Nakasone Yasuhiro
Nakasone Yasuhiro was prime minister of Japan from 1982 to 1987, five years, the longest tenure between Sato and Koizumi, the nationalist who had campaigned for revising the American-written constitution since the 1950s and who as prime minister called Japan an unsinkable aircraft carrier against Soviet bombers, took defence spending past the one-per-cent ceiling. He was Ron to Reagan's Yasu at the summits, privatised the national railways, the telephone monopoly and the tobacco monopoly. He visited Yasukuni shrine officially in August 1985 on the fortieth anniversary of the surrender, the first prime minister to do so, and never again, because of what China said. The Plaza accord of September 1985 that doubled the yen against the dollar was signed under him, and the bubble that followed was the answer to it. He was born in Takasaki in Gunma in 1918, the son of a lumber merchant, went to Tokyo Imperial University and the home ministry, served as a naval paymaster lieutenant in the war. He was elected to the Diet in 1947 at twenty-eight, riding a bicycle with a rising-sun flag, where he sat for fifty-six years. He held the science, transport, defence and trade ministries through the 1960s and 1970s, was called the weathervane for the factions he turned with, and became prime minister in November 1982 with the support of Tanaka's faction, whose leader was on trial for the Lockheed bribes. The Yasukuni visit, the remark of 1986 that Japan's average intelligence was higher than America's because America had blacks and Hispanics, and the textbook quarrels were the diplomacy. The double election of July 1986 that gave the Liberal Democrats three hundred seats, their best ever, was the politics. The party gave him an extra year for it. He handed over to Takeshita in November 1987, was named in the Recruit shares scandal of 1989 and left the party for two years. He was pushed into retirement by Koizumi in 2003 at eighty-five under an age limit he called a political assassination, and lived to a hundred and one, dying in Tokyo in November 2019.
- Lived: 1918 CE – 2019 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: prime minister, politician
