July 4, 2006Adroit politician who as Prime Minister of Japan attempted to deal with the long-festering legacy of his country's wartime pastRYUTARO HASHIMOTO, who served two terms as Prime Minister of Japan, was blessed and cursed by fortune and by many of those closest to him.He was born, an eldest son, in 1937 as Japan steeled itself for the most terrible war in history. His father, Ryogo Hashimoto, though crippled with polio as a child, had achieved high political office. He was serving as Minister of Education and Minister of Health and Welfare under Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi when Ryutaro Hashimoto went to study political science in the faculty of Laws at at Keio (St Paul’s) University, Tokyo.
After his graduation in 1960 he worked for a Japanese textile company for two years before, at the age of 26, entering the House of Representatives in the Japanese Diet (parliament) in 1963 after his father’s death. He quickly showed his aptitude and rose to become director of the social affairs division of the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) Policy Research Council and chairman of the Lower House’s Standing Committee on Social and Labour Affairs.
Photo: Ryutaro Hashimoto, July 29, 1937 - July 1, 2006And, as if to prove that his father’s inspiration continued to guide his career, Hashimoto’s first position in 1978-79 in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira, at the age of 41, was as Minister of Health and Welfare, his father’s last portfolio.
He was widely praised for his achievements in the fields of pension entitlements, medical care and welfare. He chaired the LDP Research Commission on Public Administration and Finance between 1980 and 1986, during the Governments of Prime Ministers Zenko Suzuki and Yasuhiro Nakasone. He subsequently served as Minister of Transport in Nakasone’s third Cabinet, 1986-87, during which period he privatised Japanese National Railways and split it into six regional companies as part of his wider remit to overhaul administrative reform and restore confidence in public finance.
Between 1987 and 1989 he returned to backroom politics in a variety of positions, including secretary-generalship of the LDP (and thus the second-most important member of his party after its president, the Prime Minister), and in that capacity he held sway over all aspects of his party’s internal affairs and discipline.
In 1989 he was appointed Minister of Finance by Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu until 1991, forcing through a policy of tax reforms. With the Gulf War in 1991 and the necessity of retaining good relations with the US, Japan — constitutionally barred from military involvement — had to find some way of demonstrating its commitment to security. This responsibility fell chiefly to Hashimoto and he somehow managed to find $13 billion in measures of financial assistance to those countries who had committed troops to the enterprise. In effect, Japan subsidised the US and several of their allies.
The long-term consequences for Japan were disastrous: few first-world economies would have fared half as well under the circumstances.
Meanwhile, Hashimoto was forced to resign as Minister of Finance in 1991 after the press found that one of his secretaries was implicated in illegal financial dealing. He did not long remain in the wilderness. When the LDP lost its first election in a generation in 1993, Hashimoto went back to policymaking within the inner recesses of his party as chairman of its Policy Research Council. In June 1994 Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama appointed him as Minister of International Trade and Industry. In this period he helped with a broad range of reforms in trade and industry but also played a powerful role in seeking changes in international trade and investments in the aftermath of the Uruguay trade round.
He achieved a successful outcome to long and difficult negotiations with his US counterpart, Mickey Kantor, over cars and car parts, holding his own against a determined adversary and huge vested interests.
In September 1995 he was elected president of the LDP. A month later he became Deputy Prime Minister in Murayama’s Government. And when Murayama resigned, Hashimoto finally attained the Premiership on January 11, 1996.
In October of that year, he led the LDP to victory in a general election. He completed the reorganisation of his Cabinet in November and held office thereafter in an LDP-only Cabinet with the support of the Socialist Party and the New Party Sakigake. In September 1997 he was re-elected unopposed as president of his party.
During his two terms as Prime Minister Hashimoto set himself a target of overhauling six areas in dire need of reform: administration, economic structure, education, financial affairs, fiscal structures and social security. In foreign policy areas he made great strides in the renegotiation of bilateral security arrangements with the US, and made progress related to the extraterritorial rights and base facilities held by US forces stationed in Okinawa.
