Politicians

Kakuei Tanaka

64th and 65th Prime Minister of Japan (1918-1993, in office 1972-1974). Rising from a poor Niigata farming family with only a primary-school plus night-school education, he became the youngest postwar Cabinet minister at 39, normalised Japan-China relations in September 1972, and authored the bestselling Plan for Remodelling the Japanese Archipelago that same year. In 1976 he was arrested in the Lockheed bribery scandal and convicted at first instance in 1983 of accepting 500 million yen in bribes, but his Tanaka faction, the largest in the Liberal Democratic Party, kept him a kingmaker — the so-called "shadow shogun of Mejiro" — until a stroke ended his career in 1985.

View this figure's profile