Yasuhiro Nakasone

Biography

Yasuhiro Nakasone was born in Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture, in 1918, the son of a timber merchant. He attended Shizuoka Higher School and studied law at Tokyo Imperial University from 1938, then passed the higher civil service examination and joined the Home Ministry. During the Pacific War he served as a paymaster officer in the Imperial Japanese Navy. After the surrender he returned briefly to the ministry before leaving the bureaucracy for politics.

He entered the House of Representatives in 1947 for the Democratic Party and kept his seat until 2003. A nationalist on defence questions, he argued for revising Article 9 of the constitution and for stronger armed forces, and in 1955 he pushed for the first state funding of nuclear power research. After the conservative merger he rose through the Liberal Democratic Party, heading the Science and Technology Agency, the Transport Ministry, the Defense Agency, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Administrative Management Agency, and serving as party secretary-general in the mid-1970s.

He became party president and Prime Minister in November 1982 and held office for five years. Close to Ronald Reagan, he raised defence spending and sought a more equal partnership with the United States. At home he privatised Japanese National Railways, the national telephone corporation and the tobacco monopoly, and he caused controversy by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine officially in 1985. He led the party to election wins in 1983 and 1986 and stepped down in November 1987 after failing to introduce a value-added tax.

After leaving office he was implicated in the Recruit scandal, and his faction's influence declined. He remained in the Diet until 2003, when the party's age limit for proportional candidates ended his career, and he continued to comment on politics as an elder statesman. He died in Tokyo in 2019 at the age of 101.