Word: kishi
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...father, Hidesuke Kishi, was a minor government official in a village on the green, indented western tip of Honshu, Japan's main island. His scholarly attainments won him a job with the aristocratic Sato family, and he tutored their eldest daughter, Moyo, in Chinese literature. He was permitted to marry Moyo on condition that he change his name to Sato and, for the remainder of his life, was so much under his wife's thumb that he made little impression on their ten children. The Prime Minister was the second son of Hidesuke and Moyo...
...footsteps as a yoshi. A marriage was arranged for him with his cousin Yoshiko, the daughter of his father's brother. Although the marriage did not take place for another seven years (Yoshiko was only eleven at the time), Nobusuke resumed his father's name of Kishi and was stricken from the Sato family register...
...Razor." At Tokyo's Imperial University, Nobusuke Kishi majored in law and graduated with top honors; a friend recalls that he also "drank a lot of sake and knew a great many young Tokyo actresses." In the political arguments that raged at school, young Kishi emerged as a conservative and a fiery nationalist. His hero was Kita Ikki, a right-wing radical who wanted Japan run by a military junta and called for the conquest of Manchuria and Siberia. Kishi was less happy about Ikki's attacks on private property and free enterprise; when some of Ikki...
...strives to be all things to all men. Though a right-wing nationalist, he was also a friend of many left-wingers who later became the leaders of Japan's Socialist Party, and the friendships have endured. Graduating in the cherry blossom season of 1920, the newly married Kishi became a civil servant in the Ministry of Commerce and for the next 16 years was indistinguishable from thousands of other bureaucrats. Clutching his newspaper and a black umbrella, he commuted between his modest home in suburban Shinjuku and a governmental beehive in Tokyo's busy Kasumigaseki district. Though...
...Kishi got two tours of duty abroad, visiting the U.S. and Europe to inspect iron and steel plants. He learned to play golf in Philadelphia in 1926 and on his return home became a popular member of foursomes with big zaibatsu business men who were painstakingly learning the Western game. He also had difficulties with his superiors. In 1936 a new Commerce Minister, resentful of Kishi's golf and restaurant dates with such influential businessmen as Sugar Magnate Aiichiro Fujiyama and Steelmaker Yoshisuke Aikawa, complained: "Kishi behaves as if he were the Minister instead of me!" Relations...