Kakuei Tanaka - Rise Into Politics

Rise Into Politics

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 (d. 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.

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 Doshi 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 December 13, 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.

The Tokyo District Court found Tanaka guilty in 1950, and Tanaka responded by filing an appeal. In the meantime, he took over the failing Nagaoka Railway that linked Niigata to Tokyo, and through a combination of good management and good luck, brought it back into operation in 1951. In that year's election, he was re-elected to the Diet in a landslide victory, and many of the railroad's employees came out to campaign for him. That year's election was also the first in which he was supported by billionaire capitalist Kenji Osano, who would remain one of Tanaka's most loyal supporters to the end.