was a Japanese bureaucrat and politician who served as prime minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960. As a prominent reform bureaucrat, he directed the exploitative economic management of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in China in the 1930s, and later served in the wartime cabinet. Following World War II, he was imprisoned as a suspected war criminal. After his release, he helped found the Liberal Democratic Party. As Prime Minister, Kishi forcefully revised the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, but was compelled to resign following the massive Anpo protests the unpopular treaty had provoked.
For his behind-the-scenes role in numerous important events, Kishi retrospectively received the nickname "Yōkai of the Shōwa era" (; Shōwa no yōkai). The author Takao Iwami (under his pseudonym ) originally used the nickname "Yōkai of Manchuria" in "Yōkai of Manchuria: A Study on Kishi Nobusuke," a piece he wrote for the magazine Bungei Shunjū () and another piece for the same magazine the following year entitled "A Study on Kishi Nobusuke: The Postwar Period" (), but when he subsequently published the two together in book form in 1979, he entitled it "Yōkai of Shōwa". Both phrases are inventions that can be traced back to Iwami and were not used by Kishi's contemporaries during his career. Of the two, the nickname that is actually used today is "Yōkai of Shōwa". Kishi was the founder of the Satō–Kishi–Abe dynasty in Japanese politics, with his younger brother Eisaku Satō and his grandson Shinzo Abe both later serving as prime ministers of Japan.
Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Kishi graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1920. He rose through the ranks at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and during the 1930s led the industrial development of Manchukuo, where he exploited Chinese slave labor. Kishi served in the wartime cabinet of Hideki Tōjō as minister of commerce and industry from 1941 to 1943 and vice minister of munitions from 1943 to 1944. At the end of the war in 1945, Kishi was imprisoned as a suspected Class A war criminal, but U.S. occupation authorities did not charge, try, or convict him, and released him in 1948 during the Reverse Course. At the end of the occupation in 1952, Kishi was de-purged, enabling his election to the National Diet in 1953. With overt and covert U.S. support, he consolidated Japanese conservatives against perceived threats from the Japan Socialist Party, and in 1955 was instrumental in forming the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Kishi was thus key in establishing the "1955 System" under which the LDP remains Japan's dominant party.
Kishi served as the first secretary-general of the LDP and as foreign minister under Prime Minister Tanzan Ishibashi before succeeding Ishibashi in 1957. During his tenure, Kishi had the strong backing of business, and promoted domestic industry and commercial interests in Southeast Asia. In 1958, he introduced a bill which would have granted police vastly expanded powers, but withdrew it under heavy opposition. Kishi's mishandling of the 1960 revision of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty led to the Anpo protests, the largest protests in Japan's modern history, and he resigned in disgrace. He remained a member of the House of Representatives until 1979 as a staunch anti-communist and conservative with links to right-wing groups.
Early life and career Kishi was born Nobusuke Satō in Tabuse, Yamaguchi Prefecture on 13 November 1896, the son of a sake brewer named Sato Hidesuke from a once illustrious samurai family that had recently fallen on hard times; his great-grandfather, Satō Nobuhiro, had been a retainer of the Chōshū Domain and the first governor of Shimane prefecture after the Meiji restoration. Nobusuke's older brother, Ichirō Satō, would go on to become a Vice Admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy, and his younger brother, Eisaku Satō, would also go on to become a prime minister. Nobusuke attended an elementary school and middle school in Okayama, and then transferred to another middle school in Yamaguchi. When he was about to graduate from middle school, Nobusuke was adopted by his father's older brother, Nobumasa Kishi, adopting their family name. The Kishi family lacked a male heir, so they adopted Nobusuke in order to continue the family line.
Kishi passed the difficult entrance examination to enter First Higher School in Tokyo, the most prestigious preparatory school in the country, and then attended the Faculty of Law of Tokyo Imperial University. While at the university, Kishi became a protégé of the right-wing ultranationalist legal scholar Shinkichi Uesugi. Because he studied German law under Uesugi, Kishi's views tended toward German-style statism, compared to the more progressive approaches favored by some of his classmates who studied English law. He was also influenced by Japanese radical intellectual Kita Ikki. Kishi graduated in 1920 at the top of his class. Uesugi sought to recruit him for an academic career, promising to make Kishi his successor as a professor in the future, but Kishi declined. Instead he entered the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. This was an unusual choice, because at the time, the most brilliant aspiring bureaucrats typically sought to enter the Home Ministry and eventually gain appointment as a prefectural governor. Several of Kishi's mentors even criticized his choice. However, Kishi was uninterested in administrative work, and aimed to be directly involved in Japan's economic development.
In 1925, the Ministry was split into the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, with Kishi becoming part of the latter. In 1926–27, Kishi traveled around the world to study industry and industrial policy in various industrialised states around the world, such as the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Besides the Soviet Five-Year Plan, which left Kishi with an obsession with economic planning, Kishi was also greatly impressed with the German policy of industrial cartels, and the high status of German technological engineers within the German business world. Kishi became known as one of the more prominent members of a group of "reform bureaucrats" within the Japanese government who favored a statist model of economic development with the state guiding and directing industry.
