Tanaka Is Dead, but His Legacy Lives in Japan

Tanaka Is Dead, But His Legacy Lives in Japan By Jacob M. Schlesinger 17 December 1993 The Asian Wall Street Journal (Copyright (c) 1993, Dow Jones & Co., Inc.) TOKYO -- Kakuei Tanaka, the king of postwar Japanese politics, is dead. But his legacy lives on. The former prime minister -- Japan's most powerful leader in decades and a pioneer of the nation's notorious money politics -- died Thursday of pneumonia. He was 75 years old. Mr. Tanaka lost his personal clout nearly a decade ago, after suffering a stroke. But his passing dominated the evening news shows, and Tokyo newspapers rushed out special editions with long obituaries -- testimony to his enduring im pact. Mr. Tanaka's death marks the symbolic end of an era. He was the architect of Japan's rapid growth through public works in the 1970s and the man who strengthened the "Iron Triangle" of close ties among politicians, bureaucrats and big business. The fall of Mr. Tanaka's Liberal Democratic Party last summer, after four decades in power, brought the collapse of his long-lasting political machine. Mr. Tanaka, a former construction-company executive, fostered the close ties between the LDP and contractors that this year spawned a massive public-works bribery scandal. The political reforms currently being debated in Parliament are a response to two decades of scandals, a period that started with Mr. Tanaka's 1976 arrest for taking bribes from Lockheed Corp. Yet the very politicians now leading the charge against Mr. Tanaka's empire are also Tanaka proteges. The two most powerful men in the new, anti-LDP government -- Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa and his chief strategist, Ichiro Ozawa -- started their careers in the so-called Tanaka faction of the LDP. Mr. Hosokawa is, in some ways, reminiscent of the public Mr. Tanaka. At 55, he is Japan's second-youngest premier since the war -- after Mr. Tanaka, who took office in 1972 at the age of 54. Mr. Hoso kawa's high public-support ratings have been virtually unseen since the populist Mr. Tanaka's reign. Mr. Ozawa carries on the backroom power-brokering traditions of Mr. Tanaka, who controlled Japanese politics for more than a decade after scandal cut short his term as prime minister, and even after his arrest. Mr. Ozawa was once Mr. Tanaka's most loyal lieutenant, attending all 191 hearings of the Lockheed trial, in which Mr. Tanaka was convicted. "From the time I won my first election, I was under the leadership of Mr. Tanaka, and he worried about my affairs as if he were my father," Mr. Ozawa said in a handwritten statement released by his office. "The only path left now is to employ all energy into politics for the sake of Japan while reflecting on Mr. Tanaka's teachings." Mr. Tanaka's daughter, Makiko, won a seat in Parliament in July, running with the LDP. After her victory, she took her father, silenced by the stroke, on a celebratory tour of their home district of rural Niigata. Elderly farmers lined the streets, reaching out to touch the former premier's frail hand. Born in a poor family, Mr. Tanaka never finished high school, but made a sizable personal fortune before, essentially, buying his way into politics. Shortly after becoming prime minister, he normalized relations with China. He was best known for his platform of building infrastructure, which included bringing superhighways and bullet trains to sparsely populated regions of his district. Mr. Tanaka was sentenced to four years in prison in the Lockheed affair, but he never served, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. The case was never concluded. .

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