Kakuei Tanaka

Tanaka was born on 4 May 1918, in Futamura, Niigata Prefecture (present-day Kashiwazaki, Niigata), the second son of farmer Kakuji Tanaka and his wife Fume.

He had seven siblings (an elder brother, two elder sisters and four younger sisters) but was the only son who survived into adulthood.

Although a farming family, his father was a cow and horse trader and his grandfather Sutekichi Tanaka had worked as a temple and shrine carpenter.

His mother worked even after everyone else went to sleep and was attached to her grandmother.

When Tanaka was young, his father was involved with a series of financially disastrous ventures in koi farming, importing cattle and starting Niigata's first dairy farm, which caused the family to fall into extreme poverty.

Tanaka contracted diphtheria at a young age and the aftereffect caused him to stutter.

Kakuei left school at the age of fifteen and worked construction jobs while studying part-time at night.

In 1937, while running errands for a construction firm, Tanaka ran into an elevator occupied by the Viscount Masatoshi Ōkōchi, head of the Riken corporation.

Ōkōchi, apparently impressed with Tanaka's energy and ambition, agreed to help the young man start a drafting office in Tokyo.

Japan did not have a state qualification for architects at the time; Tanaka would have a role in creating the licensing system for architects later in his career.

The drafting office only kept Tanaka busy for two years: he was drafted into the army in 1939 and sent to Manchuria, where he served as an enlisted clerk in the Morioka Cavalry, reaching the rank of superior private (jōtōhei) in March 1940.

After two years in the military, he contracted pneumonia in February 1941 and was returned to Tokyo to recover; he never re-enlisted, leaving the army in October.

Back in Japan, Tanaka ended up at the Sakamoto Civil Engineering firm, looking for office space to restart his drafting business.

There, he met the late company president's widow, who not only gave him the real estate he needed, but also asked him to marry her daughter, Sakamoto Hana.

Tanaka accepted, and married his way into the upper class.

In 1942, Tanaka took over the Sakamoto company and renamed it Tanaka Civil Engineering and Construction Industries.

He soon had two children: a son named Masanori Tanaka in 1942 (died 1948), and a daughter named Makiko Tanaka in 1944.

Luck favored Tanaka during the endgame of World War II.

None of his major buildings were damaged in the firebombing of Tokyo, and just weeks before the Japanese surrender, he travelled to Seoul and cashed in ¥15b (about US$78m) in Japanese war bonds.

In December 1945, as the first postwar Diet was being planned by the American occupation authorities, Tanaka was able to give generous donations to an associate affiliated with the Japan Moderate Progressive Party (Nihon Shinpoto).

In 1946, he moved from Tokyo to Niigata to prepare his first bid for a Diet seat: he worked around the election laws of the time by buying buildings throughout the district and placing large "TANAKA" signs on them.

However, his bid unraveled at the last minute when three other JMPP candidates entered the race.

Tanaka only captured 4% of the vote in the general election.

Kakuei Tanaka (田中 角栄) was a Japanese politician who served in the House of Representatives from 1947 to 1990, and was Prime Minister of Japan from 1972 to 1974.

In 1947, however, he placed third in his district after a strategy targeting rural voters.

He took his Diet seat that year as a member of the new Democratic Party (Minshuto).

In the Diet, he became friends with former prime minister Kijūrō Shidehara and joined Shidehara's Dōshi Club.

Then in 1948, the Doshi Club defected to the new Democratic Liberal Party, and Tanaka instantly won favor with the DLP's leader, Shigeru Yoshida.

Yoshida appointed Tanaka as a Vice Minister of Justice, the youngest in the nation's history.

Then, on 13 December, Tanaka was arrested and imprisoned on charges of accepting ¥1m (US$13,000) in bribes from coal mining interests in Kyūshū.

Yoshida and the DLP dropped most of their ties with Tanaka, removed him from his official party posts, and refused to fund his next re-election bid.

Despite this, Tanaka announced his candidacy for the 1949 general election, and was released from prison in January after securing bail.

He was re-elected, and made a deal with Chief Cabinet Secretary Eisaku Satō to resign his vice-ministerial post in exchange for continued membership in the DLP.

After a power struggle with Takeo Fukuda, he became the most influential member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party from the mid-1960s until the mid-1980s.

He was a central figure in several political scandals, culminating in the Lockheed bribery scandals of 1976 which led to his arrest and trial; he was found guilty by two lower courts, but his case remained open before the Supreme Court through his death.

The scandals, coupled with a debilitating stroke he suffered in 1985, led to the collapse of his political faction, with most members regrouping under the leadership of Noboru Takeshita in 1987.

He was nicknamed Kaku-san (角さん) and was known as the "ima taiko" (今太閤, modern taiko) and "Shadow Shōgun" (闇将軍).

(The title of "Shadow Shōgun" has since been used to describe Ichirō Ozawa.) His political-economic direction is called the construction state (土建国家).

He was strongly identified with the construction industry but never served as construction minister.

His daughter Makiko Tanaka and son-in-law Naoki Tanaka remain active political figures in Japan.