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Eisaku Satō was a Japanese politician and the 39th Prime Minister of Japan, elected on 9 November 1964, and re-elected on 17 February 1967, and 14 January 1970, serving until 7 July 1972.
Background
Eisaku Sato was born on March 27, 1901, in Yamaguchi Prefecture into a family of samurai descent. His home province, Choshu, provided much of the leadership (including Sato's great-grandfather) in the movement that overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and established the new imperial government. During the first century after the Meiji restoration, Yamaguchi provided more premiers than any other prefecture.
Sato therefore grew up in an atmosphere highly charged with political concerns; his mother was reported to have impressed upon her sons a sense of obligation to serve the state. Sato's eldest brother, Ichiro, became a rear admiral, retiring just prior to World War II. Another older brother, Nobusuke Kishi, served in the Hideki Tojo Cabinet as minister of commerce and industry during the war and subsequently, after serving 3 years in prison as a Class A war criminal, became a leader of the Liberal Democratic party and served as Japanese prime minister from 1957 to 1960.
Education
Eisaku studied German law at Tokyo Imperial University. In 1923, he passed the senior civil service examinations.
For a time Eisaku was interested in working for the N.Y.K. steamship line or the Ministry of Finance, but neither yielded him an opportunity, and he eventually ended up in the Transportation Ministry. His rise in the bureaucracy was not meteoric in the way Kishi's was in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Starting in a minor provincial post, he slowly rose through the ministerial hierarchy to become director of the Automobile Bureau. He was reportedly demoted after an argument with the deputy minister and sent to Osaka. The fact that he was not at ministerial headquarters saved him from the postwar purge.
Immediately after the war Sato was named general director of the Railway Administration and was soon promoted to deputy minister of transportation, the highest rank a civil servant could aspire to. At this juncture he made a decisive departure from his bureaucratic career.
The Occupation's purge of large numbers of the prewar political elite left room for new people to enter parliamentary politics. Shigeru Yoshida, the prime minister, was in the midst of building up a strong personal following in the Diet, composed mainly of former bureaucrats. One who came to his attention was Sato. It is said that Sato's handling of troublesome new labor unions caught the attention of Yoshida. However that may be, Yoshida asked Sato, in 1948, to become his chief Cabinet secretary, a position of considerable importance in running the affairs of the Cabinet and supervising relations with the party. Sato accepted and soon after won a seat in the Diet.
Sato's association with Yoshida lasted for several years, and he was intensely loyal to the old man. Yoshida suffered public criticism in the spring of 1954, when he rescued Sato from legal charges growing out of a scandal that involved shipping interests and many top leaders of Yoshida's Liberal party. Sato, who was serving as secretary general of the party, was accused of having received political bribes from shipbuilding executives. Yoshida employed the powers of his office to intervene and prevent the arrest of Sato, who thereafter always maintained his innocence.
In late 1954 Yoshida, whose position had been weakened by the scandal and more basically by increasing factionalism among the conservatives, was unseated by Ichiro Hatoyama. The following year Yoshida's Liberal party merged with Hatoyama's conservatives to form the Liberal-Democratic party. Behind the thin facade of party unity, factional strife continued unabated. Sato had by this time built up a strong personal following which he threw behind his brother Nobusuke Kishi, who with Sato's help became prime minister from 1957 to 1960. Sato entered the Cabinet as minister of finance. The immense popular disturbances that attended the Security Treaty crisis in 1960 toppled Kishi, who was succeeded by Hayato Ikeda.
Sato himself gradually built up his own claims to the premiership. Ikeda defeated him in a bitter struggle for the party presidency in 1964; but later in the year Ikeda, dying of cancer, was forced to retire, and Sato succeeded to the party presidency and the premiership by acclamation.
The crisis in the universities and continuing problems of Japanese-American relations were two of the major challenges confronting Sato during his term as prime minister. To deal with campus disorders, which wracked nearly all the universities in Japan, Sato's response was a bill that would allow the Ministry of Education to take over a school if the disruption persisted more than nine months. It was evident in elections that Sato's party benefited from a hard line on student disorders.
In November 1969 Sato flew to Washington seeking to conclude negotiations for the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty by 1972. Upon returning to Japan, he dissolved the House of Representatives, and in the general elections held on December 27 his party won a resounding victory. In June 1971 the United States and Japan signed a treaty to restore Okinawa and the other Ryukyu Islands to Japanese sovereignty in 1972; the accord was ratified by both countries in March 1972. In July the 71-year-old premier resigned.
Eisaku Satō went down in history as the second longest serving PM in Japanese history and the first Prime Minister to have been born in the 20th century. He is also the only Japanese laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize.
He entered politics as a Liberal-Democratic member of the lower house of the Diet. Liberal-Democratic Party also known as Jiyu Minshuto is the biggest Japanese political party at present (2004). It is not to be confused with the now-defunct Jiyuto (Liberal Party).
Although inexperienced in international affairs, Sato pursued a vigorous foreign policy during his term in office. He negotiated an agreement in year 1965 that called for the normalization of South Korean–Japanese relations, and in 1969 he signed a treaty with the United States that led to the reestablishment in year 1972 of Japanese sovereignty in Okinawa.
He led Japan to sign the Treaty on the non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Views
Quotations:
"It is the earnest hope of our people that the world may see the day when all nuclear weapons are abolished."
"If the attainment of peace is the ultimate objective of all statesmen, it is, at the same time, something very ordinary, closely tied to the daily life of each individual."
"The desire to see Okinawa returned to Japan developed into a broad national consensus among our people."
"The international order established at the end of World War II could certainly have been worse. However, this order did contain certain factors which bore within them the seeds of instability."
"Subsequently, the Japanese people experienced a variety of vicissitudes and were involved in international disputes, eventually, for the first time in their history, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare on their own soil during World War II."
"It is only natural that for any statesman at the helm of any government the question of his country's security should be a concern of the utmost importance."
"Japan is the only country in the world to have suffered the ravages of atomic bombing. That experience left an indelible mark on the hearts of our people, making them passionately determined to renounce all wars."
Personality
Eisaku was a peace loving man.
Physical Characteristics:
There is no exact physical Description of Sato, however, from the available photos o him, he had black hair, broad face and an upright body posture by the time he was the prime minister of Japan.
Interests
His hobbies included fishing, and the Japanese tea ceremony.
Sport & Clubs
He loved golf.
Connections
Satō married Hiroko Matsuoka (5 January 1907 – 16 April 1987) the niece of diplomat Yōsuke Matsuoka, in 1926 and had two sons, Ryūtarō and Shinji. In a 1969 Shukan Asahi interview with novelist Shūsaku Endō, his wife accused him of being a rake and a wife-beater.
