Yoshida Shigeru
Shigeru Yoshida was Prime Minister of Japan for most of the occupation and early postwar period, and set the strategic course the country followed for half a century. Born in Tokyo in 1878, the son of a political activist, he was adopted as an infant by a wealthy merchant and inherited a fortune at eleven. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and entered the diplomatic service. He served in China, and as ambassador to Italy and then Britain from 1936 to 1938, where he came to admire British institutions and to regard war with the Anglo-American powers as ruinous. He was sidelined during the war as insufficiently militarist, and in 1945 was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the military police after being implicated in an approach urging early surrender. That record made him acceptable to the occupation authorities. He was foreign minister and then prime minister from 1946, serving in five cabinets across 1946-47 and 1948-54. He worked with Douglas MacArthur's headquarters on the new constitution, land reform and the dissolution of the zaibatsu, accepting the substance while resisting where he could. The Yoshida Doctrine was his lasting contribution: Japan would accept the pacifist Article 9, keep defence spending minimal, rely on the United States for security under the 1951 mutual security treaty, and devote everything else to economic reconstruction and export growth. He signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty in September 1951, which restored sovereignty. He resisted American pressure to rearm substantially, and conceded only a modest Self-Defense Force in 1954. Blunt and often high-handed, he was forced out that year, and died in 1967.
- Lived: 1878 CE – 1967 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: statesman
