paipu-yaku
hanseki (My Half-Life as the Pipeline Between the Political and the Business
Worlds) (Tokyo: Tokyo Shimbun Shuppankyoku, 1990), pp. 19, 83.
8. Kano
Akihiro and Takano Hajime Uchimaku: ayasutte kita kenryoku no rimenshi
(Inside Story: The Hidden Background of How Power Came to Be Manipulated)
(Tokyo: Gakuyo Shobo, 1976), p, 57.
9. Ono Koji, Nihon seiji no
tenkanten (Reversals in Japanese Politics) (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1998), pp.
91-94.
10. Masumi Junnosuke, Contemporary Politics in Japan
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp, 218-32.
11.
Author's interview with Hori Wataru, April 28, 2000.
12. Asahi
Shimbun, June 30, 1960.
13. Jacob M. Schlesinger, Shadow Shoguns:
The Rise and Fall of Japan's Postwar Political Machine (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1997), p. 109.
14. Kishi Nobusuke, Yatsugi Kazuo, and
Ito Takashi, eds., Kishi Nobusuke no kaiso (Recollections of Kishi
Nobusuke) (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1981), p. 126.
15. See Chalmers
Johnson, Norbert A. Schlei, and Michael Schaller, "The CIA and Japanese
Politics," Asian Perspective 24:4 (2000), pp. 88-94.
16. Kishi,
Yatsugi, and Ito, pp. 118, 128.
17. Schlesinger, p. 110.
18.
Arase, David, Buying Power: The Political Economy of Japan's Foreign Aid
(Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995), p. 28 .
19. Nishihara Masashi,
The Japanese and Sukarno's Indonesia: Tokyo-Jakarta Relations, 1951-1966
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1976), p. 103.
20. Masumi,p. 229.
21. Yasuhara Kazuo, Keidanren kaicho no sengoshi (The Postwar
History of Keidanren Chairmen) (Tokyo: Bijinesu-sha, 1985), pp. 102-3.
22. On the Recruit scandal, see Gerald Curtis, The Logic of Japanese
Politics: Leaders, Institutions, and the Limits of Change (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999); and Sasaki Takeshi, ed., Seiji kaikaku
1800-hi no shinjitsu (The Reality of 1800 days of Political Reform) (Tokyo:
Kodansha, 1999).
23. For these details, see Iguchi Go, et al.,
Kuromaku kenkyu (Studies of Political Fixers) (Tokyo: Shinkoku Minsha,
1977); and Sato Seizaburo, ed., Za raito uingu no otoko: senzen no Sasakawa
Ryoichi goroku (The Rightwing Man: The Prewar Record of Sasakawa Ryoichi)
(Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1999).
24. See Ino Kenji, "Sasakawa teikoku ga
yuragu" (The Sasakawa Empire Trembles), Ekonomisuto, August 2, 1994, pp.
88-91; and Ino, "Sanninno kuromaku to Sasakawa Ryoichi" (The Three Political
Fixers and Sasakawa Ryoichi), Ekonomisuto, October 3, 1995, pp. 86-91.
25. Wakamono to Shukyo Kenkyukai, ed. Toitsu Kyokai no uchimaku
(The Inside Story of the Unification Church) (Tokyo: Eeru Shuppankai, 1992);
and Andrew Marshall and Michiko Toyama. "In the Name of the Godfather," Tokyo
Journal, October 1994, pp. 29-35.
26. Christopher Redl, "Curse of
the Kingmakers," Tokyo Journal, May 1993, pp. 34-41; and Redl, "Japan's
Divine Seduction: How the Unification Church Infiltrated the Japanese
Government," unpublished manuscript, 1994.
27. Ino Kenji, 1995, p. 91.
28. Tajiri Ikuzo, Showa no yokai: Kishi Nobusuke (The Monster of
Showa: Kishi Nobusuke) (Tokyo: Gakuyo Shobo, 1979), p. 88.
RICHARD J.
SAMUELS is Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the
Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He has written numerous books on Japan, including Rich Nation, Strong Army:
National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan (Cornell
University Press,1994), which won the 1996 John Whitney Hall Prize of the
Association of Asian Studies. He has recently completed a comparative political
and economic history of Italy and Japan, of which this paper is an edited
excerpt. It is used with the permission of Cornell University Press. Professor
Samuels received an Abe Foundation fellowship in support of this research and
was affiliated with the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo. In
October 2001, Samuels was appointed Chairman of the Japan-U.S. Friendship
Commission. |
(私論．私見)