PERSPECTIVE ON JAPAN : A Recollection of Kaku-san

The death of former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka reminds us again of how different the Japanese political system is from ours. Dubbed the “shadow shogun,” Tanaka wielded extraordinary hidden power in the postwar political system. In contrast to the usual retired elite bureaucrats who went on to become prime minsters, Tanaka was a self-made millionaire in the construction industry who never finished college. As minister of finance during the economic growth era of the 1960s, he was one of those who propelled Japan into the first rank of industrial nations. He was forced to retire when it was discovered that he had also profited financially as prime minister between 1972 and 1974. Later, he was convicted of taking a $1.9-million bribe from the Lockheed Aircraft Corp. to influence a Japanese airline to buy L-1011 airbuses.

In June, 1984, I had an interview with Tanaka at his home in Mejirodai, Tokyo. It had taken me years to arrange, always going through his loyal secretary Shigezo Hayasaka. Finally, Hayasaka had concluded that I was not a spy for the U.S. Embassy--the Etsuzankai, Tanaka’s support group, still believed that Henry Kissinger was behind the Lockheed case to get even with Tanaka for recognizing China before the United States did--or for Takeo Fukuda, the former bureaucrat who had been shoved aside when Tanaka became prime minister in 1972.

The interview was for a full-length biography of Tanaka. I still believed that someone in Japan would breathe life into the constitutional political system and begin to supervise Japan’s vast apparatus of state bureaucrats. Two years before my interview, I had published “MITI and the Japanese Miracle,” detailing how the state had guided Japan’s economic development. My conclusion was that the politicians in the Diet reigned, while the officials of the Kasumigaseki ministries actually ruled. But I believed that Tanaka, despite both his resignation and the Lockheed case, was building the political machine--the gundan of 110 Diet members--that had the potential of giving orders to the bureaucracy.

My interview was not disappointing. In his charming and unpretentious study, with a Western landscape on one wall, a stuffed deer on the other, Tanaka asked me about my background and why I wanted to write his biography. I handed over my meishi (calling card), my omiyage of Korean ginseng, and seemed to pass the aisatsu (formal introduction) hurdle.

Tanaka showed me his morning schedule. He had already met about 75 people and still had 200 to go. He said that he regarded his connections in the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications as important; his organization was penetrating the bureaucracy to strengthen its ability to get the state to do its bidding. It struck me as a kind of Huey Long version of democracy, but it was arguably more democratic than continued rule by the mandarins from Tokyo University’s law school.

At one point in our half-hour discussion, I used the phrase ura-Nippon (hidden Japan), referring to the part of the country Tanaka represented, the Japan Sea prefectures, as contrasted with omote-Nippon, the Pacific coast area of wealthy cities from Tokyo to Kobe. Tanaka then talked animatedly about how poor the area had been in the 1930s and after the war, about how it had been neglected by the ex-bureaucrat politicians and about how proud he was of the new bullet train to Niigata, the atomic power plant at Kashiwazaki and the superhighways into the region.

My impression was that Tanaka was intelligent, confident and wholly on top of his world. But as the subsequent fate of the Tanaka faction revealed, his efforts were not so much about forging parliamentary democracy as about structural corruption. Rather than bringing the bureaucracy to heel, the gundan instead split under Tanaka protege Noboru Takeshita and disintegrated under Shin Kanemaru and Ichiro Ozawa. The subsequent Recruit, Sagawa and construction-industry scandals, combined with the involvement of organized crime, made the Lockheed case look like just a couple of business luncheons.

Ultimately, Tanaka did not invigorate the constitutional political system, and the collapse of the Liberal Democratic Party is strengthening the bureaucracy further. For foreign students of the Japanese system, the lesson of Tanaka’s political life is to quit looking for Japanese versions of Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon and start studying the Japanese state itself.