Kakuei Tanaka, who served as Japan's prime minister from 1972 to 1974 and retained immense political power even after he was convicted of bribery, died Thursday in a Tokyo hospital. He was 75, suffered diabetes and died of complications from the disease, Reuters reported.
For more than a decade, Tanaka was his country's most potent political figure by virtue of his role as leader of the most powerful faction in the dominant Liberal Democratic Party, a conservative group that dominated Japanese politics until this year. His support was instrumental in putting several of Japan's prime ministers into office.In 1983, Tanaka, a shrewd political tactician, a skilled fund-raiser and a deft dispenser of patronage, was convicted of having taken the equivalent of $2.1 million in bribes from the Lockheed Corp. while he was prime minister. He immediately began an appeal process that continued until his death.
Soon after his conviction, he was re-elected to Parliament by an overwhelming majority in his native Niigata prefecture, a rural constituency that sent him to Parliament for 42 years.
Insisting that he was innocent, Tanaka told campaign audiences, "I have never done anything which I must be ashamed of before God."
He pointed to the government money he had helped to provide for medical benefits and other aid he had given to deserving recipients. "Politics by nature is warm-hearted," he said. "Without understanding these things, you can't feel the true politics of Japan."
Tanaka had an inelegant, gravelly, sometimes curt way of talking that helped to make him an outsider in the upper levels of the Japanese government. In addition, unlike many high-ranking Japanese, he did not study at a university, and he did not spend time in the government bureaucracy, which is a time-honored path to authority.