Do we like Yasuhiro Nakasone?
Our score: 4 out of 10. A long, consequential career with real reforms and diplomacy, set against a 1986 remark about minorities and a contested wartime episode.
Nothing new on him lately: Yasuhiro Nakasone died on 29 November 2019, aged 101, so this is a look back at a long career. Born in 1918, he joined the Home Ministry in 1941, served as a lieutenant in the Imperial Navy, and lost a younger brother in the war. He ran Japan from 1982 to 1987, which was a rare fifth year in office after a landslide in 1986.
His headline legacy is the 'Ron and Yasu' friendship with Ronald Reagan. Early in his term he said Japan would be an 'unsinkable' aircraft carrier for US forces, and he broke an unwritten 1 per cent of GNP limit on defence spending. At home he privatised the state railway, tobacco and telecommunications monopolies, which is a big reform whichever way you vote.
The harm check starts with September 1986. At a ruling-party seminar he called Japan a 'pretty intelligent society' and then compared it with the US, saying that in America there are Black, Puerto Rican and Mexican people who lower the average level. After a storm of complaints he first said he'd been quoted out of context, then issued a 'heartfelt apology' and said he hadn't meant to imply racial discrimination. It was a gaffe that exposed an ugly assumption, though it was a single episode and not a campaign.
The wartime story is murkier. In a 1978 essay he wrote that, as a Navy officer in the Dutch East Indies, he took great pains to set up a comfort station for men who were attacking local women and gambling. In 2007 he admitted that comfort stations existed and that women were coerced, but denied organising brothels himself, saying the people involved were civilian engineers. Where you land depends on whether you read his 1978 words or his 2007 denial as the better account.
On the corruption front, he was named in the Recruit stock affair after leaving office. Aides were alleged to have acquired shares in a Recruit subsidiary. In 1989 he told parliament under oath he'd done nothing wrong and refused to resign his seat, and prosecutors did not charge him. He did quit the LDP over it, and he returned as a senior adviser in 1991, so it's a stain on the ledger but not a conviction.
The good stuff is real. He was the first Japanese premier to make an official visit to South Korea, in 1983. After he went to Yasukuni Shrine on the 40th anniversary of the surrender, which angered Asian neighbours, he chose not to go again. The Wilson Center says he held back partly because further visits could damage China's Hu Yaobang, with whom he'd built a personal bond of trust.