After the Cabinet reshuffle of September 1997, he seemed set fair to achieve further major reforms, but the changes in his Cabinet disturbed the delicate balances on which so much of his Government’s successes had rested. He now had enemies lying in wait all around him. His economic reforms could not keep pace with rapidly changing circumstances, and it was this which appeared at the time to put all he had achieved at nought.
The economy began to descend into an uncontrollable spiral, weighed down by non-performing loans. When his measures showed what he thought were signs of halting the long-term decline, he made a fundamental error of misreading his indicators. He took a calculated risk by raising taxes on consumption, closing tax loopholes, and raising pension premiums. Beyond the tactical errors which were later to be freely admitted, the fundamental strains probably owed more to the costs of the Gulf War. Hashimoto could only watch as Japan plunged into recession and he resigned on July 30, 1998.
For a while the wisdom was that he had proved himself to be a man of the past, wedded to a style of politics out of touch with national expectations and requirements. He was succeeded as Prime Minister by Keizo Obuchi and then, when Obuchi died in office, Yoshiro Mori became Prime Minister and offered Hashimoto a portfolio as Minister for Administrative Reforms, a position he occupied for four months in 2000-01.
His successors, however, ran into the sand, too, and in April 2001 he regained control of the LDP’s largest faction and was widely thought to be on the brink of winning back control in his party’s presidential election. Mori resigned, but unexpectedly, Junichiro Koizumi, who was regarded as a maverick by the old-guard, swept to victory with a strong surge of support from ordinary voters.
Hashimoto, the old political pro, with his trademark Brylcreamed hairstyle and appeal to Japan’s equivalent of Tory matrons with flowered hats, lost his way, blown off-course by Koizumi’s appeal to younger, more radical styles of reform, reforms that in substance, however, borrowed much from Hashimoto’s own agenda.
Later, Hashimoto tried once more to regain his previous political authority. But out of the blue an old-fashioned financial scandal brought his remaining ambitions to a halt.
It became known that an illegal 100-million yen donation had been received by his faction, traced back to the Japan Dentists Federation. He was forced to appear before the House of Representatives’ Deliberative Council on Political Ethics. When asked whether he had received the cheque, he replied that he must have done so because that is what everyone said had happened. With that, any hope of regaining power vanished completely.
In Japan, without doubt, Hashimoto will chiefly be remembered for his achievements and spectacular failures in domestic affairs and for his foreign policy initiatives towards China, Korea and the US. As an elder statesman in retirement, he continued to offer good council and advice to those who called for it, notably in Third World countries.
As far as Britain was concerned, however, the key to understanding Hashimoto’s significance rests with the formative experiences of his childhood and youth. Given the highly controversial reputation of Prime Minister Kishi — he had been held on remand in Sugamo Prison awaiting trial as a war criminal and had been released on Christmas Eve 1948, a few hours after Hideki Tojo and six others were hanged for their parts in the dolorous history of Japan’s troubles with her neighbours from 1928 to 1945 — it is easy to see why the history and legacies of that period, and in particular the debts owed by, and to, Japan’s wartime leadership, several million ex-servicemen and tens of millions of innocent civilians, so preoccupied Hashimoto throughout his life.
From his youth he could recall both the war against China and the privations of his countrymen during the total war in the Pacific that culminated in the atomic bombings and occupation of his homeland. He learnt, too, of the consequences of defeat from his father’s closest political allies. These included not only Kishi but also two of the most remarkable men whom the Allies’ International Military Tribunal for the Far East had convicted and sentenced to imprisonment as war criminals: Mamoru Shigemitsu and Okinori Kaya. Kishi reinstated both to positions of great trust in his own Cabinet: the former as his Foreign Minister, and the latter, who had been General Tojo’s Finance Minister, as Minister of Justice. Against this background, it is not surprising that Hashimoto remained passionately engaged with issues such as war remembrance and forgiveness, and he appreciated that both were two-way streets. It is not without irony that he chaired, and received strong support from, the right-wing Japan War-Bereaved Families Association. This powerful pressure group of war widows and other champions of Japanese ex-servicemen bitterly resisted all apologies for Japan’s war record and recalled the 1931-45 period in quite a different light from citizens of the countries against whom Japan had fought.
