(b. Tabuse, 27 Mar. 1901; d. 3 June 1975) Japanese; Prime Minister 1964 – 72 The son of a sake brewer, Satõ studied German Law at Tokyo Imperial University, graduating in 1924 and beginning a career in the Ministry of Railways and later the Ministry of Transport. In 1947 he was appointed Minister of Transport by the Occupation Authorities because of his handling of the 1947 General Strike, but took the post of Deputy Minister because of the difficulties surrounding his brother, Kishi Nobusuke (Prime Minister 1957 – 61), who was under suspicion of war crimes.

Satõ was a protégé of Yoshida Shigeru and along with his brother Kishi Nobusuke rose quickly in the newly formed Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), becoming Prime Minister following the retirement through ill-health of Ikeda Hayato in 1964. He was the longest serving post-war Japanese Prime Minister, remaining in office for eight years until being forced to resign over the issue of recognizing the People's Republic of China (PRC) in May 1972. Satõ presided over a period of unprecedented growth in the Japanese economy, but had to deal with a series of serious international problems. He was torn between maintaining Yoshida's policy of supporting the USA and the unpopularity of the Vietnam War among the Japanese population. His greatest achievements were normalizing relations with the Republic of Korea (1965), negotiating the successful return of Okinawa to full Japanese sovereignty in 1972 and guaranteeing the removal of US nuclear weapons from Japanese soil.

Following the shock visit of US President Richard Nixon to the PRC in 1971 Satõ moved hastily to improve relations with Beijing. However, because of his long-standing support for Chiang Kai-shek and the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan he faced implacable opposition from Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. This led to widespread factional struggle within the LDP, forcing his resignation in 1972, when he was replaced as Prime Minister by Tanaka Kakuei.

In 1974 Satõ was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in negotiating the Non-Proliferation Treaty and lifelong opposition to nuclear weapons, although rumours persist that Japanese business interests were instrumental in his nomination. He remained active in politics following his resignation, in particular in the pro-Taiwan lobby within the LDP, causing great anger in the PRC when he went to Taiwan to attend the funeral of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975. His son, Satõ Shinji, remains active in the LDP and in the pro-Taiwan Lobby.

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Eisaku Sato (1901-1975) was a Japanese political leader who served as prime minister longer than anyone else in Japanese history. Under his leadership Japan gradually began to translate its immense economic strength into enhanced political power in the international environment.

Eisaku Sato was born on March 27, 1901, in Yamaguchi Prefecture into a family of samurai descent. His home province, Choshu, provided much of the leadership (including Sato's great-grandfather) in the movement that overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and established the new imperial government. During the first century after the Meiji restoration, Yamaguchi provided more premiers than any other prefecture.

Sato therefore grew up in an atmosphere highly charged with political concerns; his mother was reported to have impressed upon her sons a sense of obligation to serve the state. Sato's eldest brother, Ichiro, became a rear admiral, retiring just prior to World War II. Another older brother, Nobusuke Kishi, served in the Hideki Tojo Cabinet as minister of commerce and industry during the war and subsequently, after serving 3 years in prison as a Class A war criminal, became a leader of the Liberal Democratic party and served as Japanese prime minister from 1957 to 1960.

Career in the Bureaucracy

Like Kishi, Sato attended Tokyo Imperial University, a ladder to success in Japanese society, and graduated in 1924 after studying German law. For a time he was interested in working for the N.Y.K. steamship line or the Ministry of Finance, but neither yielded him an opportunity, and he eventually ended up in the Transportation Ministry. His rise in the bureaucracy was not meteoric in the way Kishi's was in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Starting in a minor provincial post, he slowly rose through the ministerial hierarchy to become director of the Automobile Bureau. He was reportedly demoted after an argument with the deputy minister and sent to Osaka. The fact that he was not at ministerial headquarters saved him from the postwar purge.

Immediately after the war Sato was named general director of the Railway Administration and was soon promoted to deputy minister of transportation, the highest rank a civil servant could aspire to. At this juncture he made a decisive departure from his bureaucratic career.

