Shinzo Abe is Japan's longest serving prime minister. Abe comes from a long dynasty of politicians including those who served The Empire of Japan in World War II. Japan unlike Germany was able to avoid most of the punishment dulled out after WWII.
Nobusuke Kishi is Abe's maternal grandfather who would become Prime Minister and go on to shape post war Japan. Kishi was mentored by Hideki Tojo and was a war criminal, who ruled over Manchukuo or the Japanese puppet state in China. His nickname was the "Monster of the Showa Era".
This is the story of Nobusuke Kishi and his rise to power, subsequent fall, and rise to power again in an American aligned Japan.
Shinzo Abe is Japan's longest serving prime minister. Abe comes from a long dynasty of politicians including those who served The Empire of Japan in World War II. Japan unlike Germany was able to avoid most of the punishment dulled out after WWII.
Nobusuke Kishi is Abe's maternal grandfather who would become Prime Minister and go on to shape post war Japan. Kishi was mentored by Hideki Tojo and was a war criminal, who ruled over Manchukuo or the Japanese puppet state in China. His nickname was the "Monster of the Showa Era".
This is the story of Nobusuke Kishi and his rise to power, subsequent fall, and rise to power again in an American aligned Japan.
Our Man In Japan
Shinzo Abe, is Japan’s longest serving Prime Minister, He was also quite popular in Japan, consistently ranked as one of Japan’s most popular PMs. Famous for his Abenomics Japan’s attempt at combating Stagnation that has plagued Japan for more than two decades.
the former prime minister comes from a long dynasty of politicians, dating back to the days of the Samurai and Japanese Empire. His father Shintaro Abe served as foreign minister and his grandfather and great uncle were also Prime Ministers.
Shinzo Abe the cute, old, smiling Japanese man, is also quite a controversial figure, despite his popularity some critiques have described him as a “right-wing Japanese Nationalist” and even a “Fascist”
During the second world war Japan was, if not fascist flirting with Fascism and the government of that period led to some of the worst atrocities in human history, Which Abe denies as fabrications.
Japan had colonial rule over Korea and China and is still battling these countries today over political wounds that refuse to heal due to Japan’s denial of atrocities committed.
Abe’s views on the history of Japan have been the main thing his detractors like to harp on, for example he denied that Japan forced women into sexual slavery during World War II, claiming that women in Japan’s notorious brothels were there of their own volition. Japan was famous for its use of “comfort Women” in the 2nd world war, most of whom were from Korea or China.
He also claims the Japanese puppet state in China Manchukuo was not a puppet state, Manchukuo had a nominal Chinese emperor, Puyi, the last Emperor of China however he had virtually no power and was ruled by a Japanese cabinet which instituted mass slave labor, deportations and crimes against humanity.
Abe has also stated that Class-A war criminals, or those who found themselves on the benches of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, (the Japanese version of the Nuremberg Trials). Are not criminals under Japan’s domestic law.
Abe’s maternal grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was a class-A war criminal titled the de facto “economic king” of occupied China and Manchukuo
Nobosuke Kishi also had another name the "Monster of the Shōwa era"
Kishi was one of the top advisors to Hideki Tojo, and was one of the signatures of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and declaration of War on the USA. Germany famously went through Denazification where the Nazi’s that weren’t hung or imprisoned were barred from running for political office, how could a man such as Kishi and his long running political dynasty end up leading Postwar Japan?
Nobusuke Kishi was born into a family that was once an Illustrious Samurai family. His older brother Ichiro Sato would also achieve prominence eventually becoming Vice Admiral in the Imperial Navy and his younger brother Eisaku Satō would eventually succeed him as prime minister.
You might be curious why Nobosuke Kishi and his SATO brothers have different names, that is because Kishi was adopted by his fathers older brother, you still might be questioning why his father’s older brother had a different name… Idk Japan is confusing… go look it up on Wikipedia…
adult adoption is a dynamic tool for social and economic mobility, and in many cases is a way to extend a prestigious families name, especially when they are unable to produce male offspring in the Heavily male dominated culture of Japan.
KISHI BIO
The newly named Kishi was brilliant, he passed the extremely difficult entrance exam to enter First High School Tokyo, the most prestigious high school in the country, and then attended Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), where he graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1920 at the top of his class and with the highest grades in the university's history.
Upon graduation, Kishi entered the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.[10] This was an unusual choice, because at the time, the most brilliant aspiring bureaucrats typically sought to enter the Home Ministry and eventually gain appointment as a prefectural governor.[10] Some of Kishi's mentors even criticized his choice
In 1926–27, Kishi traveled around the world to study industry and industrial policy in various industrialized states around the world, such as the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union.
Kishi became obsessed with state planned economies, like that of the USSR. He would use this ideology for his next venture in Manchukuo.
Manchukuo or Chinese Manchuria is the northeastern most point of China that connects with Russia, North Korea and Mongolia today.
