Early Life
Nakasone was born in Takasaki, in Gunma, a poor mountainous prefecture where his father was a lumber dealer. He attended Tokyo Imperial University. During World War II, he was a commissioned officer and paymaster in the Imperial Japanese Navy.
In 1947, he gave up a promising career in an elite government ministry to run for Parliament with the belief that in its postwar remorse, Japan was in danger of discarding its traditional values (according to a 2010 profile). He entered the Diet of Japan as a member of the House of Representatives for the Democratic Party. "As a freshman lawmaker in 1951, he delivered a 28-page letter to General MacArthur criticizing the occupation, a brazen move. The general angrily threw the letter in the wastebasket, Mr. Nakasone was later told. This stand established credentials as a right-wing politician." He gained brief notoriety in 1952 for blaming Emperor Hirohito for Japan's defeat in the war. In 1955, at Nakasone's urging, the government granted the equivalent of 14 million dollars to the Agency for Industrial Science and Technology to begin nuclear power research. Nakasone rose through the LDP's ranks, becoming Minister of Science in 1959 under the government of Nobusuke Kishi, then Minister of Transport in 1967, head of the Agency of Defense in 1970, Minister of International Trade and Industry in 1972 and Minister of Administration in 1981.
Read more about this topic: Yasuhiro Nakasone
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“... the great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)