Yasuhiro Nakasone, one of Japan’s longest-reigning prime ministers and known for his friendship with Ronald Reagan, has died at the age of 101.
Nakasone, prime minister from 1982 to 1987, shared the world stage with Reagan and Margaret Thatcher while battling with bureaucrats over domestic reforms.
He himself said he failed to achieve a dream of revising the country’s pacifist, post-war constitution to clarify the ambiguous status of the military.
“Revising the constitution takes time. I stressed to the public that it was necessary, but it was not possible to begin the revision quickly,” the straight-talking Nakasone told Reuters in an interview in January 2010.
The current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has made loosening the limits of the US-drafted constitution a key goal but revising the charter’s pacifist Article Nine remains contentious.
Known for his “Ron and Yasu” friendship with Reagan, Nakasone made headlines after taking office when he said that in event of a war, he would make Japan an unsinkable “aircraft carrier” for US forces and bottle up the Soviet navy.
Nakasone also broke an unwritten rule on limiting the annual defence budget to 1% of gross national product.
In 1983, he became the first Japanese premier to officially visit South Korea, mending fences with a country that Japan had brutally colonised from 1910 to 1945.
Nakasone, a former lieutenant in the imperial navy who lost his younger brother in the second world war, outraged Asian countries when he made an official visit to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, where convicted war criminals are honoured along with Japan’s war dead, on the 40th anniversary of Japan’s surrender.
He decided not to repeat the pilgrimage after it sparked riots in China.
Nakasone’s outspoken ways sometimes caused problems.
In 1986 he offended black Americans, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans living in the United States by saying they brought the average intelligence level of Americans below that of Japan.
Nakasone pursued domestic reforms aggressively, privatising Japan’s state-run railway, tobacco and telecommunications monopolies. Critics say, however, that he failed to implement a landmark set of reform proposals to help Japan’s economy grow.
He was also less successful in reforming Japan’s education system, trying both to instil traditional morals and discipline while also nurturing individuals who could compete globally.
Nakasone won a rare fifth year in office after leading his Liberal Democratic party to a landslide victory in 1986. But his career was shadowed by links to a huge political scandal, a stocks-for-favours scam.
He quit the LDP in 1989 over the scandal but two years later was welcomed back as a senior adviser.
He was forced to retire in 2003 when he was 85, along with other elder statesmen by then-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who was keen to rejuvenate the LDP’s image as a party of hidebound, elderly politicians.
Born in the hilly district of Takasaki, northwest of Tokyo, on 27 May 1918, to a wealthy timber trader, Nakasone graduated from Tokyo University before entering the Home Ministry in 1941.
He joined the Tokyo police department after Japan’s surrender in 1945. Nakasone has two daughters and a politician son, Hirofumi.