Career in Politics

The Occupation's purge of large numbers of the prewar political elite left room for new people to enter parliamentary politics. Shigeru Yoshida, the prime minister, was in the midst of building up a strong personal following in the Diet, composed mainly of former bureaucrats. One who came to his attention was Sato. It is said that Sato's handling of troublesome new labor unions caught the attention of Yoshida. However that may be, Yoshida asked Sato, in 1948, to become his chief Cabinet secretary, a position of considerable importance in running the affairs of the Cabinet and supervising relations with the party. Sato accepted and soon after won a seat in the Diet.

Sato's association with Yoshida lasted for several years, and he was intensely loyal to the old man. Yoshida suffered public criticism in the spring of 1954, when he rescued Sato from legal charges growing out of a scandal that involved shipping interests and many top leaders of Yoshida's Liberal party. Sato, who was serving as secretary general of the party, was accused of having received political bribes from shipbuilding executives. Yoshida employed the powers of his office to intervene and prevent the arrest of Sato, who thereafter always maintained his innocence.

Rise to Prime Minister

In late 1954 Yoshida, whose position had been weakened by the scandal and more basically by increasing factionalism among the conservatives, was unseated by Ichiro Hatoyama. The following year Yoshida's Liberal party merged with Hatoyama's conservatives to form the Liberal-Democratic party. Behind the thin facade of party unity, factional strife continued unabated. Sato had by this time built up a strong personal following which he threw behind his brother Nobusuke Kishi, who with Sato's help became prime minister from 1957 to 1960. Sato entered the Cabinet as minister of finance. The immense popular disturbances that attended the Security Treaty crisis in 1960 toppled Kishi, who was succeeded by Hayato Ikeda.

Sato himself gradually built up his own claims to the premiership. Ikeda defeated him in a bitter struggle for the party presidency in 1964; but later in the year Ikeda, dying of cancer, was forced to retire, and Sato succeeded to the party presidency and the premiership by acclamation.

The crisis in the universities and continuing problems of Japanese-American relations were two of the major challenges confronting Sato during his term as prime minister. To deal with campus disorders, which wracked nearly all the universities in Japan, Sato's response was a bill that would allow the Ministry of Education to take over a school if the disruption persisted more than nine months. It was evident in elections that Sato's party benefited from a hard line on student disorders.

In November 1969 Sato flew to Washington seeking to conclude negotiations for the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty by 1972. Upon returning to Japan, he dissolved the House of Representatives, and in the general elections held on December 27 his party won a resounding victory. In June 1971 the United States and Japan signed a treaty to restore Okinawa and the other Ryukyu Islands to Japanese sovereignty in 1972; the accord was ratified by both countries in March 1972. In July the 71-year-old premier resigned. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, along with Sean MacBride, for his policies on nuclear weapons that contributed to stability in the geographic area. He died the following year, on June 2, 1975, in Tokyo.

Further Reading

There was no reliable biography of Sato. For a perceptive analysis of the workings of Japanese politics see Donald C. Hellmann, Japanese Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics (1969). Another useful book for understanding the intricacies of the politics in Sato's party was Nathaniel B. Thayer, How the Conservatives Rule Japan (1969). Sato's policies were also discussed in Edwin O. Reischauer's Japan: The Story of a Nation (1989).

For more information on Eisaku Sato, visit Britannica.com.

(āsä'kū sä'tō) , 1901–75, Japanese politician, prime minister (1964–72), brother of Nobusuke Kishi. After receiving a law degree from Tokyo Imperial Univ. (1924) he entered the ministry of railways, serving there until 1947, when he was appointed vice minister of transportation. He left the transportation ministry in 1948 and entered politics as a Liberal-Democratic member of the lower house of the Diet. He held a variety of ministerial posts in the next several governments, including minister of construction (1952–53), minister of finance (1958–60), and minister of science and technology (1963–64). In 1964 he succeeded Hayato Ikeda as prime minister when ill health forced the latter to resign. Although inexperienced in international affairs, Sato pursued a vigorous foreign policy during his term in office. He negotiated an agreement (1965) that called for the normalization of South Korean–Japanese relations, and in 1969 he signed a treaty with the United States that led to the reestablishment (1972) of Japanese sovereignty in Okinawa. However, Sato did not anticipate the public outcry against a provision in the Okinawa agreement that allowed U.S. forces to remain on the island, and he was forced to resign in 1972 shortly after the treaty took effect. Sato was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974.