Satō Eisaku
Satō Eisaku was prime minister of Japan from 1964 to 1972, seven years and eight months in a single run, the longest until Abe, the years of the double-digit growth in which Japan passed West Germany to become the second economy of the West. They were the years of the Osaka exposition of 1970, of the student revolt that closed Tokyo University for a year, and of the reversion of Okinawa, which he negotiated with Nixon in 1969 and received in May 1972, saying that the post-war would not end until Okinawa came home. He declared in 1967 the three non-nuclear principles, that Japan would not make, possess or admit nuclear weapons, for which he was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974. The American documents released after his death showed that he had agreed secretly with Nixon that the weapons could come back to Okinawa in a crisis, and had told the American ambassador the principles were nonsense. He was born in Tabuse in Yamaguchi in 1901, the younger brother of Kishi Nobusuke, who had been adopted out to another family and who was prime minister in 1957-60, and the great-uncle of Abe Shinzo. He went from Tokyo Imperial University into the railway ministry, rose to be its vice-minister, and he was brought into politics by Yoshida in 1948 as his cabinet secretary. He was chief of the Liberal Party's affairs in the shipbuilding bribery scandal of 1954, from which the justice minister's intervention saved him. He held the finance and trade ministries under Kishi and Ikeda, and succeeded Ikeda when cancer removed him in November 1964. The governments normalised relations with South Korea in 1965 with a treaty and three hundred million dollars, supported the Vietnam war from the rear and profited from it, returned the Bonin islands in 1968. They were caught out by Nixon's two shocks of 1971, the opening to China and the end of the dollar's convertibility, of which Tokyo learned from the news. He resigned in July 1972 to Tanaka, in a farewell press conference at which he ordered the newspaper reporters out and spoke to the television cameras alone. He died in Tokyo in June 1975 after a stroke at a restaurant.
- Lived: 1901 CE – 1975 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: prime minister, politician