In 1931 the Notorious Mukden Incident happened. Allegedly a False Flag operation was set up by the Japanese military where a small amount of dynamite was exploded on a Japanese railway near Mukden. The Japanese then invaded Manchuria aka Manchukuo and set up a puppet state In the vast region of northeastern China. This puppet state would be a slave state of mass industrialization, whose sole purpose was to supply Japan with the materials it needed to wage war.
Kishi, Who was openly touting the policies of Nazi Germany and called for policies of "industrial rationalization" to eliminate capitalist competition in support of state goals caught the eye of the Japanese Kwantung army who was ruling Manchukuo.
in 1935 Kishi was given complete control of Manchukuo's economy by the military, with the authority to do whatever he liked just as long as industrial growth was increased. Which it certainly did…
MANCHUKO
Kishi has been described as the "mastermind" behind the industrial development of Japan's puppet state in Manchuria. He was the ultimate businessman and was very successful, his goal was to get the most profits possible from Manchukuo, which he did.
He enacted a 5 year plan based off of the soviet economic model but he was also able to persuade the Japanese military to allow private investment, thereby having the best of both worlds.
One of the new public-private corporations founded to assist in carrying out the Five-Year Plan was the Manchuria Industrial Development Company (MIDC), a corporate conglomerate established in 1937, which attracted a staggering 5.2 billion yen in private investment, making it by far the largest capital project in the Japanese empire; by comparison, the total annual budget of Japan's national government was 2.5 billion yen in 1937
The system that Kishi pioneered in Manchuria of a state-guided economy where corporations made their investments on government orders later served as the model for Japan's post-1945 development, and subsequently, that of South Korea and China as well
(The Asian Miracle as it would later become known)
ATtrocities
Under Kishi’s leadership Indistrial outcome increased massively ,Kishi lowered wages to maximize profit to a level unthinkable, even below survival standards. However those hwo found themselves working for dirt cheap wages were the lucky ones. As in 1937 war broke out with the remainder of China. Kishi signed a decree of forced conscription during “Times of Emergency”
industry needed to grow at all costs while guaranteeing healthy profits for state and private investors.[26] Starting in 1938 and continuing to 1945, about one million Chinese were taken every year to work as slaves in Manchukuo.[27] The harsh conditions of Manchukuo were well illustrated by the Fushun coal mine, which at any given moment had about 40,000 men working as miners, of whom about 25,000 had to be replaced every year as their predecessors had died due to poor working conditions and low living standards.
Kishi was disgusted by the Chinese, referring to them as “Lawless Bandits” who were "incapable of governing themselves".
he felt the Chinese were more akin to dogs than human beings and would only understand brute force
Kishi always used the term "Manshū" to refer to Manchukuo, instead of "Manshūkoku", A Japanese difference in definition which reflected his viewpoint that Manchukuo was not actually a state, but rather just a region rich in resources and 34 million people to be used for Japan's benefit.
In his later years, Kishi recalled how "inhuman" treatment of Chinese people had become naturalized among the Japanese colonial elite, turning human beings into "mechanical instruments of the Imperial Army, non-human automatons, absolutely obedient" to their Japanese masters.
Japan coined the term The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to describe an East Asian bloc of countries, free from Western Imperialism where all Asiatic peoples could embrace and support each other. In reality this was a propagandistic farce.
Manchuko for example was a state labaled as home to the Manchus, Mongols, Han, Korean Japanese among others… however
Kishi only associated with other Japanese in his time in the multi-ethnic diverse state of Manchuko.
Kishi's dinner companions were fellow bureaucrats, businessmen seeking government contracts, Army officers and yakuza gangsters.
He used these gangsters to terrorize his Chinese workers into submission, and ensure that there were no strikes caused by the long hours, low pay and poor working conditions.
Kishi repeatedly expressed a disdain for Chinese people as impure and unclean
One of Kishi's closest friends and business partners, the yakuza gangster Yoshio Kodama, summed up his boss's thinking about the Chinese as follows: "We Japanese are like pure water in a bucket; different from the Chinese who are like the filthy Yangtze river. But be careful. If even the smallest amount of shit gets into our bucket, we become totally polluted. Since all the toilets in China empty into the Yangtze, the Chinese are soiled forever. We, however, must maintain our purity".[32]
Freetime
As a self-described "playboy of the Eastern world", Kishi was known during his four years in Manchukuo for his lavish spending amid much drinking, gambling, and womanizing.[33] Kishi spent almost all of his time in Manchukuo's capital, Hsinking (modern Changchun, China) with the exception of monthly trips to Dalian on the world famous Asia Express railroad line, where he indulged in his passion for women in alcohol- and sex-drenched weekends.[29] According to Driscoll, "photographs and written descriptions of Kishi during this period never fail to depict a giddy exuberance: laughing and joking while doling out money during the day and looking forward to drinking and fornicating at night."[34] Kishi was able to afford his hedonistic, free-spending lifestyle as he had control over millions of yen with virtually no oversight, alongside being deeply involved in and profiting from the opium trade.[35] Before returning to Japan in October 1939, Kishi is reported to have advised his colleagues in the Manchukuo government about corruption: "Political funds should be accepted only after they have passed through a 'filter' and been 'cleansed'. If a problem arises, the 'filter' itself will then become the center of the affair, while the politician, who has consumed the 'clean water', will not be implicated. Political funds become the basis of corruption scandals only when they have not been sufficiently 'filtered.”