Kishi was a trusted subordinate of Shinji Yoshino, his senior in the ministry. Following Yoshino's appointment as vice minister in December 1931, Kishi steadily rose to prominence. He was named chief of the industrial policy section in January 1932, chief of the documents section in December 1933, and ultimately chief of the Industrial Affairs Bureau in April 1935. In March 1936, Gōtarō Ogawa became the Minister of Commerce and Industry. Ogawa was opposed to the faction within the Ministry represented by Yoshino and Kishi. Seeking to remove them from their positions, he pressured Kishi to accept a post in Manchukuo, where the Japanese Kwangtung Army was requesting his services, while Yoshino was offered the presidency of a public corporation in Tohoku. Both Kishi and Yoshino left the Ministry in September 1936.
Economic manager of Manchukuo In the "Manchurian Incident" of September 1931, the Kwantung Army seized the Chinese region of Manchuria ruled by the warlord Zhang Xueliang (the "Young Marshal") and turned it into a puppet state called "Manchukuo". Although nominally ruled by Puyi, who had been the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, Manchukuo was in practice a Japanese puppet state and colony. All of the ministers in the Manchukuo government were Chinese or Manchus, but all of the vice ministers were Japanese, and these were the men who really ruled Manchukuo. From the start, the Japanese Army sought to turn Manchukuo into an industrial powerhouse in support of the Japanese Empire and carried out a policy of forced industrialization. Reflecting the military's ideas about the "national defense state", Manchukuo's industrial development was focused completely upon heavy industry such as steel production for the purposes of arms manufacture.
Kishi has been described as the "mastermind" behind the industrial development of Japan's puppet state in Manchuria. Kishi had first come to the attention of the Kwantung Army officers as a rising star in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry who supported "industrial rationalization" to restrict capitalist competition in support of state goalsideas that accorded with the Army's idea of a "national defense state". In 1936, Kishi was appointed Manchukuo's Vice Minister of Industry. Kishi was given complete control of Manchukuo's economy by the military, with the authority to do whatever he liked just as long as industrial growth was increased.
In 1936, Kishi was one of the drafters of Manchukuo's first Five-Year Plan. Clearly modeled on the Soviet Union's first five-year plan, Manchukuo's Five-Year Plan was intended to dramatically boost heavy industry in order to vastly increase production of coal, steel, electricity, and weapons for military purposes.Hotta, Eri Pan-Asianism and Japan's War 1931–1945, London: Palgrave, 2007 p. 125. In order to enact the new plan, Kishi persuaded the military to allow private capital into Manchukuo, successfully arguing that the military's policy of having state-owned corporations leading Manchukuo's industrial development was costing the Japanese state too much money. One of the new public-private corporations founded to assist in carrying out the Five-Year Plan was the Manchurian Industrial Development Company (MIDC), established in 1937, which attracted a staggering 5.2 billion yen in private investment, making it by far the largest capital project in the Japanese empire; by comparison, the total annual budget of Japan's national government was 2.5 billion yen in 1937 and 3.2 billion yen in 1938. Kishi was instrumental in recruiting Nissan Group founder Yoshisuke Aikawa as president of the MIDC. As part of the deal, the Nissan Group's entire operations were supposed to be transferred over to Manchuria to form the basis of the new MIDC. The system that Kishi pioneered in Manchuria of a state-guided economy where corporations made their investments on government orders later served as the model for Japan's post-1945 development, and subsequently, that of South Korea and China as well.
In order to make it profitable for the zaibatsu to invest in Manchukuo, Kishi had a policy of lowering the wages of the workers to the lowest possible point, even below the "line of necessary social reproduction". The purpose of Manchukuo was to provide the industrial basis for the "national defense state", with American historian Mark Driscoll noting that, "Kishi's planned economy was geared towards production goals and profit taking, not competition with other Japanese firms; profit would come primarily from rationalizing labor costs as much as possible. The ne plus ultra of wage rationalization would be withholding pay altogetherthat is, unremunerated forced labor." Accordingly, the Japanese conscripted hundreds of thousands of Chinese as slave labor to work in Manchukuo's heavy industrial plants. In 1937, Kishi signed a decree calling for the use of slave labor to be conscripted both in Manchukuo and in northern China, stating that in these "times of emergency" (i.e. war with China), industry needed to grow at all costs while guaranteeing healthy profits for state and private investors. From 1938 to 1944, an average of 1.5 million Chinese were taken every year to work as slaves in Manchukuo. The harsh conditions of Manchukuo were well illustrated by the Fushun coal mine, which at any given moment had about 40,000 men working as miners, of whom about 25,000 had to be replaced every year as they had died due to poor working conditions and low living standards.