Word: sato
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...chief policy problem plaguing Tokyo and Washington is the Japanese public's attitude toward Viet Nam. Sato privately approves the U.S. involvement, and indeed was on the verge of sending a token number of troops to aid Saigon before the U.S. buildup and the bombing of the North began. Now, he has had to be careful. Since World War II, the Japanese have become pacifistic to the point of violence, as they showed in the 1960 riots that canceled Dwight Eisenhower's visit. The Mutual Security Treaty between the U.S. and Japan comes up for renewal...
Veiled Apprehensions. If 1970 is a year that Sato views with veiled apprehensions, 1968 is one that he awaits with eagerness. Next year will mark the centennial of the Meiji Restoration, the year that Japan broke out of its feudal, introspective cocoon and entered the real world. Since that time, the four islands of Nippon have moved from an era of swordplay and armor to one of supertankers and transistors...
...samurai-turned-sakebrewer, Sato was born in the somnolent town of Tabuse, on Honshu's far eastern coast, just 100 miles from the Straits of Tsushima, where in Sato's fifth year Admiral Heihachiro Togo destroyed the Russian fleet. That was the year of Japan's greatest military success, but little of it rubbed off on Eisaku. Sato's older brother, Nobusuke Kishi,* was the star of the family, graduated second in his class at Tokyo University law school (Sato was much lower). In 1941, Kishi became one of the youngest Cabinet ministers in Japanese history...
...Sato, in the meantime, spent 13 years in Kyushu, Japan's remote and rural southern island, working as a railways bureaucrat. There he learned the trick of office consensus, if only to keep the trains moving. Twice he was sent to China as a railways adviser during the Japanese war there, and during World War II served as director of a motor pool. He also contracted a serious case of typhus, and while recuperating read an article on the passivity of the Asian masses by U.S. Author Pearl Buck that changed his way of thinking. "Reviewing the past...
...chance to act on that belief came in 1947, when Sato was tapped for the Cabinet and supervised Japan's rise from the ashes of American bombing. Then, in 1953, he was accused of accepting a $55,000 bribe from shipowners, and in the uproar that followed, he resigned. Sato maintains to this day that the money was a political contribution and that he merely failed to register it according to the law. He returned to power after his former classmate Hayato Ikeda took over the Liberal Democratic leadership in 1960. Sato became Minister of Olympic Construction...