Kishi due to his 5 year economic models was blacklisted as a “Communist” in the repressive Empire of Japan This label could have had him jailed or killed. He lost his job in 1940 but rose again when he caught the eye of Hideki Tojo. Who enlisted him in his newly formed premiership, The Two had worked closely together in Manchuria and Tojo regarded Kishi as his Protégé
Tojo was appointed Prime minister in October 1941. Tojo is the most famous war criminal held and later hung in the Tokyo War Tribunal. He was an Ultranationalist who oversaw much of Japan’s sexual enslavement of “Comfort Women” and extreme war crimes during the 2nd world war.
Including the infamous Unit 731…
If you have read about the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and his disturbing experiments performed at Auschwitz this is basically the Japanese version of it.
Unit 731 was located in Manchukuo and routinely involved live human experimentation. Human subjects were referred to as “Logs” and were experimented upon in some of the most barbaric ways.
Reports include subjects being tied to logs and then having grenades thrown at them at certain distances to study the damage inflicted, they also used different weapon types including flamethrowers.
Newly graduted Surgeons from Japan would be sent to “china” to increase their experience so they could better serve the Japanese Army. They would perform numerous operations on live subjects who would after having limbs and body parts removed me shot.
Some people were exposed to hypothermia and would have hot water thrown on them to see the effects of what the human body could endure.
Most famously Disease inections were common, patients would be dissected alive at different points on the infection so that the effects of the disease on their body could be observed.
The program received generous support from the Japanese government until the end of the war in 1945.
The government of Japan has mostly upheld the bizarre tings that occurred in Unit 731. Most of what we know comes from testimonies of workers. One Worker said when contacted years later “I don’t want to think about Unit 731, Fifty years have passed since the war. Please let me remain silent”
As Tensions arose between the USA and Japan over their constant warfare and brutality in China. The USA imposed more and more sanctions on the resource dependent Japan.
On July 26, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt seizes all Japanese assets in the United States in retaliation for the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China. Which the Japanese occupied to prevent interference and weapons from entering China.
Tojo’s first move as Prime minister was the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
-INSERT TOJO DECLARATION OF WAR- (TRANSLATION?)
On 1 December 1941, Kishi voted in the Cabinet for war with the United States and Britain, and co-signed the declaration of war issued on 7 December 1941
As the war turned against the Japanese, Tojo sought to consolidate his power, amassing more positions for himself in the government. Kishi was forced to take a demotion which created a rift between the two men. Eventually by 1944 Kishi became certain the war was unwinnable and that peace must be sought with the Americans.
The American D-Day in the pacific took place with the invasion of Saipan. This was the first time in the war fighting had taken place on Japanese home soil. Saipan was the most heavily fortified of the northern Mariana Islands this was because Saipan held a strategically important airbase, which the allies could use to bomb mainland Japan.
After Saipan Tojo’s government began to collapse, he tried to save it by reorganizing his cabinet.
Kishi refused a request to resign, telling Tōjō he would only resign if the prime minister also resigned along with the entire cabinet, saying a partial reorganization was unacceptable.[39] Despite Tōjō's tears as he begged Kishi to help him save his government, Kishi was unmoved.[39] Kishi's actions succeeded in bringing down the Tōjō cabinet and led directly to Tōjō's replacement as prime minister with General Kuniaki Koiso
Battles like Saipan showed how brutal and fanatical the Japanese were.
A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson's staff by William Shockley estimated that invading Japan would cost 1.7–4 million American casualties, including 400,000–800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities.
As the war in Europe was finishing and the war drew to aclose The newly ascended President Truman decided to drop the Atomic bomb on Japan to end the war.
Sound effect nuclear bomb dropping--
After the nuclear bombings, the God Emperor Hirohito stepped in and for the first time ever addressed his people on radio.
- INSERT THE JEWEL VOICE BROADCAST-
Speaking in an antiquated Imperial style of Japanese that most in Japan couldn’t understand, The people were confused on his address… this was intended as it could prevent the people from Japan from panicking or acting irrationally
he Announced Japan had surrender to the allies and accepted whatever they would impose upon her
The Japanese Empire that had stretched the Pacific was over, and would now become an allied occupied territory
Japan’s Adversary the United States would be its sole occupier. Which actually greatly benefited Japan and led to its massive economic expansion in the post war years. However the wounds of war would not be healed anytime soon..
Nobusuke Kishi found himself along with Hideki Tojo in Sugamo prison, Awaiting trial for crimes against Humanity….