Satō Eisaku

Satō Eisaku, 1960

Satō Eisaku ( Japanese 佐藤 榮 作 ; born March 27, 1901 in today's Tabuse , Yamaguchi ; † June 3, 1975 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese politician who belonged to the Liberal Democratic Party . He was Finance Minister from 1958 to 1960 and the 61st to 63rd Prime Minister of Japan from 1964 to 1972 . In recognition of Japan's accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty , Satō was the first Asian to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974 . From 1964 to 1975 he was President of the International Karate Organization Kyokushinkaikan .

biography

Early years

Satō Eisaku was born in 1901 as the son of the civil servant and rice wine producer Kishi. Together with his father, Satō Eisaku was adopted by the Satō family and accordingly adopted this name, while his brother Kishi Nobusuke was adopted back into the Kishi family and took this name again. Satō Eisaku attended the Kuniki School in Tabuse and later a high school in Kumamoto . He graduated from the Imperial University in Tokyo , where he passed his law exam. He then started working for the Japanese Ministry of Railways , where he worked as a civil servant for 24 years. In 1929 he married his cousin Hiroko, with whom he was to have two sons.

He visited Europe and the USA in 1934 and 1937 . In 1941 he became head of the control office in the Ministry of Railways, in 1943 head of the automobile department of the Ministry of Transport and Communication, in 1946 head of the railway department in the Ministry of Transport.

Political career

During the first term of office of the Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru , he was to be appointed by the latter as Chief Cabinet Secretary, but this was prevented by the US occupation ( GHQ / SCAP ). These held at the time Satō Eisaku's brother Kishi Nobusuke as a suspected class A war criminal prisoner. Under Katayama Tetsu , he was State Secretary in the Ministry of Transport from 1947 to 1948. He then ended his civil service career.

In the spring of 1948 he became a member of the Democratic Liberal Party , where he soon became party chairman of Yamaguchi Prefecture . For the first time a political office received Satō as chief cabinet secretary in the 2nd Yoshida cabinet . In the years from 1949 to 1972 Satō Eisaku was a member of the Japanese House of Commons for the five-mandate 2nd constituency of Yamaguchi. From 1951 to 1952 he took over the post of Minister for Post and Telecommunications in the 3rd Yoshida Cabinet , and in the following two years that of the Minister for Construction in the 4th Yoshida Cabinet . In 1954 he was involved in a bribery scandal involving a Japanese shipyard, resigned from his post that year and took a backseat politically for a few years.

In 1953 he became general secretary of the Liberal Party, with whom he went into opposition as a supporter of the so-called "Yoshida School", which was mainly recruited from the ministerial bureaucracy, when Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichirō took office. In 1955 he did not participate in the founding of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which he only joined in 1957 after Hatoyama's resignation. In the LDP, he founded the Satō faction, the Shūzankai , which developed into one of the main streams of the party and was the forerunner of the powerful Tanaka faction .

In 1958 his brother Kishi Nobusuke became Prime Minister. He took Satō Nobusuke as finance minister in his cabinet. In 1961 he became Minister for International Trade and Industry under Ikeda Hayato . From 1961 to 1963 he held the office of Minister of Science and Technology and was also chairman of the Japanese Nuclear Energy Commission.

Prime Minister of Japan

When Ikeda Hayato resigned in November 1964 due to a larynx disease, he named Satō Eisaku as his successor for the post of Prime Minister, which he held until 1972. Satō only took over the party leadership of the LDP in December 1964. He continued the policy in the sense of his predecessor and tried to further advance the economy by moving closer and closer to the politics of the USA and supporting them in their policy against Vietnam .

In 1969 Satō Eisaku traveled to Washington DC to negotiate with the President of the United States Richard Nixon about the return of the Ryūkyū Islands, which had been occupied in the Pacific War , to Japan. These negotiations strengthened Japan's position and the US accepted Japan as an equal partner. The transfer of the Okinawa Archipelago took place on May 15, 1972. In July of the same year Satō Eisaku resigned as prime minister and party chairman. He was in office for eight years without a break, longer than any of his predecessors (and successors), and during his tenure Japan rose to become the third largest economic power in the world.

In 1974 Satō Eisaku received the Nobel Peace Prize for his personal commitment to the policy of reconciliation and peace policy in the Pacific region as well as for his work against nuclear armament (see also Three Non-Nuclear Principles ). Together with him, Seán MacBride received the Nobel Prize as President of the International Peace Bureau. Satō died on June 3, 1975 in Tokyo.

Collaborations with the United States

In 1965, Sato asked US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to carry out a nuclear first strike in the event of war with the People's Republic of China , and agreed a nuclear guarantee with President Johnson. In connection with the agreement to return Okinawa in 1969, a secret agreement was created that allows the US military to station nuclear weapons in Japanese ports without informing the Japanese government , as provided for under the 1960 Security Treaty.

Web links

Commons : Satō Eisaku  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1974 award to Eisaku Satō (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sato wanted US ready to nuke China. Later went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In: The Japan Times . December 22, 2008, accessed March 9, 2010 . 
2. ↑ Japan 'song' on secret US nuclear deal. In: The Australian . March 9, 2009, accessed March 9, 2010 . 
3. ↑ Japan confirms secret pact on US nuclear transit. In: BBC News . March 9, 2010, accessed March 9, 2010 . 

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Satō is the family name, Eisaku the first name.