Word: tanaka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Peking summit comes at a time when Tanaka's Japan is already riding a kind of diplomatic crest. Though the Nixon economic and diplomatic shokkus of last summer are still fresh in Japanese memories, Tanaka managed to come away from his summit with the President in Honolulu last month with what looked like U.S. approval and support. Moscow has been actively courting Tokyo, and is pressing to begin work on a long-delayed peace treaty. Then there was China's decision to deal with Japan, after so many years of anti-Japanese vituperation. As one American diplomat...
Richard Nixon, who found Eisaku Sato maddeningly vague, emerged smiling from his meetings with Sato's successor at Honolulu, and said that Tanaka "was like a touch of fresh breeze." Observes one of the few Washington officials who know Tanaka well: "He is the kind of guy Nixon likes. He is polite but does not mince words. There is no time wasted on elaborate equivocation...
...charge of Japan's first major exercise in independent diplomacy since the war is a wheeling-dealing real estate speculator and career politician who has almost no experience in international diplomacy. In the 15 years since hard-driving Kakuei Tanaka first reached Cabinet-level posts in Tokyo, he has been abroad only eight times, and then only to Korea, the U.S. and Western Europe. His one previous trip to China came in 1938, when he was shipped off to Manchuria as a young Imperial Army draftee. Tanaka's military career ended several months later when he contracted pneumonia...
Lack of experience-or of anything else-has never slowed down Kakuei Tanaka. A fast-talking, 160-lb. dynamo popularly known as "the Computerized Bulldozer," he is Japan's youngest (54) postwar Premier and the first to come from outside the narrow university-bred elite that has produced almost all Japanese leaders since World War II. The son of a poor cattle dealer, Tanaka vaulted into the upper reaches of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party after he had made millions in construction and land development. Traditional Japanese diplomats have been heard to grumble that their blunt-spoken new boss...
...Tanaka was chosen to replace the retiring Sato last July largely because the Liberal Democratic establishment was willing to gamble that he could turn the party's slowly eroding electoral fortunes around. So far, it has been a good gamble. Tanaka won an astonishing 62% approval rating in a nationwide opinion poll; Sato's last rating was a dismal...