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Nakasone Yasuhiro
中曽根康弘
Yasuhiro Nakasone
(1918- )
Yasuhiro Nakasone became Japan’s first English-speaking prime minister in 1982. He is remembered by Americans and Japanese alike for his contrarian notions—and occasional gaffes.
An Advocate of a Stronger Japanese Military
During the 1970s Nakasone was the Director-General of Japan’s Defense agency. Nakasone had been a junior officer in the Japanese wartime navy, and he was alarmed at the “power vacuum” created by Japan’s postwar disarmament. The increasingly aggressive stance of the Soviet Union in the postwar years prompted Nakasone to call for a reassessment of Japan’s constitutional pacifism. By the early 1970s, the Soviet Union was making alarming expansions of its military presence at Vladivostok, just north of the Japanese islands.
In 1976 a Soviet MiG-25 pilot successfully evaded Japanese radar, and landed in Hokkaido. The Russian pilot’s objective was a plea for asylum—not an attack on Japan—but the incident served to highlight the country’s lack of military defenses. Nonetheless, the doves generally prevailed over the hawks in the Japanese Diet, and few of Director-General Nakasone’s more radical ideas were implemented.
Prime Minister Nakasone
When he was elected to the position of prime minister in 1982, Ronald Reagan occupied the U.S. White House. Pundits in the press and academia expressed hope that Nakasone’s English skills would enable him to have a close working relationship with Reagan. However, economic tensions between Japan and America intervened. In the early 1980s, the U.S. economy was mired in recession, and the American automotive industry was losing market share to Japanese imports. Labor leaders and politicians were calling for protective tariffs and quotas on Japanese cars. American critics of Japan charged that the Japanese market was closed to outsiders by a series of structural barriers.
Nakasone responded to the crisis by making a personal appeal to his constituency. In 1985 he appeared on Japanese television, and encouraged every Japanese citizen to purchase at least $100 worth of foreign goods. But the example products he suggested were mostly low-tech items like textiles and cookware. It was as if the prime minister could not seriously ask Japanese consumers to buy American automobiles—the product most symbolic of the U.S.-Japan trade friction.
In 1986, a Japanese government initiative called the Maekawa Report proposed a series of steps for making the domestic market more open to foreign competition. Many of the steps detailed in the report were implemented—but the main beneficiaries were companies in Taiwan and South Korea—not American manufacturers. Nakasone seemed unable to defuse the growing trade tension.
Then he made his most memorable faux pas. In an apparent attempt to explain away America’s economic problems, Nakasone noted that Americans could not really be expected to compete effectively with Japanese. Japanese, after all, were more intelligent and far better educated.
When this bombshell hit the press, the prime minister felt compelled to explain: Americans were not necessarily less intelligent, but the country was hampered by its ethnic and racial diversity. How could America compete with so many blacks and Hispanics, the prime minister wondered aloud to the international press.
Nakasone has secured his place as one of Japan’s most memorable and opinionated prime ministers. Unfortunately, though, his administration was not as beneficial for U.S.-Japan relations as his supporters had hoped; and his racist remarks tainted his efforts to promote Japan abroad.