True to that background and associations, Hashimoto felt no sense of shame in openly defying critics by visiting Yasukuni Shrine, which notoriously memorialises those Japanese who died for their country in armed conflicts, including those who had been executed as war criminals.
This is not to say that Hashimoto did not strongly support war reconciliation projects. Indeed, he put a tremendous amount of his political capital behind such ideas, but he did so as a Japanese patriot. An accomplished fifth-Dan practitioner of kendo, the ancient martial art of traditional Samurai swordsmanship, he believed that Japan’s record and character were widely, and tragically, misunderstood abroad, not least by foreign counterparts of the Japanese war widows and other Japanese war victims whose causes he championed.
And nowhere were the difficulties of this juggling act greater than in China, Korea, the Netherlands, the US and the UK. So far as the last was concerned, the demands by some British wartime prisoners of the Japanese for “financial reconciliation” was the greatest worry that troubled Japanese politicians and diplomats as they were preparing for a state visit to the UK by Emperor Hirohito’s successor, Emperor Akihito.
And it was thoughts of these events and the prospects of lawsuits and public protests mounted by ex-prisoners of the Japanese that captured the attention of Hashimoto and Tony Blair, just as it had John Major and Hashimoto’s Socialist predecessor, Tomiichi Murayama, between 1994 and 1996.
Murayama had formally apologised for wartime Japanese misconduct and for operations that most people in the world condemned as “crimes against peace” and he had initiated a great project aimed at bringing about a higher form of peace and reconciliation than Japan had ever achieved during the 20th century.
No Japanese political party was convinced that public opinion would accept that it would be appropriate for a Japanese Government to pay money to Allied war victims, and in the face of threatened court cases which angered or perplexed most Japanese, some other means of reducing tension had to be found.
In August 1994 Murayama launched a billion-yen initiative designed to achieve just that. Provision was made for Britain’s share of that to be divided between a new five-year Anglo-Japanese collaborative history project and two ten-year grassroots initiatives; one, Agape, to provide opportunities for ex-prisoners and their spouses to go to Japan to see Japan’s changed face, and the other, Pacific Venture, to give similar opportunities to as many as 20 grandchildren of former Japanese PoWs and civilian internees.
As Murayama’s successor, Hashimoto agreed to continue the programme and ultimately went even further. With encouragement from the British during a five-day state visit by Tony Blair to Japan in January 1998, it was agreed to double the number of participants in the Pacific Venture programme, with new opportunities for such grandchildren to take up scholarships in Japan, and an opening of joint pilgrimages of British and Japanese veterans to battlefields and cemeteries.
And to maximise the impact of that, Alastair Campbell, Downing Street’s communications maestro, arranged for The Sun newspaper to run a front-page letter in Hashimoto’s name appealing to the British public to accept his sincere regrets and deep remorse for all the pain and suffering caused by the war — and to consign it all to history.
This received huge publicity in Britain, caused a good deal of consternation in diplomatic circles and, it must be said, went almost entirely unreported in Japan at the time. No one could recall any occasion on which Hashimoto himself had written for any newspaper in Japan or elsewhere.
The incident, however, had the unintended but predictable consequence of outraging many of the ex-prisoners who stepped up their quest to seek remedies in the Japanese courts (a painful and doomed enterprise) and to plan great demonstrations to embarrass the Emperor and Empress during their state visit five months later.
Hashimoto died a month after undergoing emergency abdominal surgery. He is survived by his wife, Kumiko, three daughters and two sons.
Ryutaro Hashimoto, Prime Minister of Japan, 1996-98, was born on July 29, 1937. He died on July 1, 2006, aged 68.
Democratic Party of Japan
In response to a question regarding the drafting of an Okinawa Vision, Ozawa pointed out, "We must consider this while taking the wishes and opinions of the people of Okinawa prefecture into consideration." He mentioned the importance of "reducing the burden of the bases on Okinawa as much as possible, as well as stabilising the Okinawan way of life", emphasising his determination to work on the problems of the division of roles between Japan and the US and on the regional development of Okinawa. Ozawa also expressed his concern regarding "a Japan-US relationship where Japan is only a follower" and said the government should not "simply create the appearance of making a big furore�cbasically it is important to have a clear direction and policy for the route that Japan should take."
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